The Fumo Theorem

What Philly loses — or gains — when it loses Vince.

by Tom Namako

What happens when a team loses its star player? Beyond the dramatic headlines, the break-room punditry, the die-hard fans destroying their outdated jerseys. We're talking on the field: How badly does the team suffer?

Take Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard. You may have heard of him. Forty-eight home runs this season, the 2006 National League MVP. An all-star. Now let's imagine him breaking a leg. Suddenly being traded. Running off with his salary to play pickup ball in Cuba.

We assume this would be a disaster. Howard's backup on the depth chart, career minor leaguer Mike Cervenak, is probably a stand-up guy, but he doesn't play ball like his predecessor. Or does he? After all, when Jim Thome went down with an elbow injury in 2005, he was replaced by ... Ryan Howard.

Most of us haven't even seen Cervenak take a pitch, and so we base our opinions on our impressions. Baseball experts do better. Rather than judge a player by sight, they look at numbers, statistics, equations. That's how they figure out how valuable a player is, and how much a team would be hurt by his departure.

In 2001, Keith Woolner, a statistics geek who learned his godly trade at MIT and Stanford, wrote up a 1,794-word entry on his Web site, stathead.com, which roughly laid out this equation for Value Over Replacement Player, or VORP:

What this calculates is, as Woolner puts it, "the number of runs contributed beyond what a replacement-level player would contribute if given the same percentage of team plate appearances." The resulting statistic compares a player to "the freely available talent." (Howard's actual VORP, by the way, is 35.3, which is 30th in the National League this year. In 2006, he was second, with 81.5.)

The Fumo Theorem click to enlarge

VORP is a pretty advanced formula for something as trivial as a professional sport; it'd be great to apply a similar formula to something of great public import — like, say, Pennsylvania politics. (True, working in the General Assembly is like playing in a league where spitballs are legal and corked bats encouraged. But hey, that's the game.)

The majority of politicians in this great state are, by definition, somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of professional quality. Some are scrubs, incapable of really doing their jobs, and quite possibly on their way out come Election Day. And a few are stars: They take the game seriously and they've mastered it. For better or worse, for the past two decades, South Philadelphia's Democratic state senator, Vincent Fumo, has been regarded as the imperator of this final category.

In a 1993 Daily News interview, former Philadelphia state Sen. Gerard Kosinski had this to say about Fumo's influence: "If an extraterrestrial came down here, it wouldn't say, 'Take me to your leader.' It would say, 'Where's Vince?'" Fumo is a registered genius, a generous benefactor and a master dealmaker (not to mention a former biology teacher and certified pilot). He rode into the legislature some 30 years ago on the coattails of a political coup, and never looked back; today, buildings from the Free Library's Fumo Family Branch to the Christopher Columbus Charter School's "Fumo Family Building" bear his surname.

Of course, not everyone wants to name things after Fumo. In February 2007, U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan alleged in an indictment that Fumo used taxpayer dollars to pay for various expenses related to his Spring Garden mansion, his alpaca farm in Halifax, Pa., his shore house in Margate, N.J., and his ocean-view retreat on Jupiter Island, Fla. The 139-count corruption indictment also alleged mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

About a year after the indictment dropped, Fumo's health did, too: He suffered a heart attack in March 2008 and collapsed on the Senate floor after becoming light-headed during budget negotiations this June. The senator said he wouldn't seek another term, but couldn't stay away from the game entirely: With his rival, union boss John Dougherty, likely to win his seat — a nightmare scenario for Fumo — he needed a replacement player.

He found one in Larry Farnese, a commercial litigator who, after spending two years planning a second run against Center City State Rep. Babette Josephs, decided to run for Senate on a reform ticket. Fumo himself, in the Daily News, called Farnese "someone who nobody knew." But Farnese got the financial support of Fumo's allies, his voter base and, eventually, his primary-election win. (Farnese still has to face his Republican challenger, Jack Morley, in the November general election.)

Still, having Fumo's backing does not turn Farnese into Fumo. We got to wondering how things would change for the taxpayers in Fumo's First Senatorial District once the Vince leaves office. Will they lose? Will they gain? What did Fumo's all-star status mean for his constituents? In short, what's his Value Over (or Under) his Replacement Politician?

Now, there's no way to say for sure what Farnese will do as a senator. His platform is health care for all, better schools and crime reduction, which is every other politician's platform, too. But he does have the following characteristics: a Philadelphia district, ties to Fumo and not much seniority. In other words, he's extremely similar to an existing state senator, the great Northeast's Mike Stack.

