How About Civic Value Campaign
To Perk Up More Voter Interest?

 by Ed Schwartz, President
Inst. for the Study of Civic Values

The city's ward leaders and committee people who tackle this city's quality of life issues on a daily basis will be those bringing out the most voters this primary.

A check of the turnout after Tuesday will show those wards to be where those leaders and committee people daily confront and demand action against building code violations, trash dumped on vacant lots, drugs and crime, absentee property owners who don't pay their taxes.

They get complaints like these every day from their voters. Those wards producing the most votes are the ones that get results in dealing with these problems.

It's popular these days to refer to problems like blight and trash as quality of life issues, which they are. But they also represent a breakdown of our civic values.

Civic Values are the values we're supposed to share as citizens. Obey the law. Treat one another with respect. Promote the general welfare, as the Constitution puts it. Unpaid property taxes, building code violations, crime itself all represent a breakdown of our civic values. And unless we confront this crisis directly, nothing else we are trying to do to strengthen our economy and rebuild our neighborhoods is going to succeed.

What we need is a A Civic Values Campaign! This would be a partnership between community organizations, ward activists, the City, and the School District to strengthen the civic values of every neighborhood in Philadelphia. The key will be to develop a specific agendaBneighborhood by neighborhoodBof problems that we want to solve. Then representatives from the community, the City, and the School District need to meet regularly to monitor progress in solving them.

Here are four key targets:

Unpaid property taxes. The City's Revenue Department and the Board of Revision of Taxes tell us that there are $230 million in unpaid property taxes. $230 million is enough to reopen every Library and Fire Station and support the entire business tax reform agenda developed by the Tax Reform Commission last year. What does this say about civic values in Philadelphia? If some of these taxes just can't be collected, then we should just write them off. Then we should insist that the Revenue Department go after everything else with our full support.

Code Violations. The database of code violations on the University of Pennsylvania's Neighborhood Information SystemB obtained from L&I-- tells us that there are 118,372 code violations citywide. Again: what does that say about civic values in Philadelphia? Which of these violations are serious? Which ones aren't? We need to know. Then we need to work with L&I to track down the offenders and get them to repair the damage they=re doing to the rest of us.


Crime, Especially Around Schools. The city is reeling from horrifying acts of violence taking place in front our schools every day. The murders are well publicized. But they aren't isolated incidents. 5,000 serious crimes were committed in census tracts around 15 persistently dangerous schools in 2004. That's nearly 100 crimes every week. Is it any wonder that most of our kids now take it for granted that they are living in a dangerous city?
If we care about our civic values, we'll work together to clean up the blocks around our schools, just as Safe Streets removed drug dealers from commercial strips.

Recidivism. Seventy percent of our crimes are committed by repeat offenders, most of them dealing drugs. Do we have an adequate system to turn these people around? Hardly.

Two thirds of the 8,000 people in the Philadelphia Prison will return in a matter of months. We spend $183 million a year to keep them there, when there are clearly programs that can help them go straight. A hospital that fails to treat people who can be cured is a menace to public health. A criminal justice system that won't even try to turn repeat offenders into responsible citizens is a menace to civic values. A Civic Values Campaign would tackle this problem head-on.

In short, a Civic Values Campaign would fight the conditions that undermine our civic values throughout the City-unpaid taxes, code violations, truancy and violence around schools, recidivism.

In conducting the campaign, community organizations, committee people, and ward leaders would work to recruit new block captains, Town Watch members, and School volunteers. The City and the School District, in turn, would launch a major effort to collect unpaid real estate taxes, enforce building codes, reduce crime and violence--especially around our schools-- and reduce the number of people who commit crimes in our neighborhoods. That's what a Civic Values Agenda for Philadelphia would look like….neighborhood by neighborhood.

And as anyone involved in grassroots politics will tell you, confronting these problems is the only real way to convince people that when they vote, their vote matters.