The William Way LGBT Community Center will return to the building it has called home after much-needed renovations are completed, instead of permanently leaving as had been previously announced, the leaders of the nonprofit’s board said Tuesday.
Earlier this year, William Way announced it was planning to sell its 175-year-old building at 1315 Spruce St. because fundraising efforts for a “comprehensive redevelopment plan to renovate and expand” the Center City property had fallen short.
The nonprofit said early last week that it was permanently closing its doors later this month and relocating services, and even had a “One Last Dance” goodbye party in the building scheduled for this Friday.
The building will still close on Dec. 18, but the services that William Way provides will eventually return, the nonprofit said Tuesday.
“Thanks to the support of multiple sources, including generous individual donors, and the efforts of our board, staff, and partners, we are pleased to share that the center will return to the building once redevelopment is complete,” Dave Huting and Laura Ryan, cochairs of the William Way LGBT Community Center Board, said in a statement.
“While there are still many details to finalize, including a timeline for when we can once again welcome the community back into the building, we are thrilled to share that the center will not be leaving its longtime home,” Huting and Ryan said.
“We look forward to sharing our vision for a reimagined facility, one that continues to be an essential resource for Philadelphia’s LGBTQ community, and which will become a reality as details are finalized,” they said.
“We are partnering with a nonprofit developer to redevelop our building at 1315 Spruce Street, transforming it into a modern and welcoming space that better serves our vibrant and engaged community,” Huting and Ryan said.
The center briefly closed for inspection and emergency repairs last fall, then partially reopened in January 2025.
In June, William Way said it needed to sell the building — which it had purchased in 1997 — because the nonprofit could not move forward with the more than $3.5 million in immediate repairs that were needed “before any broader redevelopment could proceed.”
The statement on Tuesday did not explicitly say the building would not still be sold.
A spokesperson for William Way could not be reached for comment.
In the meantime, William’s Way’s programs will move.
On Jan. 5, the center’s empowerment programs, including the elder initiative, peer counseling, and trans programs, will operate out of the nearby Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany at 330 S. 13th St.
A plan is being developed to temporarily relocate the John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives and is expected to be announced next year, the nonprofit said.
“We have always said that the center thrives not because of its building, but because of its people. However, the rebuilding of the center will allow it to become an even more effective space to advance our mission and enhance the services and support we provide to our community,” the board cochairs said.
As of Tuesday evening, the “One Last Dance” party was still being promoted on William Way’s website.
Kathleen A. Case, 80, of Bryn Mawr, longtime writer, pioneering medical journal editor, award-winning historian, researcher, and volunteer, died Friday, Nov. 14, of heart failure at Bryn Mawr Hospital.
A natural wordsmith who was interested in the origins and nuances of language as well as its use, Ms. Case spent 24 years as a top editor for the Annals of Internal Medicine and vice president for publishing at the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians. Later, for 15 years, she was publisher, archivist, historian, and director of strategic planning for the publishing division of the Philadelphia-based American Association for Cancer Research.
She was adept at understanding and organizing complex research and other medical information, and helped Annals of Internal Medicine digitize its production process and content, expand its reach, and become one of the world’s most influential and cited medical journals. “She loved precise, concise, and unambiguous writing,” her family said in a tribute.
She was one of the few female editors in the medical publishing industry when she joined Annals as an assistant editor in 1977, and she rose to managing editor, executive editor, and senior vice president for publishing by 1998. She attended many international medical publishing conferences around the world, and other journals tried unsuccessfully to lure her away from Philadelphia.
Ms. Case and her husband, Jacques Catudal, married in 1995.
“She set the highest editorial standards in medical publishing and expected the best from everyone around her,” a former colleague said in an online tribute. “But she also took the time to teach. … The lessons I learned from her have shaped my work ever since.”
Ms. Case joined the American Association for Cancer Research in 2001, served two stints as head of the publishing division, and supervised its marketing campaigns, advertising sales, and product development. She retired in 2008 but continued part time as the AACR archivist, historian, and director of strategic planning until retiring for good in 2016.
Away from her day jobs, Ms. Case was past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and what is now the Council of Science Editors. She also served on boards and committees for the American Medical Association, the American Chemical Society, the American Heart Association, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.
Even in retirement, she continued to work as a board member, writer, researcher, and historian for the Haverford Township Historical Society. She served on the Haverford Township Historical Commission, was a member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, chaired the Friends of the Polo Field, and helped establish the Brynford Civic Association.
Ms. Case graduated from Radnor High School and Pennsylvania State University.
