In a city that, despite its recent growth, has a poverty rate of 30.2% and schools that have been devastated by deep budget cuts, our two daily newspapers are now crusading to….sell the gas works. In a city that has suffered from a governor who demanded those education cuts and a mayor who was ineffective in blocking them, our two daily papers are now crusading…to make City Council President Darrell Clarke, public enemy number one.
This crusade is, fortunately for Philadelphia, not working. Unless I missed a protest at Council or sit-in at Dilworth Park, the city is not rallying to the cause of selling PGW or tarring and feathering Darrell Clarke. Nor should they. The sale of PGW proposed by Mayor Nutter remains a bad deal. And outside of a couple of blocks in Center City and a few pages on Facebook, most Philadelphians know it.
I explained the basic reasons for opposing the sale in a Newsworks column a few weeks ago. And since the newspaper editorials have done nothing but repeat the same tired arguments that I and other answered when we testified at the City Council hearing on the future of PGW, there is no reason to repeat them in detail. But it comes down to this: The whole deal is predicated on higher gas rates and lower pay for gas workers paying for the costs of city pensions. And that’s not a progressive way of funding pension costs. Moreover the Mayor has consistently overstated the benefits to the city and his numbers have been repeated, without question by the newspaper editorialists. And the additional revenues that can be generated from PGW’s assets can be secured through public-private partnership as well as a sale.
The most recent Daily News editorial questions the public private partnership (PPP) strategy by pointing to some recent failures of this kind of strategy noted in a recent Inquirer article. But if one reads to that article carefully, instead of the DN’s one-sided editorial summary of it, it’s clear that there have been successes as well and that there are paths for using this approach to take advantage of PGW’s resources. And, if one looks beyond the few examples in the article to the thousands of PPPs in Europe and the US, there are many examples of success as well as failure, just as there is for privatization of municipal assets. The trick is to do it right. And that takes a little time. The DN’s editorial And if one wants to blame someone for the delay in figuring it out how to do it right, your finger should be pointed at the Mayor who was focused from the very beginning on selling PGW and never considered or evaluated alternatives to a sale.
Don’t expect the Inquirer or Daily News to blame the Mayor, however. They are entirely focused on Darrell Clarke. Their attacks on him, however, give us a caricature of both Clarke and Philadelphia government. Clarke is the President, not the Dictator, of City Council. He serves at the pleasure of Council. Any member of Council could have introduced a bill to sell PGW. But there was so little support for the sale that no one did so.
Darrell Clarke’s effectiveness as City Council President rests not on dictatorial authority but on his ability to bring the diverse group of Council members to a rough consensus. The newspapers didn’t call him a dictator when he used that skill to move controversial measures they approved, such as zoning reform, AVI or land bank legislation through Council, achievements for which Clarke deserved, but did not receive, as much or more praise as Mayor Nutter.
And that makes the criticisms of Clarke’s on the PGW issue, whether you agree with him or not, totally unfair. Far from acting in secret, City Council held hearings on the PGW issue and far more people opposed the sale than supported it. And far from being devious about his role, Clarke explained quite explicitly—and at one point in the hearing, quite eloquently—why he opposed the PGW sale.
Despite the best efforts of our crusading editorialists, my sense is that citizens of Philadelphia have heard what Clarke is saying and agree with him.