Click on the image to watch to Town Hall Meeting #4

Town hall #4 was held last week on Monday, Dec 8th at the John Perzel Community Center at 2990 St. Vincent St from 7:00pm-9:00pm. Technical problems during the meeting required additional editing and delayed the release of this video.

Philadelphia’s fourth town hall meeting on the budget cuts was a feisty event with Mayor Michael Nutter having to verbally spar with a large contingent of fire department supporters. In addition to protests over the fire department cuts, residents continue to criticize the city’s plan to close library branches. One resident complained that with the closing of one branch it could mean a four year old child having to walk two miles to the nearest library.

This is also the meeting he announced that things are only going to get worse. “Unfortunately, I have to tell you here tonight that things have gotten worse” since last month, when he discussed Philadelphia’s financial woes in a live television address.”

Editor’s note: As you will see in the video, a power outage causes the mayor’s microphone to go out. This also shut down our video recorders for nearly 10 minutes. I was able to fire up a camcorder to catch Mayor Nutter trying to shout his explanations to the crowd before giving up and waiting for the audio to be fixed. A few minutes of video was lost but I have inserted an explanation of what the mayor said during this brief gap. This is also why it took me so long to get the video to Ch 64 and online.