City officials want 2009 to be a banner year for recycling of all kinds.  Last year the city made almost $2 million reselling used glass, plastic and paper.  Starting today the Streets Department begins picking up recycling weekly instead of every two weeks.  While the market for resold recycled material has plunged in recent months, experts say the cost of landfill space in the region will continue rising by several percentage points a year.  That means it will only get more expensive to throw things away.

Drop off locations for the Christmas trees are available on the city’s website.  It’s important to reiterate that this is a drop-off service.  If you leave your tree on the curb, it will be picked up and taken to a landfill.  I know this is somewhat of a hardship for folks without cars who, like me, walked their tree back from a street corner sales location, but perhaps the new Obama-esque trend of organizing will lead one of your neighbors (or you) to offer to take a few trees to one of these locations on your own car roof.

Click on the play button below to listen to the entire story.

So while it will now be easier to remember when to put your metal, plastic, paper, cardboard and glass on the curb, 2009 will also see fewer fire companies in service in Philadelphia.  WHYY’s Tom MacDonald talked to Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers to get more information, including the city’s plans for the decommissioned apparatus and the fate of the fire fighters:

Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers says the 7 companies were taken out of service at this morning, and the firefighters were put on the detail of packing up and decommissioning the equipment.

Ayers: “It’s a whole process where the older trucks are pushed back into inventory, some of which will be ultimately sold by fleet management and others which will be in storage, used for backup vehicles of some sort and also as vehicles when we maintain some of the others they will be put into use until the maintenance work is done.”

The Commissioner adds once the packing and moving is done, the firefighters will report to their new assignments.

Ayers: “They’re being moved around to omit the overtime, and where we needed to call in a firefighter on or off duty and pay them overtime, we won’t have to do that now they will actually fill those slots.”

On a personal note, Ladder 11 at 12th and Reed Street is about a block from my house and is included in the two ladder companies that are now out of service - the other being Ladder 1 near Fairmount.  Undoubtedly, it won’t be long until a structure fire or fire-related death occurs that many say would have been prevented had one of the closed stations been in operations.  Those in the affected neighborhoods must now hope that everything the Fire Department has said about continuity of coverage is true.

Click on the play button below to listen to the story.

If you are a home alarm owner, the annual registration fee with the City of Philadelphia is going up this year. The fee is now $50- up from $35 in 2008. But why register your alarm in the first place? The biggest incentive, from what I can tell, is that you won’t pay a dime if your alarm goes off accidentally two times; whereas if you don’t register your alarm, you will face a minimum of $150 in fines for each false alarm. Registering your alarm system is essentially like insurance in that you get a discount once you have three or more false alarms. For each false alarm, you’ll pay $75, instead of $150 or more if you aren’t registered. The rationale behind why residents get charged for false alarms, more or less, is to help offset diverting police away from more urgent matters. Most false alarms are preventable, but it seems unfair to pay the fine if something like faulty wiring or a power outage trips your alarm. Last year, residents were actually permitted three false alarms at no cost. But under the current financial mess facing Philly, Mayor Michael Nutter reduced the number of false alarms allowed from three to two to help generate more revenue. (See Nutter’s budget cut plan, page 14).

You might be wondering how Philly’s home alarm fees compare to other places. Over in Norristown, (Montgomery County), there’s no fee to register your home alarm and you get off the hook for three false alarms. But any more false alarms, and the police can write you a citation ranging anywhere between $50 and $300. Across the Delaware River, in Cherry Hill, NJ- there’s no home alarm registration fee. But if you rack up three false alarms, be prepared to fork over $106. Any additional false alarms, the township summons you to court. Ouch. Down in Baltimore, residents pay $20 to register a home alarm, which is $30 cheaper than here, and there’s no cost for two false alarms. But the third false alarm costs $50, and residents pay an increment of $50 for each additional one. By the eighth false alarm, Baltimore residents are paying $300. It gets worse. After eight, the increment shoots up by $100, and eventually to $1,000 after 14 false alarms. 

Anyway, if you want to find out more information about home alarm registration and related fines here in Philly, here’s the police unit number to call: (215)686-1584

Photo by Flickr user iFranz. Creative Commons License

Greater, Greater Washington’s Cavan Wilk posted a fantastic piece about the possible end of shopping malls that had me wondering what the changing economics of these staples of suburbia could mean for this region.  Wilk’s points to a recent piece in Slate that is among the first from outside of the traditional “urbanist” movement - where one would expect to find folks prescribing the closing of shopping malls - to call for a wholesale rethinking of the shopping mall model:

Even writers from the urbanist community don’t advocate wholesale closing of malls, acknowledging that malls are private property. While economic commentator Mike “Mish” Shedlock declared that the “Shopping Center Economic Model is History” back in April 2008, he made no comment about where to go from here; as a libertarian-leaning economics and finance writer, urban planning and infrastructure are outside the scope of Mish’s blog. As far as I know, no one outside the urbanist community has previously concluded that it would be okay or even positive for malls to go out of business, and for the stores to relocate to Main Streets.  What a year it’s been.