“She was always busy, always involved with some project,” said her husband, Jacques Catudal. She edited his published academic papers, he said, and routinely marked up her two sons’ school reports in red ink for years.
In 2019, she won a historic preservation award from the Heritage Commission of Delaware County. “She was an endlessly inspiring woman whose intelligence was matched only by her sharp wit and her extraordinary cultural sensitivity,” a friend said in a tribute.
Kathleen Ann Case was born Sept. 13, 1945, in Westfield, N.J. The youngest of three children, her family moved to Omaha, Neb., and then Radnor when she was young.
She graduated from Radnor High School, studied journalism at Pennsylvania State University, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1967. She was a reporter and editor for the Penn State student newspaper and so active that school officials waived their prohibition of female students living alone off campus so she could reside near the paper’s office. In 1987, she earned a master’s degree in technical and science communication at Drexel University.
Ms. Case (second from left) enjoyed time with her family
She married D. Benjamin van Steenburgh III, and they had sons Ben and Jason. After a divorce, she married Peter Moor. They divorced, and she married Catudal in 1995.
Ms. Case raised her sons as a single mother in Avondale, Chester County, for years and moved to Bryn Mawr in 1979. She read voraciously about history, collected antiques, and enjoyed travel, classic rock, and Irish folk music.
She rode horses, was an expert archer, and followed the local sports teams. She tended her garden and investigated her genealogy.
She liked to refinish and paint furniture and discuss current events. She and her husband camped, hiked, and canoed all over the world.
Ms. Case enjoyed hiking and the outdoors.
She also dealt with metastatic breast cancer and three heart attacks. “She always gave as much honesty, opinion, perspective, experience, literary acumen, word knowledge, help, advice, comfort, and love as could be needed,” said her son Jason.
Her husband said: “She was brilliant and extremely funny. She was an organizer and always giving of herself.”
In addition to her husband, sons, and former husbands, Ms. Case is survived by four grandchildren, a sister, a brother, and other relatives.
A 65-year-old man died Sunday after he lost control of his vehicle on Cresheim Valley Drive in Chestnut Hill, striking a downed guardrail and flipping the car upside down into a creek. Just weeks before, another driver veered off the same road but survived.
Compounding this latest traffic death is the fact that the guardrail meant to prevent cars from swerving off the road was broken and nearly flattened from previous crashes, leaving a gap in the guardrails for months, said Josephine Winter, a Mount Airy resident and executive director of West Mount Airy Neighbors (WMAN). “The guardrail was down, and it was previously crumbled so it’s a frequent site of crashes,” she said. Images from Google Maps show the guardrail down as far back as July.
The Philadelphia Streets Department is aware of the recent crash and is conducting an assessment of the guardrail on Cresheim Valley Road. “The streets department’s top priority is public safety,” a spokesperson said.
A screenshot of a Google Map’s street view captured in July 2025 shows the downed guardrail on Cresheim Valley Drive in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. On Nov. 30, 2025, a 65-year-old man crashed and went over the guardrail, later succumbing to his injuries.
Neighbors say accidents, sometimes fatal, have plagued the winding roadways in Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy for decades. These traffic safety concerns came to a head with Sunday’s deadly crash.
“It’s a curvy, tricky road, especially when it’s wet, and people tend to speed on that road,” Winter said of roadways like Lincoln and Cresheim Valley Drives, which are lined with trees, have swooping dips and hills, and are prone to flooding.
Map of fatal crashes in Northwest Philadelphia since 2019.
Winter, who leads WMAN’s traffic-calming committee, and other neighborhood organizations have petitioned for city support, urging the streets department to slow the speed of traffic on Cresheim Valley Drive, Lincoln Drive, and Wissahickon Avenue. The group’s efforts are so ingrained in the fabric of the neighborhood that, when digging through Temple University’s Urban Archives, Winter found an advertisement from 1968 stressing the need for cars in Mount Airy to “slow down to keep kids safe.”
The intersection of Cresheim Valley Drive and Lincoln Drive, in Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 1, 2025.
The streets department installed “speed slots,” traffic-calming structures similar to speed bumps, earlier this year along Lincoln Drive between Allens Lane and Wayne Avenue. Along the same stretch of road, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation installed rumble strips and speed tables to slow drivers down in 2023, in addition to traffic lane separators to keep drivers from using center lanes to pass other vehicles.
In addition to the recently completed speed slots and traffic-calming measures on sections of Emlen Street, which becomes Cresheim Valley Road, signal upgrades are planned for Lincoln Drive as well.
