Apparently the rumors to the effect that indictments might shortly follow the conclusion of budget negotiations have played out. Republican Att'y General Tom Corbett today indicted former PA House Minority Whip Michael Veon and 11 others today -including sitting Rep. Sean M. Ramaley (D., Beaver).

According to the Inky its tad a tangled web of who's who of who faces charges with it even including the one obligatory lurid detail:

Also charged were former top Democratic staffers Michael Manzo, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese (D., Greene) until last year and Jeff Foreman, Veon's former chief of staff, who is now is counsel to Rep. Keith McCall, (D.,Carbon).

DeWeese was not charged in the criminal presentment.

Behind my home there is a burned out shell. A family of possums, several dozen pigeons and an occasional raccoon call it home. Before the fire a few years ago a very nice family called it home. It was a rental property and in the fire the family lost everything. It turns out that their landlords, who lived in a well to-doish part of Montgomery County had gerry-rigged a decidedly unsafe kitchen in the former dining room to avoid dealing with some minor structural problems in the back room where the "old" kitchen was. Exposed wires, a propane fueled make do range set up on raw plywood - a fire danger waiting to happen for several years that finally did consuming a family of fours entire possessions. Luckily noone was seriously injured. Several neighbors on the block have asked about the property, what to do about gaping holes in all the windows, etc. Investigating the property on the BRT website the landlords had not paid property taxes for 12 years prior to the fire and certainly not paid any in the 4 or 5 years since the fire that the house has sat empty.

Tracking down the landlords via information on the BRT site, they weren't necessarily bad people, though they obviously had set up an unsafe condition for their tenants and in my mind bear the main responsibility for the fire and the risk to their tenants lives. Adult children of an elderly grandmother who had long since moved out of the neighborhood from a neighborhood that saw a serious downswing in the late '80s and 90's under the reign of crack and more recently a new but serious upswing. Calling repeatedly to inquire about the status of the property, various adult children and boyfriends would always say "You need to talk my mother" take down the information and then never call back. Eventually the number was disconnected and googling the address in MontCo it turns out after being only a few years tax delinquency on their home in the burbs, the MontCo house had been sold at a tax foreclosure auction with no forwarding information for the former landlords. There is no sign that shell will ever go up for auction to a possible rehabber (which in my opinion could be done profitably at current housing prices despite the fire damage) to recoup whatever uncollected taxes here in the city they could.

I take this little detour because its an example of the gray area that many of the properties that fall through the cracks of the city's longtime defacto policy of not collecting property taxes fall into - how the policy helps situations that should have not gotten as bad they do fester and become small catastrophes. I'd argue that the tenants, the landlords, Philly's schools and my neighborhood would all have been better off if the city had intervened earlier - given the landlord's a financial incentive to do some hard thinking about their attachment to a house none of them had seen in years and that all they could do to maintain was hire the worst unlicensed handyman they could find to set up a dangerous unsafe kitchen.

When people talk about property taxes people rarely talk about these muddled gray areas. Its usually black or white. You either are on the side of seniors on fixed income on the verge of being forced from their home or you are (like the role I sometimes play) complaining about the hundreds of deadbeat real estate specualtors and horrible, horrible absentee landlords getting a free ride. Because of the divide, dialog on the topic is often broken and clear and simple policy solutions get passed over again and again.

For example in today's Inquirer:

For a city and nation in the grip of the home-foreclosure crisis, Barbara Pearsall's situation seems like a familiar one: She is hopelessly behind on her bills, and barring some sudden financial windfall, the recovering stroke victim will lose her small South Philadelphia rowhouse in a matter of months.

But it's not a big mortgage lender that would turn the 67-year-old Pearsall out of her house. It's the City of Philadelphia.

City Hall is in the midst of an aggressive crackdown on tens of thousands of real estate tax delinquents. Those who won't or can't pay - like Pearsall - are losing their properties, to the tune of more than 100 tax-foreclosure filings a month.

