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When Budget Choices Arise, Think Long Term
Submitted by Fabricio Rodriguez on Fri, 07/31/2009 - 6:10pm.
The current administration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been indifferent to our calls for justice (except for granting our folks up to three days of paid sick leave in Sept 2008). I've dealt with a lot of institutions in our city who are short changing workers and I can say, without a doubt, that all of them have acted more reasonably. However, if you look back at the history of the guards at the museum, it becomes more clear where they have gotten this attitude from.
Our city's last major budget crisis occurred in 1992. Mayor Ed Rendell had just won his election and started his first days in office with a city that was, much like today, in deep fiscal trouble.
He was fighting to take away a lot from the city's municipal workers. The unions fought hard and even went on strike. Mayor Rendell was able to get many of the concessions that he wanted. The unions lost much and to this day, the city union leaders vow, "never again."
Perhaps the cruelest cut, though, was the privatization of hundreds of jobs, including the security officers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These officers were represented by AFSCME Local 1637, District Council 33. They made as much as $14/hour and had top-shelf benefits. Mayor Rendell turned those family sustaining jobs into poverty wage jobs over night.
Today, more than 15 years later, their wages still haven't caught up to previous levels. The most the guards can make is $10.03 per hour. This puts many of the guards below the federal poverty line for a family of four, earning less than $20,000 per year. With the backing of the then Mayor Ed Rendell, is it any wonder that the museum feels that they can disregard the well-being of these workers with impunity?
I love the Art Museum
but are you saying that city used to pay the wages of security guards for what is obstensibly a private non-profit tourist attraction that serves as many suburbanites and out-of-towners as it does city folks?
Sorry but if thats true - as much as I think an institution like the Art Museum should set a standard for livable wages for its employees - then Mayor Rendell did the right thing. If it comes down to deciding between subsidizing the Art Museum and basic services like cops, firefighters, trash pick-ups, a DHS that actually stops kids like Danieal Kelly from dying horrible deaths - I think my priority would always be to let the Art Museum fend for itself.
The Art Museum serves a lot of the region's, not just the city's, elite and you will always have a sympathetic ear if you think its board and management are not being fair to its workers but if we are talking city priorities - the first priority for city government has to be the health and public safety of its citiens, artsy tourist attractions are way down that list.
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
It's good that you love it. You own it.
The City owns the building. The institution owns the art.
This article from 1992 about Rendell's decision, still on the NYTimes site, explains.
Paying people minimum wage to protect million dollar art is vulgar, and denying any worker basic sick days unconscionable, no matter who's the boss.
Weird
I have to admit this seems totally foreign to me. The idea that municipal government should be involved at all seems absoltuely bizarre to me. And thats as someone who was actually an Art History major in college (but who did all his extra studies in political theory, contemporary lefty philosophy and "cultural politics" in UC Santa Cruz - which was and remains in part a hot bed of contintenal influenced post-modern, post-structuralist, post-modern, new-school feminist cultural analysis). I spent an awful lot of the time when I wasn't digesting Foucault and Lacan and in poltical theory taking a French-fried but "post-Marxist" take on what was right and what was wrong in Kant's deep and sort of the best that I've encountered "liberal" philosophy of the self-aware moral "self" you know studying in great detail, in particular, the late 19th century/ early 20th centry "isms" of modern art, and an awful lot of "mestizo" post-colonial Latin American art and architecture. I jumped right from deeply skeptical West Coast punk rock skater kid to the heights of esoterica of both heady contemporary Euro-influenced lefty thought and heady conceptual big M "modern" art and its various children as well as a lot of decidedly more mixed New World antiquities. I was very, very self-conscious about being burdened with a verbal vocabulary marked by a certain strain of Northern California mixed with mid-Atlantic slang but also I guess "ambitious" about myself as "critic" and "expert" on the signs and signifiers that make "great art" interesting.
In other words, in most of college, I thought I would be a professor of Art History very, very hip on contemporary though somewhat effete European political philosophy until I sort of got disgusted with the whole mess.