However, the work to improve these streets is not over, Winter said. Additionally, the streets department plans do not include changes to Cresheim Valley Drive, where Sunday’s crash happened.
“We’ll need a collaborative approach as soon as possible to temporarily address the downed guardrail, and then see what the options are moving forward,” Winter said.
The intersection of Cresheim Valley Drive and Lincoln Drive, in Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 1, 2025.
Throughout the last decade, locals have suggested better-timed signals, more speed tables, and reducing the number of driving lanes from two in either direction down to one. They also want to see more roundabouts and curb bump-outs in the neighborhood to keep traffic flowing, but at a reasonable speed.
A mere 50 to 100 feet from Cresheim Valley Drive is a parallel bike trail, where trail organizers like Brad Maule are accustomed to the crashes on the road nearby. Before Sunday’s fatal crash, he remembers two other cars that drove off the side of the road in recent months, not counting the crashes on the roadway itself. The city recently installed pedestrian crossing signs and repainted the crosswalk on nearby Cresheim Road, but Maule hopes speed bumps will follow.
Cresheim Valley Drive near where it intersects with Lincoln Drive, in Philadelphia, PA, Dec. 1, 2025.
While Winter said that engineers from the Philadelphia Streets Department were among the first calls she received Monday morning responding to the crash, and that the community appreciates the response, she, Maule, and other neighbors hope that more safety improvements will be considered to save more lives.
“I’m just looking forward to the new measures of safety that come here,” Maule said. “Hopefully, people will abide by them.”
Staff writers Max Marin and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.
Andy Chan, a Philadelphia Highway Patrol officer who suffered a devastating brain injury in a motorcycle crash while on his way to work six years ago, has died.
Chan, 48, was riding through Northeast Philadelphia one evening in January 2019 when an elderly driver unintentionally struck him on the 3300 block of Rhawn Street. He was thrown about 20 feet, police said, and was critically injured.
Chan, a 24-year veteran of the force, was in a prolonged coma and was hospitalized for weeks on a ventilator. In the years since, his injuries have required around-the-clock care, with family, friends, and colleagues in the Philadelphia Police Department regularly at his side.
The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 announced Chan’s death on Tuesday. The cause of death was not immediately clear.
“Andy died a hero and we will always remember and honor his sacrifice,” the union wrote on Facebook.
Andy Chan was thrown from his highway patrol motorcycle and critically injured in a crash on the 3300 block of Rhawn Street on January 3, 2019.
Chan, a father of three, grew up in Chinatown and had always dreamed of being a highway patrolman. His family recalled how he watched with awe when the leather-clad officers approached his parents’ restaurant on their motorcycles.
He decided, they said, that would be him one day.
“That was the only place he strived to be in,” his wife, Teng, said years ago.
After becoming a Philadelphia police officer in 1996, he was first assigned to the 39th District, working as a bike cop. Eight years later, he was promoted to the elite highway unit.
He took such pride in his work that when he walked into police headquarters, instead of yelling, “Hi,” he would shout, “Highway!”
And even when he met Teng nearly two decades ago, he introduced himself as such: “I’m Highway.”
Chan and his partner, Kyle Cross, were among the first officers who responded to the Amtrak crash in 2015 that left eight people dead and nearly 200 injured. Cross, in an earlier interview, recalled how Chan kept his composure as he sought to rescue survivors from the wreckage.
“What I remember from Andy was his poise — he stayed so calm, he really just led the way,” Cross recalled. “I followed his lead.”
Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, in an email to the department Tuesday morning, described Chan as “larger than life, not because of what he did, but because of who he was.”
“He was the kind of officer whose reputation reached every corner of this Department and City; not because he sought attention, but because his work, his character, and his heart made him impossible to forget. Andy represented the very best of who we are and what we aspire to be: skilled, humble, kind, and unfailingly courageous,” Bethel wrote.
“Andy,” he said, “will forever remind us of why this work matters.”
Funeral arrangements have not been announced.
Since Chan was injured, police and community members have gathered each December to support his family and raise money for his recovery. Supporters will continue to gather in his honor this year, on Dec. 12 at Craft Hall at 4 p.m., for the sixth annual Andy Chan Block Party.
Quinta Brunson wants you to dig into your pocket to make free field trips possible for Philadelphia students.
The actor, writer, and comedian — along with Philadelphia School District officials and the leader of the district’s nonprofit arm — announced the “Quinta Brunson Field Trip Fund” on Tuesday.
