The Philadelphia school board on Monday signaled its intentions to play ball: Later this week, it will hold a special action meeting to vote on a resolution authorizing Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. and his team to consider handingover a portfolio of unused school buildings to the city.
Watlington, the resolution states, “recommends that, in the best interests of the district and its students, the district explore and pursue negotiations with the city to potentially convey certain vacant and surplus district property.”
Parker, in a statement, said the process was about “public health and public safety” and the school buildings can be used to improve residents’ quality of life.
Officials “cannot let blighted buildings in the middle of residential neighborhoods lie vacant — many of which have been vacant for many years — from two years to over 30,” Parker said. “It’s unconscionable to me that we are in the middle of a housing crisis and we have government buildings sitting vacant for years or even decades. That cannot continue.”
School board president Reginald Streater said that no decisions are final and that public deliberation will still happen at the special meeting at 4 p.m. Thursday. But, he said, the move makes sense with “the board moving toward being much more willing to be intergovernmental partners” with the city.
“Many of these properties have not been used in the last decade or more, and they require a significant amount of upkeep and maintenance,” Streater said. “These properties are unused, for the most part, and unnecessary for K-12 education.”
The district is in the business of running schools, Streater said.
“I do believe that the city possesses considerably more expertise and capacity than the district does regarding property development,” Streater said. “We are an education institution. To build the capacity to do such things is out of our wheelhouse, and economic development would take us out of our lane.”
According to the language of the resolution, the district is urging Watlington to consider all angles — bond obligations, property conditions, financial protection of the district, any legal processes that would need to happen, and more.
The action comes as something of a surprise, happening just a week after what was to be the final voting meeting of the year. Streater said he did not want to add it as a walk-on resolution to the December school board meeting, but wanted to give members of the public time to understand it and provide testimony, if desired.
Giving unused school buildings to the city could further academic outcomes, the school board president said.
“It’s possible,” Streater said, “that conveying these vacant and surplus properties to the city for redevelopment and revitalization could help stabilize and grow the city and district’s tax base … and consequently positively impact future revenues to the district and educational experiences for students.”
Asked for a list of the unused buildings the resolution would cover, school board officials said more internal evaluation is needed before such a list is released.
The possible transfer of district properties to the city comes as officials debate the specifics of one of Parker’s signature initiatives.
The mayor wants to spend $800 million on her housing initiative, Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or H.O.M.E. In a rare sign of division, Council last week allotted more housing funds to the city’s poorest residents over the Parker administration’s objections.
Because of Council’s move, more legislation is now needed to advance H.O.M.E. It will not come until January at the earliest.
Thomas, chair of Council’s education committee, has long been pushing for a school facilities plan.
“It’s unclear to say what this step forward means, but I want to understand how it fits into a larger plan for Philly’s educational institutions,” Thomas said in a statement.
“Without getting into hypotheticals, and due to a lack of communications with City Council, there are a lot of moving pieces and still many questions about what this means and what is the overall plan for the future of our school buildings,” Thomas said.
A former top Philadelphia labor official claims in a lawsuit that she was passed over for a promotion because she’s a woman, and was later fired afterraising concerns about gender-based discrimination spanning two mayoral administrations.
Monica Marchetti-Brock, the former first deputy director of the Department of Labor, said in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that Mayor Cherelle L. Parker fired her last year, days after Marchetti-Brock had reiterated complaints about gender bias at the top rungs of the city government that had occurred before Parker took office.
Marchetti-Brock had worked for the city since 2013. Under former Mayor Jim Kenney, she rose to the city’s No. 2 labor role.
The man hired for the position was Basil Merenda, a former top state labor official whom Marchetti-Brock claims “had a problem with women.”
What started as a change in boss under then-Mayor Jim Kenney culminated in spring 2024 with Parker firing Marchetti-Brock after she complainedof sex-based discrimination, according to the suit. The lawsuit says an outside investigator probed Merenda’s behavior and in 2023 recommended he undergo implicit bias training.
The lawsuit accuses the city of minimizing the results of that investigation and of terminating Marchetti-Brock and a second woman who was mistreated by Merenda.
“When [Marchetti-Brock] asked if her termination had anything to do with her sex discrimination complaints, [the city] refused to answer the question,” the complaint says.
