philly

Oh it's election season again and step one is getting your ass on the ballot and I've decided I'll be helping two folks do just that. One of them is Andy Toy who is running for City Council At-Large. He's aiming to become Philadelphia's first Asian councilperson and I'm gonna help out however I can. Philadelphia has a thriving Asian community, but as far as I can tell, absolutely no representation in city government. While Toy wouldn't be some one trick pony advocating solely for Asian initiatives, he would bring a point of view never brought to the planning table before and this city needs some fresh eyes. His issues page isn't all encompassing, but it's a good start.

On the environment, he looks to the guidance of the city's design community. A new look already! Energy efficiency through efficient building is a wonderful way to save money and energy. Philly's rowhouses are densely packed together and energy efficient and you didn't even know it. There are other ways to actively conserve without the end user even knowing it and that's where innovative designers come in to play. The zoning board and the codes they, achem, enforce are bogus. They need to be redone and not by crony developers. Of course, there's gotta be community involvement from the start! Toy was a big part of cleaning up Brownfields sites here in Philly and helped bring in $2.5M+ in federal and state funding for Brownfields projects.

On equity, he talks of ending the USELESS [my mistake] changing the ten-year tax abatement to perhaps a seven-year abatement in places where business is doing better and extending it in places where more developmental encouragement is needed and have the money recouped from actually collecting the tax "go to the Housing Trust Fund, which supports affordable housing development." Whoa - affordable housing development, crazy!

And then we have Mike Untermeyer for Sheriff. Philadelphia has a sheriff! Who knew? Well, I knew, but only because I [ocassionally] read my Neighborhood Networks newsletter and caught that we have a sheriff and a challenger this time around. I met Untermeyer, briefly, at my Ward 5 NN meeting last week and he told us about what the sheriff does and what a crook our current sheriff is. Untermeyer is overqualified for the office, but wants to hold it because he felt the office, commanding ~250 staff, is a microcosm of the city and he believes he can fix this office because he's worked along side it and has seen and experienced its inefficiencies. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding this time is in the form of controller's reports. The current sheriff has an office which is missing $11M. Not as bad as the $8B missing in Iraq, but let's get Untermeyer to fix one problem at a time.

Where's my clipboard…

Photo credit: Photos from campaign sites

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 @ 2:20 am. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or trackback from your own site. Your comments will be moderated [if you have never previously commented] but will appear as soon as humanly possible.