The city has every legal right to seize the land of those who haven't met the most basic of civic responsibilities. And the collective debt the delinquents owe is massive: about $290 million, money the city and school district badly need.

Yet by getting tough at a time when mortgage foreclosures are hitting Philadelphia hard, the city runs the risk of putting further stress on already shaky neighborhoods.

One standard response is "the city should not collect the taxes because foreclosing on properties in shaky neighborhoods makes things worse"

"What the city is doing doesn't make sense. Market values are tumbling, homes are being boarded up, neighborhoods are being disrupted," said Irwin Trauss, an attorney with Philadelphia Legal Assistance who runs the city's mortgage-foreclosure hotline.

"The city ought not be adding fuel to this fire. The city ought not be taking this opportunity to collect its debt, certainly not from low-income folks, by selling people's houses and making them homeless."

But I would argue that not collecting the taxes for so long has in the instance of the house behind me has in its own way poured fuel on the fire: underfunding our schools, reducing the number of up-to-code safe rentals on the market, helping to build blight.

The city's response:

The city promised an extensive safety net for low-income homeowners when the stepped-up collection program was introduced. There was to be a $1 million loan fund, and $500,000 more for tax-foreclosure housing counseling. Neither materialized.

"The safety net doesn't exist," said Monty Wilson, an attorney for Community Legal Services who has specialized in tax-foreclosure cases.

The Nutter administration disputes that, but Pritchett acknowledged the city had not done everything Street promised. The difficulty, he said, is that the prior administration did not set aside enough money to meet the promises.

The city does offer payment plans to delinquent low-income taxpayers, which Pritchett said was perhaps the most important part of any safety net.

But attorneys such as Wilson say the agreements are part of the problem. Those who sign up, Wilson said, waive their due-process rights, in essence giving the city permission to take their homes without notice or the right to a court hearing if the homeowner misses so much as a single payment.

"It would be a national scandal if the mortgage companies tried to do what the city is doing," Wilson said.

City officials dismissed Wilson's concerns, suggesting he was misinterpreting the agreement's language.

"Community Legal Services is wrong," said Cynthia White, chief deputy city solicitor. "This is an agreement we've been using for 25 years."

In practice, White said, the city is highly accommodating to low-income homeowners who have signed payment agreements. Fine, Wilson and CLS respond, then change the agreement language to better reflect that.

Now here's the problem, without taxes to fund L&I inspectors or social workers or education programs to reach out to homeowners starting to get in a pinch before it hits a crisis the city is definitely running the risk of putting lots of homeowner's in dire straights.

The thing thats craziest about the predicament is the city already has a model praised for how it should be dealing with its own tax foreclosures based on its recently passed mortgage foreclosure laws. Why aren't we doing this already? I would submit - the "divide".

What really worries community lawyers, however, are homeowners like Pearsall, who sought help just a little too late.

Pearsall inherited her modest brick rowhouse from a sister around 1980. Undereducated and unemployed, Pearsall said her average monthly income was $500, all of it public-assistance money. On that she raised three children and three grandchildren.

"I didn't have the money," Pearsall said. "I didn't have the money for the taxes. And I didn't pay them."

By last year, she owed the city $27,000, and the foreclosure warnings were arriving in the mail at a furious pace. She sought help in November, but it was too late. Her home was sold at sheriff's auction days later.

Pearsall still lives there, but her time is running out. The redemption period, in which she can get her home back (by making good on her debts, plus interest, rent and attorneys' fees), ends in December.

Monty Wilson, who now represents Pearsall, says it all could have been avoided. If the city did for her and other tax delinquents what it does for those with mortgage trouble, Pearsall would still have the title to her home, Wilson said.

The city's new and innovative mortgage program, which was featured in a Wall Street Journal front-page story earlier this month, mandates that no home can be auctioned without a court-mediated conciliation session between the homeowner and the lender. Had Pearsall had access to the same program, Wilson said, she could have signed on to a payment plan, or gotten a reverse mortgage to make good on her debts.

