We Could Do Worse

A City Paper Editorial

by Doron Taussig

Time Out

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We here at City Paper have given Michael Nutter a fair amount of grief since he took over as mayor. We didn't love his caddying for Hillary Clinton. We gave him hell on libraries. We briefly introduced a feature — the short-lived "Reform-o-Meter" — intended to monitor his commitment to structural government change. And we wondered, when he made his first round of budget cuts this fall, how the cuts imposed by the man who'd promised a "new day" were any different from what anyone else might have done.

But last week, as the mayor introduced his budget and then sat down in his office to answer a slew of nit-picky questions, something occurred to us: Thank God it's Nutter. Given the scope of this shitstorm and the political talent in this city, we could be doing a lot worse.

After an inauspicious start to this budget crisis, lowlighted by closed-door meetings with City Council, an attempt to ram permanent library closures through as emergency cuts, and all sorts of shifting, after-the-fact rationalizations of same, the mayor seems to have gotten his act together. He initiated a sophisticated public feedback process. He decided to take on the political class, calling for the closure of row offices but not, crucially, alienating Council, which is not that expensive in the grand scheme of things and which he needs to help him save the city. And while it's too early to pass final judgment on the budget Nutter's proposed, the mayor does seem to have done an honest job of trying to balance citizen preferences with his responsibility as an executive.

Contrast this to the conduct of other elected officials in this city. Much of Council couldn't be bothered to attend public meetings. A majority of members have resisted calls to give up their city cars or cut their own salaries, and few have brought ideas to the table — it's like they're hoping this whole thing will just blow over without anyone paying attention to them (Bill Green has been a notable exception to this inactivity, but apparently has a lot to learn about cooperation — he's managed to get just about everyone on Council pissed off at him).

If you dare, you might also contrast Nutter to what might have been, had the mayor lost the election. Bob Brady could be sitting in the mayor's office right now, threatening to bang people's heads together until they figure something out. Tom Knox could be leasing out City Hall, running the government from inside his Two Liberty Place apartment. Chaka Fattah could be in his second year of trying to lease the airport. We will all be rich when we lease the airport.

Look, we remain wary of Nutter's tax plans. We worry about how things will go between him and the municipal unions, which, people should remember, are filled with middle-class Philadelphians like most of us. And we really don't like where he's come down on casinos. We think he's betrayed a campaign promise in giving up the fight against them, and that he's endorsed the trade of a short-term revenue solution for a long-term social problem.

But as the city digests the mayor's budget proposal, and Council prepares to interrogate it, it seems like a good time to point out that we have a mayor who's been taking the problem seriously, searching for intelligent, sustainable solutions, respecting the desires of the citizenry, and improving as he goes along. That's not nothing.

OK then. Back to complaining.

(doron@citypaper.net)