The Nutters

In the midst of the budget crisis, which mayor do you see?

by Doron Taussig

Illustration By: Evan M. Lopez

Back in the early days of last year's mayoral primary, the local political punditry didn't believe Michael Nutter stood a chance. One of the reasons for this was that Nutter didn't have an obvious base. Bob Brady was a party man and a union guy. Chaka Fattah was the logical inheritor of John Street's coalition. Dwight Evans enjoyed a loyal geographic core of support. Tom Knox didn't have a base, per se, but he had a giant bag full of money.

Nutter, meanwhile, was well-liked by the press, and polishing an image as a reformer. But neither of those things guarantee a lot of votes. It did not seem coincidental, early on, that the former Fourth District councilman was last in the polls.

A few months later, Nutter was completing a damn near perfectly executed campaign, in which he appealed not to some coalition of interest groups (although a bit to business), but to a general sense that Philadelphia was not governed as well as it could be. He eschewed identity politics, and instead argued for good-faith governance and intelligence. We at City Paper loved it. We thought it was, psychologically, exactly what the city needed.

What's more, while a few other cities have elected reformer/technocrat types, Philly hasn't recently — we weren't sure what "good governance" would look like. Things didn't get much clearer with Nutter's first budget: Essentially no one got screwed, we got tax cuts and a bump for a lot of different departments. Even the municipal unions, which were expected to maybe be on the outside in a Nutter administration, got a reasonable one-year deal.

And then this happened — this global economic meltdown and resulting municipal budget crisis, which have forced the mayor to propose massive cuts. More than $1 billion over five years, and 13 percent of the discretionary budget. You'd have to do a lot of things a lot smarter to come up with that kind of money.

So when the mayor went on TV, two days after the presidential election, to disclose the scope of this crisis and announce his cuts, it was, in a sense, his coming-out party: Nutter would have to identify some priorities — he'd have to choose A over B — and show us, in prime time, what this good, smart governance is all about.

It's been about a month since. Nutter's proposed cuts — which include laying off more than 200 city workers, reducing the number of new police hires, discontinuing snow plowing on small streets, shuttering five fire engines (with no fire department layoffs), suspending tax cuts and, most notoriously, closing 11 libraries and the bulk of city pools — have sparked a public outcry, and the mayor has launched a series of town hall meetings in response.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been talking to citizens at those meetings, as well as to various political watchers, to try to get a sense of what we've learned so far in this crisis about the man who will, most likely, be Philadelphia's mayor for the next seven years. There's no one answer: Nutter scattered his cuts fairly well, and different people are interpreting the process by which he made them quite differently. Still, as these conversations have accumulated, I've noticed some common themes: distinct traits that various people attribute to the mayor. Philadelphians have begun, I think, to see one of a few different versions of Michael Nutter.

Nutter the Oligarch

At the town hall meetings, a few subjects have surfaced repeatedly. The question about City Council's cars has come up, almost verbatim, at each of the first three, and citizens have several times urged the mayor to reach out to the private sector for funds (he has). But perhaps the most basic criticism being levied is some version of the one made by a woman at Kensington High School who wanted to know why the Fishtown Library was closing, but not the branch at 19th and Locust.

"It's only seven blocks from the Central Branch," she said, adding that most of the people living near the Locust branch probably had computers in their homes.

In other words, she wanted to know, why us? Why not the rich?

It's not just libraries, and not even poor neighborhoods vs. wealthier ones. People at meetings have challenged the mayor about tax abatements, and some activists have attacked what they see as Nutter's Republican-esque preference for cutting services over raising taxes: The mayor has proposed suspending scheduled tax cuts, but has resisted calls to raise taxes, even if just to offset a tax break coming next year from the state. Even some of the traditionally "liberal" things Nutter is protecting by cutting lightly, like his Office of Sustainability, have been characterized as elitist. Councilman Bill Green has suggested cutting the chief integrity officer and bike czar, and putting their salaries toward saving a library.

"The problem with the way the mayor is going about this is, he's asking [neighborhoods] to fight over crumbs," said Sarah Grey, another attendee at Kensington High School.