District teachers and administrators will be able to apply for money for field trips by completing a short application subject to evaluation by an independent, internal group of educators. Field trip grants will be made twice a year.
“They opened my world, sparked my creativity, and helped me imagine a future beyond what I saw every day,” Brunson said. “Going somewhere new shows you that the world is bigger and more exciting than you believe, and it can shape what you come to see as achievable. I’m proud to support Philadelphia students with experiences that remind them their dreams are valid and their futures are bright.”
“Abbott Elementary” star Quinta Brunson watches the Phillies play the Atlanta Braves during a taping of the show in Philadelphia in August.
Every Abbott Elementary season has featured a field trip episode, including visits toSmith Playground, the Franklin Institute, and the Philadelphia Zoo. Brunson’s fund “will remove the financial barriers that too often limit our children’s access to these enrichment opportunities,” officials for the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia said.
The GivingTuesday launch kicked off with an unspecified donation from Brunson herself.
Kathryn Epps, president and CEO of the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, said getting students out of their classrooms is crucial.
“We are honored to partner with Quinta to expand these experiences for children in Philadelphia’s public schools, helping them to envision and realize any future they desire,” Epps said.
Tony B. Watlington Sr., Philadelphia School District superintendent, said he was grateful to Brunson.
“We want our students to venture out and bridge what they’re learning in the classroom to engaging, real-world learning experiences,” Watlington said. “This commitment to equitably expanding opportunities for students to have experiences outside of their classroom will help accelerate student achievement and we are becoming the fastest improving, large urban school district in the nation.”
The estate sale of the late lawyer and bibliophile Bill Roberts, whose Rittenhouse townhouse is filled with thousands upon thousands of books and other treasures, opens to the public this week.
Roberts, a longtime lawyer at Blank Rome LLP, was a Renaissance man whose interests — and library — spanned genres and eras, touching on microeconomic theory, beekeeping, botany, classical music, poetry, and much else. When Inquirer columnist Stephanie Farr toured the Delancey Street home earlier this fall, she found books stacked on chairs, tables, carts, shelves, and “piled precariously in pillars, like paperback towers of Pisa.”
The contents of Roberts’ home were meticulously inventoried by Sales by Helen, the Main Line estate sale company, over the past few months.
“It’s cerebral, educated. There’s no Calvin and Hobbes books, unfortunately. As much as I love Calvin and Hobbes,” said John Romani, owner of Sales by Helen.
Roughly 300 of the highest-value books are now on auction in conjunction with Briggs Auction, which will close bidding on Thursday, Dec. 4. That collection includes an atlas of Venice, works on translating Homer, and volumes on lichen, algae, and fungi, among many other topics. Romani said the Briggs books are likely to fetch thousands.
About 250 valuable nonbook items, including Roberts’ Hermès ties, will be available on the Sales by Helen online store beginning on Wednesday at 8 p.m.
But the real thrill, for those who wants to examine the thousands of books and other objects in-person, will begin on Thursday Dec. 4, at 2 p.m., when Roberts’ home will open for the estate sale. Continuing through Sunday, Dec. 7, the sale will feature books, as well as artwork, rugs, and other household items from the upscale home.
Romani said he expects to sell the vast majority of books for flat rates: $3 for paperbacks, $5 for hardbacks, $20 for coffee-table books.
“I’m not saying I planned it that way, but I may have looked and seen when it’s going to be,” Romani said.
Bill Roberts read on many subjects. Here’s one of his books, about butterflies and moths of Newfoundland and Labrador.
In addition to working as a lawyer, Roberts played both the lute and the violin, was a researcher on the botany team for the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University, and was president of the board of directors for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.
When a bookstore near his home closed, he bought its huge shelves and hired a carpenter to transform his home library, The Inquirer wrote in Roberts’ 2024 obituary.
“You’ll find a little bit of everything,” Romani said of the collection. “Just come in, the door’s open, we let everyone in. It’s gonna be fun.”
Historic preservation advocates are sounding the alarm about legislation from Councilmember Mark Squilla, which they argue would weaken existing protections in Philadelphia.
The bill, introduced Nov. 20, would institute changes to the city’s Historical Commission, which regulates properties on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places and ensures that they cannot be demolished or their exteriors substantially altered.
“This is the first time the [preservation] ordinance has been proposed for amendment in decades,” said Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. “This is a developer-driven proposal that does not reflect any of the priorities of the preservation community.”
Proponents of the bill argue that it is simply meant to give more notice and power to property owners before their buildings are considered by the Historical Commission.