While conceding that it’s unlikely that all shopping malls will suddenly go away, Wilk does note that in Washington D.C. at least, a number of retailers are turning away from the auto-oriented locations along suburban arterials with large parking lots and focusing on downtown stores in walkable locations:

But these stores [Banana Republic, Anne Taylor, Express, Guess, Kenneth Cole] have found success opening stores in walkable urban places. In the District of Columbia, there are four shopping districts that support clusters of national retail chains that are usually mall-based: Downtown (Old Downtown clustered around Metro Center), Connecticut Avenue between Farragut Square and Dupont Circle, Friendship Heights, and Georgetown. Columbia Heights is emerging and has a different mix of retailers. Additionally, some clothing stores that usually locate in malls have opened shop in the Fenton Street development in Silver Spring.

Wilk concludes that are there are a couple directions that this retail-driven revitalization of urban spaces could go.  Large corporate chain stores like those cited above and other retailers like Apple could continue to bid up rents in previously revitalized places driving out the legacy mom-and-pop operations.  To some degree we may have already seen this with the recent announcement that Restaurant Row pioneer Brasserie Perrier lost its lease because of a sharp increase in rent over its original 1996 rent.  It’s unclear what will be moving into that prime location but it’s likely to be another national chain with the willingness to throw a ton of money around to be in Philadelphia’s premiere retail stretch.

Wilk says that corporate outfits, without the on-the-ground knowledge of a city are not necessarily interested in finding lower rent corridors with good access to public transit (Girard Avenue, Frankford Avenue, Northern Liberties, Passyunk Avenue, etc.) and potential to revitalize.  So just as the Apple Store in D.C. is looking to move into Georgetown and not the Shaw Historic District, we in Philly get rumors of an Apple store (the sign that your city has “made it”) at Rittenhouse Square, not on 52nd Street.

But back to the original question about that benevolent monarch who draws scores of his subjects in their shiny metal chariots every weekend - the King of Prussia Mall.  Wilks concludes in the piece on D.C. that:

As a result, all these stores that are getting displaced from dying malls are in for a rough ride. In the big picture, most players in the commercial real estate game have no idea what consumers want right now. Most consumers don’t either. However, consumers are voting with their dollars that they don’t want the suburban mall anymore. In other words, strap in because we’re in for a really rough ride in retail, as our nation enters a period of cognitive dissonance that will mark the historic boundary between the post World War II oil-and-corn-syrup economy, and whatever emerges next. Based on the trends in commercial real estate, a more urban future looks bright on the other side.

My special brand of Philadelphia cynism (on display in my recent prediction about the Eagles) prohibits me from being so sanguine about the future of retail in this region.  While it would be great for specialty retailers, like the one’s cited above, and department stores to look to the city and its many commercial corridors, many of the obstacles that drove them out in the first place are still in place.

1. Parking and Driving.  While I can think of no worse torture than puttering along at 20 miles per hour on the Schuylkill Expressway and driving around for another 20 minutes to find a parking space that’s a lovely 10 minute walk from the mall doors, others can’t imagine a shopping trip without their own personal taxi to store their wares.  Increasing parking and encouraging driving in Center City and other commercial corridors would completely defeat the environmental and experiential benefits of the urban walkable experience.  To the extent that there are people who would never go shopping without their car, Philly can’t be a shopping destination for them.  Which leads me to…

2. …mass transit.  There are those who are on the margin and can be convinced to take public transit into town for a shopping trip.  The combination of regional rail, the El and the Subway actually come close to reaching a number of commercial corridors.   There’s even plenty of evidence to show that rising fuel costs are causing more folks to use public transit to get to the city, presumably for work and entertainment purposes.  However, the infrequency of many lines, the appearance of many stations and the design of some of the train cars make them unattractive alternatives for the retail shopping rider.  SEPTA is taking steps to improve and the new regional rail cars may make the situation better.