FUMO =

OK, we admit, our calculation will not be as scientific as Woolner's VORP. Because stats are kept less fastidiously for state legislation, and because, unlike baseball, the Senate is not a zero-sum proposition, we'll be using a lot of informed guesses and estimation. Still, we think we'll end up with a better idea of the Meaning of Fumo.

To start, we have to consider what really constitutes a politician's job. We asked almost a dozen public policy experts what measurable indicators would help us gauge Fumo's effectiveness. They wound up with three main considerations: legislation (aka making laws), money brought home to a district (aka funding for programs) and constituent service (aka executing government-funded initiatives). Intangibles like intelligence and charm, and even some tangibles, like seniority or committee seats held, are means to these measurable ends. (This is all, of course, putting aside the subjective question of whether a politician supports your particular political views — which shouldn't be much of a consideration in a Fumo/Farnese transition.) For each of these, we use Stack — a solid-but-not-renowned legislator with many similarities to Fumo's successor — to give us an idea of what Farnese will likely be capable of. It's not perfect, but it's a decent way to compare a young local senator to Fumo.

Mark Stehle

LEGISLATION +

Forget what you learned in civics class. In Pennsylvania, your effectiveness as a legislator — that is, a person who proposes bills to become law — has little to do with proposing bills to become law.

Since joining the Senate in 1978, approximately 14 percent of the bills that list Fumo as their prime sponsor have made it to the governor's desk. That's 63 total in 30 years. One enacted bill from 1980 focused on "judicial procedure"; one from 1988 dealt with "property tax relief provisions"; and in 2001, a bill granting South Philadelphia's Tolentine Community Center a parcel of land was enacted.

By comparison, Stack has introduced 140 bills under his name in the past eight years. Not one has passed — though that's not an entirely fair summary of his record. In 2001, Stack sponsored a bill that would make Hepatitis C a workplace-related injury for firefighters, and a similar bill in the House was agreed upon and became law. In 2003, he helped pass a bill amendment to redevelop the abandoned Byberry Hospital into businesses and senior housing.

The problem with this comparison is that it usually doesn't matter whose name is actually on a bill. "Having your name attached to proposed legislation is not necessarily about getting something done," says Matthew J. Brouillette, president and CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation, a nonprofit research group that supports limited constitutional government. "People like Fumo can get [their] way without sponsoring a single bill. It's not an indication of ability." Especially around election years, Brouillette says, legislation will be reserved for politicians who may face tough challenges in their districts, so they can return home to tout their accomplishments.

The true measure of legislative influence is the ability to see your will done without using your name. That's commonly called clout.

Clout is ever-present, though not exactly measurable. Still, Fumo has had it. "For Fumo, it came from an institutional memory, knowing how to run plays that weren't written in the playbook, and personal relationships," says Randall Miller, professor of history at St. Joseph's University. "Although he was a tough guy, people knew they could make a deal with him. That's something that's acquired and accrued. You don't get it from just being there." In other words, these are not the characteristics of an average legislator.

In the mid-'90s, Fumo held sway over a huge bloc of Democratic votes, and used it for things like holding off then-Gov. Tom Ridge's school choice plan, according to the Inquirer (the state took over the city school system two years later, when Fumo was out of town at his Florida home). With Fumo's support, it would have had a much higher chance of passing. The same can't be said for Stack, and probably won't be the case for Farnese.

Why is Fumo such a powerful legislative force? Where does he get his clout?

MONEY +

Think of the state budget as a massive pie, made of money. That money has to be cut a certain way between state agencies and legislative programs to make the power brokers happy. And over the years, Fumo has become one of the guys with a knife.

"He mastered the appropriations process," says Eric Epstein, a good-government and clean-energy watchdog who runs rockthecapital.org. "With intelligence, testosterone and an absence of opposition, he figured out how to leverage the process" so that funds are directed to his district.

We asked Fumo's office for a detailed list of every program in his district and in the city that he has steered funding toward. We wanted to know how much money Fumo is really responsible for directing to the area.

Gary Tuma, Fumo's spokesman, declined the request. Instead, he said he had a "macro-level" list, on a single sheet of paper, titled "Additional Funds Provided to Philadelphia, 1985-2006." It includes 30 line items in eight categories (think broadly, like "child welfare," "regional sales tax," "SEPTA basic subsidy").

At the bottom, there's a grand total: $7,989,024,767 (nearly $8 billion). That's about $380 million a year. Just to make a point, let's do some subtraction: Even disregarding any money Fumo brought in between 1978 and 1985; not factoring in the $1.2 billion he claims in regional sales tax revenue (after helping negotiate the Philadelphia area's 1 percent sales tax increase); and removing the $1.8 billion from a new dedicated tax fund for SEPTA — because the transit system's funding has been so erratic over the years — his yearly average, over 30 years, is still more than $164 million.