But still it seems bizarre totally bizarre that something as rarified as the Philadlephia Museum of Art should be owned and at one point staffed by city workers.
I mean, as a basketball (but forgive me) not a big baseball or footbal fan, I have a hard time seeing the city paying for running the operations end of the Art Museum much different from the city paying the salaries of both professional athletes and the groundskeepers at the stadiums. They are all essentially "special" cultural activities that go way, way outside the sort of the "essential" of a.) are Philly streets safe, b.) do Philly schools produce people who can ultimately find jobs easily in a 21st century economy c.) is the economy of the city growing to support basic services for the next generation d.) are the most vulnerable provided for.
It seems to me totally bizarre that Philly of all places should be worried inside city government about the operation of the Art Museum beyond a totally mercenary "does it bring tourist dollars that help support basic services" economic interest.
Everything else seems totally absurd for a city with the problems that Philly (God bless it) has to even touch. Yeah, the people protecting priceless pieces of art should be fairly compensated but that whole entire world is so profoundly removed from what I, as someone who at one point in my life obsesesively studied it, percieve as the "practical well-being" of most people - I gotta say WTF is city government doing being so involved in something so erudite, something so completely driven by the whims of the "collector class"?
Like at a fundamental level as someone who LOVES THAT STUFF personally, WTF is city government doing subsidizing something so utterly removed from say the dire, dire daily lives of folks out in the neighborhoods?
I mean I spent years of my life studying that stuff as what I believe is one of the most profoundly interesting products of human civilization and it still bothers me deeply morally that in a city like Philly that city government would be so involved in paying for it. I'm sorry that's just not right.
Its ethically flawed the way the the sexual abuse of kids is wrong. Its just screwy.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
It's only weird if PMA
does not do enough to make art available to everyone including those who can't afford its admissions fees.
The great works of art are part of the common culture and should be there, not hidden away in the homes of the very rich.
That's why the great museums were all founded and supported in part by the public here and in Europe.
I would think it weird to do anything else. We need public support not just for our bodies but our souls.
But what counts as "art"
is completely arbitrary, completely defined by what a very small group of intellectuals that frequently disagree with each other successfully convince an also small group of the very, very, very wealthy is of lasting cultural significance. And historically a fundamental part of what defines visual artifacts as "of lasting cultural significance" for the vast majority of its history has been precisely how desperately the rich want to either squirrel it way. Or alternately to put proudly on public display as very public evidence of either their piety or magnificence as a political overlord.
That's what "art" is and has always been.
"Sustaining our souls" is indeed a worthy goal. Thats probably part of why human beings have cooked up so many varied religions and spiritual systems to perform exactly that function. And I guess a few of us secular humanists too romantically seek to assign that function to "art". In reality its great that private non-profit institutions run by boards of wealthy "patron of the arts" types make what through a very political process, occasionally bolstered in their decision by a few academics whose career path's trajectory and favor is in turn completely political and derived in part by whats currently intellectually trendy. make "art" available to the rest of us. That's a good thing but hardly primary to the core functions of city government.
The question isn't whether the city doesn't benefit from having a venue for this tenuous, arbitrary, political football known as "art". It does. Many of us love it, benefit from it and it does in fact bring tourist dollars and speaking honestly, in deciding personally whether I could live in Philadelphia, I actually considered for a moment what a great museum the Museum of Art is.
The question is how much city government wants to be intimately involved in the nitty gritty of such an by its very definition culturally precious and inevitably elitist institution. From that perspective city government being that involved in the fine points of its operational budget makes about as much sense as city government being saddled for retirement benefits for bartenders at the Khyber or Ortleibs or Tri-tone all of which have been places where I have seen performances of intensely erudite, masterfully perfected, conceptually challenging aesthetic value. One could say the same thing about the projectionists at the Ritz.
BTW the Art Museum is only "pay what you will" one day a month these days. I've been feeling too broke to go since the policy changed.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Helps pay the bills too!
