Philadelphia Fire Commissioner To Retire
Harold Hairston Stepping Down After 40 Years

PHILADELPHIA -- Philadelphia's fire commissioner says he is retiring on Aug. 1 because he's been on the job an unusually long time.

Harold Hairston has been commissioner for a dozen years, and he's been with the Philadelphia Fire Department for four decades. He notes that his predecessors spent an average of just four years on the job.

Also, the 64-year-old Hairston says that under the city's pension rules, he'd lose money if he were to continue to work.

Earlier this week, Hairston had announced $7 million in cuts to the Philadelphia Fire Department's budget, shutting down several ladder companies and engine companies.

Bush Speaks In Philadelphia
President Discussed Federal Grants To Affiliated Charity

PHILADELPHIA (AP) President Bush, on a fund-raising trip to Pennsylvania, said Wednesday he will commit more money to a program for delivering medications to people with HIV and AIDS. The administration said it would make an additional $20 million available immediately for the drug program.

The announcement was made as Bush flew here to visit the Greater Exodus Baptist Church and to raise money for the Republican Party. It was his 29th visit as president to Pennsylvania, a crucial state in his fight for re-election.

The administration also announced it was making Vietnam the 15th country in its $15 billion plan to fight AIDS.

Philadelphia City Council passes budget

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The City Council, as expected, approved a new budget despite the threat of a mayoral veto — but did so by a vote of 12-5, a margin large enough to override a veto.

Mayor John F. Street had vetoed the City Council's previous budget proposal.

Street cannot veto the new bill until July 1, when the new fiscal year begins, and the lack of a budget on that date would leave the city unable to pay employees and vendors. But if the 12 votes hold firm, the Council could reconvene and override the veto.

Council members also approved by the same margin a five-year spending plan, a requirement for the city to keep receiving millions in state funds.

The Council also approved a package of tax cuts opposed by the mayor, but did so by a vote of 11-6 — one vote shy of the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto. The mayor says the city cannot afford the revenue loss, while supporters say the tax cuts are needed to bring business to the city.

Street and council members have been at loggerheads over how aggressively to cut the city's wage and business privilege tax, both called disincentives for people to stay in or move to Philadelphia. Street has proposed small reductions while the Council wants sharper cuts.

Philadelphia's homeless efforts praised
San Francisco Chronicle

PHILADELPHIA -- The City of Brotherly Love, perhaps more than any other in the United States, has solved its problem with chronic homelessness.

"A few years ago, it didn't look anything like this," said Josette Adams, 36, as she pushed her toddler son in a stroller along Philadelphia's Market Street.

"You'd be walking like this, and people were sleeping everywhere, doing their business in the street, panhandling, yelling at you, getting in your face." She paused under the balmy sun, smiling slightly as she looked at the slowly moving mass of tourists and shoppers all around.

"Now?" she said. "I can come down, get a nice lunch, walk around with my son. You can have a nice day."

Philadelphia figured out how to help its chronically homeless people - how to give them more than just a blanket and a sandwich and an emergency cot. It got them into permanent housing with counseling services to help them handle their personal demons, particularly mental illness; it got them into drug rehabilitation; it got them into decent, clean shelters that are open 24 hours a day and have teams of doctors and social workers in offices a few feet away.

And, most important of all, the city sent squads of outreach workers into the streets, day and night, to persuade - not force - the homeless to make use of all these services. When the outreach workers made the offer, they had services and housing to offer right on the spot, with no waiting.

How did this turnaround happen?

Many people point to Sister Mary Scullion, a nun who owns no home and lives with homeless people she rescues from the sidewalk - but who can pick up the phone and get a quick return call from everyone from the mayor on up to President Bush's homelessness czar.

She spent the past two decades walking every Philadelphia park, alleyway and street corner where the down-and-out held out their hands or hid in a haze of mental illness, and she asked them again and again if they wanted to come inside. She built or badgered local leaders to build hundreds of supportive- housing units and launched outreach teams to emulate her street skills - and she did these things in such a famously relentless but caring way that she was called "Mother Teresa of the Homeless."


"To me it was just so simple," Scullion said, standing outside the headquarters of Project HOME, the homeless housing and counseling center she co-founded in 1989 with Joan Dawson-McConnon. "What enables a person to get off the street? They see that it's possible. All we did was make it possible."

The headquarters are in an economically ravaged stretch of North Philadelphia that contains both lawns trimmed with pride and crowds of young men on stoops downing 40-ounce beers. As Scullion talked, everyone who passed - street toughs, chronically homeless people in her housing program, elderly neighbors - called out a hello or stopped to chat.

"We are all each other's mirrors," Scullion said. "How we see each other affects how we help each other. If you're on the street and people show you respect, you feel respect."

That philosophy started everything that changed the face of Philadelphia in 1997 when City Council President - now Mayor - John Street proposed a rigid anti-loitering law aimed at clearing the streets of panhandlers. In the mid-1990s, city officials estimated that 4,500 homeless people lived in the city, and half of those were on the street at any given time; the downtown was considered overrun and inhospitable to tourists.

By 1998, there were 850 chronically homeless people on the streets.

Today there are 130.

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. reported last month that since homelessness efforts began in 1997, overnight visits by tourists have jumped 40 percent - while the same figure nationwide rose just 8.8 percent. Part of that is due to a big push by the city to promote tourism and the addition of two dozen hotels and more than 100 restaurants in the central city , but the virtual elimination of panhandlers and shopping carts heaped with their belongings made a key difference.

Today, the city puts 20 outreach workers on the street day and night, ranging from general social workers to police officers assigned to outreach and mental health specialists. And Hess, the city's homelessness "czar," makes a priority of pounding home the concept, day in and day out, that the homeless must be engaged and immediately brought into shelters or housing with counseling services upon demand.

"For anyone to say, 'I can't help this guy on the street,' is not acceptable, whether it's our cops or our outreach workers," said Hess, who is regularly tapped by homeless officials in cities across the country for advice. "I've waked the managing director (Philadelphia's city manager) up before to get him to open up a service so we can bring someone inside right away. You need the field guys to know that they are empowered to call us, me, anyone, at any time.

Cash-strapped city to buy $403,000 boat for cleaning Philadelphia waterways

PHILADELPHIA -- The city is planning to spend more than $500,000 this year on a boat that would clean up trash from local waterways, but critics say the expenditure would further trash city finances.

The skimmer boat, similar to the ones used near Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York, would be used to clean up debris in the Delaware River, the Schuylkill River and Tacony Creek.

But city Controller Jonathan Saidel said he can't fathom why the city would want to spend money on the boat now, when it's struggling with its financial books and the water department in February proposed a nearly 43 percent water and sewer rate increase over three years.

"I can't for the life of me figure out why they think this is so important that it has to be purchased now," Saidel said.

City officials say that if more isn't done to clean up those waterways, the state Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency might require even more costly measures.

The $514,390 price tag includes $403,450 for the boat, $24,575 for a water cannon, $61,485 for a trailer, $8,970 for cabin accessories, $10,610 for miscellaneous accessories and $5,300 for a demonstration, city officials said.

Water department officials said there was no connection between the proposed rate increase and the purchase of the boat.