Of course, we set out to fact-check this against public documents. We had the Legislative Data Processing Center at the Capitol run a search on appropriations bills sponsored by Fumo that eventually became law, but they didn't add up to $8 billion. We scoured every regular bill he'd passed, but the money wasn't there, either. We tried searching amendments to the budget he might have slipped in at the last minute. Again, no luck.

Where's all the money Fumo says he brought in?

"You're not really able to find that out," says Nathan Benefield, director of policy research at the Commonwealth Foundation.

"It's a mystery," says Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania.

"The reason you can't get an answer to that is because nobody knows," says Tim Potts, president of Democracy Rising PA and a former staffer for powerful Democratic state Rep. Bill DeWeese.

One way Fumo did this, these experts say, is mastering what's called Walking Around Money (usually known as WAM). Here's how WAMs work: When Harrisburg lawmakers put together the budget, it bounces back and forth between the House and Senate. Both sides prioritize how they want taxpayer money spent; then they come together and agree on it before they hand it to the governor. That's called the conference committee.

The conference committee is held behind closed doors, usually those of the Senate majority leader. Aides pour into the room, essentially throwing chips on the table — Senator X wants Y money for Z project, they say — and depending on that person's clout, he'll either get it or get bumped. This is where Fumo came in. As a ranking leader on the appropriations committee, as someone with connections to the state's business and political power brokers, as someone who isn't afraid to negotiate aggressively — and as, essentially, the smartest guy in the room — he helped broker the demands of many other legislators.

He also, with other legislative leaders, laid his preferences on the table. Many of the funds for these preferences take the form of WAMs. So, for example, the state Department of Community and Economic Development gets $2 million that they know Fumo will direct to his region. (The legality of WAMs has been questioned, but Harrisburg watchdogs say it's an accepted part of the legislative process.)

Potts, who also used to work for the state Department of Education, offers a perfect example. He was working at the department in the late 1980s, a week before the new budget was enacted, when his office got a call from Fumo's aides.

"They said, 'We were looking at this part of the budget, and there's money in there, it's a WAM, our WAM,'" Potts recalls. The staff asked Potts and his staff to write up a proposal for spending it before the finances vanished in the new financial year. Think about that: The legislative branch was telling the executive branch what to do with its finances. It wasn't the Department of Education making the decision — it was, according to Potts, Fumo.

"We wrote up a grant that supported educating citizens through the media," Potts says. But Fumo's office didn't like some particulars. "So we wrote up another proposal for him, and sent it in. They were fine with that."

There was nothing in the original budget to indicate the department needed to draft a proposal in the first place, Potts said.

Fumo's spokesman, Gary Tuma, said he has "no idea" how much of the $8 billion figure was from WAMs, though he said it's likely "a small percentage." He added: "It is a very detailed and careful approval process for those grants."

(It's hard to tell if these funds are being used appropriately — the state Department of Community and Economic Development did not return a request by deadline asking for the number of grants that have been flagged for possible misuse.)

Potts estimates that this year alone, there's $750 million in WAMs throughout the state budget. And what might Farnese do with that money? We used Fumo's own figures to measure his production, so we'll use Stack's figures to get an idea of the amount of funds Farnese may be able to direct to his district. Stack's office says that, in his eight-year tenure, he's directed at least $30 million per year to the region. Certainly sounds respectable. But even given the unscientific nature of the comparison, it's just not in the same league as Fumo's production.

That's no embarrassment for Stack: Fumo was able to work the budget like no one else. He was, says Potts, far more interested in the process than most legislators, and far more capable of mastering it. Potts believes it's unlikely someone else will come along and do the same.

"The textbook version of democracy is, you elect people to go to Harrisburg who work out compromises between competing social interests," he says. "These legislators go to Harrisburg and listen to lobbyists. And they say to them, 'You want this, and the other lobbyist wants that — you both work out the difference and come back to me when you're done.'"

Fumo, by contrast, "would actually work the deal. ... That's where he gets his strength. People know they have his word — he's able to negotiate and keep everyone happy for decades. The other folks don't do this because they're too dumb, too lazy or too new."

The point? Unless Farnese becomes the next Fumo, he's more likely to be in Stack's league. Fumo has simply been on a different playing field than the average legislator. Was the money he brought in being used for good purposes? We'll get to that in a minute.

CONSTITUENT SERVICES

Now, all of this money has to go somewhere.