You know those tourist dollars that pay for schools, cops, and health centers in post-industrial Philly?
One out of every 10 of them is directly attributable to PMA!
Check out these stats from Asst Director of Administration Bill Valerio's testimony before the House Urban Affairs Committee:
PMA, and art in general, doesn't seem rarified to me because my mom was a secretary there when I was a kid, so I got to run around the place in off hours. Like Marc, I think of art as part of culture and society that ought to be accessible to everyone, even if that's not the way some of the older European artists looked at it.
Makes sense for the City to support such a cash cow, especially in the period of transition they're currently in; the late great director Anne d'Harnoncourt really was as good as anyone on the planet at creating those great big exhibits, like the Dali and the Cezanne, that generated the intense tourist activity described above. Timothy Rub has giant shoes to fill.
Makes sense too for the City to make sure the guards are treated fairly, so art-supporting liberals and progressives aren't chattering away on blogs about their mistreatment.
Proximity to art and artists is a great raison d'etre for Philly specifically and cities in general in the 21st Century.
So if we go to Plan C
the first thing we should do is add everyone who works at the Art Museum onto to the city's beleaguered pension plan even if it means we have to go to once a month trash pickup instead of just every two weeks? That's screwy.
I feel like I'm having a discussion with people who are going through the motions automatically. If the poop hits the fan, I'm sorry but PMA is way, way down the list in terms of priorities and that includes its internal staffing policies. We are talking about having to completely shut down all the libraries and lay off 600-800 cops, all but two health clinics, for comparison. Compared to that I refuse to appologize for saying PMA staffing policy is not on the top of my list. I'm a little in desbelief at the disagreement I'm facing on that.
I also frankly find the the phrase "I don't find art rarified" innately oxymoronic. By its very definition the difference between what we look at through the lens of "art" as opposed to cultural anthropology is precisely that we as a society have decided to raise it up to level in our perception of as being somehow aesthetically "rarified". That is really the only concrete thing you can grab onto to define what "art" actually is.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Not arguing to put guards on City payroll this year
Just supporting the City's giving the institution a gentle push to secure decent/above minimum wages and sick days -- not a tall order -- and for the City to make sure the museum avoids a labor dispute, especially since PMA is such a huge moneymaker for the City.
Institutions that draw tourists and keep money flowing through the hotels and restaurants, some of which ends up at City Hall through taxes, those too are especially important in economic crises, along with social institutions like health centers and libraries.
Not sure if it's language or point of view we're arguing about re: art.
Rarified means, according to Merriam Webster:
Throwing out the chemistry term, "of, relating to, or interesting to a select group : esoteric" is pretty much exactly not how I'd describe PMA, museums as institutions, or the art inside of them.
I tend to fall into the Andy Warhol-inspired Arthur Danto Tranfiguration of the Commonplace school of thinking, who say art, especially in America (but really in many places in a globalized world), has been knocked off a pedestal from which it once looked down upon the rest of us, and that the fall was a good thing. Such a museum-goer is edified to encounter the same MacBook that she or he may have been lucky enough to have carried into PMA in a RE-Load bag, residing in a PMA gallery alongside and an oh so cool array of Italian industrial design objects, which she or he may hope Target will one day knock off while a cheshire cat grinning Warhol looks down approvingly from the clouds (Andy famously compared department stores to museums, and he was throwing kisses to both when he did).
On the subject of museums, Danto said in a recent interview:
Art -- even museum art -- on a really basic level, is for everyone, not just a select or esoteric group, and while it may not ultimately be loved by everyone, some more art education likely gets more people involved in the forum and the conversation that is the museum, yielding better conversation and more interesting art.
I agree this is a side argument to, and compared to, the City budget. That's a pile of oily rags the State Assembly is currently tossing their cigarette butts at, mindless of the inferno we Philadelphians may be about to experience -- where the City's most vulnerable would be burned first and most.
We all should be working in the most practical way possible to prevent that inferno. Agreed.