3. The 1% rule.  Shopping in the Philadelphia suburbs automatically means a 1% discount since Philadelphia is subjected to a 7% sales tax as compared to the statewide 6% (dating back to when the state bailed out a nearly bankrupt city in 1991).  Even if the cost of transit into the city for close-in suburbanites proves much cheaper than driving (not to mention the negative externalities associated with pollution and lack of exercise), without that cost appearing on the sales receipt, like the 7% sales tax, most people aren’t going to think about it.  They will, however, see that spending $1000 at Banana Republic (update: reader correctly points out that there is no sales tax on clothing in PA) at a popular electronics retailer means an extra 10 bucks in Philly.

4. The Danger Factor.  Cities can be scary places for people who aren’t used to them.  For a lot of folks in this media market, the dominant image of Philadelphia is the oft-reported story on local tv news of the late night street complete with flashing police lights and crime scene tape or stories of rampaging teens beating up SEPTA riders.  Never mind that this perception of the retail experience in Philadelphia is way off base.  Somehow, dealing with throngs of suburban teens wandering around in the mall, by contrast, seems less daunting to people.

5. The Quality of Life things.  Malls have places to sit and rest.  Malls have bathrooms that are clean and, sometimes, easy to find.  Malls keep patrons sheltered from the elements.  Public areas in malls are, for the most part, kept clean and free of debris and the homeless.  The bathrooms issue is not to be taken lightly.  It can be difficult to find a bathroom in the stores that occupy many of the city’s older buildings and until these cool pay toilets are on every corner, folks are going to be deterred by having no place to go.

I’m sure there are a ton of other factors to back up my skepticism at the return of retail to Philadelphia and I invite you, the readers, to offer your thoughts on why folks might not be so eager to shop here or your thoughts on why I’m being too skeptical.

Regarding the Apple Store example cited in Greater, Greater Washington and modified for Philadelphia, I wonder whether the draw that such a store has for iPod, iPhone and Mac fans could outweigh their hesitancy to travel to a spot like the 52nd Street corridor?  The El runs frequently enough and is easy to get to from the western and northeastern suburbs and Center City.  Most of the products bought at such a store are easy to carry on a train.  Would you take the trip to such a location?

If the Mummers don't take action, this could be the only guy left watching the parade.

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 Broad Street Thursday to see the Mummer’s strut their stuff wasn’t… well…a crowd. There were long stretches of Broad Street that remained empty all day. Even at prime locations (at the Bellevue, to name one) parade watchers ran only two deep.

Parade enthusiasts offered the usual excuses for the lack of audience. It was cold. The publicity about the city cutting off the subsidy money may have kept people away. The parade was shorter this year, but maybe there were fewer people because the usual string band performance spots were also cut back. Etc. and so forth.

But, here is the reality: Attendance at the parade has been slipping for years. It has defied various attempts to juice it (Remember the parade on Market Street years?). Cold is not an excuse because the parade used to draw five to six times the crowd it does today on more frigid New Year’s Days.

Lose your audience and you lose your reason for being. But, if the Mummer’s want to get serious about reclaiming their place as anything more than a folk curio, they are going to have to address these issues:

1. It is not a parade. A parade is where you stand and witness a continuous stream of performers, marching bands, floats, etc. that go by at a continuous pace. The Mummer’s Parade is a stop-and-start affair. And sometimes more stop than start - especially when it comes to the string bands, which is why 90 percent of the people go to the parade. You often have to invest four hours on a street corner to hear 60 minutes of music. In terms of pacing, it resembles the Stations of the Cross.

2. It is monotonous. I won’t go as far to say that if you have seen one string band you have seen them all. But, if you have seen four or five you have. There is a reason for this sameness: The Mummers are wedded to tradition. Changes in performance, selection of music, choreography and costumes come slowly and incrementally. There may be differences in the polish of the performances, but not in their basic structure. They follow rules and rubrics handed down from one generation to another. That’s why it is hard to tell one string band (or comic or fancy division) from another. Now, ask yourself this: Would you stand on a cold street corner for 7 hours to watch 30 troops of Boy Scouts pass by?  Same uniforms.  Same marching style.  Same insignias.  Same.  Same.  Same.  The charm wears off quickly.

3. It is too long. Nine-to-11 hours parades are the norm. This year, because of the cut in the city subsidy, the parade time was trimmed to a more manageable 6-plus hours. Necessity is the mother of invention. The Mummer’s did it only because they would have been forced to pay additional police overtime and other costs associated with a longer parade. A shorter parade is a better parade.

