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Breaking: How casinos fit vision

mgolas — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:48:37 -0400

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July 30

By Thomas J. Walsh
For PlanPhilly

Amid the discussions coming out of a three-day PennPraxis workshop addressing the designs of the two proposed Delaware Riverfront casinos, there were some veritable positive vibes about the gaming halls, especially from a California architect with casino experience in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

While pointing out what he considered “gigantic” parking garages, both the SugarHouse and Foxwoods casinos would be “actually an amenity to do what you want to do, which is to bring people to the riverfront,” said Tim Magill, a Hollywood architect who has worked with gaming magnates like Steve Wynn and on high-profile projects like the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

“Thinking about how development can happen north and south of both of these sites is an important aspect” of the casinos’ plans, Magill said. “On both sites ... there is potential for major public access. By minor modifications [from the casino developers], you could deliver on your goals.”

Those goals comprise the 10-step civic action plan laid out by PennPraxis for the central Delaware waterfront for the next decade. But Magill was laying out facts about the gaming industry around the country – that, if developed in a smart fashion, casinos can be leveraged to pull in the public and increase surrounding property values.

After the morning session, Magill pointed to an example on a large map, among many views of the river pinned to the walls. He told PlanPhilly that one site, now the home of Wal-Mart and Home Depot (and their accompanying mega-parking lots), would probably be redeveloped, since it sits directly south of the Foxwoods site. The big box stores represent “property values that have not been fully realized,” he said. “The developers know that. What they’ve done is sort of land-banked it” with the retail chains serving as an interim means of cash flow.

It’s about the vision
The workshop, with a couple of dozen city representatives and experts on traffic, transit, environmental and ecological matters, got started Tuesday night, with the group concluding that the two casinos are not currently compatible with the “civic values, principles and design guidelines” put forth in the Praxis vision of a redeveloped waterfront. (See previous story from earlier this morning here: http://www.planphilly.com/node/3607.)

The presidents of both casinos declined invitations to the workshop from Harris Steinberg, executive director of Praxis, in strongly worded replies (see Foxwoods' and SugarHouse's) that said their presence would be pointless, since Steinberg had stated publicly several times that he and Praxis were against the casinos ever breaking ground.

But Steinberg stressed that he’s not anti-casino, and that Tuesday evening’s conclusion that the casinos were incompatible meant “only as currently designed.” His goal, he said, is to tease out how these projects, on these sites, can contribute to the overall Praxis vision and action plan, endorsed last month by Mayor Nutter.

That’s what Steinberg charged a smaller afternoon group to come up with. Magill started that process by laying see-through drawing paper over the Foxwoods site and marking up areas where, for instance, retail could replace parking garage facades, or spots that seemed realistic as possibilities for more vertical development. With a few “minor modifications,” Magill said, the casinos could be “activity generators that will prime the pump for other properties” down the line.

“Casinos are highly public,” Magill assured the attendees. “The key is to optimize the public’s access to the river. I actually think you’re on your way.”

‘No man’s land’
But before that happy scenario can play out, there are infrastructure questions galore, not the least of them having to do with parking and the importance of incorporating the casinos’ plans for extending existing streets to the riverfront, along with the opportunity to stress impacts to the environment, from the new buildings themselves and from the traffic they bring to the problematic Columbus Boulevard (also known as Delaware Avenue), which Steinberg called a “no man’s land” for pedestrians.

“By what criteria do they contribute?” Steinberg said was the main question underlying the workshop. “Tim [Magill] is saying they could be, but not necessarily that they will be. The real concern is that there is clearly not a parking solution. And we’re going to push back hard to see where things fall in terms of the civic vision. We’re here in an advisory capacity.”

Steinberg said he’d like to deliver a report on the group’s findings by Friday, Aug. 8.

Even with the parking question, which dominated the afternoon session, Magill posited some California optimism, suggesting that encouraging bus transportation and off-site “employee parking pods” would actually enhance sustainability and a transit-oriented boulevard.

Ecological and environmental concerns were aired before lunch, with the theme of “honoring the river.” Using the water in the best way and protecting the estuary were main points. Mark Alan Hughes, the city’s first Deputy Mayor of Sustainability, admitted that any recommendations on these fronts would be “aspirational” at this point.

“We just want to know where they are,” Hughes said. “There can be no deal-breakers. There are tools [related to energy and emissions] that are just not there yet. We have a set of mechanisms that we are working toward.”

Waiting and seeing
Terry Gillen, senior adviser to Mayor Nutter for economic development and the interim executive director of the city’s Redevelopment Authority, said the most significant issues have to do with air quality, within the context of traffic and parking. “It’s a very car-centric industry, at least in the U.S.” she said of the casino business. “In Europe, they have a different model.”

Magill also said that modern casinos have been increasingly moving toward maximizing spaces for non-gaming activities, such as nightclubs and spas. Indeed, the state of Nevada reached a point several years ago when non-gambling revenues surpassed the total “take” from slots and table games, a trend that has only increased.

The proposed Philadelphia casinos are said to be “mixed-use” from the start, and attendees at the afternoon workshop wanted to make sure of that. But subsequent phases of development, contingent upon the success of the initial building phases (with 2,500 slots for each casino) have been a consistent concern among city officials since Nutter took office earlier this year.

Foxwoods and SugarHouse have had an entirely different relationship with City Hall since the change in administrations, and contend that permits have been intentionally stalled by order of Nutter. They cite nothing but favorable decisions from the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board and the state Supreme Court.

“There have been at least five different traffic studies, including ones by the Mayor’s Gaming Advisory Task Force, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, SugarHouse, Foxwoods, and the City Council,” according to information on the SugarHouse web site.

“I can only hope that we can come up with some decisions that they’ll look at,” said Gillen. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

On the Foxwoods web site, the owners say the casino “supports the city’s long-term goal of economically reinvigorating the remainder of the riverfront, and will provide public access to the river.” For its first-phase development, it lists restaurant and lounge venues open to the public, fine dining, sports bars, a 2,000-seat showroom, retail shops, a 4,200-space parking garage and a riverside walkway, in addition to the 3,000 slot machines.

The Philadelphia problem
Regarding the possibility of later phases of development, with a large hotel and more casino space, Gillen said that’s historically been “the Philadelphia problem. Developers come in and tend not to put all their cards on the table, and don’t tell us about future plans. We want to make sure there are no surprises down the road. The problem is that no one talked about that issue until January.”

Gillen said nailing down long-term plans is especially important from the city’s point of view because only when the later developments – the hotels, restaurants, nightclubs – become reality will the city see tax revenues. For the first phase, which will mostly be income from slot machines, the state will be the beneficiary.

Paul Levy, the popular president of the Center City District and the Central Philadelphia Development Corp., said developing master plans is vital for setting guidelines for major developments, but he may have surprised some attendees by suggesting that with regard to the casinos, “the horse” is “out of the barn, or partially out of the barn.”

“These casinos started the design process, and we as a city are trying to change the rules,” Levy said. “The development of a master plan is absolutely essential. ... We’ve all got to realize that we’re playing catch-up.”

In less direct terms, others agreed, saying recommendations on street landscaping, balance of retail with gaming, the creation or reduction of traffic lanes, pedestrian metrics, access to the river, ecological concessions, safety and any other concerns – broad in scope or narrow – should be offered as an opportunity to implement smarter growth along the waterfront.

