Are we seeing the end of "I Know a Guy" governance in Philly politics?
The Ready: The end of "I Know a Guy" governance?
Philly'south insider culture has long been an like shooting fish in a barrel path to corruption. Finally, Philly 3.0'south engagement director notes, new Metropolis policies may be addressing that.
Aug. 10, 2020
Philadelphia is famously a small boondocks masquerading as a big urban center, and in the globe of government and politics, this has large benefits and big drawbacks.
One of the benefits is that a superabundance of social uppercase means networks of personal relationships can sometimes brand up for systems-level failures in governance and service commitment.
And 1 of the drawbacks, on the flipside of the same coin, is that the ability to muddle through on the force of personal relationships saps too much political free energy away from coming upwards with systems-level solutions to the systems-level failures.
The gaps in the system sometimes create business opportunities for people to pace into the breach and essentially hire out their networks in government to paying clients.
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Sometimes this takes the class of above-board corporate services like expediters, and sometimes at that place'southward more of a freelance nature to what goes on, which is where y'all tend to see people getting in legal trouble over bribes and scams.
This is a useful frame for viewing terminal week's news where Jeffrey Blackwell, a sometime employee of the Controller's Role, and step-grandson of sometime Councilmember Jannie Blackwell, plead guilty to crimes related to bribes and kickbacks for things resembling freelance expediter services, some of which he never delivered on.
According to United states Attorney William Chiliad. McSwain, Jeffrey Blackwell, 47, of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty Wed to charges of honest services wire fraud, filing a false tax return, and two counts of failure to file a tax return.
Blackwell, a onetime Urban center of Philadelphia employee in the Office of the City Controller, committed a serial of frauds, accepting more than $20,000 in bribes and kickbacks, regime said […]
At his plea hearing, he admitted that he solicited bribes from at to the lowest degree 5 individuals who were seeking permits or contracts from the city.
One of these individuals owned a furniture store and paid Blackwell for permits to park a storage container on the street. The 2d person was renovating a house and paid Blackwell for permits to allow that renovation. The tertiary person endemic a structure business and paid Blackwell to obtain a plumbing let. The quaternary person owned an automobile body store and paid Blackwell in the hope of getting a license to purchase and sell cars too equally a city contract to install decals on police vehicles. The fifth person, who was cooperating with the FBI at the fourth dimension, told Blackwell that he needed permits from the City of Philadelphia to renovate a house.
The commentary on these kinds of stories typically dwells on shaming officials' willingness to appoint in illegal behavior and what information technology says about Philadelphia'due south civilisation, but without minimizing that attribute of it, it's a chip of a dead terminate when it comes to thinking almost the concrete things that concerned people in positions of power should actually try and exercise nearly it.
The main thing that nourishes the "I Know a Guy" system is the overcomplexity of getting really normal things from city government like, patently, parking permits for a storage container, plumbing permits or home renovations—all things that should be pretty piece of cake to do without the assist of a political fixer, but in practice is not ever the case.
The place to target efforts, so, is in making these processes much more than straightforward and administratively elementary for people such that it would never even occur to anyone to track down guys with political connections for assistance.
What makes this so difficult to change is that the existing ways of doing things create and reinforce their own political constituency. If personal connections to government staff are a valuable form of majuscule that many people will pay to rent, the people who have mastered the arrangement—both inside and exterior regime—accept piddling incentive to prioritize changes that devalue that capital past making things less relationship-based.
The good news is that things aren't hopeless, and in that location's been some of import progress to make things better, fifty-fifty if in that location's still a ways to become.
For example, the City just rolled out a new Contracts Hub for the first time that makes it much easier for people to encounter what contracts are available using keyword searches, and submit bids. And the cosmos of the eClipse online permitting system has forced some departments to better spell out some of their requirements and processes more clearly, making project approvals less of a moving target.
The city has also been convening working groups on business process issues hosted by the Commerce Department to identify the pain points of operating a business within the constabulary, which doesn't appear to have quite borne fruit yet, but is a step in the right direction in terms of emphasis.
Additionally, the pandemic has required city government to motility more processes online and make changes to them to arrange to applied realities. Public health considerations accept also temporarily deposed one of the worst ideas in local government—the neighbor petition for urban center permits—which, thankfully, nobody can be expected to deport out since it would be unsafe to have people become door to door for signatures for things similar outdoor eating house seating, the Playstreets plan and more than. As a consequence, we run across more of those things happening.
The pandemic has really thrown into sharp relief many of the ways where local governance is unpleasing at a systems level, but also has resulted in big, fast changes to processes that previously seemed similar they could never be changed.
With whatever luck, our elected leaders volition take some of these lessons to center and make a priority of fixing them as the city digs out of the Covid-19 mess in the coming years.
Jon Geeting is the director of engagement at Philadelphia 3.0 , a political action commission that supports efforts to reform and modernize Urban center Hall. This is part of a series of articles running on both The Citizen and 3.0's blog .
The Ready is made possible through a grant from the Thomas Skelton Harrison Foundation. The Harrison Foundation does not exercise editorial command or blessing over the content of any material published by The Philadelphia Citizen.
Photograph by Charles Deluvio / Unsplash 
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/philly-politics-insider-culture/
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