4. It has too many string bands. Nominally, there are 18 string bands. In reality, there are about 6 top-notch bands, 6 middling bands and 6 truly pathetic bands. Has anyone ever seriously thought of consolidating the 12 bottom-feeders into maybe 5 or 6 stronger bands? Ditto the comics and the fancies.

5. It has too many drunks. I don’t want to mythologize the past. I am sure there were always drunks at the parade (and in it, as well). But, the lid seems to have come off in recent years. Are you going to take your family to a parade where it seems like every third person is either throwing up, peeing against a wall, bobbing and weaving, shouting and screaming or blowing on one of those #@*$! plastic horns in your ear? I think not. The drunks have driven away regular folks because no one has done anything about the drunks.

6. It isn’t about the audience. The Mummers all have the same line - “We do it all for the folks who come to the parade.” But that rings hollow to me. If the Mummers existed for the audience, heads would roll among its leadership because it is losing its audience.  They would jazz it up. Change the pace. Try new things. Try anything to get the folks back. And they don’t.

Take the string bands, please. Their performances have become more and more elaborate, with the kind of flats and sets that you usually see on Broadway shows. But, suppose you went to Broadway to see a musical and entered the theater to discover that there were no seats facing the stage. They were all on the side. You’d have to watch the show from the wings. Would you pay $100 for that ticket?

Ther same is true on Broad Street with the string bands. They don’t orient their performances to the audience. They play to the empty street in front of them. A lot in the audience are relegated to staring at the back of their flats. Does this make sense? No, unless you consider this fact:

The parade is not about the audience. It is about the Mummers. It’s about the tribe of guys who make up the various divisions. It’s about them, not about you.  So, if you are a member of the audience, you’d better get used to that fact.

This is my list. Maybe you can think of a few reasons more. And this desk is open to suggestions on how to improve the parade.
But, let us be realistic. Don’t expect much to change.

When it comes to the Mummers, tradition rules - expect for one. The tradition of people going to the parade.

Nutter: Wait for written ruling before appealing library closures

As Tom said earlier today, the library issue seems to have won Nutter nothing and in fact set him up for an examination of the power of mayor vis-a-vis City Council that he probably wasn’t looking for.

YPP’s Ray Murphy has a New Year’s resolution for the city:

We need to let members of Council know that under the right conditions, we would pay more in taxes.

We’d forgo a wage tax decrease from casino revenue. We would also support a change in the property tax formula. We support closing business tax loopholes. And a lot of us think that very high wage earners should pay a bigger share than they do now.

If we did pay more in taxes, we’d certainly expect more in representation from our electeds than we have now. But I think that is a demand Council and the Mayor could meet.

So in the coming weeks, we need to let Council know that we have their backs on taxes. That’s an easy new Year’s resolution right?

Philly’s new 3-1-1 information line received 3,576 calls within its first 24 hours of operation - with public-safety questions topping the list of requests.

The new 3-1-1 nonemergency call line formally kicked off just after 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

Any bets on at when we’ll be celebrating the “50 millionth 3-1-1 call?”

Here’s my suggestion for the city’s website: choose the most outrageous call of the day, or a top 10 for the month and put the audio up at phila.gov.  Comedy gold, I tell ya.

Ghost bike on MLK Drive near Sweet Briar. Photo at Philly.com

The piece in today’s Inquirer about the Ghost Bike movement brings to mind a lot of items that I’ve been reading on sites like Streetsblog (NY), Greater Greater Washington (DC), Philadelphia Bicycle News (Philly, of course) and elsewhere that attention is called on a regular basis to the difficulties of cyclists and walkers in this auto dominated world.

Often times, stories about cyclist fatalities are reported in short blurbs in the briefs section of the local papers.  As PBN says, that’s if the story even gets reported at all:

There was only one reported death in the media in Philadelphia in 2008 although they generally miss a couple. I am going to assume until I hear otherwise that there were less than the 5 bicycle deaths in the city last year.

Most often, the death is attributed to an “accident” like the one in that killed the 6-year old featured in the Ghost Bike piece.  Greater, Greater Washington once made the point about why media reports that call these incidents “accidents” or police decisions to call them “tragic mistakes” affect the driving public’s willingness to change behavior:

By the way, we need to stop referring to crashes as “accidents.” As many others have pointed out in the past, calling collisions “accidents” makes them sound completely blameless, like random happenings we can do nothing about. Drivers should be careful enough not to hit people, and we should engineer our intersections so that if drivers have a momentary lapse, there’s as little chance as possible that someone will get hurt or killed.