Merenda is currently one of two commissioners of the Department of Licenses and Inspections. Parker announced his appointment in February 2024, a few weeks before Marchetti-Brock says she was fired. It is common for there to be significant turnover in personnel at the beginning of a new mayoral administration.
A city spokesperson declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
Attempts to reach Kenney were unsuccessful. The former mayor appointed many women to his top staff through his more than two decades in City Hall. When he took office as mayor in 2016, the majority of his cabinet were women.
Marchetti-Brock began reporting to Merenda in January 2023. He ignored his deputy, excluded her from meetings and communications, yelled, and “unjustly” criticized her, the suit says.
Marchetti-Brock says she complained of sex discrimination in the labor department to a long list of officials, some of whom still work for the city, including City Solicitor Renee Garcia and Chief Administrative Officer Camille Duchaussee. Marchetti-Brock “described how she was treated compared to how male employees were treated, including that Merenda ignored what female employees said and focused on what male employees said,” according to the lawsuit.
The city opened an investigation in the spring of 2023, the suit says.
After Parker was elected in November 2023, Marchetti-Brock again expressed her interest in the top labor role. However, the incoming mayor ultimately tapped Perritti DiVirgilio, who was previously the city’s director of labor standards. Marchetti-Brock described DiVirgilio in the suit as a “noncomplaining, male employee.”
In February 2024, Marchetti-Brock received a letter summarizing the findings of the investigation into Merenda. The letter said that the probe concluded that “no violation” of the city’s sexual harassment prevention policy occurred. According to the complaint, Marchetti-Brock was told that Merenda had received a warning and the investigator recommended he undergo implicit bias training.
The policy says city employees are protected from sexual harassment regardless if it’s “unlawful,” and it prohibits retaliation against employees who raise concerns or complain. Marchetti-Brock had a role crafting the policy following a critical 2018 City Controller report that said the city’s sexual harassment reporting protocols were inadequate.
According to the suit, Marchetti-Brock pushed back on the summary letter in an email to Andrew Richman, a city attorney, saying that even though no unlawful behavior was found, “there were findings of bias toward me and other women.”
“As you are aware, our policy holds our leaders to a higher standard than the law,” Marchetti-Brock wrote, according to the complaint. “It is misleading to say there are no findings under our policy.”
Three days later, in early March 2024, top officials from Parker’s administration informed Marchetti-Brock that her employment would be terminated, according to the complaint. The suit states that another female employee who had complained about Merenda was terminated as well.
The lawsuit asks the federal court to find that the city violated antidiscrimination laws and award Marchetti-Brock an unspecified amount of damages.
For years, preservationists have countered claims that historic designation limits development and housing supply. Some neighborhood groups have gone as far as filing petitions to oppose new historic districts in Philadelphia on these grounds.
Although only about 5% of the city’s land and 4.4% of its buildings are listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places — up from just 2.2% in 2016 — that expansion in designations shows how Philadelphia has begun to catch up with peer cities. This growth reflects both resident advocacy and the city’s expanded preservation capacity, which were spurred by efforts under Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration, including the convening of a Historic Preservation Task Force.
The new report produced striking findings that flip the old narrative on its head: that preservation constricts housing supply and reduces density.
In fact, the data show preservation supports growth and density. Population density in historic districts is 34% higher than in other neighborhoods, and housing units there grew 26% over the past decade, nearly triple the citywide rate.
The study also found that older neighborhoods are becoming more diverse, with preservation helping sustain racial and economic inclusion. Nonwhite homeownership in these areas is rising faster than in the city as a whole, a clear sign that maintaining older housing can open doors to opportunity, not close them.
It’s evidence that preserving the city’s older housing stock is a key component of Mayor Cherelle L.Parker’s H.O.M.E. Initiative to provide new affordable housing opportunities. Investing in these neighborhoods will support the growth of homeownership for Black and Hispanic populations.
The 1500 block of Christian Street in the historic Black neighborhood nicknamed “Doctors Row,” photographed in 2021.
Beyond the data, historic neighborhoods offer beauty, character, and a sense of place that newer developments often struggle to match. Built long before cars shaped our neighborhoods, these areas were designed for people: compact, walkable, and full of architectural variety. Their mix of rowhouses, corner stores, and small apartment buildings naturally creates the kind of density and vibrancy that newer communities struggle to emulate.
