In mid-February, Grid requested an interview with Carlton Williams, the newly announced head of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s flagship “Clean and Green” initiative. After receiving no reply, we repeated the request a few weeks later. This time a communications official acknowledged the email, but that’s it so far.
Fortunately, we’ve got other source material to examine: the Mayor’s five-year plan for the City.
Clean and Green seems to be focused on waste disposal and cleaning up highly-visible commercial corridors. (Oddly it does not deal with the parks, where most of the City-run “green” is, or with the most important “clean” assets of air and water.) A promising sign is that Clean and Green oversees the sanitation side of the Department of Streets; splitting transportation and sanitation from their current awkward union under Streets could allow both sides to operate more effectively.
Clean and Green promises to work across departments to better deal with waste and litter. Grid readers might notice that this sounds similar to the stated mission of the Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet that, in spite of promising results, was disbanded by the Kenney Administration at the start of the pandemic. Hopefully this time the culture of coordination will stick.
Illegal trash dumping plagues Philadelphia, as we have covered in these pages, and the new administration plans to add more cleanup teams and hire additional sanitation inspectors to check that businesses and residents are properly handling and disposing of their waste: more good news.
What is missing, though, are any solutions for the waste system’s shortcomings that lead contractors and small-scale waste haulers to illegally dump their loads into vacant lots and parks. Grid has covered solutions to some of these problems, such as Circular Philadelphia’s suggestion to take in smaller, commercial trash loads at the City’s Sanitation Convenience Centers. Residents would be spared a lot of dumping, and the City could save a lot of the resources that go into cleaning it up, if more waste ended up in official dumps.
Clean and Green will give $130 million in operating funds over five years to Mayor Parker’s beloved “Taking Care of Business” Program, which focuses on cleaning up commercial corridors. It is troubling that this money will be routed from the Department of Commerce to community groups via district City Councilmembers. Those community groups in turn will hire contractors to do the cleaning. Why not just use all that money to hire more sanitation workers? There are a few answers, none of them savory.
For one, politicians love initiatives they can claim as their own, even at the expense of not maintaining the necessary but unsexy basic machinery of government that residents routinely rely on (such as Sanitation Convenience Centers or L&I inspectors).
The other answers have more to do with currying favor with City Councilmembers.
It is much more difficult to follow the money and provide effective oversight when small community groups handle funds rather than a City department. The City’s civil service system has many flaws that demand attention but they are side effects of a structure designed to avoid cronyism. Going around the civil service makes it easier to pay favors and hire staff based on connections rather than qualifications.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, do our elected officials even want a government that serves Philadelphians? If there were no dumped trash, that would be one less reason to call your district councilmember.
And a city with fully-functioning sanitation and L&I departments would not need special initiatives like Taking Care of Business at all.
Maybe someday we’ll be able to talk to someone from the administration about it.
Bernard Brown, Managing Editor
