Citywide, 86 percent of voters pushed the "yes" button on
Tuesday's ethics referendum - the strongest showing in favor of any
of the 25 municipal referendum questions put before voters in the
last 14 years.
That level of support suggests a big payoff for civic groups and
community activists, who put 120 pro-referendum volunteers on the
streets, printed 20,000 brochures, and distributed hundreds of red
"Vote Yes for Reform" T-shirts.
They can now boast of a hometown with one of the strictest
pay-to-play laws in the country, a city that has put some serious
distance between politicians and the work directed to their big
campaign donors.
But there's a downside: The yes vote was so high because spirits
were so low.
So says one expert from the Washington-based consumer advocacy
group Public Citizen. "Scandal breeds reform: That's an old
principle of politics," said Craig Holman, who has studied
campaign-finance proposals across the country. "Sometimes, the worse
the scandal, the better the reform is... . And it was a bad one in
Philadelphia."
That said, voters on Tuesday have now pushed Philadelphia -
beleaguered for two years by news of FBI probes that have led to
more than a dozen indictments and 10 convictions - to the forefront
of progressive government-ethics policies being adopted
nationwide.
With 95 percent of the vote counted yesterday, only 81,146
Philadelphians bothered to vote, or less than 14 percent of the
electorate.
Still, the sense of outrage that referendum backers believe was
behind that vote spilled out into almost every pocket of the
city.
"The call for reform was pretty universal, coming from not just
affluent neighborhoods but row-home communities," said Chris
Sheridan, policy director for the local civic watchdog group
Committee of Seventy.
As of Feb. 1, companies going after no-bid contracts worth more
than $25,000 will now be restricted to donating no more than $10,000
a year to city officials or candidates.
For individuals who want no-bid work valued at $10,000 or more,
they will be barred from giving more than $2,500 a year.
Those changes and others approved, Holman says, put Philadelphia
far ahead of most cities and states in the move to curb the
pay-to-play culture that permeates the political world.
According to Holman, just three other major cities have
pay-to-play laws in place: San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland.
New York and Chicago are debating proposals, while the issue hasn't
yet surfaced in Baltimore and Atlanta.
Philadelphia's law, he said, has more teeth than the rules in
other cities and states. For instance, in Kentucky and West
Virginia, companies and individuals are banned from making campaign
contributions once they obtain a government contract, and until that
contract expires - but they can make unlimited donations before and
after that time.
The Kentucky law applies to no-bid contracts only; the West
Virginia law applies to all contracts.
Perhaps the only state with rules like Philadelphia's is New
Jersey, Holman said. Rules there apply to all competitive and most
no-bid contracts, and limit annual donations from businesses to $300
per elected official.
"New Jersey and Philadelphia stand apart" from the rest of the
country, he said.
Even so, concern here is already growing about efforts to
sidestep the new law.
"Some of us talked about trying to identify the loopholes as
quickly as possible," said Marc Stier, of the political group
Neighborhood Networks, one of the leading organizations backing the
referendum.
And campaign consultant Dan Fee, who worked on the elections of
Mayor Street and Gov. Rendell, said it is just a matter of time
before those loopholes emerge.
The new limitations don't "decrease the influence of the big
fund-raisers. It just makes their job harder," he said. "The success
of this will really depend on what happens in the next municipal
election."
That will be in 2007, when Council terms expire and the city
elects a new mayor.