A 1995 Inquirer analysis found a good bit of Fumo's money going to good causes. The Philadelphia AIDS Consortium, for example, was granted $400,000 at the senator's direction. "Losing that money (in the future) would be a disaster for people living with HIV in Philadelphia," James H. Littrell, the consortium's executive director, said at the time. Fumo also sponsored a $200,000 grant to the Pennsylvania Post-Conviction Defender Organization, so they could meet the fundraising requirements of receiving a federal grant valued at $621,000, said Robert Dunham, the organization's executive director. The funds allowed them to legally represent people on death row. What's more, dozens of Community Revitalization Program grants have been awarded to organizations in the First Senatorial District over the past nine years. (The CRP, Benefield says, holds a significant amount of WAM until legislators assign it. A critical report of the program conducted by the state Department of the Auditor General was released in 1997, noting: "For an application to be selected for review and funding, [an official] must have knowledge of the project, or have been influenced by external sources. Those external sources include, but are not limited to, the Governor's Office, legislators and local officials.")

Stack, too, has a significant record when it comes to assigning funds. According to his office, he's pulled in grants for arts programs, expensive hospital equipment and seminars for people with disabilities. As a representative of the Northeast, his priorities have often been firefighters and police officers. It's hard to say what Farnese's priorities will be once in office, but, if Stack's performance is any indication, he should be able to funnel some money in his district's direction.

Still, "when it comes to bringing the bacon home, Vince is excellent," said Jim Panyard, who covered Harrisburg budget negotiations for the old Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and later served as a lobbyist for the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association. "Road repairs, money for community groups. ... We'll be standing at the back of the line for that money again. No other senator, not Hardy Williams, not Mike Stack, none of those guys have that kind of muscle."

- Alleged Corruption?

Just looking at the rough financial numbers and anecdotes laid out above, we can see that the region will suffer in some sense once Fumo leaves office. In terms of legislative clout, funds and constituent services, Farnese's initial productivity — based on what Stack has been able to do — will almost certainly pale in comparison to Fumo's.

The funds Fumo would have commandeered will now be dispersed around the state. "Post-Vince Fumo, there will be a different way of setting agendas," says David Thornburgh, executive director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. But, he says, "That's a good thing."

Thornburgh says you have to look past Fumo's raw productivity. "That $8 billion, it's an impressive quote, but you've got to ask — was it in the best interest of the community?"

That is indeed the question. Here are the two schools of thought:

According to Brett Mandel, executive director of Philadelphia Forward and former director of financial and policy analysis for the city's Office of the Controller, the all-important variable here is the federal indictment against Fumo. The government alleges that some money that could have gone to constituent services instead went into Fumo's pocket — to the tune of more than $2 million between 1991 and 2007.

If Fumo is guilty, Mandel says, another factor needs to go into the equation calculating his value: opportunity cost. Essentially, even if Fumo took $1 to buy a candy bar, Mandel says, that $1 could have been invested instead, and, in years, become $2. In other words, skimming a bit here and a bit there could mean that taxpayers could have gotten much more than they did.

If he did take money for himself from, say, the PECO deal (within the last decade), Fumo and PECO negotiated a settlement in a lawsuit about electricity deregulation, in which PECO donated millions of dollars to the neighborhood nonprofit Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods; prosecutors allege that Fumo used some of this money to fund personal activities), that's money that could have gone toward, say, burying power lines. "If he's guilty and was dealing for himself, I don't care if he brought home $8 billion," says Mandel. "With the opportunity cost, maybe that could have been turned into $18 billion."

It's been alleged, both in the indictment and in the media, that Fumo acted in his own self-interest. And as Mandel says, if Fumo did indeed take for himself, at the expense of people who don't have multiple homes, a stable job and unparalleled power, then he's not worth another vote.

Yet others look at the way Harrisburg is today and, perhaps, the way it will always be, and say that taking some for yourself is fine if you're good enough at giving to others.

"The charges against him are things that virtually all legislators do, maybe on a more expanded basis," says Panyard. "They all use government-paid cars to go to political fundraisers, use state cell phones to talk politics, have political meetings in offices. It's a matter of how far you stretch the line."

Effective governing? Or clear abuse of power? The final factor in determining Fumo's VORP falls now to the 12 people who will judge him sometime around the day Farnese is inaugurated in January 2009. If they decide he's innocent, then we'll really miss the work of state Sen. Vincent Fumo. But if he's guilty, he'll go down as the city's most infamous tragic figure. If he's guilty, says Mandel, he has "disqualified" himself from greatness because he broke the public trust.

"You could be a great backer for Philadelphia, and generate lots of revenue, but the second you step over the line, you're banned for life. That's the rule: no betting, no gambling. If people believe that game is fixed, crooked, then the entire foundation collapses. It's a high-level sin, no matter how many hits you have," Mandel says. "It's like Pete Rose, betting on baseball."

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)