“The bill does nothing to decrease the power of the Historical Commission to protect important historic resources,” said Matthew McClure, who served as co-chair of the regulatory committee of Mayor Jim Kenney’s preservation task force.
“It is a modest good government piece of legislation,” said McClure, a prominent zoning attorney with Ballard Spahr. He emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of a client.
The bill was introduced too late in this year’s Council session to receive a hearing. Squilla says it will be considered next year.
Currently, the interest group most supportive of the bill is the development industry. But even some preservation opponents are displeased with Squilla’s effort, arguing that it does too little for homeowners.
“Everybody’s talking, and I think they all agree to move forward with continued conversations to maybe tweak the language a little bit so everybody feels comfortable with it,” Squilla said.
At least one more stakeholder meeting will be held in December.
Tensions over preservation
Squilla’s proposal comes in the midst of heightened debate around preservation in Philadelphia, where the majority of buildings were constructed before 1960.
Over the last decade, the number of historically protected properties doubled, although well below 5% of the city’s buildings are covered. Preservationists oppose what they see as a demolition-first approach to development in the United States’ only World Heritage City.
These have provoked backlash among some homeowner groups and pro-development advocacy organizations, which see these regulations as increasing housing costs.
Members of the Philadelphians for Rational Preservation gathered at Seger Park in the Washington Square West neighborhood on July 27 to talk about their opposition to the Washington Square West Historic District.
Some property owners have grievances against the way the local nomination process works.
In Philadelphia, citizens are empowered to nominate buildings to the local register — giving buildings protection from demolition or exterior changes — without input from the property owner until the Historical Commission considers the case.
This practice persistently causes controversy, especially because there are few local incentives for homeowners whose properties get protected.
In some localities, preservation protections are promulgated exclusively by planners. In others, owner consent is required.
“The current historic nomination process is most often dictated by nongovernmental actors who operate without notice to property owners,” McClure said. “The administration’s bill is aimed at increasing transparency and basic fairness during the nomination process.”
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration did not respond to a request for comment.
What’s in the bill
Squilla’s bill is thick with new provisions to the local historic ordinance. A key aspect of the legislation gives property owners at least 30 days before a pending nomination of their building is considered by the commission and protections kick in.
While homeowners probably would not have time to radically alter the exterior of their house — and presumably wouldn’t demolish it — preservationists fear that developers will use the extra time to begin razing historic buildings.
“No one likes the notice provision the way it’s written; that’s freaking people out,” Steinke said. “We made clear why we think that’s a problem, and we were heard. Of course, the development community would love it to be the way it’s currently expressed in the bill.”
A Victorian home in the Spruce Hill historic district. Recently large new historic districts have been created to cover neighborhoods like Powelton Village, parts of Spruce Hill, and 1,441 properties in Washington Square West.
The delayed provision particularly worries preservationists in combination with a proposed requirement that the commission approve permits — including demolition or exterior design work — if “material commitments” were made to plans before the attempt to protect the historic building.
Other provisions include language to make it more difficult to protect land because it may house archaeological remains. It also limits the ability to consider a property for protection due to its relation to a landscape architect (as opposed to, say, a building designer).
Despite their animus toward existing preservation rules in the city, groups like 5th Square and Philadelphians for Rational Preservation called the legislation a sop to those who least need help.
“While this bill is a boon to developers, it doesn’t help ordinary Philadelphians,” said Jonathan Hessney of Philadelphians for Rational Preservation.
He argues that Squilla isn’t curbing historic districts that burden homeowners, “while at the same time risks allowing genuinely historic properties to be destroyed in the new 30-day race to demolish or deface it creates.”
A possible reform that some critics of the bill would like to see are flexible, tiered historic districts, where only a select group of buildings would be fully regulated. Demolition protections would still exist for many buildings, but most would not be subjected to oversight for changes like replacing a door or window.
“That was discussed as something that the preservation community would like to see that was mentioned in the original draft and then stripped out,” Steinke said.
Squilla said the pushback surprised him, given that negotiations have been held since June. He’s confident a compromise can be reached.
Beyond the Preservation Alliance — the advocacy group with the most funding and pull in City Hall — the bill has caused alarm among historic activists.
“It was a blindside to the progress that many stakeholders in the preservation community felt they were reaching with him,” said Arielle Harris, an advocate. “Squilla understands the preservation climate in the city — given that he was on the preservation task force — so this is out of left field.”