“This is a neutral analysis,” Steinberg said, as the afternoon session started. “The report that’s issued will be used as a political tool by various constituencies, so it’s important to be sure about ‘What would it look like for a casino on that site to comply?’” with the Praxis vision and Action Plan.

In the meantime, Magill said that in his experience, casino developers usually listen to well thought-out alternatives, if only to see if they would make financial sense. Also, trends in the gaming industry have been drifting toward smaller “neighborhood casinos,” even in the Las Vegas and Reno metropolitan areas, Magill said (relatively speaking, SugarHouse and Foxwoods are not considered especially large gaming destinations). These venues have generally placed interactivity with their neighbors as a high priority, even when initially opposed.

After the workshop’s findings are written up and presented to Nutter, what then? Looking at large-scale, detailed maps taking up the better part of two large walls, peppered with post-it notes and varying computer-generated images, Steinberg was asked if he thought one or both or neither of the proposed and state-approved casinos will have broken ground a year from now.

It might have been a question he’s heard before. “I’m not a betting man,” he said, without batting an eye.

Contact the reporter at thomaswalsh1@gmail.com

SugarHouse web site: http://www.sugarhousecasino.com/home/index.php

Foxwoods web site: http://www.foxwoods.com/AboutFoxwoods/FDC_foxwoodsphiladelphia.aspx

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July 30, By Thomas J. Walsh Experts in transportation, sustainability, infrastructure, ecology grapple with merging near-term realities and long-term goals.

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Casino analysis underway

mgolas — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:09:26 -0400

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July 30

By Thomas J. Walsh
For PlanPhilly

The second day of a “casino workshop” featuring senior city officials, traffic consultants, planning experts and architects began early Wednesday morning under the direction of PennPraxis, the clinical arm of the UPenn School of Design.

The discussions were part of what Praxis calls an “independent, third-party analysis of the current casino site plans” relative to its recent 10-year action plan for the Central Delaware Riverfront, which was endorsed by Mayor Michael Nutter.

Per Nutter’s request, Praxis plans to issue results from the casino report within 30 days. Present for the discussion were deputy mayors Rina Cutler (transportation and infrastructure) and Mark Alan Hughes (sustainability), Nutter’s economic development czar Terry Gillen, Center City District President Paul Levy and about 20 other professionals, some of them local specialists and some from other cities around the country.

Noticeably absent were representatives of the planned Foxwoods and SugarHouse casinos. “You are not an ‘independent’ voice in the casino debate,” wrote Robert Sheldon, president of SugarHouse, in response to an invitation to the workshop by Praxis Executive Director Harris Steinberg. “Even before being tasked by the Mayor to conduct an analysis, you concluded that casinos do not fit into your vision of the waterfront.”

Likewise, James Dougherty, president of Foxwoods, wrote to Steinberg that he had spoken out several times against the casinos within the Praxis vision, but that in any case, the point was moot, since the first phase (of three) of the casino development has been greenlighted by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (during the Street administration) and the state Supreme Court.

While Steinberg, in his opening remarks Wednesday, said that the casinos as currently designed do not meet planning and transportation needs for the long-term, he stressed that the workshop was not about re-location of the casinos, or about gambling.

“It’s not about use,” Steinberg said. “It’s about form” and how we as a city talk about investment in infrastructure and sustainability. “We’re not going to be taking sides whether these are good or bad developments.”

The morning sessions were broken down into four breakout groups to discuss transportation, urban design, ecology and sustainability.

Participants were issued a “civic vision matrix,” meant to facilitate discussion of specifics, with 10 goals broken down into detailed questions about the design and infrastructure of both casinos. If the questions were deemed in the negative, the chart further answers if the problem “can be fixed” or “can’t be fixed.”

“You’ll note that there’s a lot of ‘can be fixed’ in this,” Steinberg said.

Among the transportation subgroup, the discussion moved into not only the capacity and width of Columbus Boulevard (the location of Foxwoods), parking, parking garages and the possibilities of enhanced public transit, but also the future relationship between the casino and the big box retailers to the south, such as Ikea and Home Depot.

“We have the only waterfront Wal-Mart in America,” noted Cutler. “The whole thing was developed in a truly suburban fashion. For me, part of what needs to happen is that a.) we don’t make those same mistakes over and over again and b.) to see if there’s a way to mitigate it.”

Cutler and others in the group generally agreed that Foxwoods’ plans for re-working Columbus Boulevard would work in the near-term, but there was much concern expressed about ultimate goals for the area.

“They are prepared to make big investments, but they might not be the investments we want to see, long-term,” said Jeremy Alvarez, a traffic engineer with Center City-based Stantec Consulting, which has worked with the city on a variety of traffic and transportation issues. “How much are we tying our hands if we allow these investments to go forward?”

Cutler also reminded the group that Columbus Boulevard is the official, federally mandated “escape route” for Interstate 95.

The concept of a new light rail system, which would alleviate many of the congestion concerns, was talked about, but such a system is “10 years away and a lot of money” at best, Cutler said.

PlanPhilly will continue to update this developing story as well as bring you video out-takes of the conference.

Contact the reporter at thomaswalsh1@gmail.com

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July 30 / By Thomas J. Walsh Experts in transportation, sustainability, infrastructure, ecology grapple with merging near-term realities with long-term goals.

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Why we need civic engagement

mgolas — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:21:19 -0400

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March 31

By Alan Jaffe
For PlanPhilly

Over the last 18 months, the city has had a case of “civic engagement” fever. The symptoms are a rash of Sharpie-wielding facilitators, an outbreak of breakout groups, a yen for cold cuts and cookies, and contagious debates on the future of Philadelphia.

• PennPraxis asked communities to rethink what can be done on the Central Delaware Riverfront.
• Great Expectations sessions were organized by The Inquirer to figure out how to make us the next great city.
• Multiple city agencies and organizations led Green Plan discussions on how to improve the environment.
• The City Planning Commission set up a circuit of Imagine Philadelphia roundtables as the first phase in drawing up a new comprehensive plan.

And there are more requests for your presence coming down the pike. Anyone with a mind to share an opinion has had a choice of soapboxes and a variety of willing ears.

But what is behind the recent spate of invitations and concern for public input? Just how much longer will people show up before they sink into civic engagement fatigue? And why does the city seem so damned democratic lately?

Athens, Rome, Philadelphia

Coordinating the civic engagement programs for both Great Expectations and PennPraxis has been Harris Sokoloff, director of the Center for School Study Councils at the University of Pennsylvania. Sokoloff traces the framework of that work to the senates of Athens and Rome.

“In every decision-making process we have where people come together in some sort of equal terms, we use some form of deliberative model,” going back to those early republics. “The tools we’re using are different; the ideas are still the same. It’s still a matter of: people get together, find a way to identify the issues, what the pros and cons are, the different ways of understanding the issues and the different forms of action, and use that in the decision-making.”

As in ancient Rome, “power politics” always play a part, Sokoloff adds, but there are ways to keep the process transparent and the public an important partner.

Beverly A. Harper traces her involvement in modern civic engagement to the early 1970s. Harper is founder, president and CEO of Portfolio Associates Inc., the agency that managed the series of Imagine Philadelphia meetings held in neighborhoods around the city over the winter.

Back in the ‘70s, Portfolio Associates conducted a study for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation that examined how and where citizens could become involved in the transportation planning process. The agency surveyed the 50 state transportation departments around the country, then took an in-depth look at four departments’ experiences with civic engagement.