Pritchett, the mayor's policy adviser, says it's an idea worth considering.

"But let's remember the big picture, which is that there are many people in the city who can pay their taxes who aren't," Pritchett said.

He is no doubt right about that. Many of the deadbeats are thought to be absentee landlords or speculators. Others are regular folks who haven't paid because, until now, there were no consequences. And these aren't property owners who are past due by a few months. Most haven't paid their taxes in years, or even decades.

But it is also true that there are low-income homeowners, largely elderly and on fixed incomes, who are now squarely in the city's tax-collection sights. Exactly how many is impossible to say, however. White said the city didn't even keep track of which delinquent homes were occupied by their owners, much less their household incomes.

In a few months, the city's contract with the Texas-based tax-collection firm Lineberger, Groggan, Blair & Sampson will expire. The city is using the opportunity to think about changing its approach, Pritchett said.

"We are going to do an evaluation of exactly what the new contract will look like, who they'll go after, what kind of people should we be targeting," Pritchett said. "We'll ask if in light of the change in the economy should we maybe have a different approach."

For many homeowners caught in a pinch "a few months" is too late.

So that my pitch for a "middle ground" on smart property tax policy. I might go a step further and say we should make a serious case for suspending tax forclosures (on owner occupants only) till a decent well-funded program for mediation was put into place.

Sometimes a "middle path" is the way to go. Others here may differ.

Under the 1996 electric competition law, electric rates - distribution, transmission, generation - charged by electricity companies were capped. For a majority of the state’s electric consumers, generation rates remain capped, meaning it is too early to examine the long-term impact of restructuring on consumers.

The electric competition law provided a framework for giving all retail electric customers direct access to alternative suppliers of generation. When the law was passed, the average electricity price in Pennsylvania was about 15 percent above the national average. Today, on average, the prices throughout Pennsylvania are at or below the national average.

In the last 10 years, the prices of natural gas and coal have doubled – both of those products are fuels used in the generation of electricity. While Pennsylvania consumers’ rates are capped, the market prices for electricity have risen – just as the prices of other good and services have risen.

The future expiration of those energy regulations, coupled with quickly rising global energy costs means that consumers in Philadlephia may face dramatic rises in utility costs in the future.

Democratic candidate for state representative Vanessa Brown, invites you to a special community event on the impact of these changes to consumers plus a chance for consumers to meet directly with representatives from their local utilities on issues a tad closer to home.

Some of you know I've been threatening to put together a substantial piece covering Philadelphia's incarceration problem for a while. This probably won't be it but Karen Heller's Inquirer piece today is such a strongly worded piece, I had to put this up just to echo the seriousness of the problem.

"If the United States leads the world in incarceration," says civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, "Philadelphia leads the United States."

We have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than anybody else, 3.5 times more than New York City.

We're No. 1!

Prisoners are a growth industry. "Booming," says prison commissioner Lou Giorla.

It's not hard to see why. When so many of the city's population are woefully uneducated - almost 30 percent lack high-school degrees - decent jobs are hard to come by.

The drug-dealing business, however, is always hiring.

The criminal division heard 15,000 felony cases last year, 80 percent of them related to drugs.

"We're not doing the things that would prevent the market from growing," says Judge Pamela P. Dembe, chief of the criminal trial division. "We operate a justice system that is based on a very old model, a punitive model."

Amazingly even though Philadelphia is almost 1 million smaller in population than it was 50 years ago, we have never incarcerated as many as we do now and the costs aren't cheap.

This spring, Philadelphia's prisons made history - by having more prisoners in jail than at any time in the last three centuries, 9,334 prisoners, at an annual cost of $30,000 each. The facilities were designed to hold 6,433.

Two-thirds of inmates are awaiting trial, half for minimum drug charges. Some wait as long as two years for their cases to be heard.

It's an expensive mess. Fifteen percent of prisoners are mentally ill. More than 2,000 are held three to a cell designed for two; one of them has to sleep in a plastic shell on the floor. Due to overcrowding, guard overtime will hit $35 million this month.