Moreover, many older neighborhoods were built at a time when transportation options were more limited, such as walking and transit, causing them to be more densely developed than later, automobile-oriented areas of the city. These neighborhoods were often built with a wide variety of housing types, including multifamily buildings that are inherently denser than neighborhoods of primarily single-family homes.
Historic districts are simply desirable places to live. And that attracts housing developers seeking to put up new housing, whether on vacant lots or on parcels containing “noncontributing” properties, which can be demolished under Philadelphia Historical Commission regulations.
These and other new buildings constructed within historic districts in recent years have been subject to Historical Commission review to ensure they do not detract from the character of the historic districts in which they were built.
Preservation also fuels local jobs and investment. Philadelphia ranks among the nation’s leaders in historic tax credit projects, which, since 2010, have generated roughly 2,500 jobs and $141 million in annual labor income — a steady return that proves preservation is as much an economic strategy as a cultural one.
Historic districts are living, breathing neighborhoods that welcome both new housing and new residents. The findings from the latest study should put to rest some of the more persistent claims of preservation’s detractors.
Paul Steinke is the executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.
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.
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.”
Activists rallied outside the Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center on Thursday to press their assertion that ICE has been allowed to turn the courthouse into “a hunting ground” for immigrants.
The noon demonstration crystalized months of contention between activists and lawyers who say the courthouse must be a place to seek and render justice ― not to target immigrants ― and federal authorities who insist that making arrests there is legal, safe, and sane.
No ICE Philly, the rally organizer, says agents have been enabled to essentially hang out at the Center City courthouse, waiting in the lobby or scouring the hallways, then making arrests on the sidewalks outside, a pattern they say has been repeated dozens of times since President Donald Trump took office in January.
“ICE is kidnapping immigrants who are obeying the law and coming to court,” said Ashen Harper, a college student who helped lead the demonstration, which targeted Sheriff Rochelle Bilal. “She is capitulating and cooperating with ICE.”
Many people who go to the courthouse, the group noted, are not criminal defendants ― they are witnesses, crime victims, family members, people dealing with alleged offenses like shoplifting or trespassing, and others who are already in diversionary programs.
Organizers said ICE has arrested about 90 people outside the courthouse since January, a dramatic increase over the previous year. And they pledged to return on Dec. 4 ― lugging a podium for Bilal so that, organizers said, she can explain changes she intends to make, including barring ICE.
The sheriff did not immediately reply to a request for comment Thursday.
Members of No ICE Philly rally outside the Criminal Justice Center on Thursday, calling on the sheriff to cut off Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to the building.
“We want to put the sheriff on notice that we’re watching,” said Aniqa Raihan, a No ICE Philly organizer. “We want to raise awareness of the fact … that ICE is using the courthouse as a hunting ground.”
As word of plans for the demonstration spread, Bilal issued a statement aimed at “addressing public concerns” around ICE activity.
“Let me be very clear: the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office does not partner with ICE,” the sheriff said. “Our deputies do not assist ICE, share information, or participate in immigration enforcement.”
Deputies verify the credentials of ICE agents entering the courthouse ― and those agents are not permitted to make arrests in courtrooms or anywhere else inside, she said.
Raihan and other advocates say that is no protection. ICE agents linger in the lobby, they said, then follow their target outside and quickly make the arrest.
A police department spokesperson said at the time that the Spanish-speaking officer offered to walk with the man to help translate, but did not detain him. The Defender Association of Philadelphia and others questioned how the incident squared with the city’s sanctuary policies.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Philadelphia did not reply to a request for comment.
On Thursday, about 40 demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse, chanting and singing under the watchful eye of city police officers and sheriff’s deputies. No ICE agents were visible. Protesters carried signs to indicate that they, too, were watching, raising colorful cardboard eyeballs, eyeglasses, and magnifiers.
Lenore Ramos, the community defense organizer with the Juntos advocacy group, called on the sheriff and city government officials to protect immigrants at the courthouse. Proclaiming Philadelphia a welcoming city, she said, is not just a slogan ― it’s a promise, one that local government must fulfill.
“The city is not standing behind our immigrant communities,” Ramos said. “It is walking all over them.”
In an interview earlier this week, Whitney Viets, an immigration counsel at the Defender Association, said ICE agents are at the courthouse almost every day, and arrests occur there almost daily.
