It's Time....(continued)

With all of that having been said, it's really unfortunate that City Council's Convention Center
transfer ordinance has gotten to be such a political mess. The ordinance had been drafted in a way that would ensure that the Center's expansion could, finally and officially, commence, and that it would reflect, in a municipality whose population is more than 60 percent comprised of minorities and 52 percent comprised of females, the most accountable minority inclusion language in the City's modern history. Regrettably, that piece of legislation, that already seemed to be more than suitable and ready for overwhelming support from the full Council, was further amended, at the last minute, to include an ad hoc referendum on the Building Trades.

It may be true that Building and Trades Council Business Manager Pat Gillespie didn't do very much to help his own cause in his long and uncomfortable Council testimony. His insistence, once again, that there was no way that he could possibly have determined the black and minority composition of his member-unions smacked of unnecessary defiance, disrespect and racial insensitivity--especially when the topic was his authority to determine the ethnic, racial and gender composition of the workforce on a $700 million, publicly funded project, in one of America's most diverse big cities.

Thank God, that act doesn't fly anymore in Philadelphia. It really is beginning to look like a "new day," here, and Pat should have known better.

At the same time, Councilman DiCicco's reaction to Gillespie's presentation, suggesting that the
Convention Center expansion be constructed on an "open shop" basis, immediately shifted the voting prospects for the Convention Center transfer ordinance from a virtual "slam dunk" to "nip and tuck."

Councilpeople who loved the idea of an expanded Convention Center and who overwhelmingly understood and accepted the need for inclusion, were now faced with deciding whether they wanted to vote against the regional, blue-collar workforce, perhaps against the interests of their own ethnic constituents and, in many cases, against the interests of their long-time political sponsors.

In a city with so many entrenched, naturally occurring crises, this was a crisis that was self-made, and clearly avoidable.

I have no idea what's going to happen or whether there is a genuine possibility that Council can find the nine votes it'll need to pass the now bloated and complex ordinance, but it it's clear, with
so much at stake for the City's economy, that it would have been much, much better to have the referendum on the Building Trades, if they really wanted to have it, as a separate piece of legislation.

We really do need the Convention Center expanded and, in a city with a 60 percent "minority" population, we really can no longer afford not to have a credible, economic inclusion strategy, at the Center, and in other local projects.

What we really didn't need, at this critical juncture, was the confusion.

I trust that there's a group of really smart Councilpeople, somewhere in City Hall, that has figured out how to separate these issues, and that they also figure out how to get that done tomorrow, or at some point prior to their yearend recess.



######