“We found that in the Boston area there was almost a billion dollars in projects that had been stopped because of public involvement,” which occurred at “a very late stage in the projects,” Harper said.

“Involving the public early in a realistic way – and realistic means letting them know all of the different factors that will go into the decision-making – does help a project have a smoother development,” she said. “If you involve them early enough and know the kinds of issues and concerns that they have, you can do things to mitigate some of those concerns.”

Civic involvement programs continued into the 1980s, according to Harper, then trailed off for the next 10 years or so. The resurgence in Philadelphia is the result of several factors, she said.

“I think that part of it has to do with federal guidelines related to the National Environmental Policy Act,” the 1970 measure that required federal agencies to prepare Environmental Impact Statements before taking action and then sharing the information with the public. “Many government-funded projects and public agencies use those guidelines to identify the projects where they need engagement,” Harper explained.

Another reason for greater public involvement is governments’ limited funds and resources, she continued. “So one of the ways to help identify what should be done, and how it should be done, is by engaging citizens.”

The third factor is increased sophistication on the part of the citizenry, Harper believes. “Thanks in part to the Internet, they can find out what’s going on. When there are things they don’t like, they know how to get involved and who they should be contacting.”

Sokoloff’s plunge into the deep end of civic engagement came in 1995, in partnership with Inquirer editorial page editor Chris Satullo. Each year Sokoloff and Satullo took on a new topic that included civic engagement initiatives, from national to local issues, on everything from health care to the needs of a particular school building.

Over the past year, their collaboration on Great Expectations was part of a larger effort, the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, which also included the Delaware waterfront project led by PennPraxis executive director Harris Steinberg. Sokoloff, Satullo and Steinberg had worked together four years before on the attempt to find a developer and the right development for Penn’s Landing.

Sokoloff said the civic trend is due to the realization on the part of government leaders and agencies that “those who must be involved in supporting or solving a problem or challenge ought to be involved in naming and framing the problem, and in helping to find a solution.”

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, for example, recently acknowledged that he can’t do anything without the support and involvement of other people, Sokoloff said.

“The leaders can no longer say ‘do this’ and it happens,” he said. “Issues are too complex; the solutions are too complex. Everything requires adaptation. …It requires a different kind of citizen involvement and engagement, and that’s why you’re seeing all these community forums.”

The Right Model

There are many models for conducting civic engagement, Sokoloff said, and he doesn’t claim to have the best one, “though we try to make it better and are constantly revising it.”

In too many cases, the process takes the form of an expert- or advocate-driven discussion. “An expert gets up in the front of the room, makes a presentation, and has a question-and-answer period. Or there may be a group of people who have developed an agenda and all they want to happen is for all the people to bless the agenda,” he said.

Liz Gabor, a real estate manager at the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, was a participant in two civic engagement efforts in recent months. The Imagine Philadelphia session, she said, was an “organic” interchange in which neighbors were asked to brainstorm solutions to city problems. “People were imaginative and came up with very good ideas.”

But Gabor said her experience in the Great Expectations did not seem as productive. “We were told, ‘read this report and comment on it.’ It was too guided.”

Another participant in both the Imagine Philadelphia and Great Expectations sessions found them equally constructive. “I heard similar comments at each meeting and a consistency in what people were saying,” said Jo Ann Desper, a senior consultant for a healthcare services company. “They were both good, open forums.”

Public involvement means more than meetings at which participants offer opinions and possible solutions, Harper said. “That is one tool that you can use to get reaction and input. There are lots of others that can be used,” including surveys, focus groups, and online interaction.

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is in the midst of a public outreach effort for its long-range strategy, entitled “Connections – The Regional Plan for a Sustainable Future.” An online survey is underway through the end of March that will help refine planning in the areas of transportation, land use, economic development and the environment. The survey will be followed by planning exercises, focus groups and public workshops.

The public meetings have dimensions beyond surveys, Harper said. They serve as an educational tool that shows participants how the next person thinks, and they provide “directly and subtly an empathy and understanding of the position that the agency or organization has in trying to come up with a plan, knowing that everyone is not going to be of one mind.”

Those differing views are a vital component of civic engagement. A diverse group of participants is a primary goal in calling the meetings. “I was very pleased with the diversity of the Imagine Philadelphia sessions,” Harper said. “It was diverse in lots of different ways. The meeting in West Philadelphia had lots of young people, and I thought that was terrific. In the Northeast, there were lots of Eastern Europeans, but they were from different ethnic groups. I’m very happy with the cross-section we achieved” over the course of the nine citywide meetings.

Sokoloff also seeks a diverse group of participants. “The idea is always to make the group as inclusive as possible – by gender, ethnicity, race, and different levels of expertise,” he said. “The more diversity, the richer the conversation.”

While different viewpoints are sought, the civic engagement sessions organized for Penn’s design department or the meetings for the City Planning Commission did not specifically invite developers to the table.

But they would not have been turned away, either. “For Imagine Philadelphia, we wanted to hear from ordinary citizens,” Harper said. Developers may have attended, but they would have probably been there in their roles as residents. “The only people we explicitly invited by letter were elected officials.”

In the Central Delaware engagement process, separate meetings were held with developers to gather their input and expertise. “That’s where you say, ‘We’re going to have a closed session with developers.’ And when you do that, you let people know you’re doing it,” Sokoloff said. “It is a matter of transparency, but I like to think beyond transparency to co-production – the idea of experts working with citizens.”

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Even an engaged citizen may need to rest his voice occasionally. To prevent civic exhaustion, Harper suggests more collaboration among agencies. Portfolio Associates is currently undertaking public research into two projects – one looking at ways to ease traffic congestion on the west side of the Ben Franklin Bridge and the other exploring an extension of the PATCO line along the waterfront – with a combined questionnaire and meetings that will ask stakeholders about both issues.

“This is to recognize that people’s time is valuable. I think we need to do a little bit more of that,” she said. “So that you’re not asking the public to come out too many times.”

A more serious problem arises when organizers of civic engagement create “unrealistic expectations about how much say people will have in a project. I think it’s something you have to repeat early and often – that this is just one of the factors you use in the decision-making process,” Harper emphasized. “I think it is incumbent upon organizations who are managing this process to be truthful with people about what their involvement is going to mean.”

There must be an implementation mechanism in place, she said, to show participants their input had a result. If there is no implementation, “I think that hurts other efforts,” she said.

The new Philadelphia Police Commissioner, Charles Ramsey, conducted his own form of civic engagement, a round of six town hall meetings in the six police districts, when he took office earlier this year.

“The commissioner had said he wanted to get the public’s input for developing a plan for Philadelphia,” explained Lt. Frank Vanore, of the police public affairs department. “He knows about policing, but he didn’t know Philadelphia. He was following a format he did in Washington, D.C., where he held town hall meetings to create his strategy.”

According to Vanore, Commissioner Ramsey took notes at every meeting in Philadelphia and shaped a plan to fit each neighborhood. The result? “Some of those things the people said went verbatim right into his plans.” The commissioner’s Crime Fighting Strategy was then posted on the police department’s website for town hall participants to read.

Every municipal or regional issue does not require public involvement sessions, Sokoloff said. “You don’t want to do it with every decision. … You’d get stuck. You don’t have time to do it all. There’s so much that has to be done quickly.”

The problems that require the most “citizen adaptation” are those that call for citizen participation, he said.