But good government and good advocacy has to keep a lot of balls in the air, and I don't think -- even amid this crisis -- we need to drop the guards or PMA.
We should drop instead the needless either/or decisions.
so what is the difference between the city paying for pma
security guards and paying for the ritz ticket sellers when it can be argued that the ritz per dollar of ticket money spent could lead to more economic act than the pma . the 4 dollar figure for pma includes the multiplyer effect that includes indirect econ act to come up with the 4 buck fig. so it would be a bit less for direct act. since nearly every ticket buyer at the the ritz pays for parking (even the discounted rate) ,dinner and movie snacks you could argue that every dollar of ticket rev generates almost 4 bucks in direct act and much more if you used the multiplyer to calc total act.since the ritz movies are art and since possibly a dollar spent at the ritz generates more than at the pma should the city pay for the ticket sellers there.
you've got to be kidding me.
you've got to be kidding me. The Ritz probably only makes $$ on popcorn sales as 99% of ticket sales goes back to the movie distributor - not into our local economy.
try finding a ritz goer that doesn't have dinner at a nearby res
taurante and park in a lot.there are a few but not many .so 20 bucks for 2 tickets ,5 bucks for parking, 60 bucks for dinner and 10 bucks for popcorn etc is a total of 95 bucks .only 50% of the ticket gross goes to the distributer ie 10 bucks, so with a ticket cost of 20 bucks , 95-10 = 85 bucks is generated in local direct economic activity ,BEFORE the multiplyer is used to calculate total direct and indirect economic activity. since the ritz movies are art and they lead to impressive economic activity in the phila region then by that standard the ticket sellers should be put on the city payroll.
I don't. When I go to the Ritz, I eat at home.
But when I do go the museum I generally make a day of it and end up lunching late at the bar at the London or one of the restaurants along Fairmount there so I actually disagree with you. In fact, I personally know people that come to stay in Philly for some of the block buster shows, like that Dali one a year or so ago. Nobody, by contrast, rents a hotel room in Philly to go see a movie at the Ritz - you wait to see it on Netflix.
The point is that "culture" and "the arts" is an important part of our local economy but its not as important as whether its citizens are going to die in a fire or be senselessly shot or be wiped out by potent mutation of this year's pandemic strain of influenza. "The arts" are an important economic factor for Philly to grow generally in times when we can afford more than the basics, but PMA hardly has exclusive patent on artistic creativity in this town. I think we can agree to take the PMA off the pedastal a little but still be realistic in evaluating its importance as a draw for the entire region. That said, maybe more of "the entire region" can chip in a little bit more to pay for it in times of severe economic stress - not just Philly taxpayers.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Yes but thats proximity that is only slightly diminished
when living in Montgomery or Chester County so there are some stark limits to how far that argument goes when compared to things like public safety, schools, etc. And also an indication of how much maybe we should expect that art fans from Montco or Chesco should be kicking in to support the institution and its hopefully fairly paid guards.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Esoterica vs Tax Money Paying Family Sustaining Wages
Ok, I'll freely admit that I don't really know what esoterica means. Nor have I been schooled in a "hot bed of contintenal influenced post-modern, post-structuralist, post-modern, new-school feminist cultural analysis," and I haven't seen the Queen or her damned undies (I can roughly qoute Sam Elliot in the Big Lebowski, which means I did attend a decent public university in the 90's). However, I don't think that any of that is really at issue.
The fact is, governments subsidize lots of things. If you count tax breaks and consumer incentives like the Obama, "Cash for Clunkers" scheme, governments often pick winners and subsidize the profits of large corporations and well-to-do Americans. This is just as it is. So, leaving aside the question of whether or not governments should be aiding, assisting or staffing museums, ball parks, parking lots or making libraries "free" (free my ass, I had to pay $6 in late fees this weekend), I say we all just agree that they do and have for a long time.