Some of the folks making this critique are liberals who accepted Nutter's history of supporting tax cuts precisely because he'd also been an advocate for libraries, recreation centers, etc. Now they're wondering if the mayor is a closet "downsizer" — someone who always wanted to reduce the scope of government, now exploiting this opportunity. Activist Marc Stier wrote on the blog Young Philly Politics that he has a "nagging worry" that Nutter's priority is the "happy 500,000" Philadelphians, and that the mayor doesn't think the city can do much for its poorer residents.

Other folks making this case are longtime Nutter skeptics — something closer to Philly's left.

"There hasn't been a tax cut that Michael didn't like," says Tom Cronin, former head of the city's white-collar municipal employees' union. "[Now] he's going after the poor, the working poor."

"It looks to me like he's taken a big chunk out of the neighborhoods, which is consistent with his campaign, which was mostly concerned with issues of green and arts and culture," says Phil Goldsmith, a managing director under Mayor Street.

It's true that Nutter has lately been justifying his service cuts by saying that Philly's infrastructure was built for a more heavily populated city — he calls this "right-sizing" — indicating that he does think Philly's government is too big. And it's true that no libraries are closing in say, Center City or Chestnut Hill. But libraries aren't really closing in poor neighborhoods, either: As my colleague Isaiah Thompson has reported in these pages, the closures are affecting primarily working-class areas. As for taxes, Nutter is suspending business tax cuts, which he's been in favor of his whole career. This isn't to say that there's nothing to the class critique; just that the focus of Nutter's cuts has not been sharp enough to suggest something so straightforward. So some have looked for a less-ideological characterization of the new mayor.

Nutter the Incompetent

A city of neighborhoods." It might well be the oldest cliché in Philadelphia's book. And yet some people think the Nutter administration missed this point in making its cuts. At the South Philly High town hall meeting, I stood in the back of the school's auditorium with a neighborhood activist (he asked me not to use his name) who took issue with the geographic rationale for pool closings: One pool could be just a few blocks from another, he said, but in a completely different ethno-socio-cultural neighborhood. And kids from the two neighborhoods might well not get along.

"That's why we have so many pools," he said. "So we don't have neighborhood clashes." He predicted a lot of pool-related violence this summer.

The administration might argue that it didn't miss this point; it just doesn't think neighborhood pools are something Philly can afford anymore. But the incompetence critique goes deeper. Nutter has been accused of making haphazard, poorly informed cuts. As Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sanchez understands it, the mayor failed to give his administrators clear parameters for cutting, leaving the decisions up to them. And the bureaucrats, being bureaucrats, decided to protect the bureaucracy. "They said, 'How do we keep all the full-time positions?'" Sanchez says. (Sanchez makes clear that she's in agreement with the mayor about the bulk of his proposed cuts.) Some of them apparently failed to do their research: As City Paper reported in a recent column by Mike Newall, the Fire Department explained the closing of Engine 39 in Roxborough by saying that Engine 37 is right nearby, just over the Bells Mills Road Bridge. But fire trucks are too heavy for the Bells Mills Road Bridge.

It's because of things like this that people have begun to wonder whether the smart people Nutter has assembled can really provide smart governance.

"There's no coherent universal vision that ties together all of these cuts," says Ben Waxman, who blogs about budget issues for "It's Our Money."

"I wonder if some of his people are more thinkers and planners than doers," wrote Dave Davies in a column in the Daily News.

Even the savvy PR that Nutter and his people delivered during the campaign seems to have gone missing: I'll get to the merits of Nutter's town hall meetings in a bit, but for now, why on earth weren't they announced before the public raised hell about being left out of the budget process? Zack Stalberg of the Committee of Seventy believes the administration thought very hard about its cuts, but failed to sell them. "He didn't make the world's greatest case for why this library vs. that library," he says. Stalberg means it kindly when he says this is Nutter's "first experience with this, and there's plenty of time to recover." But hey, this is the big time. Is Nutter ready?

"I think it's much harder than he thought it was going to be," says Waxman.

Given the scope of the crisis he's facing, that's almost certainly true. Still, there's an important caveat to add to the incompetence critique: You don't hear it much from citizens at forums. It tends to come, instead, from careful political watchers and analysts, professional nitpickers (like me) who have the luxury of second-guessing the mayor and pretending to be smarter than him while he performs the unsavory task of trying to save the damn city. And so some people see another Nutter: One who's just doing what no one else will.

