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3:26 AM / Monday February 17, 2025

19 May 2024

Hanging In The Hall: Copy and paste

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May 19, 2024 Category: Commentary Posted by:

One thing that I’ve noticed about City Council these days is the amount of copycat legislation.

By Denise Clay-Murray

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Well, if that’s the case, the members of Philadelphia City Council have been flattering each other quite a bit these days. Or at least the District Council people have.

From legislation designed to keep certain businesses out of their districts to curfews on certain business corridors, to legislation designed to keep Mayor Cherelle Parker from putting one of the triage centers she’s proposing in their district, Council has been duplicating each other’s legislation.

The purpose behind all of these bills appears to be regulating various nuisances ranging from selling drug paraphernalia to the unregulated video poker machines that have been cropping up in corner stores. A bill banning those machines is currently the subject of a lawsuit.

For example, during Thursday’s Council meeting, Councilmembers Anthony Phillips, Cindy Bass and Mike Driscoll introduced three bills designed to impose curfews on business corridors.

Phillips’s bill calls for a midnight to 6am curfew for businesses along Ogontz Avenue between Haines St. and 66th Avenue. Bass’s bill covers businesses near the Olney Transportation Center on North Broad Street and would be in place from 11pm to 6am.

Driscoll’s bill would require businesses along East Allegheny, Kensington, Torresdale and Frankford Avenues in his district to be closed from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

All of this legislation exempts businesses with liquor licenses such as restaurants, bars, event spaces and concert halls.

These pieces of legislation have been modeled after the curfew bill Council passed in March for the Kensington Avenue business corridor in Councilmember Quetcy Lozada’s district. The reasons for this legislation in Lozada’s case was kind of obvious. When the phrase “open-air drug market” keeps getting tossed around about a section of your district, getting that section under control becomes a priority.

(Especially when conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro start hanging out there. Oops, did I say that?!)

The other bills’ purpose appears to be ensuring that potential problems in these other business corridors don’t reach Kensington Avenue’s level.

Of course, you’d have to add in those impacted by America’s inability to hold corporations to account until people start dropping dead in the streets, but that’s another column for another time.

It also leads into the second set of duplicate bills.

During last week’s Council meeting, Councilmember Jeffery Young introduced legislation that would prohibit the city from renewing its lease with the Commonwealth on the former Philadelphia Nursing Home site at 2100 W. Girard Avenue. Recently, the Parker administration announced that it would be expanding the number of beds at the city-run facility in the city’s Fairmount section by 75 beds to accommodate people battling substance abuse.

The problem is, that the administration didn’t tell Councilmember Young or the residents of the surrounding neighborhood before they did it. A tense community meeting was held on Tuesday in Fairmount with Young, Parker administration officials and about 950 residents to discuss what was going on. The proposal is on hold for right now.

Meanwhile in the 4th Councilmanic District, Councilmember Curtis Jones has introduced legislation that would keep healthcare entities — medical and dental offices, or hospitals — from being located around 3905 Ford Rd. The building there, formerly the West Park Hospital and Wordsworth Academy, a residential treatment center for boys with behavioral issues, has been slated to become a 300-bed inpatient drug and alcohol rehab facility.

Jones’s reasoning is that the area in the Wynnefield Heights section of the city is that the neighborhood is a high-rent district — houses in the area are valued at as much as $300,000 — and that doctors, lawyers and former politicians call the area home.

Now, I could get into the NIMBY-ism inherent in these two bills and how it illustrates that the only thing that everyone can agree on when it comes to finding drug treatment beds for those dealing with addiction in the city is that no one wants them in their neighborhood, but I won’t. At least for now.

Since there are 10 districts and not all of them have been represented here, this probably isn’t the last of Council’s legislative imitations. There is nothing new under the sun, after all.

But my guess is that the business districts aren’t going to let the curfew legislation go down without a fight. So when that happens, we’ll have it here.

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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