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REPRINTED FROM THE PHILADELPHIA BUSINESS JOURNALApril 6, 2007 press release, (compliments of the Philadelphia Business Journal) |
Chaka Fattah must have been one of those kids who never colored within the lines because he was too busy drawing his own stuff.
Rather than accept common budgeting, which usually means that cutting taxes translates to cutting services while expanding services requires raising taxes, this Philadelphia mayoral candidate offers a different take.
The U.S. congressman recently outlined his plan to lease Philadelphia International Airport in a meeting with Philadelphia Business Journal reporters and editors.
Experts tell him a long-term lease to a private entity will bring in $3 billion. Of that, $1 billion would pay off debt and $2 billion would be invested. Fattah estimates the investment would bring in $160 million to $200 million per year for his major initiatives.
Rather than broker big deals, he pledges to put a laser-like focus on people, opportunities and small business.
He wants to embark on a city-based war on poverty.
That means addressing the 25 percent of citizens who fall at or below the federal poverty line, which he characterized as the highest among large cities. It means putting a stop to the generational cycle of poorly educated people working in low-paying jobs, if they even have jobs.
The plan is to start with the 105,000 children who live in poverty, providing the early childhood education most city children don’t receive.
He supports a major initiative on math and science to prepare students for jobs in science-related industries, including chemicals — strong local employment sectors.
He would hire 181 neighborhood coordinators to encourage collaboration among government, recreation programs, hospitals and nonprofits to meet children’s needs.
Building on his CORE Philly initiative, which he founded to provide college sponsorships for Philadelphia students, he aims to increase the number of adults with college degrees. The city now lags behind 25 other big U.S. cities.
He also is pushing to reconfigure job training, breaking it up into City Council districts and creating clubs to help address the needs of job seekers.
Fattah understands a key point about jobs: “Most Philadelphians go to work for small businesses and they’re always going to go to work in small businesses.”
Like most mayoral candidates, Fattah favors eliminating the gross receipts portion of the business privilege tax, which taxes business on sales even if they’re losing money. Only Fattah, however, has tried to suggest he’s eliminating the BPT, which is only a politically savvy word game if you’re going to keep the net receipts portion of the tax, which comes out of profits.
Fattah has an easy way about himself in public, but he doesn’t hesitate to over-ride those who work for him. Within an hour of the meeting, which had been set up through an intermediary and Fattah supporter after efforts to work with his publicist failed, the campaign insisted the congressman was booked to be elsewhere. When he walked in a short time later, Fattah was ready to give us whatever time we needed.
The man with big ideas, it seems, wasn’t going to be told where he had to go next.
Among the five major mayoral candidates, Fattah easily offers the biggest and boldest vision. He’s extremely precise about how he wants to get things done. Yet change comes hard, particularly in Philadelphia. The fate of his campaign may come down to whether voters believe he can truly reshuffle the deck.