Nutter the Responsible Grown-Up

Last Thursday at City Council, a woman approached Councilman Brian O'Neill. O'Neill represents a district in the Northeast, and she wanted explanations for some of the cuts in her Northeast neighborhood.

"Talk to the mayor," O'Neill said.

Talk to the mayor, indeed. While Nutter is sweating it out in front of crowds of angry citizens, what's Council been doing? For the most part, members have been "expressing concerns" just enough to distance themselves from the cuts, without actually opposing the cuts to the extent that they could, you know, shut down city government.

Attendees at town hall meetings haven't always been realistic in their expectations, either. When audience members at South Philly High were asked to raise their hands to indicate their top fiscal priority, not many limited themselves to one choice. To some extent, that's fine — it's the mayor's job to make these decisions, not theirs. But is the city really being fair in its reaction?

Nutter has started off each town hall meeting by emphasizing that Philadelphia is in a fiscal crisis: Like many other cities across the country, we have a massive, unanticipated deficit. Unlike previous administrations, says Councilman Jim Kenney, who supports Nutter's cuts, this one is accounting for it honestly — trying to make cuts adequate for the actual deficit, as opposed to, say, pushing off 2008 costs to the 2009 budget.

"We have Council members who want to whipsaw people back and forth, and make people think this is going to go away," says Kenney. "I disagree with the lack of acknowledgment that this is a world financial crisis." He sees the mayor as "a mature adult who recognizes the seriousness of the situation." 

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Maybe the point of "good governance" is that it doesn't always mean the same thing. It means doing what's right for a particular situation. In the context of a world financial crisis, that would mean understanding what a city government's core mission is, and trying to preserve key services — something Nutter says he's doing by not making any police or fire layoffs. Looked at this way, "right-sizing" becomes downsizing not for its own sake, but to deal with a new, possibly long-term economic reality. And hey, maybe you leave aside a little money for something forward-thinking, like, say, an Office of Sustainability.

As for the concerns about the scheduling of his town halls, and the fact that Nutter is intent on sticking with the cuts he's announced regardless of what citizens say, the mayor has simply explained that he plans to take public input into account while making next year's budget, but that some cuts have to be made immediately if the city is going to continue to function. "You cannot spend what you do not have," he said at Kensington High School.

It's a strong case: Maybe Nutter is just doing what he has to do, naysayers be damned. And by no means is it just people inside the administration making this argument.

"Personally, I think that Nutter's doing a really great job," said Maria Rovello, a public school teacher, at South Philly High's town hall. "I think he's a listener. He's sincere. These decisions are hard."

But for other folks, there are certain things about this characterization that just don't seem right. For instance: If some cuts had to be made immediately, fine. But why make any of those particular cuts —namely the library closings — irreversible? Deep interrogation of Nutter's proposal can make it feel like there are things at play that the public just doesn't know about. And people who have that feeling don't see a responsible Nutter. They see someone else. Someone familiar.

Nutter the Same-Old

During the campaign, the most talked-about Nutter TV ad was the one featuring his daughter, Olivia. But these days, it seems, the ad Philadelphians remember best is the one that showed a giant hand ripping the spire off City Hall and dumping some suits out into the street. "Throw out the bums in City Hall who have been ripping us off for years," it said.

For much of this budget process, that spirit has stood in sharp contrast to the deference the mayor has shown City Hall. The former district councilman has been very aware of Council's concerns: He met with members behind closed doors — a meeting that may or may not have been legal, but was in either case extremely un-transparent — to provide a "briefing" on the budget situation, and emerged, for the most part, with their support. Brett Mandel of the advocacy group Philadelphia Forward, which lobbies for tax cuts and open government, said earlier this month that he believes the mayor has been overly eager to please what Mandel calls the "political class": Nutter hasn't taken on the municipal unions over health care and pension costs, and if there are patronage jobs being eliminated in the budget-cut process, well, he hasn't said so.

"This is not the candidate Nutter who ripped the towers off City Hall," Mandel said. "He's concerned with making sure that the insiders are on his side."