But keeping the public engaged through rounds of meetings is “a real challenge,” Sokoloff said. “It’s a possibility that they will get fatigued. I think it’s less likely to happen if what comes out of the engagement – the action steps, policies, proposals, whatever – is responsive to the citizen voice.

“The minute you engage the public in this kind of conversation, you have a responsibility to tell them what you heard, what you did with what you heard, and how what you heard impacted your decisions,” he said.

“People need to know their time is being well spent. They need to know they’re making a difference.”

Desper, the healthcare services consultant, hasn’t tired of civic engagement after participating in two projects. “The more of these the better, as far as I’m concerned. They are a wonderful example of our government working the way it should. They are opening up opportunities for what citizens want at a very basic level.”

Contact the reporter at alanjaffe@mac.com

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Citizens involved in supporting or solving a problem must also be included at the get-go in framing and naming the problem.

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March 31, 2008

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New day for the Delaware

mgolas — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:10:20 -0500

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Nov. 14

By Alan Jaffe
For PlanPhilly

A new vision for the Central Delaware waterfront, forged over 13 months in more than 200 collaborative, occasionally contentious civic meetings, was formally introduced last night with dramatic flare and some compromise on the most disputed elements.

Inquirer coverage
Metro coverage
Daily Pennsylvanian

The proposal to bury a section of I-95 was softened by less drastic options. The dense riverfront street grid was proposed with a nod toward developers’ concerns. And the casinos, the hottest issue, were plotted on the plan – and then dissolved on an alternative map.

The audience of about 1,200 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center cheered the proposals and offered a standing ovation to the concluding video fly-over, a time-warp that transformed the current waterfront into an active, thriving scene of green spaces and well-balanced development and communities.

Public reaction

Approval for the plan, which was coordinated by PennPraxis, the clinical arm of the design department at the University of Pennsylvania, came from nearly every front. Mayor Street lauded the process for engaging the river ward communities and taking on a challenge that has eluded the city for decades. Michael DiBerardinis, secretary of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, called the Civic Vision “meaningful and important.” Riverfront developer Bart Blatstein said the plan is “a great start.”

Dissenting voices in the audience condemned any allowance for casinos, intermittently disrupting the presentation by PennPraxis executive director Harris Steinberg, who has guided the Civic Vision through several combative meetings. Outside the Convention Center, a six-foot skunk urged people to wear clothespins to show their displeasure with the Foxwoods and SugarHouse sites.

A panel of government, business and community leaders were invited to respond to the presentation, and they lent their support to most aspects of the plan. But there was a clash over the issue of funding a major I-95 reconfiguration. Rina Cutler, deputy secretary at PennDot, warned that an estimated $10 billion needed to depress the interstate at Penn’s Landing would be hard, if not impossible, to raise. Mayor Street disagreed. Initial response to large projects is always negative, Street said, but “there is plenty of money” if the public says “this is the priority.”

Overall, the evening was upbeat, congratulatory, and very hopeful.

Councilman Frank DiCicco, whose constituents’ fears of waterfront gaming sparked his suggestion that the city create a master plan for the Central Delaware, said the unveiling last night was “the highlight of my political career.” He thanked the William Penn Foundation for providing more than $1.6 million for this first phase of the waterfront process. He also credited Street for signing the executive order in October 2006 that charged PennPraxis with leading the effort.

The mayor noted that “plan after plan failed” to make the best use of the 13-acre parcel on the Center City riverfront. “The thing that should distinguish this report from other studies is you,” he told the audience last night. “We never had this kind of community engagement” in the process before, and “what will deter it from sitting on a shelf is you not letting it happen.”

With just over 50 days left in his term, he urged that the plan more forward with the formation of an organization that will take up the banner and “ensure that this work has not been done in vain.”

Steinberg then took the podium to present the culmination of his team’s year-long labor in an eloquent, 30-minute sales pitch. With archival, contemporary and conceptual images of the waterfront beamed on two screens flanking him, and on screens in an adjoining hall for the overflow crowd, Steinberg emphasized the historical and regional context of the Central Delaware -- from William Penn’s arrival, through the riverfront’s industrial dominance, through the traffic-jammed state of things today. The initial question was, “how do we create a framework for growth?” he said.

PennPraxis conferred with elected officials and every civic group with a stake in the waterfront so that the “pinheads from Penn,” as he heard one resident describe his team, “would not impose their image on the waterfront.”

The planners relied on the values expressed by residents in that series of meetings, and on the best practices for riverfront redevelopment accomplished in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Hoboken. “Man, if we can’t beat Hoboken,” Steinberg laughed.

What the Philadelphia team came up with was three frameworks based on movement, open space, and development.

Movement refers to connections across and beneath I-95 to the river, a street grid that replicates the feeling of Center City life on the waterfront, and a north-south urban boulevard.

A reborn Delaware Boulevard, the “spine” of the riverfront, would mean keeping a six-lane avenue for now, but eventually “skinnying up” the current road to allow for a light-rail or other mass transit line down the center.

The street grid would recall the 17th-century template designed by William Penn “which has guided our identity,” Steinberg said. “We need to think about extending that to the river,” not only to disperse traffic, but also as “the connective tissue” that links land parcels.

The audience applauded the Civic Plan’s suggestion that Septa and Patco lines be linked on a reinvented waterfront. Water ferries and water taxis are also part of the plan, as opposed to a Camden-Philadelphia tram that links the two cities.

Turning to the high-profile proposal of burying I-95 to reclaim the Penn’s Landing area, Steinberg offered a conciliatory tone. “Is there a way to sink it? I don’t know. There is lots more study to be done. It is something that the plan doesn’t live or die on.

“But if we don’t start thinking about it,” he said, “Philadelphia will miss the boat to capitalize on that potential.”

The open space framework in the Civic Vision foresees “a great lawn” at Penn’s Landing, “a great democratizing element of the city.”

Frankford Avenue and Spring Garden Streets were presented in artist’s drawings transformed into pedestrian-friendly green streets of trees, blooming medians, and bike lanes. The string of parks and open spaces along the Delaware would “do work,” Steinberg said, filtering stormwater and pollutants, and creating wetlands, wildlife habitats, tidal gardens, and a healthier city and river.

Land development along the water, and specifically how casinos fit into the plan, has been “the most contentious part of this project,” Steinberg said,

“Not an option!” an audience member shouted.

“Yes it is!” responded another.

“Bull----!” answered the first.

Acknowledging the debate, PennPraxis provided two options for those sites on the waterfront plan, with and without the casinos. But Steinberg said the issue is “not about what is there. It’s about how the buildings relate to each other” and surrounding streets, and whether they allow access to the waterfront.

Other development issues should be addressed through zoning code reforms, according to the Civic Vision. The street grid plan must be codified and buildings must “meet the street line,” with retail, commercial and “life-affirming” uses, Steinberg said. Tall buildings should be staggered along the landscape to ensure “everyone has light and air and views of the river,” he also said.

There is a place on the river for big-box development, too, so long as it is “done more gracefully,” Steinberg said.

The presentation ended with the video, reminiscent of the 1964 World’s Fair ride that looked ahead to the city of the future. The audience was remarkably silent as it was given a glimpse of what Philadelphia could become 50 years from now. When it ended, they rose and applauded the vision.

In an official response to the plan, DCNR secretary DiBerardinis, a 30-year resident of Fishtown, said the unveiling of the plan was an “important event for Philadelphia.”