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has said her administration relied on expert advice from a top law firm when it decided to end a Philadelphia policy prioritizing businesses owned by women or people of color in city contracting following recent court rulings that limited affirmative action-style government programs in hiring and contracting.
“I call them my genius attorneys because they all clerked for Supreme Court justices, and they handle the hardest cases throughout the country,” City Solicitor Renee Garcia, the city’s top lawyer, recently said of the New York-based firm Hecker Fink.
“And we went back and forth,” Garcia said. “Can we do this? Can we do this? What about this? What about that?”
But when it came time to replace the city’s old program with a new policy, the Parker administration didn’t adopt all of the suggestions it received from Hecker Fink, internal administration documents obtained by The Inquirer show.
Hecker Fink attorneys suggested that Philadelphia replace its old contracting system with one that favors “socially and economically disadvantaged” businesses, the documents show. Parker instead created a new policy favoring “small and local” companies.
The differences between Parker’s program and alternatives the city could have adopted are highly technical but hugely important, attorneys and researchers who study government contracting told The Inquirer.
Critics say the new policy indicates Philadelphia took the easy way out in the face of conservative legal attacks, instead of fighting to preserve the spirit of the old program: promoting equity and diversity in city contracting.
Parker, however, is adamant that her “small and local” policy will achieve that goal, given that many small companies in the city are owned by Black and brown Philadelphians who have faced discrimination.
“Our small and local business program is our disadvantage program,” Garcia said in a written statement. “Considering counsel’s advice, the City determined that a small and local business program is the best way to incorporate social and economic disadvantage in a way that is objective, content-neutral, consistent, demonstrable, and could be stood up very quickly.”
The documents, which include confidential legal memos from Hecker and internal administration emails, show how top city officials attempted to navigate a new legal landscape after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 upended decades of jurisprudence on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said her “small and local” contracting policy will boost Philadelphia companies.
In early 2025, the Law Department provided a spreadsheet of line-by-line edits to the city’s Five Year Plan, a long-term budgeting document, to remove language about racial and gender-equity goals submitted by city departments.
When the Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity, for instance, wrote that its mission involved “advancing racial equity,” the Law Department simply wrote, “remove racial,” as it did for several other agencies.
The edits signify a stark contrast to the city’s approach under former Mayor Jim Kenney, who in 2020, operating under very different circumstances, instructed all departments to craft comprehensive racial-equity plans.
There is no indication in the internal documents, which are primarily from 2024 and 2025, that Parker, the city’s first Black female mayor, or administration officials were eager to make those changes. And no city officials appeared in the documents to view the “small and local” policy as less aggressive or safer than the other options at Parker’s disposal when she replaced the city’s race-conscious contracting system.
But for Wendell R. Stemley, president of the National Association of Minority Contractors, the mayor’s choice was revealing.
“The cities that want to cave in on this issue without doing the hard work are just doing small [and] local, race- and gender-neutral,” Stemley said.
‘Disadvantaged’ vs. ‘small and local’
The documents obtained by The Inquirer show that Hecker recommended the city abandon its decades-old contracting system — responsible for allotting more than $370 million each year in city contracts to historically disadvantaged firms — due to the threat of potential legal challenges, as Parker and Garcia have said.
But they also show that the firm proposed replacing that policy with a system “setting mandatory goals for hiring socially and economically disadvantaged businesses or persons,” a race- and gender-neutral standard based on the federal Small Business Administration’s 8(a) business development program.
Like the city’s contracting policies, the federal program previously had a stated policy of aiding business owners who were members of specific historically disadvantaged groups, such as women and Black people. But a 2023 federal court ruling in Washington, D.C., prohibited the SBA from presuming that members of those groups had faced barriers and required 8(a) applicants to demonstrate social and economic disadvantages.
The change allowed the program to pass legal muster by not favoring race or gender groups, while still allowing the agency to consider whether each applicant had faced discrimination on an individual basis.
Hecker, a litigation and public interest firm, suggested that Philadelphia adopt a similar approach.
“Adopting mandatory goals for hiring socially or economically disadvantaged individuals or businesses, defined along the same race-neutral lines as in the SBA’s 8(a) program, would likely be defensible if challenged,” Hecker lawyers wrote in a May 5 memo to the city.
An internal administration memo analyzing the city’s options on May 16 said that Hecker “recommended taking a look at the federal SBA 8(a) Business Development Program as a model.”
“This is a program to recognize small and disadvantaged businesses,” the city’s memo said, adding that the SBA defines socially disadvantaged individuals as “those who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society because of their identities as members of groups and without regard to their individual qualities.”