A quarter of Philadelphia's budget goes to criminal justice, almost $960 million on cops, courts and prisons. And 80 percent of the criminal justice system deals with the nasty tentacles of drugs. Do the math. That's $767 million to deal with problems at the end of the line, not the beginning, before they all clot the system.

Sorry for all the quotes, but the staggering facts of our local problem have to be addressed in order for people to understand how pressing this problem is, how much it steals from the budget that could be better applied to prevention for youth and reentry services for people coming out of the system so it stops functioning as a revolving door. Philadelphia is facing a crisis of incarceration - literally.

Heller's piece is addressed to civil libertarian David Rudovsky's suit over the fact that our local prison system is unconstitutionally overcrowded. Locally we are currenly triple celling putting 3 into cells designed for two. The majority of those we incarcerate locally are simply awaiting trial - mostly because they can't afford bail for non-violent offenses. The courts are backed up from the crushing load of drug cases and we are using our local jail system increasingly as an expensive and incredibly ineffective mental health holding facility, in turn putting other inmates and employees of the system at risk.

This is a system in dire need of reform. Luckily there are solutions we could be using and Everett Gillison is examining some them. Amazingly besides being more effective, they also can save us money.

More on that in a bit, but folks can get started looking at how Philadelphia could be saving money better invested in prevention and reentry while making the system better by looking at this article - on options Gillison is investigating including GPS ankle bracelets and day reporting.

I have more to add but let me just say that I've been collecting some information resources for this issue over on the Philly ADA forum so please check there as well.

So an interesting story about Bill's analysis of his wife's loss.

“She will win the general election if you nominate her. They're just trying to make sure you don't," Bill Clinton said at the Fort Thompson event. "It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out.” He then began impersonating an intimidated superdelegate: “Oh, this is so terrible: The people, they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up."

Who's they? MoveOn.org apparently.

So I notice no talk about this here yet but the accusations in the League of Women Voter's suit against former PA Supreme Court Justice Ralph Cappy are startling if true. The suit accuses Cappy of a jaw-droppingly cavalier attitude towards the separation between the state legislature and the PA Supremes. Essentially they say that Cappy negotiated in no uncertain terms, trading pay raises for the judiciary, including himself, in trade for finding Act 71, the gaming legislation, constitutional.

Quoting John Baer's handy summary from the Daily News:

The League of Women Voters, in a 17-page federal civil action, alleges that in its challenge to the state's 2004 gambling law, its right to due process was violated by a too-cozy, inappropriate relationship between the Legislature and the state judiciary.

So President Bush, after 7.5 years in office, has recently decided that he's interested in Israel and serious about addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - enough to actually visit Israel personally for the second time in his presidency, the second time in a period of a few short months. Better late than never as they say.

Anyway, as part of a speech commemorating Israel's 60th anniversary, Bush decided to take a swing at Barrack Obama over his suggestion of direct diplomacy with Iran.

President Bush has said repeatedly that he would not insert himself into the presidential race, but that stance changed dramatically today during his trip to Israel. After likening Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Osama bin Laden, Bush compared Barack Obama to Nazi appeasers:

A friend of mine from Brewerytown asked me to post this. It looks to be a lively neighborhood political forum discussing amongst other things a topic near and dear to many of us outside of Center City - access to healthy foods as a means to promote better diet and also as a keystone for inclusive neighborhood economic development.

The West Girard Supermarket Coalition Candidate Night is being held by the West Girard Supermarket Coalition. It is a coalition of neighborhood groups working towards getting a supermarket into the neighborhood. The night is specifically towards this topic with a Q&A afterwards if time permits.

We invited all Democrat and Republican candidates for the 2nd Congressional, 3rd State Senate, 1st State Senate and 195th State House. We have had several confirmations already.

This is an open night to everyone and we expect a decent turn out of residents. The more that show up, the more it shows neighborhood support.