The government does not publicly release data detailing where most immigration arrests occur, but Viets estimated that dozens of arrests have taken place at the courthouse since the start of the year. Masked plainclothes agents are seen outside the building, in the lobby, in courtrooms, and in hallways, she said.
“Agents are effectively doing enforcement in the courthouse, through identification,” she said.
She explained that agents may identify a person they are seeking in or near a courtroom, then either follow them outside or alert other agents who are already waiting on the sidewalk.
It is unclear where ICE is obtaining information on who will be at the courthouse on any particular day, although some details about ongoing criminal cases are available in public records.One result of ICE enforcement, she said, is people are afraid to come to court.
“This is about whether our justice system operates effectively,” Viets said. “The actions of ICE have gotten brazen. … What we need at this time is public engagement against this activity.”
No ICE Philly decried “kidnappings” by the agency and demanded the sheriff “protect everyone inside and outside the courthouse,” including “immigrants targeted by ICE as well as citizens observing and documenting ICE arrests.”
The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office is in charge of courthouse security. However, Bilal said in her statement, her office has no authority to intervene in lawful activities that are conducted off the property.
“Inside the courthouse, everyone’s rights and safety are protected equally under the law,” she said. “We are law enforcement professionals who follow the law.”
Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal stands to be recognized at City Hall in March.
In Philadelphia and places around the country, courthouses have become disputed locales as the Trump administration pursues ever-more-aggressive arrest and deportation policies.
Under President Joe Biden, limits were set on what ICE could do at courthouses. Agents were permitted to take action at or near a courthouse only if it involved a threat to national security, an imminent risk of death or violence, the pursuit of someone who threatened the public safety, or a risk of destruction of evidence.
Even then, advocacy groups accused ICE of violating the policy by arresting people who were only short distances from courthouses.
The Biden restrictions on ICE vanished the day after Trump took office.
The new guidance said agents could conduct enforcement actions in or near courthouses ― period. The only conditions were that agents must have credible information that their target would be present at a specific location and that the local jurisdiction had not passed laws barring such enforcement.
The guidance said that, to the extent practicable, ICE action should take place in nonpublic areas of the courthouse and be done in collaboration with court security staff. Officers should generally avoid making arrests in or near family or small-claims courts.
The Department of Homeland Security said that the Biden administration had “thwarted law enforcement” from doing its job, that arresting immigrants in courthouses is safer for agents and the public because those being sought have passed through metal detectors and security checkpoints.
“The ability of law enforcement to make arrests of criminal illegal aliens in courthouses is common sense,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said earlier this year. “It conserves valuable law enforcement resources because they already know where a target will be.”
Philadelphia city officials have said repeatedly that they do not cooperate with ICE, and that the sanctuary city policies created under former Mayor Jim Kenney remain in place under Mayor Cherelle L. Parker.
Protesters Elias Siegelman, right, with No Ice Philly, who also works with the groups Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Progressive Victory, outside the ICE office, in Philadelphia on Oct. 30.
Nationally, 10 months into the Trump administration, some Democratic jurisdictions are acting to tighten ICE access at courthouses.
In Connecticut this month, state lawmakers passed a bill to bar most civil immigration arrests at courthouses, unless federal authorities have obtained a signed judicial warrant in advance.
The Senate bill, already approved by the House, also bans law enforcement officers from wearing face coverings in court, Connecticut Public Radio reported. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont is expected to sign the measure.
Last month in Chicago, which has faced weeks of controversial immigration enforcement, the top Cook County judge barred ICE from arresting people at courthouses. That came as federal agents stationed themselves outside courthouses, drawing crowds of protesters, CBS News reported.
On Monday, a federal judge dismissed a Trump administration challenge to a New York law that barred the immigration arrests of people going into and out of courthouses. New York passed the Protect Our Courts Act in 2020, during Trump’s first term, a law the administration said had imposed unconstitutional restrictions on enforcement, the Hill reported.
The Thursday rally marked the third recent protest by No ICE Philly, which seeks to stop agency activity in the city. The organization’s Halloween Eve demonstration outside the ICE office erupted into physical confrontations with police, with several people pushed to the ground and four arrested.
The arrests came after some demonstrators attempted to stop ICE vehicles from leaving the facility at Eighth and Cherry Streets.
No ICE Philly organizers said Thursday that they will continue to scrutinize ICE activity at the courthouse.
“There are people watching. We have eyes on this,” Raihan said, adding that ICE is “allowed to hang in the lobby, sometimes in the courtrooms.”
