Philadelphia 3.0 is pleased to announce our 2019 endorsements for the City Council primaries this May 21st. Continue reading

Philadelphia's crowded 2019 primary for City Council At-Large passed a key milestone yesterday with the drawing of ballot positions, leading to some big surprises that could impact the primary results on May 21st. Continue reading

With the 2019 petition deadline in the rearview last Tuesday, and ballot position drawings coming up next week, the shape of Philadelphia's municipal primary is starting to firm up. Let's dive right in to some of the highlights. Continue reading

Mayor Jim Kenney really would like to get the Sweeperheads off his case about breaking his campaign promise to bring back citywide street sweeping, and in his budget address this week, he committed another $2.3 million to increase sweeping service. That earned Kenney some glowing headlines, but reading deeper into the Mayor's plan, it's clear it's not time to put the pitchforks down yet.  Continue reading

A new data analysis of requests for city-owned vacant lots from Ryan Briggs at WHYY clearly shows that Philadelphia's vacant land problem is still very much a City Council problem, and that the Land Bank will never work while we still have Councilmanic Privilege over land sales. Continue reading

City Council is out with a new anti-poverty plan timed to the primary elections that you can think of as a sort of campaign platform for incumbents. There are several good ideas in there, but also some misguided ideas, particularly in the affordable housing plank, which unfortunately just reinforce an unhelpful narrative about housing that we were just starting to get away from with Council's much better affordable housing package that passed last Fall.   Continue reading

(Image: Provident Mutual Building) A bumper crop of recent reporting about City Council land scandals is conspiring to make the 2019 City Council elections into a welcome referendum on Councilmanic Prerogative—an unfortunate governance tradition that's landed past Council members in jail, and that stifles Philadelphia from doing any real planning. Continue reading

With the steady drumbeat of criticism from property owners about the Office of Property Assessment's 2019 assessments, and City Council's recent decision not to reapprove OPA's chief assessor Michael Piper, the Kenney administration has announced they'll conduct a national search for someone new to lead the city's property assessment office. But just a day later, in a separate story about OPA's land valuation methods, Kenney spokesman Mike Dunn is still out there defending the biggest thing OPA is doing wrong.  Continue reading

(Hitting the road to talk low-capacity municipal governments | Photo: Wolf for PA) New Lt. Governor John Fetterman is out on a listening tour to learn more about Pennsylvanians' attitudes toward recreational marijuana, in what feels like advance work for a legislative push from the Wolf administration on the topic. Continue reading

(Committee of Seventy button wall | Photo: Jon Geeting) Philadelphia is coming off of two unusually competitive and high-turnout election cycles in 2017 and 2018, in the wake of Donald Trump's surprise 2016 victory, and while we're still too far from Election Day to know whether 2019 will fit the pattern, early signs point to another lively change election. Case in point: ten out of ten District Council members are facing a primary challenge. Continue reading