By Tom Ferrick
What would you call a big parade that hardly anyone shows up to watch? I would call it a failure. In Philadelphia, we have a different name for it. We call it the Mummer’s Parade.
News reports in the Daily News and the Inquirer made it clear that the crowd that lined up on [...]

By Tom Ferrick
When it comes to Mayor Michael Nutter and the libraries, the phrase “more trouble that it’s worth” comes to mind.
The Urban Dictionary, a snide and funny web site of American slang, defines the phrase as follows: “high maintenance; requiring excessive investments of effort that may not be exceeded by the return.”
That sounds about [...]

“We cannot grow, or even preserve, our revenue base unless we cut taxes. The status quo will lead to less revenue”
In the end, the tax reform movement in Philadelphia died without a whimper.
Last week, when City Council voted to freeze the wage and business tax reductions scheduled for coming years, it was done by unanimous [...]

It looks like the brief and undistinguished judicial career of Willie Singletary may soon be over.
The state group that oversees judicial conduct recently chastised Judge Singletary for his pitch to bikers in 2007, urging them to pony up $20 for his campaign for Philadelphia Traffic Court.  In so many words, Singletary said: You help me [...]

For a city like Philadelphia, smaller is not better. To survive as a viable city, it has to attract new people. If it keeps losing population - and most of the folks exiting are middle class - then what will be left is a city that is increasingly poor. That is a city that cannot [...]

Sometimes you can get lost in the numbers and I encourage you to do so.

Appended is a data set on usage of public library branches in Philadelphia. They compare total circulation by branch in 2004 to the same numbers in 2008. Total circulation means the number of items people checked out – books, CD’s, [...]

 By Tom Ferrick
 After a few weeks of getting beat up over city budget cuts that target libraries, fire stations and pools, the Nutter administration has finally gotten its mantra down.
What people must realize, Mayor Nutter has said, is that many of these facilities and services were created for a city of 2 million.  Today, we [...]

By Tom Ferrick
The weirdest thing about the debate over the budget cuts proposed by Mayor Nutter is not what is being talked about, but what is not.
The public debate is all about closing libraries and reducing the number of fire trucks.
There is no talk - zero, zilch, nada - about what may turn out to [...]

To begin with, libraries are not libraries. They are sanctuaries.
This is especially true in big cities, where life can be hard and the streets mean. They are places for latchkey children to go after school. They are destinations for the elderly to ease the loneliness that sometimes comes with old age. They [...]

The most surprising thing about the budget-cutting booklet issued by the city yesterday is the signature at the end of the mayor’s introductory letter on page 5.
It reads Michael Nutter. I expected it to read John Street.
That’s because many of the cuts and tax measures outlined in the plan are the same ones Mayor Street [...]