|
| |||||||||||||||||||
|
INSIDER INFO -- MARCH 2009 A Tale of Two Cities
Harrisburg
Toomey Switcheroo
An easy romp
Fumo awaits fate
|
We
welcome and appreciate any feedback
you may OPT OUT
The views contained in The Insider are those exclusively of its editor, Al Neri, unless an article is specifically authored by another writer. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Insider's Stories | |||||||||||||||||||
|
Pittsburgh
Mayor Luke Ravenstahl will battle a city councilman and a political novice attorney for re-nomination in May
It seems strange in this day and age where political campaigns are driven by cash, why four challengers seem willing to go up against incumbent Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and his nearly $1 million political machine gun.
But that appears to be the situation in the Steel City where one lone member of council and an attorney with no political experience have filed in the Democratic primary to challenge Ravenstahl, 29, as he seeks his first full four-year term as the city’s chief executive.
With the city’s 6-1 Democratic registration edge, the winner of that party’s primary is virtually assured election in November but that axiom is being challenged by another 29-year-old – Franco “Dok” Harris, the son of the legendary Steelers running back of Immaculate Reception and Super Bowl fame.
The younger Harris announced this week that he will run in the general election as an independent candidate. He says he gets inspiration to break the odds from President Barack Obama and his improbable win over front-runner Hilary Clinton in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes.
Harris has a backpack full of degrees – he has an undergraduate from Princeton University and a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh and master’s in business from Carnegie-Mellon University. He works in his father’s business, Super Bakery Inc.
Another candidate has also expressed an interest in a independent run, which would make it a total of four challengers – two in the primary and two in the general.
But back to the Democratic primary: Dowd, 40, a first-term council member from Highland Park and former private school teacher, who has a reputation as a bit of a loner on that political body, has declared his candidacy against Ravenstahl even though he only has $2,715 in his campaign coffers as of year’s end.
Dowd has said he is not deterred by his lack of funds and that he will rely on the grassroots campaigning that got him elected to the city school board and then his council seat.
In the period leading up to his Feb. 19 announcement and subsequently, Dowd has been critical of mayor’s administration, including attacks on a proposed lease of the city’s 11 parking garages to ease the city’s pension debt and a city water authority deal that went sour.
Ravenstahl, then a first-term council member, was tapped to be its president when more veteran members failed to get five out of the nine votes in January 2006. Nine months later, the city’s new mayor, Bob O’Conner, died of brain cancer and Ravenstahl was installed. He was just 26 at the time.
With the primary election just nine weeks away, Ravenstahl has countered by citing glowing reviews of the city and its economy in national publications as well as an 11-point plan that he announced March 9 to build on those strengths.
He outlined 11 goals in a news conference: solving the city's long-term costs; boosting the health care and education industries; improving government by using technology; completing riverfront development; enhancing public education; connecting people with jobs; improving governmental transparency; pursuing clean and safe neighborhoods; improving the environment; promoting diversity; and ultimately merging the city with Allegheny County.
"Our plan, executed well, will result in a bigger, better, stronger Pittsburgh," Ravenstahl said. "It capitalizes on our greatest assets and continues to build on them." During his speech, he repeatedly invoked his campaign slogan, "Getting it done."
No Pittsburgh mayor has been unseated since the Great Depression.
Attorney Kevin Acklin, initially announced plans to run for mayor as a Republican in the general but apparently decided the GOP brand was too damaged for a city election. He is now planning an independent run.
If both he and Harris go through with their planned candidacies, that would create a three-way general election.
Harrisburg “Mayor for Life” Steve Reed announced his candidacy last week to an unprecedented eighth term in office.
He was first elected in 1981 at the age of 32, when Pennsylvania’s capital city was declared the second most distressed city in the nation.
Since then, Reed has led a revival that has been much heralded. The first was his inspired development of City Island and its minor league baseball park.
The other for which he is best known is the remaking of 2nd Street downtown into “Restaurant Row” which draws lobbyists and legislators on weekdays and droves of young people on Friday and Saturday nights.
But despite those and other achievements, Reed has not been without his critics and two of them are poised to run against him in the May Democratic primary to thwart his continued control of City Hall.
Council President Linda Thompson, also a Democrat, has been involved in city politics for the past 16 years and is known for her community activism and her loud criticism of Reed the past four years.
She has been aided and abetted by colleague Dan Miller, a professional accountant, who passed on a mayoral run to seek the city controller’s position.
Also running is another former Reed ally, Les Ford, who has been a Harrisburg resident since 1994. He is a senior analyst of business systems with the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.
He is also a former teacher who was appointed by Reed in 2006 to the Board of Control that runs Harrisburg city schools in place of an elected school board. The Legislature put the beleaguered school system under Reed’s control (by appointments to the board) in 2000.
Reed removed Ford from the board of control after Ford called for a vote of no confidence in Superintendent Gerald Kohn, Reed’s hand-picked schools administrator.
Unlike his past mayoral terms when Reed had four or more allies on the seven-person council, this last term has been far more divisive with disputes ranging from city finances and taxes, debate over a proposed private lease of the city’s public parking garages and a legal fight over who has the authority to appoint the city solicitor -- the mayor or council.