“Somehow they seem to know when somebody vulnerable is in the courthouse. … We’re concerned with how they’re finding out that information.”
City Councilmember Jimmy Harrity wants to revisit the contentious debate that led to the 2017 creation of Philadelphia’s sweetened beverage tax, arguing that the levy has cost the city jobs and will eventually prove insufficient to pay for the programs it was enacted to support, such as subsidized prekindergarten.
“We‘re going to keep on pulling more money out of the general fund each year, taking away from other programs,” Harrity, a Democrat, said Monday at a hearing of Council’s Labor and Civil Service Committee, which he chairs. “If we were in business and these numbers were the numbers of the business, we wouldn’t be in business long.”
The tax, which is paid by distributors of sweetened beverages sold in Philadelphia, is 1.5 cents per ounce. Council approved it in 2016 despite vociferous opposition from the beverage industry and Teamsters Local 830, which testified Monday the tax has led to 1,000 of its members who drove trucks for distributors losing work.
Harrity,an ally of the Teamsters, noted that revenue from the tax has declined as Philadelphians either drink fewer sweetened beverages or find ways to purchase them outside the city. The tax produced about $73.4 million in the 2023 fiscal year, but only $64.4 million last year, he said.
A Council staffer arranges a table of sugary drinks before Councilmember Jimmy Harrity (not shown) holds a hearing in City Council Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages.
For Harrity, that means that the city should consider eliminating the “soda tax,” as it is widely known, in favor of a more “sustainable” funding stream. He did not offer any alternatives.
But based on his colleagues’ reactions, it is unlikely the tax will be reconsidered in a serious way any time soon.
Marcy Boroff with Children First dresses as a coke can for a City Council hearing Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages. She was there to support the tax. Children First advocates for policy changes to improve child health, education, and welfare, especially for low-income children. .
And they stressed its critical role in paying for the three initiatives that Kenney launched alongside the tax: PHL Pre-K, which provides free childcare to 5,250 kids; community schools, which offer a multitude of services to families in 20 Philly schools; and the Rebuild program, which renovates and improves recreation centers and playgrounds.
“We have to make tough decisions that will actually benefit the greater good, and that’s what we did here,” Democratic Councilmember Rue Landau said during the hearing, adding that “the majority of us up here on this panel think this is a great investment.”
“We would not have been able to fund these programs without that beverage tax money,” said city Finance Director Rob Dubow, who has held his role under Parker, Kenney, and former Mayor Michael A. Nutter. Nutter twice tried unsuccessfully to implement a “soda tax” before Kenney succeeded.
Dubow told lawmakers that the decline in the tax’s revenue over time was always part of the plan and that city leaders intended for the regular city budget to make up the difference for funding Rebuild, pre-K, and community schools when they created the tax. The moment when the soda tax began taking in less money than the city pays out for the three programs it helped launch was the 2024 fiscal year, he said.
“We pay for it out of the general fund, which is what we always intended we would do,” Dubow said.
This year, Rebuild, pre-K, and community schools are projected to cost $110 million, Dubow said. Of that, $73 million pays for the 5,250 slots in the city’s pre-K program.
Preschoolers and their caregivers attend a City Council hearing held by Councilmember Jimmy Harrity Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages. The tax funds the city’s universal pre-kindergarten program
‘Why not Taj Mahals?’
Councilmember Brian O’Neill was the only other Council member besides Harrity to vocally criticize the tax at Monday’s hearing.
O’Neill, Council’s lone Republican, noted that Council members have traditionally had control over capital funding for Philadelphia Parks and Recreation projects in their districts. That money, he noted, is split evenly among the 10 district Council members.
“This program — Rebuild, they call it — they didn’t decide to bring playgrounds up to some minimum level where people over the years may not have spent their money well,” O’Neill said. “They decided to build Taj Mahals in many cases. … You know what happens when you build a playground and spend tons of money on it? … All the playgrounds around it look terrible.“
Councilmember Brian J. O’Neill (center) speaks during a hearing in City Council Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages. Behind him, front to rear, are: Councilmembers Kendra Brooks, Jimmy Harrity, Nina Ahmad, and Rue Landau.
That comment did not go over well with some of his colleagues.