A century ago, he said, Pennsylvania stood at a similar crossroads, with its forests decimated and streams polluted by the Industrial Revolution. But some leaders had a vision for the commonwealth that helped save its ecosystems. “We are in a similar moment in this time,” he said. Conservation and sustainable communities will become policy imperatives, and “cities that imagine a waterfront like this are the ones that will succeed,” DiBerardinis said.

“The plan is right. The economy of the future will be built around efficiency and sustainability,” he said.

To make it happen, the city must build on the collaboration of the community, DiBerardinis continued. There must be consistent city leadership to shepherd the plan forward, and it must move from a vision to a detailed planning process. Strategic investment must be made and leveraged through the local, state and federal governments, he said. And “early victories” should be implemented “so people can see the reality.”

Inquirer columnist Chris Satullo moderated the panel discussion that ended the evening, posing his own questions and those from the audience.

Blatstein, of Tower Investments, said “planning is not the enemy. The enemy is lack of planning.” He said the Civic Vision has been a “marriage of planners, developers and communities.”

Blatstein also said there should be no gated communities along the waterfront and there should be open and free access to the river.

Cutler, of PennDot, who was among the supervisors on Boston’s Big Dig project, said Philadelphia should not become too focused on a large I-95 reconstruction. “If we spend years debating if it is possible to bury 95, we will miss the opportunity to rethink what else exists there.”

A better choice, she said, might be improved public transit on the waterfront. Because of funding limitations, “we may have to make those choices,” she said.

Mayor Street said an ambitious 95 redo can happen. “It will not happen unless we say this is the kind of investment we want from the local and federal government,” he said. That will require the support of surrounding counties, who must also see that a revived city waterfront will benefit their residents. “The biggest deterrent is perceived regional differences,” he said.

Steinberg said the next steps in the process will be “early action projects,” such as the blazing of a bike trail from the Pier 70 neighborhood to Penn’s Landing, the restoration of riverfront wetlands, and the release of an implementation guide in the spring.

“This is the very beginning,” he said.

Alan Jaffe is a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor. He can be contacted at alanjaffe@mac.com

Home Page Summary

PennPraxis and Central Delaware Advisory Group present <a href="/vision" target="_blank">Civic Vision</a> for Philadelphia's waterfront. Public <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUxB6quu7wU" target="_blank">reaction</a>.

Source

Written By

AlanJ

Publish Date

November 14, 2007

Abstract

Nutter won't waver on SugarHouse

mgolas — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:06:28 -0400

Bio

Body

Oct. 3

By Kellie Patrick Gates
For PlanPhilly

Mayor Michael Nutter still wants SugarHouse to move off of the Delaware River - despite the willingness of casino officials to redesign their project to fit into the city's long-range plan for the waterfront.

SugarHouse officials Wednesday told city officials they are going to revamp their design to better fit with the city's vision for the waterfront. That vision, developed by PennPraxis after more than a year of community input, calls for extending the street grid to the waterfront, a stronger reliance on public transportation, walk-ability and human-scale buildings, among other things.

At Mayor Michael Nutter's request, PennPraxis did a second, shorter study to look at whether casinos could fit into that vision. The verdict was no, but experts who participated suggested there were ways to design a casino that would fit better into the plan than the designs SugarHouse and the other proposed casino, Foxwoods, had developed.

Foxwoods last month announced it would investigate moving from its waterfront site to The Gallery at Market East. SugarHouse officials say they are sticking with their Delaware Avenue location.

But at Wednesday's meeting, requested by SugarHouse's main investor, Neil Bluhm, "They came in and said 'we want to stay at our site, but we're taking PennPraxis' plan seriously," said Andy Altman, Deputy Mayor for Commerce and Planning, in a phone interview Friday.

That meeting was talk only - no plans were presented, Altman said. "It was a brief meeting to let us know what they were looking at. They said they would get back to us" with revised plans, he said.

Altman said the city will certainly meet with SugarHouse and look at any new designs, but the city's position has not changed: "There are better sites than waterfront sites to be used for a casino," he said. "Waterfront sites are scarce sites. There are other sites that could better suit a casino."

SugarHouse spokeswoman Leigh Whitaker said the casino remains committed to its Delaware Avenue site.

There was no discussion of moving SugarHouse at Wednesday's meeting. Wednesday's meeting was not the first time the mayor and Bluhm spoke of a redesign, however.

They and Rep. Dwight Evans gathered in a hotel room in Denver during the Democratic National Convention in August. Bluhm is a big donor to the Democrats. Whitaker described it as an informal, unplanned discussion that happened because all the right people were in the same place at the same time.

Foxwoods' potential move came about after officials from that casino met with Nutter, Governor Ed Rendell, and other elected officials. At the Sept. 10 press conference at which the potential switch to The Gallery site was announced, Rendell said he still wanted to have a similar meeting with SugarHouse, and that the meeting had not yet taken place because of scheduling difficulty.

Altman said Friday that the relocation meeting was "separate" from the discussions about a redesign, and that the city still anticipated the relocation meeting would take place.

Rep. Michael O'Brien, one of the waterfront legislators who has been involved with the effort to move the casinos off the river, said he still wants that meeting. O'Brien called the governor's office Friday, but had not heard back by late afternoon.

"In my mind, I fully expect the governor to fulfill the commitment he made to me that I would be part of the resiting meeting," he said.

O'Brien was also in Denver for the convention, but said he was not invited to the design discussion and knew nothing about it until he was questioned by a reporter. O'Brien does not think the Denver meeting should have happened. He said it feels like decisions are being made behind the scenes instead of through a legitimate process.

Rendell Spokesman Chuck Ardo said late in the work day Friday he was trying to get the answers to PlanPhilly's question: Did the governor still want to meet with SugarHouse to discuss a different location, despite the new conversation about a redesign?

As recently as late September - long after the discussion at the convention - Ardo said the governor still wanted to talk about a new location for SugarHouse. Ardo said then the governor was waiting to reschedule it until after the State Supreme Court dealt with the city's Sept. 5 petition asking the court to reconsider its decision in HSP Gaming v. The City of Philadelphia. (The court had earlier ruled that a submerged lands license issued to SugarHouse during the Street administration, then revoked during the Nutter administration, still stands. SugarHouse needs the permit to build as planned on its current site.)

The pending decision "helps explain why there is a lack of urgency - a piece of information is missing," Ardo said on Sept. 23. But the meeting is mostly dependent on scheduling. "People are busy. There's an election coming up so the Governor is less available - there are all sorts of things to prevent people from getting together," he said.

Contact the reporter at kelliespatrick@gmail.com

Home Page Summary

Deputy Mayor Andrew Altman says city remains firm in its position that even a redesigned casino is inappropriate for the waterfront.

Source

Written By

KellieP

Publish Date

October 3, 2008

Abstract

South Street Bridge redo moving forward

mgolas — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:45:10 -0400

Bio

Body

Sept. 23

By Steven B. Ujifusa
For PlanPhilly

During the past year, the South Street Bridge Coalition has been negotiating with the Philadelphia Streets Department and PennDOT to revise the replacement design for the crumbling South Street Bridge. For the past several years, the 1923 structure has deteriorated to the point of becoming a safety hazard.

When the city released the original replacement design to the public in December 2006, many South Street residents and business owners objected to it. They argued it catered almost exclusively to the needs of cars and did not include sufficient safety provisions for pedestrians and bicyclists. They also felt that the city and PennDOT did not allow for sufficient community involvement in the design process.