The executive order governing the city’s old minority contracting program, which aimed to award 35% of contracts to historically disadvantaged firms, expired at the end of 2024, and the city quietly ended it at some point earlier this year.
The key difference between Parker’s program and the 8(a) model is that the city’s new policy gives no explicit consideration for social disadvantage, prejudice, or cultural bias.
Garcia, the city solicitor, firmly pushed back against the notion that the city had ignored Hecker’s advice on reshaping its contracting landscape and contended that the “small and local” policy will result in equitable outcomes because many of Philadelphia’s small businesses are owned by people of color and have faced discrimination and other barriers to growth.
“The City’s small and local business program … is more aggressive [than an SBA 8(a)-style policy] in that it is broadly applicable to small and local businesses, without creating unnecessary hurdles and confusion over the word ‘disadvantage’ or requiring onerous paperwork” for business owners to demonstrate their disadvantages, she said.
City Solicitor Renee Garcia is the Parker administration’s top lawyer.
Although Parker’s new program is not exclusively available to disadvantaged firms, Garcia said it “has built-in elements of social and economic disadvantaged programs like the SBA 8(a) and [U.S. Department of Transportation] programs, such as utilizing SBA business size standard caps, examining years in business, examining employee count, and personal net worth considerations.”
But Andre M. Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that while the city may be intending to help disadvantaged businesses with its “small and local” approach, specifying that goal in writing is important. The mayor’s executive order does not use the word disadvantage.
“They are different,” said Perry, the author of Black Power Scorecard, an examination of access to property, education, and business success. “The downside of any approach that does not use some criteria for being disadvantaged is that you can ignore them.
“There is a history that suggests that you absolutely need some process to identify groups of people who have been ignored by the city. It’s certainly not a given that you will touch those communities that have been denied opportunities in the past under ‘small and local,’” Perry said.
‘Too early to tell’
Parker’s move to abandon the city’s goal of prioritizing businesses owned by women and Black and brown people has become the latest flashpoint in the debate over the centrist Democrat mayor’s approach to the new political reality under President Donald Trump’s second administration, as critics like progressive City Councilmember Kendra Brooks have accused her of “caving” to Trump.
Parker, however, said the city had little choice but to end the old system following Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited affirmative action in college admissions and has had widespread consequences for race-conscious government programs.
“There were people who told us that leadership meant justifying the [old] law,” Parker said at a recent news conference announcing the contracting policy changes. “They said, ‘Forget about the Supreme Court ruling. Philadelphia should just continue functioning and operating its program even if your Law Department and these genius lawyers at [Hecker] who have clerked for Supreme Court justices [recommended abandoning it.]’
“I want to take some advice from somebody to interpret the Supreme Court ruling right for some folks who have worked there.”
The U.S. Supreme Court upended the legal landscape for race-conscious government programs with a 2023 case ending affirmative action in college admissions.
But Parker also said she felt that the city’s old system was “broken” long before the Harvard decision because it failed to achieve its goal of boosting the number of “Black and brown and women and disabled business owners” in Philadelphia.
Parker, who as a lawmaker worked on policies aimed at boosting economic opportunities for minority- and women-owned firms, said she was optimistic that pivoting to a focus on “small and local” firms would produce better results.
Parker has not publicly discussed suggested alternatives to her new policy, including the 8(a)-style approach.
Several government contracting attorneys and researchers interviewed by The Inquirer said that both “small and local” and “socially disadvantaged” programs have downsides and that the success of either would primarily depend on how well it is executed. Details are scant on what the new policy will actually look like, making it difficult to evaluate the potential impact.
But experts said choosing a policy that seeks to favor disadvantaged businesses rather than any small Philadelphia firm would indicate the mayor was fighting to maintain the spirit of the old program, which sought to boost companies owned by women and people of color who have long been underrepresented among business owners and government contractors.
“Adopting an 8(a)-style program with language prioritizing contracts for socially disadvantaged businesses would signal a desire to maintain the pre-2024 understanding that cities can procure goods deliberately, intentionally, in different ways, with preferences from disadvantaged businesses,” said Brett Theodos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has written a paper about how governments can use contracting to promote equity, despite recent court decisions. “Having an (8)a-style [program] would signal that the mayor wanted to try something more.”
Parker has defended her policy shift by invoking the bona fides of the Hecker attorneys who worked with the city. She and other city officials have noted that one clerked for liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and now works for the American Civil Liberty Union — “not somebody who would have had a conservative mindset,” as Garrett Harley put it. (Those comments later prompted the ACLU-PA to distance itself from what it described as the city’s “DEI rollback.”)
