Walnut closure | School District’s September hangs on AVI | waterfront trail development | hardware history

Don’t expect to drive down Walnut Street between 16th and 18th today. It’s closed for the production of “Dead Man Down,” the new Colin Farrell film shooting in Philly.

If City Council doesn’t pass the Actual Value Initiative (AVI) and bring in more property tax revenue, the School District faces dire choices, NewsWorks/The Notebook reports. “Were we not to get the $94 million from the AVI initiative, it isn’t clear that we could in fact open schools this Fall,” Thomas Knudsen, the School District’s Chief Recovery Officer, said at a budget meeting last night.

Some in City Council say that tying AVI to the school district’s deep deficit is a false link, but public education is of course funded by property taxes. Councilwomen Blondell Reynolds Brown & Maria Quinones-Sanchez published an opinion piece in today’s Daily News, urging Council to bite the bullet and pass AVI. They wrote: “Philadelphians deserve a modern, transparent, easy-to-understand, accurate and fair system that is in step with today’s real-estate market and reflects national best practices. Likewise, the students of the School District of Philadelphia deserve a fair shot at an education so they too can grow up and ‘pay it forward’ as property-owning taxpayers themselves.”

RBA Group is working on plans and design guidelines for the multi-use trail along the Delaware River. PlanPhilly’s Kellie Patrick Gates reports that the first section to be designed is the Penn Street Trail, which would connect Spring Garden Street with Sugar House’s trail segment, and realize a piece of the Master Plan for the Central Delaware.

Monica Yant Kinney paid a visit to Fern Rock Hardware, a living time capsule of hardware that thrives by not changing a thing.

 

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