The 2008 budget of the City of Philadelphia included $2.5 million contribution to the PMA. The museums budget shows a much more generous $6 million which must include the in-kind donation of the lease of the land, the payment of their enormous electric bill and the said direct subsidy. This is to say nothing of the huge contractual payments to the museum from city and state sources for events and promotions that are held on museum grounds like the recent, by invitation only party, that was hosted for state legislators. As a not-for-profit corporation, the museum doesn't pay certain federal, state and local taxes.In addition to that, the museum will receive $80 million in federal stimulus tax money to fix up their loading dock (their truck bays will be a work off art unto themselves, on a post-modern jawn and a tip of the hat Duchamp).
SO, to me at least, the question is, given that our tax money pays for so much at the PMA should we not be able to set some standards for how that money is used? Is there any accountability?
The PMA, under interim CEO Gail Harrity, has answered that question for us. Yes, they are accountable to the public. It makes sense, our tax money pays her entire salary and then some.
We began our campaign trying to win some paid sick days for the guards at the PMA in November 2007. On Labor Day last year, they finally relented and gave out a small benefit of up to three days of paid sick leave for less than 1/3 of the security officers there (you have to have worked at the PMA for at least a year to get one day of leave, to increase each year by one day up to a maximum of three days).
It was a nice start but it will not suffice. It is simply impossible for the officers (who have formed their own independent, Philadelphia Security Officers Union to push for more) to do their jobs with such low pay, unaffordable health care, few or no sick days and inadequate training. We hope that the citizens of Philadelphia, art patrons and museum members will implore incoming CEO, Timothy Rub to sit down with the union and work something out for the good of the officers and the museum.
Or, perhaps to the liking of Mr Luigi, the PMA can draft up a plan to get off the public dole and give back any contributions from the city (we sure could use them), pay their own light bill and purchase the land and building out right. I would assume that "donate what you can" Sundays would soon be gone. But, at least they won't have address pesky workers rights issues anymore. Priceless!
Now you are barking up a tree I can get behind
If the taxpayers of the city of Philadelphia are subsidizing PMA then there are standards of what fair compensation and a livable wage in Philadelphia means that PMA should live up to.
The whole detour into just how esoteric a lot of contemporary cultural theory and a lot of contemporary art actually is, is just to underline that the idea that "art" brings us into spiritual balance with the great uncontested eternal truths really is sort of something that basically went out in the 1890's. OK it had a sort of vague resurgence with Piet Mondrian's abstractions of the 1920's but still. For the most part, the type of art that museums collect has not been about soothing souls for more than a century. If thats what we are going to hang support for the arts on, its the artists themselves who are going to be the first to rip that to tiny shreds, set it on fire and then stomp up and down on in some highly ritualized form of performance art. And certainly great and iconic examples of industrial design (to connect to Sam's example of an Italian design exhibit) is neither about "spiritual unification with eternal Truth" nor the "triumph of the human spirit", its about the inventiveness of old-fashioned crass commercialism at its most ingenius and breathtakingly brilliant in execution.
That said, we should be careful to not mistake Federal government spending big to kick start the economy with money its basically printing with city government which does not have the same power to say "Hey lets just print up a couple thousand more twenties, OK?"
All levels of government are not the same in their ability to magically "generate" new revenue.
So 1.) in that PMA recieves funding, it should meet certain community standards, including fair compensation for musuem guards, and 2.) while that funding is of immense civic value that civic value pales in comparison to safe streets and trash and sewers and having enough of a health and safety network in place to make sure H1N1 doesn't do for the Philadelphia of the 2000's what yellow fever did for the Philadelphia of the 1790's.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Family sustaining wages vs H1N1
So, just to be clear, 1) you are agreeing with me that the museum should pay family sustaining wages because tax payers give them millions of dollars and 2) you are disagreeing with no one OR agreeing with yourself when you think that giving the museum money is not as important as other priorities?
If you are making the case that maybe we should spend the money on other stuff, then I should point out that that is an entirely different can of worms. Thankfully, most of the rest of this blog is dedicated to dicing up those budget choices.
