LITMIR.BIZ

      I ended up tackling some big issues very early on. My first big initiative on the City Council stemmed from concerns about the relationship between police and the community. There had been a couple of scandals here and there, and citizens beaten and roughed up, so I pieced together legislation to create an independent police advisory commission. I was not, and I still am not, antipolice. I support good police officers, but I’m also certainly pro-community. I think we need a forum or a place where good community people and good police officers can meet, get to know each other, and develop respect.

      I introduced this highly controversial piece of legislation right out of the gate, when I was all of eight months into the job, in September 1992. It provoked a significant fight with new mayor Ed Rendell, who emphatically rejected the commission idea. He was a former prosecutor and didn’t want to ruin his relationships with the police. Ed and I were friends, but I was committed to doing this work. He vetoed the bill and the council subsequently overrode his veto, 12 to 5.

      Also during my first term, my new colleague and former boss, Angel Ortiz, had put forward legislation to give benefits to same-sex domestic partners of city employees. This legislation would only have applied to public employees, and it only provided for domestic partnership benefits—things such as health insurance benefits, a right to transfer property to the partner without fees, and the ability to assign a pension to a same-sex partner. We didn’t have the authority to do anything about same-sex marriage—that’s a state issue—but this would provide some similar benefits of marriage to city employees, at least.

      The domestic partnership bill was being proposed about the same time as my police commission legislation. And I have to confess that I was not as supportive of that legislation at the time as I should have been, because the council president was supporting my police advisory commission and opposed the domestic partnership legislation, and wanted me to do the same, as an informal quid pro quo for his support of my legislation. This was an early lesson in my rookie term on the kind of horse trading that can occur, and the pressure that relationships can exert on legislative decisions on the council.

      The police commission happened, and domestic partnership benefits did not, and I held myself somewhat responsible for that. It stuck with me that I had unfinished business. I was reelected to the council in 1995. I decided that I needed to remedy and make up for what I had not done in 1993 on the domestic partnership issues. I wrote three pieces of legislation in 1999 on those issues—and council president Street was furious about it. We had been working together on several things, and he knew that I knew that he was adamantly opposed to domestic partnership benefits, so I think from his perspective, he probably thought I was being disloyal if not presumptuous to write and introduce these three pieces of legislation.

      From my perspective, I had to some extent retrained my mind, values, and judgement around the matter, and I felt that I was revisiting an issue that I should have supported years earlier. Far from being premature, the legislation, to me, seemed many years overdue. Street and I had some blowout conversations around this issue, and it is among the one or two factors that opened a huge rift between us.

      There were numerous hearings around the domestic partnership legislation, and people would come to city hall and say the ugliest things imaginable about domestic partners, same-sex couples, and the LGBT community.

      This legislation would be a meaningful step toward fairness, on its own terms, but it’s also true that local government policies are often the leading edge or inspiration for changes in the private sector. As a council member I believed that government, in many instances, should lead the charge on issues of equity, fairness, justice, and rights, and propel the private sector forward. In this case, I knew that the council would hear from the private sector that they were a little nervous about the government establishment of domestic partnership benefits, because then they would start hearing from their own employees. This raised the stakes on the legislation, and likewise the political battle and furor surrounding it.

      In 1997 and 1998, it was already obvious that Street was probably going to run for mayor in 1999. In part I argued the legislation’s case to him by pointing out, “You have your personal position, everyone knows that you don’t support this legislation. Why not get it over with now, and you won’t have to campaign on or around it in 1999 or revisit it as mayor?”

      With seventeen members we needed nine to pass the legislation, and it was a challenge to find those nine. Eventually, all three pieces passed. Ultimately, one bill passed 9–8, so we didn’t have much on the margins. There was absolutely no room for political error. Rendell was still the mayor at this point, and he was eager to get the legislation passed and cleared out of the council. As legislation, the domestic partnership provisions worked well, and I’m especially proud that I had a hand in their passage.

      My major City Council accomplishment in 2000 was to introduce the first legislation on a smoking ban in the city. That legislation actually began with my daughter, Olivia. She was five years old in 2000, and Lisa, my wife, was out of town. Lisa was a consultant and traveled a fair amount, so rather than torture our daughter by trying to prepare a perhaps inedible meal at home, we went out for dinner at a city restaurant.

      We were sitting and chatting at the table, and Olivia was drawing. She looks up and says, “Daddy, that man over there is smoking.”

      I replied, “Well yes, people do that sometimes.”

      She goes back to her drawing and then she says, “Well, does he know that can kill him?”

      And I said, “Well yeah, he probably does, but, you know, he’s an adult.”

      Olivia returns to her drawing. Suddenly she says, “Well, aren’t you on City Council? What are you going to do about that?”

      So much for a quiet evening with my daughter!

      I started doing research on smoking bans in other large cities; in particular, New York City was in the process of developing this sort of legislation. During this exploratory phase, Katherine Gajewski, an extremely smart and creative policy mind, started working with me as a consultant around the smoking ban legislation. She was a relentless driving force in the messaging, outreach, and advocacy around the issue (eventually, she joined my City Council staff, and would serve as the chief sustainability officer in my administration, leading Philadelphia to become internationally recognized in this area). After I’d done a fairly substantial amount of research on secondhand smoke, and waded through many denials from the tobacco industry about its dangers—just as they had earlier denied that cigarettes were addictive and unhealthy—I introduced a piece of legislation in 2000 for a smoking ban that went nowhere. There was great consternation that the world would end, the economy would tank, and people would lose their jobs.

      While New York continued to refine and upgrade their smoking ban to make it even more stringent and encompassing, I kept making amendments and talking to my colleagues, but many were unyielding in their opposition. The tobacco industry was nowhere to be heard, but rest assured that they were behind the scenes, stealthily trying to undermine the legislation. As part of the big tobacco settlement, the large tobacco companies had to release millions of pages of documents. I went through a fair amount of that material since it was publicly available, and found a few documents that indicated that there was actually a significant amount of collusion between the tobacco industry and the liquor industry. I buried my council colleagues with this kind of information and more, but in this particular case I don’t think the information and data mattered as much to the legislation’s ultimate success as two other things.