"Maybe the bums that are being thrown out of City Hall are librarians," said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, co-editor of Young Philly Politics. "Who knew?"

On Tuesday, Nutter countered this critique a good deal by announcing that he would consider eliminating or consolidating some of the city's independently elected "row offices," like the Sherriff or the Clerk of Quarter Sessions. Urevick-Ackelsberg, on his blog, called this a "good step." (Nutter would need Council to approve a charter change to do this.)

Still, there are other ways in which Nutter's "new day" has reminded of the bad old ones. When the administration was asked for various data explaining its cuts, it was not especially forthcoming: Councilman Green is still waiting for answers to questions he's submitted about things like the operational cost of individual libraries and how much revenue the Department of Licenses and Inspections (targeted for cutbacks) generated last year.

Some citizens feel this administration is no more open, public-minded or transparent than any previous one.

"This is probably a waste of time," said a janitor from Fishtown outside the Kensington High School town hall. "They already made up their minds." 

"His government is not corrupt, but it's just as impermeable as the Street government was," said Magali Larson, a former Nutter volunteer, at the School of the Future town hall in West Philly.

On top of this, before Nutter announced his (as yet not specific) intentions regarding row offices, the new, smart, different politician hadn't come up with many new, smart or different ways to address city budget problems — in fact, many of the closings he proposed were also proposed by John Street (and opposed by then-councilman Nutter). For some, that was a let-down.

"What has he done that anyone else couldn't have done?" asked Urevick-Ackelsberg a couple of weeks ago. "How is this any better than John Street?"

You could see this as part of an inevitable political cycle: Maybe we can look forward, in eight years, to a new mayor Green or Quiñones-Sanchez closing libraries. But that's pretty pessimistic, and not very generous to Nutter. Because while there are things the mayor could have done more transparently — he'll get no pass here on his closed-door meetings with council — he is now holding town halls, where he's being pretty frank, and talking about bigger ideas. Plus, assessments like these should really be made in context. We're talking about a guy who took office pretty much just in time to deal with the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Which brings us to our Final Nutter.

Nutter the Unlucky

For the great bulk of politicians (as with the great bulk of everyone else), what you accomplish is determined, in large part, by your circumstances. It's true that some of history's greatest leaders made their bones during crises (and hey, there's nothing to say Nutter still can't). But in general, crises suck. They make it harder for you to do what you want.

Michael Nutter took over as mayor of Philadelphia riding a huge wave of optimism, and with plans to make city government more efficient and effective. He assembled his team, learned the lay of the land ... and was promptly derailed by the shit-tanking of the global economy. It's fair to ask whether Nutter's early budget projections were a bit rosy, but we've reached a point where he can't have been expected to see this coming. Given that everything he's had to do has been unplanned and reactive, can we really say much about his vision and ability besides, hey, the guy got screwed?

"He has to make cuts," said David Deal, a town hall attendee at South Philadelphia High, when asked what he's learned about the mayor. "He's adjusting to circumstances, to deal with the economy."

It is indeed hard to predict much about how the mayor will govern, going forward, based on his handling of this crisis. But I'm not sure there's nothing we can learn. Nutter's core principles and philosophy should be evident, after all, in anything he does: If Nutter the Responsible Grown-Up believes public safety is a city's most important function, we should expect that to show in or out of a crisis. And anyway, the Mayor Nutter who governs without a crisis doesn't exist yet. Nutter won't get to do his first year over. This is the only mayoralty we can assess.

One noteworthy thing about the different Nutters Philadelphians see is that, despite their being very disparate, there's not an incredible amount of contradiction between them: It's perfectly plausible for the mayor's administration to be business-oriented, operationally flawed, serious and mature, and, thus far, disappointing in terms of creativity and transparency, all at the same time (it's a bit harder to square the "responsible grown-up" Nutter with the one some people see exploiting this crisis to shrink government, but that remains an open question). Nor is it inconsistent to say that the mayor has displayed all these traits, while also experiencing terrible luck, and that it would be damn hard for any politician to avoid some negative reviews under these circumstances. Here's hoping the Nutter we see in the coming year is luckier, and better.

(doron@citypaper.net)