To be sure, adopting a program in which contractors need to demonstrate social disadvantages, such as past instances of discrimination, has its own drawbacks.
Following the 2023 federal court decision, the SBA now requires 8(a) applicants to submit “social disadvantage narratives,” or essays, increasing administrative burdens and potentially favoring savvier contractors. The U.S. Department of Transportation has a similar essay-based approach.
The U.S. Small Business Administration’s 8(a) business development program is aimed at helping “socially and economically disadvantaged” firms.
“We have heard from our businesses it is already too hard to do business in Philadelphia; these kinds of additional requirements will exacerbate an already difficult and burdensome process,” Garcia said.
And despite being a race- and gender-neutral federal policy, the current 8(a) standard, which was adopted in President Joe Biden’s administration, may still be challenged in court.
The lawyers at Hecker Fink, however, believed that a Philadelphia version of the policy could withstand scrutiny.
“The next wave of conservative litigation in this space may target such programs, arguing that social or economic disadvantage is a proxy for race,” Hecker attorneys wrote in the May 2025 memo. “However, based on our assessment of the current legal landscape, the City would have a strong chance of defeating such challenges.”
Like many diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives cast as discriminatory by the president, the 8(a) program has come under siege since Trump took office in January. On the agency’s website, hyperlinks to guidelines on how companies can demonstrate social disadvantage have gone dead, and the Trump administration has launched an audit of the program in the wake of an alleged bribery scheme.
None of those issues, however, address the question of whether a similar policy crafted for the city would be legally defensible. Despite Trump’s attacks, the current version of the 8(a) program’s focus on “socially disadvantaged” firms has not been overturned in court.
Regina Hairston, president and CEO of the African-American Chamber of Commerce of PA, NJ, and DE, said the organization will wait and see how Parker’s new policy shakes out.
“It’s too early to tell if the mayor’s policy is the right policy, but from what I’ve seen across the country, other cities are moving to [prioritize] small, medium enterprises,” Hairston said. “We don’t know if that’s the answer, but we will be monitoring it.”
Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this article.
After 13 years at 6abc, reporter Annie McCormick is leaving the station, she announced on social media. Her last day was Monday, Dec. 1.
“For our viewers, I just wanted to do the job the constitution gave us the right to do in the most fair and respectful way. I am most thankful for the everyday people who have let me into their lives on even their worst days. I’ve learned my greatest life lessons from our viewers,” she said in a Facebook post.
“I will continue to tell the public’s stories in a variety of mediums, stay tuned,” she said.
In her announcement, McCormick did not detail what her next career move will be. She said that she was grateful for her time at 6abc and was “looking forward to my next chapter in journalism.”
McCormick and 6abc did not respond to requests for comment.
McCormick joined 6abc in 2012 as a general assignment reporter. She began her journalism career as a White House photo intern during the Clinton administration and went on to work as a photojournalist for several outlets, including the Philadelphia Daily News.
As a television reporter, she worked in Texas, New Mexico, and Harrisburg before returning to Philadelphia. Born and raised in South Jersey, McCormick stayed local to attend Muhlenberg College.
McCormick shared in her post that she is continuing to write her latest book, Restless Ghosts, a historical true-crime story about the 1929 death of two Moorestown, N.J., socialites. It is slated for publication sometime next year.
Drivers in Philadelphia’s Logan Square neighborhood should expect new delays as the city continues to prepare for America’s 250th birthday next summer.
Construction is set to cause lane closures in both directions on weekdays from Dec. 1 until May 19, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation officials said in a statement.
“This project will improve the safety and accessibility for Logan Square residents and the increased number of visitors during 2026 events,” city officials said Saturday.
Drivers won’t be able to use the interior lane around Logan Circle, the left inbound lane on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and the left lane on 19th Street north of the circle, according to the city.
The work is set to occur between 7 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on weekdays, according to PennDot, and will be weather dependent.
“Motorists are advised to allow extra time when traveling through the work area because backups and delays will occur,” PennDot officials said.
During construction, pedestrians will also be unable to use the sidewalk around the circle or access Swann Memorial Fountain at its center, according to the city.
The beloved 101-year-old fountain hasn’t been fully operational since 2023 due to vandalism. Philadelphia Parks and Recreation Commissioner Susan Slawson said in September that the city is making repairs, with plans to have the fountain completely restored by May 2026.
