Photo credit: RNAi Global

Greg, who happens to be a friend of mine and someone I met while I was working in the mayoral race in 2003 and he was lobbying to save Love Park’s iconic status as a skateboarding mecca, has taken the view that the recent denial by a judge of Fox Chase Cancer Center’s proposed expansion into Burholme Park is an example of a system that functioned properly but should probably be changed.

Setting aside, for a moment, consideration of whether it would be a good thing to have the expansion or a bad thing to lose the park land, Greg compares the Fox Chase situation to the Unisys signage debate and explains how both cases were examples of overreaching (or over promising) by a mayoral administration:

These two episodes bring up the tenuous issue of how much we are willing to sacrifice (and in these cases, bend the law) in the name of economic development. In both cases powerful City leaders urged the deciding body to rule in favor of a company that would bring jobs and cachet for the city. However, in both cases the deciding bodies made their judgment based on their legal purview, not the potential for economic stimulus.

However, he continues, it’s important for the companies in question to expand in or move to the city and bring those much needed jobs and that much need tax revenue with them.  So what to do?

The answer has less to do with the decisions themselves, and everything to do with the consistency of the decisions.

…

Companies want nothing more than consistency. They care less about how much it costs, and more about getting a dependable timeline and schedule for what steps a project needs to go through, what hoops need to be jumped through. In Boston, for example, that city’s development review process, Article 80, is much more cumbersome than Philadelphia’s. However, it generally runs smoothly and consistently.

For details, check out Greg’s post.  There have been plenty of forums out there on which people have been commenting one way or the other about the Fox Chase expansion proposal.  You can use this post as another place to vent your opinon on that particular issue either way.  However, I’m more curious to hear from anyone who has done development work with the city to see if you agree with Greg’s point about cost vs. consistency.  Some of the zoning rules in place (or that may be in place after the Zoning Code Commission gets done) may mean greater costs for developers.  But is the promise of consistency in the enforcement of these rules as attractive as it would seem?  Again, read Greg’s whole post and let me (or him on his blog) know what you think.