Yes
Its the job of municipal government first and foremost to provide for the basic local health and safety services that can only be delivered at a city/local level.
If we are forced to make dire, dire decisions because H'burg screws us on the budget Council passed, PMA and things like it are frankly a much lesser priority and should be the first to go. Whether the new PMA that ends up after that is more self-supported or not, if it recieves public funding at all and it truly treats its workers unfairly that's not acceptable.
But I have a little problem imagining that with a city so profoundly broken on how it does basic city/county stuff - crime and homicide rates in many parts of the city, L&I, Health Department inspections, DHS supervision of abused kids - that it ever got in the business of employing Art Museum guides as city workers with city pensions.
I'm sympathetic to your current sruggle but I feel like Rendell was 100% right to say PMA operating staff was never a core function of city government. If people do work for any institution they deserve to be treated fairly, more so if its a publically supported institution, but PMA guards are not a basic city service the way L&I building inspectors deciding whether a building is fit for human habitation are. PMA guards deserve to be fairly compensated by the non-profit institution they actually work for, not the city. Its not the city's job to take over every aspect of economic life in Philadelphia so every single one of us get represented by a humongous all-powerful version of DC33. They tried that in the Soviet Union and it didn't work out so well.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
I'm sympathetic to your
You are making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be. We don't have to say the Art Museum is a core function of government to say that when the city spends a lot of money on something, or gives away a lot of money, it can attach strings to it... such as paying people humane wages.
Except the first post said
If we are up shit's creek budget wise, I say emphatically yes privatizing stuff like museum guards is a lot better than endangering core city health and safety services. That's where my priorities stand and this thread is titled about "priorities". Museum guards deserve to be treated fairly by the private non-profit they work for, not to brought into an ever expanding umbrella of city government that does all things but fundamentally fails at the basics.
That's a core principle about where to go with "what-if" in a dire fiscal crisis that I don't just stand by, I emphatically endorse.
The job of city government is to optimally serve the people of Philadelphia in the things that only city government - not state or Federal government - does. Its not to "invent city jobs". Citizen's health and safety first and we we employ people under fair terms to serve that purpose, not to create city government jobs as an end to itself.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Again, you are getting very
Again, you are getting very hung up on something that doesn't need to be that complicated.
We give the PMA a lot of money. With money that the city gives, there are always strings attached. For example, it cannot be used in a discriminatory way, nor to advance religion, etc. We can and should also say that if you take our money you will pay humane wages. That doesn't mean the city will fold back in the guards. It means we will say that in 2010, if the Art Museum wants our money, they can pay a living wage.
In fact, it is the same thing we should have done- but didn't- with the Linc and CBP.
I'm responding to the title and the "message" of the thread
This I agree with you empahtically on but its not where this thread started and where this thread started was emphatically not what we should be "prioritizing" in a dire city budget. We should prioritize city government doing the basics of what it needs to do to protect the safety and health of its citizens well.
Bingo.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
OK, you don't like the
OK, you don't like the title. I read the post as talking about the history of guards at the museum, and why the PMA thinks it can treat them unfairly.
But, so, we all agree- the PMA takes our money, therefore, they should pay humane wages.
Thanks for keeping us updated, Fabricio.
Long term we may be talking more privitization
if the H'burg forces Plan C. Garbage collection, for example, is something that gets talked about. If that happens, garbage collection should be union and pay a livable wage, but I'd rather have that than a city where neighborhoods have to start BID's to hire private police because the PPD fails to deliver.
Budget priorities are a serious conversation I think this city desperately needs to have and soon, sorry if that conversation misdirected a discussion of why museum guards deserve a fair shake from the non-profit they work for.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
No, privitization is not where we should be going
For all that is broken with our city government, our tradition of having a unionized workforce with good wages and benefits is something critical to this city and is not something I'm prepared to part with.
City workers are a critical part of the middle class in this city. Undermine them and you undermine the strenght of the city
Moreover, most evidence suggests that privatized services are rarely more efficient than public services. The only savings comes in union busting.