But the city’s biggest problem and its biggest liability remains the municipally owned incinerator that carries a huge debt load and is now run by a private contractor.
Reed has announced he would like to sell the incinerator to the private sector to rid the city of its debt but it remains to be seen if there will be any takers.
Because of the friction between the mayor and council, the past four years have been devoid of any of the signature accomplishments that marked Reed’s previous tenure and made him a living legend among municipal leaders.
And at his candidacy announcement, Reed was accompanied by a drum line from Harrisburg High School which had been pulled out of classes for the event. Ford commented to the Harrisburg Patriot-News that it was “pimping out our children for his own political gain.”
James Ellison, an advisor to Thompson, said in the same article that Reed should pay more attention to the district’s low test scores.
To his credit, however, both test scores, even though they are low by state standards, and graduation rates have risen since Reed took control of the district in 2000.
The biggest controversy facing Reed this election might be the incinerator and huge debt load it carries. The estimates of the Harrisburg Authority’s long range debt on the incinerator range from $250 million to $308 million.
Thompson has accused Reed of buying expensive artifacts for the city’s National Civil War Museum and a now defunct plan for an Old West Museum while Harrisburg citizens were paying more and more for trash removal because of the non-profitable incinerator.
If Reed, whose campaign coffers are well financed, gets by his two primary rivals on May 19, he faces a general election challenge from Nevin Mindlin in November.
Mindlin is legislative director or lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Bar Association. Before that, he worked as a director of policy for the Department of Labor in the Ridge administration and before that for the House Republican caucus.
He is also the founder of the Landmark Neighborhood Association, a non-profit devoted to helping the city’s uptown neighborhood.
Mindlin said for too long City Hall has focused too much on downtown Harrisburg to the neglect of its neighborhoods.
“. . . Real leadership is not imposing your agenda because you have the power,” Mindlin said in a statement. “Leadership is listening to a multitude of different perspectives and opinions, with the ability to find a common voice.”
Toomey Switcheroo Specter’s 04 rival is going for a rematch against the veteran and moderate Republican instead of joining the crowded GOP field for governor
At least that is what he is telling friends, supporters and associates, according to news reports. Toomey himself hinted that would be his course in an interview on Lehigh Valley radio March 2.
Sources tell the Insider that Toomey’s change of heart came after he took polling during the last week of February showing Specter extremely vulnerable if the spring 2010 primary were held today. It also comes within weeks after Specter broke party ranks to be only one of three Republicans in Congress to vote for President Obama’s stimulus package.
Many supporters have been urging Toomey to switch races. Three other Republicans are expected to run in the primary for governor – Attorney General Tom Corbett, former U.S. Attorney Pat Meehan and U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach – have all expressed interest in that contest.
By contrast, Toomey, when he has been interviewed by reporters, has been more fluent about what is happening in Washington. In 2004, he came within 14,000 votes and 1.6 percentage points of upsetting Specter for the GOP nomination. Specter will be 80 if he runs next year for an unprecedented sixth six-year term from Pennsylvania.
It is not known what Toomey’s survey of the Senate race showed but a parallel poll taken the same week by Susquehanna Polling & Research also showed Specter in trouble within his own party.
When asked if Specter should be re-elected or a “new person” chosen, only 26 percent of Republicans questioned chose Specter while 66 percent said a “new person” should be elected – a nearly 3-1 margin against the veteran lawmaker.
There was very little uncertainty about Specter. Only eight percent of those surveyed were undecided.
James Lee, the pollster who conducted the poll, said “These kinds of numbers are lethal. It means most of the voters have already made up their mind about Sen. Specter and there is not a lot of room for him to grow.”
“It means he (Specter) is going to have a difficult race especially if a candidate with decent conservative credentials runs against him one-on-one.”
And now comes the rub. Even though Toomey, currently the national president of the Club for Growth, meets that criteria in spades, late this week there came word that he may not be the only conservative leaning toward challenging Specter.
Peg Luksik, who made her name as an anti-abortion and conservative activist in three gubernatorial elections in the 1990s – 1990, 1994 and 1998 – said on March 10 that she too planned to run against Specter in the GOP primary next year.
“This is about giving families a voice in the U.S. Senate,” Luksik, a mother of six, told the Associated Press. She said it was publicly known she was considering the race before Toomey’s entry earlier this month and that if Specter has an easier primary than he should it will be Toomey’s fault.
“(Toomey) told me he wasn’t running (for the Senate) in February,” Luksik told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “I’m assuming I can take him at his word.”
Until this month, Toomey had made statements that he would either sit out the 2010 elections or run for governor. But, as mentioned earlier, there are already three other Republicans considering that race and Toomey would have been the fourth.
Former state Rep. Jeff Coleman, now a political consultant, praised Luksik, who is the founder of a charity that helps single mothers who choose to keep their babies.
Don’t underestimate Luksik, Coleman the newspaper. “She’s not followed anyone’s political rulebook. She’s earned her credibility layer by layer. Peg’s network is partly an array of kitchen-table activists involved in so many of the fights she’s taken on. . . . She’s got a pretty thick Rolodex.”
