The Worst Legislative Body in the World?

The good news: Philadelphia City Council isn’t as inept as it used to be. The bad news: That’s a low, low bar

JANNIE BLACKWELL ARRIVED in Council in 1976, as a staffer for her late husband, Councilman Lucien Blackwell. Make that the staffer. In those days, Council offices didn’t feature today’s legion of legal counsels and legislative aides and constituent-service specialists. Today she has a staff of nine, handling zoning issues, housing problems and quality-of-life complaints, among other chores.

While civic attention focused on pesky details like the members and staffers who keep getting hauled off to federal prison, Council has built itself an infrastructure befitting a legitimate legislative body, complete with budget wonks, attorneys, and specialists of all stripes. (And only some of those specialists — like, say, former City Commissioner Edgar Howard, the $80,000-a-year “veterans affairs” aide — come from the out-of-work-political-hack demographic so well loved by city pols.)

But even though today’s Council has the wherewithal to act like an equal branch of government, it’s not clear whether critics want it to act like one.

Case in point: During last year’s budget battle, mayoral partisans bemoaned Verna’s leadership style. Back in Ed Rendell’s day, the argument went, the mayor was able to reach agreements with Council president John Street — and Street was able to deliver the votes. Verna, however, has no taste for refusing to schedule hearings on bills she doesn’t like, or threatening the personnel budgets of recalcitrant Council members, or otherwise bludgeoning Council to do her bidding. To Verna, this is a positive change: In a democracy, treating colleagues like independent adults is a good thing, right? And yet it drives the avowedly reformist Nutter administration bonkers. “Ed only had to suck one dick,” groused a member of Nutter’s inner circle. “We have to suck 17.”

For Council members, it’s a source of great frustration: For years, they were lampooned as doltish marionettes, easily bought off by a string of mayors. Now that they’ve got the means to get their way, they get beat up for being obstructionist. Given Council’s culture, it’s no wonder a chief executive would rather they stick to full-time tuxedo retrieval. But for citizens who’d like a legislative check against dumb mayoral ideas, the choice between a Council that performs that function only to protect car privileges and a Council that won’t perform it at all is pretty gloomy.

WHEN YOU READ UP on City Council’s bad old days, it’s striking to see how many of the characters are still around. Verna’s been there since the Gerald Ford administration, or even longer if you count her service as a staffer for her father, whose seat she inherited. Brian O’Neill and Joan Krajewski were elected while Jimmy Carter was president. The current Council’s roster of three rookie members is an anomaly. Though Green, thanks in part to his famous name, actually displaced an elected incumbent, colleagues Curtis Jones and Maria -Quiñones-Sánchez took over offices whose last full-term occupants had either resigned or been sent to jail.