Durrell Hospedale | PHL City Council
Hanging In The Hall
During Thursday’s Philadelphia City Council meeting, Council voted to let voters decide if the City Charter’s resign-to-run rule should be abolished. But after reading it, I’m not sure if the third time is going to be a charm.
By Denise Clay-Murray
Thanks to many of the shenanigans going on in Washington, a lot of us are paying a lot more attention to our government, who is currently working in it, and who wants to work in it.
Right now, due to the retirement of U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, we have a total of 17 people — 15 Democrats, two Republicans — that are vying to represent the Third Congressional District seat that he currently holds. In fact, everyone is going to be looking at Congress this year.
But what makes this group of people significant for the purposes of this column is that three of them — State Reps. Chris Rabb, and Morgan Cephas and State Sen. Sharif Street — currently hold office. While Rabb is pushing all of his chips at the center of the table for Congress, Cephas and Street are running for the seats they currently hold simultaneously.
While Councilmember Isaiah Thomas’s attempt to change the City Charter wouldn’t allow folks like his fellow Councilmembers, the city controller, or the register of wills to run for two offices simultaneously, the proposed resolution to modify the Resign to Run rule would allow all of the people in those offices to keep doing their jobs while they’re running.
This will be the third attempt to change this part of the charter. It failed the two previous times in 2007 and 2014.
(Maybe they think that switching it up a little and not trying it every seven years will be more effective.)
Currently, the Home Rule Charter mandates that any city employee, elected official or officer that wants to run for any public office must resign from where they currently are to do so. That means that if, say, your garbage man wants to run for, well, the Third Congressional District seat currently held by Rep. Dwight Evans, he’s got to resign from his job.
Under this proposal, your trash man would still have to resign to run, and so would the mayor, but Councilmembers and row officers would be able to do their jobs while on the campaign trail. But unlike politicians on the state level, they can’t run for their current office while running for another office.
Councilmember Thomas believes that this charter change would expand the influence of the city’s voters when it comes to state and federal elections because these officials could continue to serve their constituents.
But while the measure passed in Council, there was one no vote on both the resolution itself and the legislation needed to put it on the ballot. Councilmember Jeffery Young Jr. thinks it should have been partnered with something else: term limits.
“I support the idea that this legislation creates fairness among Councilmembers and creates parity with our state and federal counterparts,” he said. “But I do think that we should pair this resign-to-run rule with term limits on City Council. I believe that all elected officials should have term limits as we’re serving the public.”
Skipping the term limits question for the moment, I’m not so sure how voters are going to feel about this.
Why? Because it seems fairly targeted to the one group of people that probably could afford to resign to run for office. Don’t get me wrong, I know that it’s tough to maintain a family while on the campaign trail, but a Councilmember or someone who occupies a row office has a better chance of getting a gig to hold them over than the garbage man channeling his inner “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.”
Yet this legislation will change nothing for the trashman, who will still have to resign no matter what.
I also think that Young might be onto something. Allowing folks to stay in their Council seats while they run for other offices without addressing the possibility of term limits might make voters more than a little annoyed as well.
That said, Philadelphia’s voters will have the chance to decide if they want to get rid of Resign to Run when Thomas’s referendum appears on the May 19 primary ballot.
Whether or not the third time will be the charm is anyone’s guess.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, The Philadelphia Sunday SUN, the author’s organization, committee or other group or individual.
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