I talked a lot about the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter yesterday and it strikes me that most folks in Philadelphia - on the order of, say, 98% - have never seen the charter or known about its existence.  So let’s begin the lesson with a couple of use full links.

The city’s website has the annotated copy of the charter in, oddly enough, the Personnel Department’s website.  The American Legal Publishing Corporation has a copy that’s searchable and organized with a side window that allows the user to click through various sections.

When you click on this link you’ll be taken to the Philadelphia Code, the set of laws governing the city and the place where all of the bills passed by City Council and signed by the Mayor go on to live their fruitful life until repealed or, more likely, ignored.  I’m looking at you littering law!  Click on the link that says “Click here to go to the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter.”  Use the navigation window on the left just like you would Windows Explorer and open up the folder for Philadelphia Home Rule Charter.

The annonated version given was “prepared and published primarily as an aid to the officials and employees of the City who are charged with carrying out its provisions. It is also intended as a guide to a better understanding of the Charter for the residents of the City and others who will be concerned with and interested in it.”  Lest you think they just made it all up out of thin air, the annotations show you were the Charter Commission got the idea for certain provisions of the charter, whether they were “statutory provisions, ordinances, model provisions, and provisions from Charters of other cities.”  It always help to know where these ideas came from.  In fact, a new charter would probably borrow pretty heavily from the things that work in the current charter and would therefore cite them as sources.

For now, let’s take a look at a piece of the charter and see what it can teach us.  How about Article II, Chapter 1, Section 100: Numbers, Terms and Salaries of Councilmen:

The Council shall consist of seventeen members, of whom ten shall be elected from districts and seven from the City at large. The terms of councilmen shall be four years from the first Monday of January following the year in which they were elected except that a councilman elected to fill a vacancy shall serve only for the balance of the unexpired term. Each councilman shall receive a salary at the rate of $9,000 per annum, or such other sum as the Council shall from time to time ordain, and the President of Council shall receive in addition a salary at the rate of $1,000 per annum, or such other sum as the Council shall from time to time ordain.

The annotation explains:

Provision is made for a Council Consisting of Councilmen-at-large and of district Councilmen in order to assure a more representative legislative body. It is expected that Councilmen-at-large will not be bound by sectional considerations in acting upon legislation. Yet sectional representation is preserved through the provision for district Councilmen.

A new charter change commission would have to consider whether we should keep this in place or try something different.  Has this system worked or can it be improved upon?  Should the city’s districts be re-drawn into 17 pieces with 17 district councilpeople or no districts with all at-large council people?  Perhaps they’d want 10 districts with 2 councilpeople in each one.  Should council be able to set its own salary or should that be determined by an independent board appointed by the mayor and confirm by council?  Finally, the new charter may contain a term limit provision for council such as the current one for mayor or it may decide to get rid of the one for mayor.

You start to get a sense of how big such an undertaking would be.

Today, mentions of the charter change, a new charter or reorganization of government can be found in this comment on Young Philly Politics.  Otherwise a pretty quiet day.