Quote:
Originally Posted by 1487
yes and you have people on here suggesting that any decision made or not made has some connection to a payoff or corruption when there was ZERO such scandal during Nutter's term and Philly has aggressive pay to play rules that the state lacks. You can donate however much you want to state politicians and Harrisburg has made no attempts to clean up the rules.
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Haha Philly politicians still find ways. But what you said is largely my point, there has been so much effort to stamp out that kind of corruption, new regulations, new transparency efforts.
Today it seems that for most Philly pols, many bad decisions are not made not for money but for power (which is not to say Philly politicians NEVER enrich themselves, but that issue is on serious decline). Decisions are frequently made with far too much weight placed on a small proportion of the Philadelphia population in mind, rather than the greater benefit of the city in whole. Far too often it is still common for council members to oppose a project that would be great for the city and the tax base for largely petty and irrelevant reasons. But those reasons are the ones that are near and dear to the people they depend on reelecting them. It's one thing to stand for your constituents, it's another to make decisions that put your reelect-ability above the interests of the common good even for many of your own constituents who are less politically active.
So Philly still has a ways to go and ending Councilmanic Prerogative would go along way in shaping Philadelphia for the better going forward. But I totally understand why you feel the need to strongly rebut those who continually make posts that disparage the city government and portray it as totally inept and corrupt. To see such great strides of progress, not only in terms of standards and ethics but even in the make up of our government itself and the types of more progressive, intelligent, economically engaged minds that are being elected; and to see the progress go largely ignored by many people is frustrating. It's like you have a child that regularly got D's and F's, who has worked hard and now regularly gets C's and B's and sometimes even the odd A and yet some people just continue to relentlessly criticize him and fail to acknowledge progress.
Rome wasn't built in a day. The City Government is far from perfect. But the negativity here regarding that government is largely misplaced. Looking back on the past 30-40 years, if you're not feeling more optimistic about Philadelphia and its government then you simply haven't been paying attention and your views are largely not based in reality. There's still more work to be done, but the trend has been steadily building toward a brighter future for many years now.
None of this can be said about Harrisburg. Which wasn't great to begin with and is arguably at its nadir with no signs of reversing course. To ignore the impact of Harrisburg and how their decisions hamper Philadelphia's ability to be the best city it can be is to miss a lot of the picture.
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