Yes, we are in a crisis. But we should not allow political forces that don't care about the vast majority of people in this city to use the crisis as a way to undermine much that is good about this city.
Privitization is part of the Mark Alan Hughes decoupling strategy, that is, of creating a city government that works for the rich and the upper middle class and ignores everyone else.
See this more general discussion
is one that I think a lot of folks will soon be focused on and debating. Perhaps it was impolite of me to assume that we were already having it, rather than just talking about whether PMA guards should be unionized and get a decent wage if PMA is publically supported (yes and yes).
But yeah, the "big theme" is very relevant to our current situation well beyond the PMA.
I would say you make a stronger case against privitization the less city government does that isn't core municipal government functions and the better, more efficient job it does at those core services (who here has stood in line at the MSB for 3-4 hours or tried in vain to get through to the Water Dep't. on the phone in the last month - because I have done both).
I will also say I have lived in cities where trash pick up was private and union and fairly well paid and the world did not come to an end. I also think that if you have a city government that fails to deliver on the basics on a city-wide level you actually speed yourself along the path to a creeping defacto privatized two-tiered local government. CDC's and BID's that do more and more of what city government failed at till you have Chestnut Hill private cops asking "suspicious" persons "so what brings you this far up Germantown Ave?"
I would point out that extra trash pickups and street cleaning was already a major reason people emphatically supported Citizen's Alliance and that plus extra security are a major thing valued by both merchants and residents about the CCD and UCD.
I would say thats proof positive that folks in Philly would greatly appreciate and value city government that does the basics very well. So much so that they have just given up on receiving it from the city and are increasingly already just contracting it out. Some of the very, very cynical would even argue that part of Vince Fumo's brilliance as a politician was figuring out that if he could do a better job of some of that stuff than city government does, people would put up with a whole lot of other extra-legal uses of their taxes they wouldn't normally be so eager to support.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Daley Pulls a Rendell Circa 1992
This situation parallels what happened in 1992 when PMA guards were privatized...
As Chicago's two-year contract negotiations with the city and its police union comes nears its end, Mayor Richard Daley is now proposing giving security guards the ability to write citations for minor infractions, which as of today only police officers are legally allowed to do...
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-security-articles/recession-effects-on-...
Sort of - re chicago
Actually it sounds closer to the Chestnut Hill Neighborhood Council secondary privatized police force idea I mentioned just above. Yes its about reducing city work force, but really its more that in the end rich people get quality of life crimes enforced and poor people do not.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Museum in the $? 14 laid off in Cleveland
The Philadelphia Museum of Art jumped a hurdle today on their way to getting $750,000 to improve their transit from the Federal government when an amendment to strip the earmark was defeated.... http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2009/08/the_2009_club_for_growth_repor.php
Meanwhile, Timothy Rub, the incoming director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced that the Cleveland Museum of Art would lay-off 14 workers. With only $510 million in the bank, they could not afford to keep them on...
http://www.cleveland.com/cma/index.ssf/2009/08/09-week/
I'm still not getting your beef
Museums exist to collect art, make it nominally available to the public. They are by definition collections of the worlds most aesthetically and monetarily precious things as determined by what amounts to some of the worlds most culturally privileged individuals. They are inherently a little elitist because their mission is to collect the "best examples" of a very specialized world of cultural objects. For better or worse, museums are run by rich people to collect the immensely expensive things most valued by other rich people. They have immense endowments to allow them to collect yet more immensely expensive things. They are not whatever else you say about them in the business of creating jobs.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, goes to a museum and says "This is a good museum it employs .5% more people proportionally than the one in the next town". They judge it on how "good" the art is, at how insightfully its curators present it.
Its only fair to ask that if government puts in money that people get paid fairly but if the museum decides it can complete its mission most effectively employing less people, well whatever. Its yet one more reason why the less directly involved government in what makes "good art" the better it is for both art and government.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.