May 19th, 2008
6:30 pm

So I curious about people's read on the latest salvo's between Rev. Wright at the Press Club vs. Obama's reaction. I'm still sorting it out. Its not that any of Wright's comments in the Q & A section were so terribly off (though they were clownish to the point of resembling a stand-up routine at points) but jeesh! "With friends like this who needs enemies" as they say.

First Wright's Q&A session:

So in news of other races, physical copies of the official DCC sponsored voting guide in the 190th have apparently recently surfaced. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) Vanessa Brown, the one Democratic candidate actually on the ballot, is not on it. Instead it urges voters to write-in Tommy Blackwell's name.

In an election where voter turnout will be increased dramatically, Tommy's chances of success are slim but VANESSA BROWN STILL NEEDS YOUR HELP, on election day making sure no funny business goes down, reaching out to voters before e-day and to be blunt retiring some of those legal bills.

Please, if you feel strongly about Vanessa’s candidacy:

So I am a little surprised to be the one posting this, as it is not my area of specialty, and especially since YPP is usually such a hot bed of discussion for alternate voting systems, but how about that idea for re-doing the Florida and possibly the Michigan primary as a vote by mail process?

Because MI and FL moved up their primaries against the wishes of the DNC, they had had their delegates stripped - which was at the time plainly unfair to the voters of those states and in the current situation a disaster waiting to happen. Because of the unexpected closeness of the Presidential race, the prospect of a fight over seating delegates the DNC had sought to bar would seem to be in the best interest of party to avoid at all costs unless you are looking forwrd to 8 years of President McCain.

Love them or hate them, the two state races sucking all the air out of the room (besides of course the Presidential race) will both be the subject of one of the only neighborhood head-to-head candidate forums of the season.

Come See the 1st Dist. State Senate Debate on March 12th
A THRILLA IN SOUTH PHILA!

Candidates Night

Wed. March 12th
Palumbo Recreation Center
10th and Fitzwater Street

7:00PM

State House Candidates at 7PM sharp!
Peggy Banaszek, Bob Gormley & Babette Josephs

State Senate Candidates at 7:30 PM sharp!
Anne Dicker, John Dougherty
Larry Farnese, Office of Vincent Fumo
& Jack Morley

Come with your questions,
concerns and comments.

Brought to you by
Bella Vista United Civic Association
www.bvuca.org
267- 872- 4686

So you have all by now seen the strangely creepy political ad where State Senator Vince Fumo appears to have broken into some family's home while making highly debateable assertions about his record on gun violence in Harrisburg.

Basically he touts his record against gun violence, intersperses an out of context quote from Rendell with a shot implying an endorsement from both Rendell and Nutter when he has received neither, and then somewhat menacingly serves pasta to a startled and downright worried looking family in their kitchen.

Pebbles Bam Bam it will be recalled predicted / championed Rene Gilenger running for State Senate against Vince Fumo, which many folks (including myself) pooh-poohed saying "But she's running Larry Farnese's campaign, pshaw". Well it appears she was half right. Rene Gilenger is running Larry Farnese for State Senate against Vince Fumo.

And also for State Rep against Babette Josephs at the same time - which much to my surprise is perfectly legal.

Under state law, Farnese can keep his options open for a long time - even to appear on primary ballots as a candidate for both House and Senate.

"State law does not prohibit multiple candidacies for public office," said Cathy Ennis, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State. "They just can't hold more than one elected state office."

Well you learn something new every day.

Well Councilman Jack Kelly is in the news again for factors unrelated to his recent razor thin electoral win. Federal investigators are looking at alleged deals in his office involving two brothers who are real estate developers, large scale landlords and coincidentally friends and large campaign contributors to the councilman. As is always the case in such instances, Kelly is providing "full cooperation" with Federal investigators.

The case hinges around questions about the connection between Kelly's chief of staff, Christopher G. Wright, and the two brothers, Hardeep and Ravinder Chawla. According to the Inquirer , Wright recieved a $1000 Christmas check from the Chawla brothers.