Pundits and advocacy groups such as the Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition joined in the fray. In a February 9, 2007, Inquirer columnist Inga Saffron lambasted the H2L2/Gannett Fleming design as “little more than a chute for efficiently moving traffic onto the most frightening of the I-76 entry ramps.”

Previous coverage

With the clock ticking and concrete chunks dropping into the Schuylkill River, Deputy Mayor for Transportation Rina Cutler has vigorously pushed to build the replacement as soon as possible.

A few months ago, the South Street Bridge Coalition, PennDOT, and the Streets Department agreed on some significant revisions to the bid documents. These included:

• Turning Radii at Schuylkill Expressway Ramps - Turning radii were reduced from earlier designs to 33/36/36/42-ft. corners, which are the minimum that can be accomplished under Federal Highway Administration requirements.

• Bicycle Safe Roadway Grates - Bicycle safe grates that have adequate inlet capacity will be used.

• Translucent Barriers - “Quilite” panels will be installed at the railroad crossings to increase natural lighting. The pre-assembled barriers that block noise (from the trains) look like glass-block walls. Its a safer, better looking alternative to chain link fence, which is what is found at the Arch Street RR crossing.

Despite these changes, the South Street Bridge Coalition continued to push for additional revisions, so that, in the words of Coalition President Jim Campbell, the city would end up with a “cleaner, greener, more pedestrian and bike friendly bridge,” one that “would not be a repeat of the Walnut Street Bridge.”

Last week, the Coalition announced that even more progress has been made at the negotiating table. In an email released on September 17, Campbell and 30th Democratic Ward Leader Marcia Wilkof confirmed that PennDOT and the Streets Department had agreed upon additional, significant design concessions, which have been listed verbatim:

• Vehicle Lane Design – A four-lane traffic design will replace the five-lane design.

• Crosswalk at Schuylkill River Park – An additional crosswalk with a pedestrian activated traffic signal will be added at the ramp and stair from the Bridge down to the Schuylkill River Park. The traffic signal will be portal mounted above the roadway. The curb ramps at this crosswalk will be widened to 6-ft. on both sides of the Bridge to allow multiple bicyclists to simultaneously cross and access the bicycle lanes.

• Speed Limit – The posted speed limit for the entire Bridge and viaduct will be reduced to 25 MPH.

• Bicycle Lanes – Bicycle lanes have been widened as a result of the reduction in the number of vehicle lanes.

• Advanced Bicycle Stop Bars – Bicycle stop bars will be advanced to allow bicyclists to get ahead of motorists for greater visibility and safety.

• Lighting – Pedestrian style lights will be installed. The majority of the bridge lighting will be sidewalk mounted at the curb. All light standards will include mounting brackets for future banner placement.

• Signal Timings –Traffic signal timings have been optimized for pedestrian movements and safety.

• Reflective Pavement Markers – Reflective pavement markers will be installed at the curve on the east side to improve roadway visibility.

• Sidewalk Surface – The sidewalks will be scored and tinted to resemble grey slate pavers.

• Roadway Surface – The roadway will be tinted to resemble asphalt.

• Guiderail – Decorative vertical elements will be added to the sidewalk side so that the railing appearance is more pedestrian friendly.

These changes were based on recommendations made by the South Street Bridge Coalition in their community based-design, funded by a grant facilitated by State Senator Vince Fumo.

When asked about what he thought about these concessions, Campbell was extremely enthusiastic. “The Streets Department and PennDOT were really very supportive and very good to work with,” he said. “There are a lot of people in the Streets Deptartment and PennDOT who got it. We also got support from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, as well as wonderful political support from Councilman Frank Rizzo, Mayor Michael Nutter, and Senator Vince Fumo. These changes are a result of everybody listening to what people ultimately really wanted.”

After reviewing the list of the agreed-upon changes, H2L2 Principal in charge of design Tom Piotrowski pointed out that he had "no official marching orders to do a four lane plan," and was unaware such a revision had been made last week.

"We will gladly change the design to suit current needs," he continued. " I don't have any objections to what was approved from an architectural standpoint. Whatever was done in the original plan was responding to requirments from 10 years ago."

James Templeton, another H2L2 architect, added, "We are in dialogue with Gannett Fleming about implementing these changes and how to go about doing them."

Is this the end of the negotiation process? Campbell still feels that additional revisions will be needed before the South Street Bridge Coalition signs off on the design. “We are still working actively with the Streets Department and PennDOT,” he said.

John Boyle, advocacy director at the Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition, was also pleased with the changes made thus far. “We’ve got about 80 percent of what we wanted,” he said. “The main thing was the inclusion of the bike lanes. But also we got the turning radii at the intersection at the Schuylkill Expressway ramp. In the original design, two of those four corners were squared off, which was the minimum which Federal Highway Administration would allow. We are also happy we got the crosswalk on the east side of the bridge that connects with the walkway. Overall, this is going to be a significant improvement compared over the Walnut Street Bridge. It’s built to be much more in the context of the neighborhood.”

Sarah Clark Stuart of the Schuylkill River Park Alliance, which did much of the organizational legwork for the South Street Bridge Coalition, stated that “all these changes are very good. They are going to enhance pedestrian and bicycle access to and from the Schuylkill trail to the bridge, and we think it is great the community had an opportunity to weigh in and make the bridge much more bicycle and pedestrian friendly. I think it’s an example of a civic process that worked well for the neighborhood and the community of users of both the bridge and the trail. I hope it’s a sign of other improvements that the city makes further down the line during this administration.”

Contact the reporter at steven.ujifusa@gmail.com

Home Page Summary

UPDATED: Design compromises will create a “cleaner, greener, more pedestrian and bike friendly bridge.”