“My community benefited from a rec center that was through the Rebuild program,” said Councilmember Kendra Brooks, a member of the progressive Working Families Party who lives in Nicetown. “It’s not a Taj Mahal. It’s a quality rec center in the middle of North Philadelphia. It does not have everything, because I personally went and bought a refrigerator.”
And Councilmember Nina Ahmad, a Democrat, questioned why building grandiose rec centers would be a problem in the first place.
“Why not Taj Mahals for all our folks? Why not have the best-quality rec centers so our children want to go there, our children want to spend time there?” Ahmad said. “We live in a first-world country and yet we are begging for scraps for our youngest citizens.”
City Controller Christy Brady, seeking her first full term as Philadelphia’s independently elected fiscal watchdog, is being challenged by Republican Ari Patrinos in the Nov. 4 general election.
The controller’s office is charged with auditing the city’s finances and investigating fraud, waste, and abuse.
But despite that critical role, there hasn’t been much drama in this year’s race.
Patrinos, a former stockbroker and Philadelphia public school teacher, acknowledged the odds are against him in heavily Democratic Philadelphia and said he has no particular complaints about Brady’s performance.
Instead, he said, he ran because “it was important that somebody run on the ticket.”
“The truth is nobody wanted to run, and my ward leader asked me if I would run,” said Patrinos, who has not reported raising any money for his campaign. “I didn’t have any specific attacks on Brady. My concern is that the city is too single-party, and I think the city functions better when you have a two-party system.”
Brady, a Democrat who has a $250,000 campaign war chest she likely won’t need to use this year, has the support of much of the local political establishment, including the Democratic City Committee and the building trades unions.
A 30-year veteran of the controller’s office, Brady has struck a notably conciliatory tone during her tenure, striving to work collaboratively with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration rather than butt heads with the executive branch, as many of her predecessors have done.
“Because of my experience when I took office two years ago, I hit the ground running,” she said.
Seeking a full four-year term for the first time, Brady this year ran uncontested in the Democratic primary.
“The biggest question I get [on the campaign trail] is: What does a controller do?” she said. “And so I’m getting out there and spreading the word of what we’re currently working on and what we do in the office.”
The controller earns an annual salary of $171,000 and oversees an office with more than 120 employees and a budget of about $11.8 million.
Patrinos also had no opponent in the May primary. He said he has been spending much of his time on the campaign trail promoting Pat Dugan’s campaign for district attorney.
“I spend like half my time when I campaign advocating for Dugan because I’m very concerned about the crime,” Patrinos said.
From Philly to Harvard and back
Patrinos, who lives in Chestnut Hill, said he was a Democrat until about four years ago, adding that he voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
His conversion was prompted primarily by his alma mater, Harvard College, which he felt had too enthusiastically embraced a “woke” stance.
“The immediate driving factor was on the cultural front. It was what was going at Harvard,” he said. “I’m a little bit of an anti-woke warrior. … 2020 was peak woke.“
Academia’s leftward trajectory and the Biden administration’s “terrible” handling of the pandemic combined to leave Patrinos with the feeling that he had no place in the Democratic Party, he said.
“These Ivy League liberal types who really don’t have a sense of what’s going on in the lives of average Americans — they seemed to be so indifferent to the negative effects of their policies,” he said.
He became involved in local Republican politics and helped boost President Donald Trump’s Philadelphia campaign in 2024.
“I’m not a MAGA guy, so I didn’t join [the GOP] because of Trump,” he said, “but honestly I’m very happy with the higher education stuff, the hardcore stand he’s taken with Harvard.”
Patrinos, a Central High School graduate who also has a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago, was a stockbroker in New York City before moving back to Philly about 15 years ago.
He then became a math and history teacher and worked at West Philadelphia High School and Strawberry Mansion High School. Patrinos said he suffered a seizure several years ago that temporarily limited his employment opportunities, but is now seeking other jobs should he come up short against Brady.
If elected, Patrinos said, he would audit the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I), examine whether SEPTA could do a better job preventing fare evasion, and push the school district to prepare more students for careers in information technology.
Controller and mayor on the same page
Brady’s approach to the mayor’s administration is the exception when it comes to the recent history of her office.
A decade ago, then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz’s relationship with Mayor Michael A. Nutter became so toxic that Nutter at one point issued a statement calling Butkovitz “a sad and sick person.”
