(PennDOT Secretary Leslie Richards | Image: SEPTA) SEPTA's General Manager Jeff Kneuppel is leaving his post next year, Ryan Briggs reports, and the most likely successor for the transit authority's top job is current PennDOT Secretary, and former Montgomery County Commissioner, Leslie Richards.  Continue reading

It's been over a year since City Council last had a hearing on Council member Derek Green's campaign finance reform package, which would have established a new public financing option for local elections, and moved from annual contribution limits to cycle limits—two changes that would be expected to make our elections more competitive. Some good news out of Seattle about the success of their democracy vouchers program in the recent municipal elections could help renew interest in this idea in the next Council session. Continue reading

(Preview of the Ward Portal | Image: Sixty-Six Wards) Election data fans rejoice! There's a really useful new Ward Portal tool from Sixty-Six Wards blogger Jonathan Tannen that now makes it much easier to analyze past election results or plan a campaign.  Continue reading

(The Austin housing authority purchased this 452-unit apartment complex to operate as non-profit housing | Image: Community Development Trust) Everyone would like to see a lot more affordable housing created in Philadelphia, but the most common ways that capital-A Affordable Housing is created today makes this unaffordable to scale.  Continue reading

Municipal-year general elections are usually pretty sleepy in Philadelphia, with most of the action happening during the primary, but this year we're in for a little more lively of a fall campaign season because there's a boomlet of independent candidates running for City Council At-Large.  Continue reading

(Tom Wolf is raising the roof...on licensing rules that make it harder to find work in Pennsylvania) Nearly 25% of all U.S. workers now need a license from the state to do their job, thanks to a growing tangle of state-level employment laws known as occupational licensing. Continue reading

(Image: Most PA local tax bases are too small to do anything real) With a patchwork of over 2,500 different municipalities, 500 school districts, and over 1,500 different special authorities making up the most local layer of local government in most of Pennsylvania, most areas of the Commonwealth aren't terribly well-governed at the municipal level. That's because the skimpy local tax bases that result from so much fragmentation can support only bare-bones services in many places—and a great many PA local governments don't even have all the basics covered, with fully half of them lacking even a local police department.  Continue reading

(At 1213 Walnut, you can rent just a home without a parking spot | Photo: Jon Geeting) Parking is a sensitive subject these days, with a few central and south Philadelphia neighborhoods seeing overnight curb parking occupancy rates nearing 100% or more, and little appetite from our elected officials to address the problem at the source by managing curb turnover. Instead, some elected officials want to approach the problem by increasing parking requirements for new or repurposed buildings in a vain attempt to fix the curb parking crunch. Some new research out of Boston helps illustrate why this approach not only doesn't work, but creates even more problems than it solves. Continue reading