I’d wager that in most cases these “accidents” involve some degree of negligence by the driver.  A careful examination of almost any of these incidents would probably reveal that there was a moment at which a driver could have slowed down, become more aware of his or her surroundings, or seen a potential situation developing.  As much as car advocates say that it’s the cyclists who need to be more mindful of the rules of the road, the cyclists are not the ones driving around in a potential weapon of death.  There’s no denying that in our society a bias exists in which drivers are allowed to get away with a lot more and where the assumption by the public is most often that somehow the cyclist, or even pedestrian, had it coming.

Anyway… I guess this means that I’ll volunteer to start tracking cyclist and pedestrian deaths-by-auto on this blog in 2009.

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.”

It has been a tough climb but has it been worth it?

That sounds about right.

The latest turn in the story came Tuesday when Common Pleas Judge Idee C. Fox blocked the mayor’s plan to close 11 branches as of Jan. 1, saying Nutter needed City Council’s specific approval to shut them down. Judge Fox cited a 1988 law passed by Council – over Mayor Wilson Goode’s veto – to require its approval before any city facility is shuttered.

Suffice it to say, the Fox ruling will be appealed by the city and the case is likely to go up to the state Supreme Court. It could be months – it could be 2010 – before the issue is resolved legally.

Which is another way of saying the libraries are likely to stay open, in some fashion, for the foreseeable future.

It also means that Nutter has set into motion a fight that could result in a court ruling that diminishes the power of the mayor’s office.

To recapitulate:

The mayor announces a plan to close 11 of the system’s 54 branches.

He ignites a storm of protest from library-lovers and neighborhood folks.

He prompts a faction on Council to rebel against him and his plan.

He prompts a law suit that challenges his power — and the challengers win Round One.

He gets holy Hell for these actions and others at a series of town hall meetings.

His approval numbers have taken a major hit. (I haven’t seen them, but you can bet they have.)

The man who was praised a few years ago as a savior of libraries, now is cast as a villain.

And for what?

For an estimated $8 million a year in savings. Out of a $4 billion city budget.

At a time when he needs broad public support to make tough decisions about city spending in the face of this wicked recession, Nutter has expended a vast amount of political capital in a losing cause to save a pittance.

Where did he go wrong?

Let me take a crack at answering that question.

In attacking the libraries and city swimming pools, Nutter went after city services that are heavily used by city residents. Visits to the city’s library branches totaled 5.5 million last year. The city’s swimming pools had nearly 1.2 million visitors during the eight weeks they were open last summer.

The mayor’s argument wasn’t that these services weren’t heavily used, but – simply and plainly – that the city could no longer afford them.

With this argument, he went against a sizable segment of the city’s population – many of them working class or lower-middle class – that is service oriented.

Give them a choice between city services and higher taxes and many of them will pick higher taxes.

Convincing them to give up services requires a lot of groundwork.

It can’t be done – as the mayor tried to do – in one speech announcing a crisis and the closures at the same time.

What’s worse, the mayor didn’t mete out the pain equally. He picked winners and losers.  Roxborough, Chestnut Hill, Center City, North Philly – you deserve libraries. Kingsessing, Olney, Fishtown, Holmesburg – you do not.

Again, to recapitulate: You go after heavily used and popular services.  You do not sell the idea of the necessity of service cuts. You give the impression of favoring one neighborhood over another. You refuse to retreat or consider alternatives to the plan.  You get your head handed to you by a judge for overstepping your authority.

Badda bing, badda boom.

More trouble than it’s worth.

How to get out of it? Well, one thing not to do is to do what the administration hinted at doing after the Fox ruling: Inflict punishment and pain on all library users by severely curtailing hours and services at all branches.

Take that step now and it will be seen as payback to the groups (read: rabble rousers) who filed the suit (read: had the audacity to challenge the mayor).

It would also be, if I may coin a phrase, a very John Street thing to do.

Here’s an alternative: Back off on the library issue, Develop a comprehensive plan for meet the economic crisis that involves sacrifice by everyone –taxpayers, vendors, city employees, the mayor and his top staff — and use the upcoming budget address (for fiscal 2010) to begin the process of selling it to the public.

If people feel that everyone is feeling some pain, they won’t resent as much swallowing their piece of it. If people think the administration has really, actually listened to them and their concerns – and taken them into account – then maybe they will go along with the plan.

In other words, admit you made a mistake and go back to the drawing board.

Anyway, 2008 was one heckuva year for Philadelphia.  If you were “the city” what would your resolutions for 2009 be?  What do you think the city will look like on January 1, 2010?

Share your thoughts in the comments and have a happy New Year!