On Wednesday, Dave Davies put a question to the city’s business community:

Say you’re in business in this town, and you’re in a tussle with an elected official, and he proposes to settle your differences if you pay some serious money. What do you do?

He tells the story of Willard Rouse, who faced that problem and decided to go to federal authorities, resulting in the arrest and ultimate conviction of a Philadelphia city councilman.  Contrast that with the most recent tidbit to come out of the trial of State Senator Vince Fumo.  We already know a lot about Fumo’s own alleged special trash collection schedule but the trial has brought to light some of the times when the state senator allegedly tried use his legislative power to extract promises of funding for causes, people and organizations that were close to him.

This week’s memorable testimony came from Verizon Pennsylvania President Dan Whelan, who told the court of receiving a list of $50 million worth of favors that Fumo would like the telecommunications company to do, apparently in return for Fumo backing off some legislation unfavorable to Verizon.  In the end, says Davies, a businessman put in that kind of position does have the option of going to federal authorities, as Rouse once did famously.

What Davies doesn’t explicitly say, perhaps because by now this is so well understood, is that Philadelphia’s pay-to-play culture existed (some would contend still exists) because people have been willing to pay.  For all of the blame that gets heaped on elected officials who sell the ability to play, the “payers” get very little public scrutiny and are subjected to much less public outrage.  Many people still remember Ron White and Corey Kemp, but does anyone remember the names of the business execs who were convicted of paying?

In a way pay-to-play is a crime of opportunity.  If no one ever agreed to play the game of contributing to a re-election campaign or sending charitable donations to that “special” non-profit,  but chose instead to take business elsewhere or alert the authorities, elected officials would soon find the risk-reward ratio to be too high.  The shadiest of them may even decide to get out of the politics business altogether.

This doesn’t mean that the elected officials are blameless.  Far from it.  They are the ones who are supposed to be stewards of the public welfare, of our tax money.  They are the ones we choose for a job the sole purpose of which is to make our city, our lives, better - or at the very least, not worse.

So it’s perfectly understandable that the elected officials get the most attention and the most press.   Heck, that’s the reason we all know how to pronounce “Blagojevich.”  But the other side of the pay-to-play equation - those who pay - shouldn’t be let off the hook in the court of public opinion.  And a special brand of outrage might be reserved for the “fixers” whose best advice for the besieged business executive is “find a way” to play ball with a grasping politician.

The men Whelan went to for help, David L. Cohen and Arthur Makadon, are the kind of power brokers, as Davies puts it, with “a thousand connections and interests among the city’s political and business elite” and all of the benefits and prestige that come from such a position.  Since one of those connections and interests was undoubtedly Vince Fumo himself, they were the ones who could have stepped in and at least tried to rein him in.  But why do that when the status quo seemed to be working so well?   These men are just a few out of an entire class of Philadelphian with close connections to the halls of power.  There are hundreds of lawyers, consultants and advisers who connect the business people who provide our goods and services to the elected officials who regulate and tax them.  When they say “play ball,” well, what ensues sometimes is the kind of thing prosecutors can make a federal case out of.

Ok, that said, the incident that Davies writes about is over eight years old.  A lot has changed since that alleged Fumo-Whelan incident took place.  Way back then, for example, the Phillies didn’t even seem to know there were playoffs.   The hope is that, just like our sports teams “will never lose again,” such behavior is on its way out, especially with an administration in place that ran so hard on ethics and reform.  In all that has happened to dampen people’s opinion of the Nutter administration, there hasn’t even been a hint of corruption.   In fact, as the Daily News points out today with an article about Inspector General Amy Kurland, the administration has taken action against lower level corruption among city employees:

During Kurland’s first year, 27 city workers were fired or forced to resign due to I.G. investigations. That number is actually less than in 2007, but Kurland notes that the improprieties for many of the 2008 dismissals are far more extreme.

In past years, most firings were for residency fraud, but in 2008 more were for fraud and corruption. And Kurland said that by the end of 2009 the focus on corruption will be more evident. Investigations under way include a double-billing scam and a theft from a quasi-city agency.

Judging from our commenters, there’s a sense that some decisions have been made with a little less transparency than would be desired but no one has accused the Mayor of doing anything to personally enrich himself or his campaign war chest. In fact, reading through some of Philly.com’s commenters, anyone who thinks the city is still very corrupt seems to be referring to City Council, a body over which the mayor and the IG have no investigatory or prosecutorial power.

So do you get a sense that Philadelphia feels “less corrupt” than it did even a year ago or, at the very least, it’s heading in the direction of being less corrupt?

(On a related and somewhat timely note, the City Ethics Task Force will be holding a public meeting tomorrow to gather citizen input.  Campaign finance, political activity by city employees, ethics and conflicts of interest, outside employment of city employees, and lobbying will be on the agenda.  Feel free to go there with your newfound appreciation of the “fixers” and let your concerns be known.)

(UPDATE: This just in!  Before you answer, read about a mayor who allegedly has actually ran afoul of the law.  According to the indictment, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon seems to have a thing for Target and Best Buy gift cards.