For his part, Specter has wasted no time in targeting Toomey’s potential candidacy, saying in a radio interview in Wilkes-Barre that Toomey, as a former Wall Street investment banker and a supporter of deregulation of the financial industry when he was in Congress, made him, in part, responsible for “this current mess.”
An easy romp Likeable, boyish Dave Argall wins by a 3-2 margin in special election for State Senate
After it was all over, it hardly seemed like a contest.
Republican State Rep. David Argall won a special election March 3 against Democratic rival, Steve Lukach, Schuylkill County clerk of courts, to replace the late State Sen. Jim Rhoades in the 29th district.
Rhoades died October 18th from injuries sustained in a car accident the day before.
Argall won 20,786 votes against Lukach’s 12,551 votes. With 93,812 voters registered in the multi-county district, the poll turnout was just over 35 percent.
Based on the information available on the Pennsylvania Department of State’s election web site, Argall won all six counties (Schuylkill, Berks, Lehigh, Carbon, Northampton and Monroe) in the district with percentages near or greater than 60 percent.
Although the election had a low turnout rate, it was not without its own blitzkrieg of negative political ads and that will-never-die-or-go-away issue of the 2005 legislative pay raise.
Lukach had run television ads criticizing Argall’s vote to raise his pay 30 percent and mentioned it in both the opening and closing statements of the one public debate held.
Argall countered with his own negative ads blaming Lukach for the 2007 release of a child molester who fled the county before trial and was on the run for a year.
But Argall was able to outspend Lukach by a margin of 3-1 or 4-1 by the March 3 special election. It is estimated he ultimately spend $600,000 or more.
That gave Argall three times as many TV ads for three times as many weeks as Lukach.
Boyish looking despite his 50 years, Argall becomes the latest veteran of the lower chamber to ask voters to promote him to the Senate. He was first elected to the House in 1984 and was re-elected easily 12 times.
Argall has said that he has been promised a seat on the state Senate Education Committee, the panel formerly headed by Rhoades.
He also has voiced opposition to Gov. Ed Rendell’s proposed school consolidation plan, saying he is skeptical of going from 501 school districts to 100 “overnight.”
Argall said that high schools and higher education institutions need to be more flexible and tailor their programs to fit the needs of the job market, citing a “disconnect” between school officials and local job markets.
Argall said he backs a plan to reduce the number of seats in the state House of Representatives, and supports that idea of a constitutional convention to reform state government.
He said he would support legislation to “lop off” 10 seats from the House every 10 years, reducing that chamber’s membership from 203 to 103 state representatives.
He also said he would support easier ballot access for third-party candidates, specifically, by lowering the number of signatures needed to be placed on the ballot.
In the meantime, Argall’s seat in the House will be filled in the May 19th primary.
Fumo awaits fate After a five-month-long federal trial, the former political powerhouse will soon learn if he walks or goes to prison
After week after week in which he was vilified (at the very least) as an arrogant state senator who wielded his power to get personal favors from employees and goodies from three entities, Vince Fumo’s fate lies in the hands of 12 jurors in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia.
At press time, the jurors had deliberated for a week or five full days with no sign of when they will render their verdict.
That is not surprising given that the jury must shift through 15,000 pieces of evidence and match them up against the 137 charges levied against Fumo, once described as the consistently the most powerful Democrat in Pennsylvania, and the 45 counts against codefendant Ruth Arnao, the former head of Citizens' Alliance for Better Neighborhoods. The jury has not asked any questions since deliberations began on March 5.
Fumo, who was in the Senate since 1980, left public office last November after he declined to run for re-election to a new four-year term last year citing the stress the upcoming trial was having on his health. He was hospitalized last year with a heart attack.
During the trial, one prosecution witness was a former Fumo girlfriend who said his motto and modus operandi was to use “Other People’s Money” when ever possible. He even had an acronym for it: OPM.
“This is a case about greed, power and an overwhelming sense of entitlement,” U.S. Attorney Robert Zauzmer told jurors in his summation of the 70-day trial. The senator should have followed the law, not “shower himself with riches” and victimize taxpayers.
The defense argued that prosecutors sought to portray Fumo as a criminal when Pennsylvania law gives senators broad discretion over their staffs. They said Fumo’s staff may have done personal and political favors for him but it was all voluntary and done out of loyalty to the boss and that those same employees worked 37 and a half hours per week for the Senate.
It did not disagree that Fumo accepted tools and other goods from Citizens’ Alliance but contended they were legitimate because he served as the de facto executive director of the agency.
The Fumo case showcases “the dominant issues that have played out in Pennsylvania politics for decades – people in a position of power abusing that power,” Chris Borick, a Muhlenberg College political science professor and pollster told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
“If he’s convicted, it is a real blow to the Legislature,” Jack Treadway, author of a book on state elections, told the newspaper. If Fumo is acquitted, he said “in some ways it’s worse” for taxpayers, he explained.
“They’ve heard months of accusations –devastating illegalities and irregularities alleged – and if he (Fumo) is able to beat it. . . the average citizen will wonder. . . what’s the point of taking anyone to court.”
| |||||||||||||||||||
