The Committee of 70 favors abolition of judicial elections. That means they abolishing elections for about 140 Philadelphia judges (Common Pleas Court, Municipal Court, and Traffic Court) as well as the 6 row offices.

They have not yet called for the abolition of elections for Mayor, District Attorney, City Controller, and the 17 members of City Council, a total of 20 offices.

I commend them on their restraint.

After I made the above comment, the Northeast Times, owned by the Philadelphia Inquirer, came out for reducing the number of Philadelphia City Council from 17 members to 11 or 13 members.

I would not be surprised if someone would favor reducing the size of the City Council to 3 or 5 members.

And do we really need ANY Philadelphia elected officials? Why can't we just have the Governor make appointments as he does with the School Reform Commission?

Of course, in the suburbs, there are literally hundreds of boroughs,townships, and school districts, each of whom have their own structure of elected officials. Jenkintown--with a smaller population than any Philadelphia ward--has fifteen elected members of its borough council, along with a lot of other elected officials.

I am sure it is just a wild coincidence that the vast majority of these suburban elected officials are Republicans and there is little "good government" interest in abolishing their positions. There is nothing like having an office dominated by Democrats to encourage "good government" support for its abolition as an elective office. The alienation and frustration so widely noted here as being prevalent in Philadelphia might just have something to do with the lack of elected offices to run for in Philadelphia, compared to the Philadelphia suburbs and the vast majority of communities in the United States.

In light of this letter to the editor in today's Daily news, is abolishing the clerk of quarter sessions' office the right thing to do? especially since the only option that has been presented/recommended is to turn the office over to the FJD....

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/opinion/20100317_Letters__Making_the_cas...

A lot of the case for the abolishment of the BRT and other row-offices is that they are stocked full of incompetent patronage employees, who perform unneccessary functions. definitely not the case for the CQS, which performs very vital functions, and is not full of patronage employees....

Also, how important is the need for an independent voice/set of eyes to protect the citizens of the city that have to go through the judicial process. By giving the CQS over to the FJD, the city would be eliminating that voice/checkpoint.

Some people might be ok with that... but frankly, as long as we've got politicians elected as judges (or judges that are politicians), I would much rather have that independent set of eyes/voices included in the mix.