Commuting around Philadelphia is expensive, unpleasant, and time-consuming. But Lieutenant Governor and former Northeast Philadelphia State Senator Mike Stack recently came close to arriving at an ingenious fix for the problem.
Too bad Stack himself would have been almost alone in benefiting from his proposed solution. Reportedly, he tried to secure the insertion of a provision in the annual budget bill that would give him the legal authority to force traffic to get out of the way so that a car in which the Lieutenant Governor was a passenger could pass through unimpeded.
This special rule would not have applied only in an emergency, but all the time. Basically, the people who Stack would have been allowed to force all other drivers off any road in Pennsylvania for his own convenience.
Nine states don't have a separate office of Lieutenant Governor, perhaps because people there don't like to waste money employing one. In our state, the office exists to give some political worthy a fat salary, personal staff, and a state-leased vehicle. The incumbent's function, if it can be called that, is to attend ribbon-cutting events. Stack apparently believed that the office should come with power to push around ordinary people, and figured that the state's roads were a good place to accomplish this. (He was recently quoted as saying, "PennDOT is the best," and has got to be one of the few people in the state who thinks so.)
Fortunately, if the news report about the matter is correct, state legislators and Governor Tom Wolf decided not to give Stack the privilege the desired. Unless Stack manages to get the provision slipped into another law, he may be forced to sit in traffic with the rest of us.
Roadways in Philadelphia are congested. and the major ones seem like permanent construction zones. Despite that, they're often in disrepair. Pennsylvania's taxes on gas and diesel fuel are, at the time of this writing, the country's highest. Gas tax revenues are being used to repair the state's highways, but after decades of neglect, improvement is very slow. Roads in the city deemed too unimportant to be targeted for this money (the vast majority of roads here) get barely any attention. The only consistently well-maintained road, the Turnpike, has seen tolls rise for nine years in a row to high levels far out of line with turnpikes in other states. It's no illusion that Turnpike tolls nearest to Philadelphia are the most expensive. The rest of the state likes it that way. If you drive into Philadelphia, you'll pay massively for parking. If you think you can avoid trouble by not taking your car, most people familiar with SEPTA, the public transit system, would tell you to think again. It isn't good even when it's running at its best, and it hasn't been at its best lately.
Political connections shouldn't be the ticket to getting around hassles like these that ordinary people must face everyday. Rather than trying to add more comforts to their own privileged lives, politicians should be thinking about how to help other people.
But what should happen isn't always what does happen. In 2013, Stack, some relatives, and James Anderson (the head of a big construction firm that often performs services for public agencies in Pennsylvania, and a man whose name appears on the "contributions" schedules of several local politicians' campaign finance filings) reportedly came close to profiting from an interesting land deal. A company that they owned, known as the Beach Street Corporation, had somehow acquired more than a million square feet of riverfront land at 2001 Beach Street for $1 in September 2008, according to the city's online property tax database.
Casino gambling had been legalized in Pennsylvania in 2004, and two of the casino licenses were mandated to be issued for casino sites in Philadelphia. Licenses were awarded in December 2006, but controversy persisted over where casinos would be built. Casino operator Steve Wynn reportedly wanted to buy the Beach Street Corporation's land and, with one of the two Philly licenses, build a casino. Wynn was slated to pay a lot of money for the site, enough to net many millions of dollars for the Beach Street Corporation's owners.
At some point in the process, Wynn must have noticed that our region would soon have so many casinos that the one he planned might lose money. (Incidentally, despite recent interest, only one casino, the Sugar House, has been built so far.) When the Wynn deal fell through, the Beach Street Corporation continued to hold the land. According to the city's property tax database, it still does. But without a casino deal in the offing, the site, which is in an area surrounded by old warehouses and industrial sites on the Delaware River side of I-95, wasn't worth anything like what the Wynn deal might have yielded.
In July 2016, State Senator John Sabatina, an ally of Stack's and his successor for his old Senate seat, announced that he had helped steer a state grant for planning for riverfront development to the Delaware River City Corporation (DRCC). According to the DRCC's webpage, its chairman is former Congressman Robert Borski. James Anderson sits on the DRCC's Board of Directors, which also includes two City agency managers, another from the Port Authority, and a proxy for City Councilman Bobby Henon. (The board's other members own or manage local businesses.)
The DRCC is not well-known to people in Northeast Philly despite the influence it wields here. It will use the grant to update the "master plan" for the Delaware River Greenway. The Greenway is a public park project many years in the making. When completed, it's supposed to stretch along the waterfront from Port Richmond to the Bucks County line.
Currently, the Greenway plan doesn't call for it to extend quite so far to the south as the Beach Street Corporation's property. But plans can change, and Sabatina's grant is intended to pay for changes of some kind in the Greenway plan. One can easily imagine changes that might favorably impact development prospects for the Beach Street Corporation's idle land. For instance, the Greenway's planned route could be extended to reach the property. Or plans for access to the Greenway could be changed to favor the property. Either way, the property's value and development potential would increase.
I don't know whether Stack, his family, or any of his friends are currently the beneficial owners of the Beach Street Corporation, as the Inquirer reported they were in 2013. But Anderson's name is listed as president of the Beach Street Corporation on the state's corporate entities search page. And Stack has expressed interest in the recent Greenway grant. A post on Stack's Twitter account thanked Sabatina "4 securing vital funding 2 update N. Delaware waterfront."
It would be nice to see the Greenway project completed. It has been talked about for years, but implemented only in spots, and a trail that exists only in spots leaves something to be desired. A completed riverfront trail would be great for local recreation. It would attract people to visit and to live in its vicinity.
Changing plans for the Greenway might actually push its date of completion farther into the future, and cost more money. Any changes made mainly for the benefit of a few well-placed people could make the plan worse, rather than better, from the public's point of view. And the idea that public projects might be changed to aid people who know people, rather than the public at large, is objectionable in itself. The project is supposed to be a Greenway, not anybody's way into the green.
Here's hoping that whatever the DRCC does with its recent grant, and with its plans for the Greenway, is done solely in the public interest and done well. And here's hoping that Stack has better luck in the future avoiding traffic snarls, even if he didn't gain the right to blow past them. I'd hate to think that any of the very important things the Lieutenant Governor does might be delayed.