Source

Written By

StevenU

Publish Date

September 23, 2008

Abstract

Bill would void casino's riparian license

mgolas — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:14:31 -0400

Bio

Body

The 22.6514-acre parcel impacted by House Bill 2775

Sept. 23

House Bill 2775

SugarHouse webcam

By Kellie Patrick Gates
For PlanPhilly

    A bill that would repeal the 1907 law that allowed the Philadelphia Commerce Department to grant SugarHouse Casino the right to build on the submerged lands of the Delaware River and render the city-issued license void has passed out of the Pennsylvania House's State Government Committee.
    In August, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the submerged lands license the city issued to SugarHouse during the Street administration is still valid. Attorneys representing City Council and a contingent of state legislators argued that the 1907 law, Act 321, was wiped out by the Dam Safety and Encroachments Act of 1978. Mayor Michael Nutter's administration drew the same conclusion and revoked the permit shortly after Nutter took office in January. But the court agreed with SugarHouse attorneys that because the Dam Safety and Encroachments Act did not repeal Act 321 by name, it still stood.
    The portion of the bill that revokes Act 321 is a direct response to the Court, said Rep. Babette Josephs, prime sponsor and majority chair of the House State Government Committee.
    Another part of the bill says that the city-issued permit - which the Court upheld despite the Nutter administration's attempt to revoke it - is null and void. This would require SugarHouse to go through the legislature to get riparian rights, Josephs said.
    It would probably also mean another Supreme Court case, she said.
    Tuesday morning, Josephs said she sponsored the bill "because I thought maybe we could right what I consider a wrong."
    A bit of background: SugarHouse needs a submerged lands license, also called a riparian lease, to build its casino complex as planned on the Delaware Avenue site. The power to grant such a license rests with the state legislature, because the riverbed land is owned by the Commonwealth. No legislature was willing to propose legislation granting a license to SugarHouse.
    As part of its August decision, the Supreme Court also determined that the city's notice of revocation was invalid because the city tried to revoke it after the period for SugarHouse to file an appeal had passed and no notice of the revocation was given nor a hearing on the matter held, among other reasons.
    Should the newly proposed legislation become law, SugarHouse would have to come to the legislature for a submerged lands license, Joseph said. And the proposed bill uses a definition of riparian land that would make the entire site unusable without such a permit.
    But "I'm sure that SugarHouse would be right back in court," Josephs said.
    There's still a considerable distance to go before any of that could happen.
    The bill is now in the house Appropriations Committee. This is a typical last-stop before the House floor, Josephs said, but she does not know when it will land there for a vote. She has sent a letter to appropriations chair, Rep. Dwight Evans, urging him to act quickly. Josephs wants both the house and senate to deal with this matter before the pre-election recess, especially since the Senate plans an extended break, she said.
    But as of now, there is no Senate companion to HB 2775. Josephs said she will talk about that - likely this week - with her counterparts in the Senate's State Government Committee, majority chair Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, who represents Dauphin County and part of York, and minority chair Sen. Anthony Williams.
    The bill would also require Gov. Ed Rendell's signature, and Josephs says she's not certain he would sign a bill that left SugarHouse without a license.
    Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said there's no way for the governor to know what he'll do when the bill has so far to go before it could hit his desk. "We can"t speculate on the future of a bill that is still undergoing consideration in the legislature and could change drastically before it reaches its final form."
    SugarHouse spokeswoman Leigh Whitaker had no comment.

Contact the reporter at kelliespatrick@gmail.com

Home Page Summary

Should the newly proposed legislation become law, SugarHouse would have to come to the legislature for a submerged lands license.

Source

Written By

KellieP

Publish Date

September 23, 2008

Abstract

The Mark Alan Hughes Challenge

mgolas — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:37:37 -0400

Bio

Body

Sept. 22

By Seth Budick
For PlanPhilly

Between glances at the deluge of e-mails on his Blackberry, Mark Alan Hughes spends a lot of his time these days thinking about the future. In an interview last week, Philadelphia’s new Director of Sustainability mused about the city’s potential to meet the mayor’s challenge of becoming the greenest city in America. In the process, Hughes provided a preview of the strategy and ideas that might actually get us there.

In a sign of the enthusiasm that has greeted his appointment, Hughes said that he could easily spend his days simply responding to the outpouring of offers of assistance that he receives daily by phone, mail, and that ubiquitous Blackberry. That makes sense since sustainability has become “one of the most engaging things you can possibly be working on in any government in the world right now,” he said.

So how does the man in charge of sustainability define that term? Hughes suggested what he called the classic definition: “meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” “For me,” he went on to say, “what that really means is that that’s where the present and the future come together and negotiate what they owe each other. Sustainability is really the treaty table where that stuff gets worked out.” One of leadership’s responsibilities, he believes, is to be the future’s advocate at that table. “What we’ve got in Nutter is a game changer who is prepared to talk about the future’s place in present decisions,” he said.

Though he’s barely had time to settle into his office, Hughes already has a clear sense of his role as the first Director of Sustainability, and that role flows directly from the mayor’s green challenge. “He’s got this aspiration, he wants to know how he can act on it. My job is to figure out how to set it up,” he said. Hughes therefore sees one of his primary responsibilities as bringing the mayor “actionable decisions that he can demonstrate, and make real.”

The second part of the job, in Hughes’ opinion, has to do with those messages piling up on his Blackberry. Hughes says he wants to build the organizational capacity to take advantage of all that enthusiasm for sustainability, both inside and outside of government. He pointed to the announcement two weeks ago of the Sustainability Advisory Board as a tangible sign of that capacity building. The 21-member regional and multi-sector board “will help guide and react to some of our early ideas around this,” he said.

So what are those ideas, and how will Hughes and his team implement them? To answer that question, he pulled out a dog-eared copy of plaNYC, a blueprint for a “Greener, Greater New York” announced by that city in 2007. With 127 initiatives organized under 10 goals, plaNYC lays out an explicit framework for achieving a sustainable future by improving everything from energy efficiency to transit access. “We’re ripping this off,” Hughes said only half facetiously. “We’re using that as a template, we’re crafting the 10 or so organizing goals that will help us frame the specific initiatives that we plan to pursue over the next seven years.” Unable to resist putting a Philadelphia stamp on his version, Hughes likes to refer to it as Phlan.

Organizing those initiatives into a single document has multiple advantages, according to Hughes. First, it makes it easy to keep track of a broad set of goals. It becomes, as he put it, “the place that inventories what everybody’s doing. So it’s not all in my head because I’ve talked to everybody across government, but actually it starts to become a tangible inventory of things.”

Second, the document will contain clear metrics for progress on each of those initiatives, a means of answering the question: how will we know if we’ve become the greenest city in the country? As far as providing that answer, “I think that there is no one metric,” Hughes said. “But it’s very important to design a metric for each of your goals.” And it’s those metrics that will provide the necessary accountability over the coming years. The plan, as he put it, “literally becomes this kind of encyclopedia. You can turn to page 127 and say, ‘how’s that going?’”

Accountability also means adopting goals that can be met within a meaningful time frame, according to Hughes. While he doesn’t hesitate to laud plaNYC, Hughes pointed out an important distinction between it and Phlan, and in the process expressed optimism for the prospects of the current administration. “plaNYC came at the end of the Bloomberg administration and Phlan is coming at the beginning of the Nutter administration, so this document, this framework, it’s a 2015 plan.” Hughes drew a stark contrast between the Nutter administration’s commitment to progress within its own tenure, and the ease with which elected officials often talk about goals for 2020, 2030, or some other point far off in the future.

Along those lines, a key component of plaNYC thus far has been the city’s willingness to issue an annual report card on its progress. Asked if Philadelphia would similarly be providing regular assessments, Hughes’ answer was emphatic: “Oh yeah.” “For every year, we’re going to tell you what we’re trying to do, and that’s the ultimate in accountability,” he said. “One of the reasons why I’m in such a madman mode to get this thing created is that we’re in a position to align the aspiration with the accountability for the next seven years. So a 2015 plan, if we can get this thing out in 2009, and baseline it from where we started in 2008, we’ve got seven years that get reported every year.”

Hughes also drew a contrast between Philadelphia’s approach to sustainability and a pattern that’s becoming common elsewhere. Unlike some other cities, which have created departments of the environment, Philadelphia is relying on a “matrix management” approach, Hughes said. In part, this means that his small Mayor’s Office of Sustainability is counting on the cooperation of the rest of city government to help implement its sustainability initiatives. As Hughes put it, he’s going to “rely on other peoples’ budgets and reporting lines and authority, my four Deputy Mayor colleagues and the Managing Director in particular, to actually get stuff done.” While relying on that coordination may sound optimistic, Hughes hopes that it won’t be difficult when sustainability is currently such a pervasive theme in government. “Every department uses energy, every department generates waste, every department’s got a stake in how we do capital and operating budgets,” he said

It seems reasonable to ask where accountability resides in this kind of organizational structure. Hughes stressed that the plan itself will encourage responsibility through its articulation of a well-defined set of goals, along with the metrics to determine whether those goals are being met. As he put it, “In the end though, really it’s this matrix and the framework that really pulls everything together so it’s easy to look up for the guy who has the ultimate accountability hammer, which is the mayor.” And it’s the mayor’s commitment to making Philadelphia sustainable that Hughes thinks provides him with the authority he needs. “The mayor has delegated to me all the power I could possibly want. He has told everybody in the region that he wants Philadelphia to be the greenest city in America. What more do I need?”