Their successors, Kenney and Rhynhart, started off with widespread expectations that they might have a better working partnership, given that Rhynhart served as a top executive branch official under Nutter and, briefly, Kenney. But the relationship soured in a matter of months after Rhynhart publicly criticized the administration’s bookkeeping, prompting a call from Kenney that reportedly “got personal” and the cancellation of their planned monthly meetings.
Cherelle L. Parker, then a candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, stops to greet a group, including Christy Brady,(center seated), during election day lunch at Famous 4th Street Deli in Philadelphia on Tuesday, May 16, 2023.
That outcome does not appear likely with Brady and Parker.
Brady shares many political allies with Parker, especially the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, a coalition of unions that spends big on elections and has reason to be pleased with both Brady and Parker’s tenures so far.
Brady, for instance, touts her office’s audit of L&I that revealed inspectors often failed to confirm that construction sites were being run by licensed contractors — providing ammunition to the trades unions, which often rail against “fly-by-night” contractors that do not employ their members. And the mayor last year split the department into two agencies, with one focused largely on enforcing construction regulations.
Brady said her healthy relationship with the Parker administration should not be confused with a reticence to call out fraud and waste.
“I am an independently elected official. I am not afraid to stand up for what’s right,” she said. “I believe in the rules and regulations in city government.”
Her approach to the executive branch, she said, is designed to advance the aim of any auditor: ”getting management to implement your recommendations.”
“In my experience in the controller’s office, when you fight, they’re not going to listen to your recommendation,” said Brady, a certified public accountant who graduated from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, now Jefferson University. “When we issue our reports, the mayor has been thanking me for the recommendations. And I really appreciate that relationship because I believe that we can make change.”
Staff writer Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.
Philadelphia lawmakers are for the third time trying to pass legislation requiring that stores charge customers a fee for paper bags. And for the third time, it’s facing opposition from the mayor.
A City Council committee on Monday advanced legislation requiring all grocery stores, convenience shops, and other retailers in the city charge 10 cents per nonreusable bag. The goal is to update the city’s already existing ban on the plastic variety and encourage shoppers to bring their own bags.
The full Council could vote on the new legislation in the coming weeks. It is cosponsored by a majority of Council members, meaning it is likely to pass the chamber.
City Councilmember Mark Squilla, the architect of the plastic bag ban that first passed in 2019, said during the hearing Monday that he’s aiming to “change behavior.” The city says the use of paper bags has skyrocketed since the plastic bag ban took effect — studies show that while they are recyclable, unlike plastic, paper bags are still less energy efficient than reusable ones.
Squilla’s original plastic bag ban legislation included a required 15-cent fee on paper bags, but he stripped it from the bill after opposition from former Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration. In 2023, Council passed legislation to institute it, but Kenney issued a pocket veto, meaning he left office without taking action on the legislation, effectively killing it.
It wasn’t clear at the time if Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, who was the incoming mayor, would support the legislation if it were reintroduced. She made cleaning and greening the city a top campaign promise, and environmental advocates hoped she’d support efforts to reduce single-use bag reliance.
But one of Parker’s top officials testified in opposition to the legislation Monday.
Carlton Williams, the director of Parker’s Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, called Squilla’s effort well-intentioned. But he said charging bag fees could disproportionately impact low-income Philadelphians experiencing high grocery costs, “especially given the current economy.” He also said the fees could push shoppers out of the city and harm mom-and-pop businesses that already operate with low margins.
Councilmember Mark Squilla takes his seat in Council chambers on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024, before a scheduled committee vote. Squilla authored legislation requiring stores charge a fee for paper bags.
If the legislation passes Council, Parker could sign or veto it. She could also let it lapse into law without her signature. If she vetoed the legislation — it would be her first since taking office last year — Council could override her veto with 12 votes out of the 17-member chamber.
When the paper bag bill was introduced in 2019, members of Kenney’s administration also said at the time that they were concerned that fees on paper bags would hurt the poorest Philadelphians. Former City Councilmember Maria Quiñones Sánchez similarly described it as akin to a regressive tax.
However, proponents of the legislation said Monday that they don’t think the argument holds up.
Maurice Sampson, the eastern Pennsylvania director of the environmental group Clean Water Action, said prices on essentials such as food could rise for everyone if stores absorb the costs of paper bags.
“There is no foundation or basis,” he said, ”in the idea that fees on bags will hurt low-income people.”