Hughes anticipates that Phlan will be ready by April 2009, in time for Earth Day. It’s clear though that he already has a pretty good sense of its priorities. “It starts with energy,” he said, and the motivation for that is twofold. On a global level, reducing our emissions footprint and its impact on climate change is simply Philadelphia’s “obligation to the world,” as he put it. But Hughes also stressed that on a local level, there’s a financial imperative to become a more strategic user of energy. The goal, he said, “is to reduce your exposure to a world where prices are going up. That’s what it’s all about, it’s about survival in this world.”

Towards that end, Hughes wants the city to become “a strategic consumer, manager, and producer of energy.” As a consumer, Hughes said, that means becoming savvy about entering into long-term purchasing agreements, whether those are for gas or alternative energy. The goal, he said, should be to lower not just our consumption, but the unit cost of energy.

Reducing demand is also essential though, and that’s what Hughes means when he talks about energy management. At the city government level, that involves building retrofit programs and benefiting from the substantial savings that Hughes thinks could come from simply asking city departments to pay their own electric bills. “Right now, you can turn the light on or off and you don’t even know what the bill is anyway, so there’s no incentive.”

Finally, Hughes would like to see the city produce more if its own energy, whether through solar power or other sources. He mentioned cogeneration, where heat produced as a byproduct of electricity generation is used for heating purposes, fitting neatly into Hughes’ overall emphasis on efficiency. “We could be a producer of energy, closing our own waste loops.”

Even if City Hall transforms itself into a model of sustainability though, Hughes acknowledged that the far bigger payoff will come from small changes in the behavior of the million and a half Philadelphians. “The mayor’s challenge is to not to be the greenest city government in America,” he said, “it’s to be the greenest city.”

And it’s especially in this sort of “collective action” problem that Hughes sees the value of government leadership. “Everybody’s got kind of a $5 piece of this,” he said, whether that means new caulk around the windows or not idling your car for longer than two minutes. “Each of these things is relatively small, but when you start to aggregate that across a million people, then you start to have huge benefits, and that’s when you really need government.” “What’s the metric?” he asked. “Every house in Philadelphia is weatherized and has a smart meter in it, and I think we can do that by 2015, which is the horizon for our framework.”

Not only will strategic energy use put money in the hands of Philadelphia’s energy consumers, it will create a marketable commodity in a world where carbon offsets are traded, a world that Hughes believes is likely to emerge in coming years. He also hopes that these sustainability initiatives will help create an identity for Philadelphia as a low energy intensity place to live and work. “It’s a comparative advantage as Atlanta and Phoenix scramble to reinvent themselves into places that we already are,” he said. “We need to extend our lead as a walkable, bikeable, transit-rich community.”

While Hughes often emphasizes the long-term savings of many sustainability initiatives, paying for those programs, particularly their initial capital costs, is a topic that will clearly need to be addressed. When asked about costs, however, Hughes was ready with just the kind of elegant solution one might expect from an experienced policy strategist.

It’s becoming increasingly common, he explained, to secure financing for cost-saving investments by effectively borrowing against those future savings. He gave as an example a solar-thermal hot water heater that might require a loan for the up-front investment of five or six thousand dollars, but that can be paid off in six years from the stream of savings on energy bills. “So it actually doesn’t cost you anything except you’re sharing the savings with somebody who’s actually giving you the money to pay for all the new heating equipment, for example.” This sort of financing is already happening at the level of “large building managers, the city, the airport, private commercial buildings, and the school district,” he said, but the key will be making similar channels available for average homeowners. “It’s a super simple idea, but no banks offer that.”

So how might Philadelphia look in 2015, at the end of a second Nutter administration and after Phlan has had a chance to work its magic? “I hate this question!” Hughes said in mock outrage. “I’m not a planner,” he explained, incentives and policies are his primary motivation, rather than a specific vision. He humored this reporter though by envisioning a city that no longer “feels like it’s missing a million people.” The Philadelphia of 2015 will be a city that’s adopted “the appropriate urban form for exactly the foreseeable future,” he said.

Hughes doesn’t shy away from describing the difficulties in Philadelphia’s recent past or the challenges that lie ahead. But his affection for the city is on display in the historic maps of the metropolis that cover his office’s walls, and in the infectious optimism with which he speaks about its future:

“Right now, Philadelphia too often feels so obsolete, so crumbling, so forgotten, except in a few places. But what I imagine, even in this relatively short period of six or seven years, what I imagine is a completely different vibe. That in fact this is exactly the urban form and the combination of infrastructure, like streets and bike lanes and rail and so on. Infrastructure and land use integrated in a way that says, ‘man, this is sustainable, this is the urban form for the next 50 years.’”

Contact the reporter at sbudick@gmail.com

Home Page Summary

Sept. 22 / By Seth Budick New Director of Sustainability talks about what it will take for Philadelphia to energize its future.

Source

Written By

sbudick

Publish Date

September 22, 2008

Abstract

Dangerous conditions at 17th and Walnut

mgolas — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:23:06 -0400

Bio

Body

Sept. 12

On Sept. 4, architect George Claflen sent the following memo, which details hazardous conditions for pedestrians and motorists at the busy intersection of 17th Street and Walnut Street, to the Philadelphia Streets Department.

To date, there has been no response to the memo and no progress on remediating the sidewalk closure that is forcing pedestrians to stand in the street while they are waiting for public transportation.

The first photos in the slideshow were taken on 9/4/08. Additional photos were taken 9/05/08 and 9/10/08.

Claflen's memo of Sept. 4

I hope you will take a moment to look at these photographs that reveal in my opinion a breakdown in leadership at the Streets Department.

1701 Walnut is the building in the background of the photograph -- it is being renovated. So far so good. A few weeks ago the sidewalk was closed and temporary sidewalk zone was created by the orange barricades that you see loaded on the truck in the other photograph. Now the situation at one of our busiest corners and a major bus stop is the following: The entire sidewalk is closed and people as you can see are waiting for the bus in the street.

The contractor told me that the Streets Department told him to remove the orange barricades which were in the street. (As they are at another construction site on the opposite side of the street in the next block north of Sansom on 17th Street.)

The current situation is unacceptable. No one should have to wait in the street for bus. Certainly there should be coordination between SEPTA and the City on these matters.

I am submitting these images and this complaint on my own -- but you may be aware that the Design Advocacy Group (DAG) of which I am a member has submitted a comprehensive photo dossier on this problem as a contribution to legislation on this problem.

The best solution to this would be restoration of the temporary pedestrian protected zone which is also consistent with how this type of situation is handled in other cities -- but whatever you do the present condition is not safe. Additionally wouldn't it be a good idea to have the Streets Department personnel who issue permits for this type of work receive some basic training and supervision on safety, pedestrian issues, and public transportation? And isn't it appropriate to require a higher standard of traffic and pedestrian management on our most densely used streets?

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely yours,
George Claflen

Home Page Summary

At one of Center City's busiest corners the entire sidewalk is closed and people are forced to wait for public transportation in the street.