Editorial for January 3, 2008 edition:


He’s just a politician

"It’s a terrible, terrible thing to be out of shape and unfit," Mayor John Street said during a year-end news conference to announce his final citywide fitness program under the direction of Gwen Foster, his good buddy and extravagantly paid "fitness czar."
We can only hope that, in these last days of his second and final term, the mayor himself isn’t out of shape. He’ll need washboard abs and strong, even breaths as he hauls those heavy money bags filled with nearly $564,000 out of City Hall.
Street should call his final fitness program Take the Money and Run.
Yeah, yeah, it’s too late to get overly hot and bothered by Street’s decision to seize a ton of dough from the city’s joke of a pension program, not to mention his last-minute announcement that he’ll take a ton of dough in past cost-of-living raises that he’d rejected, it is now clear, in a disingenuous display of sharing the pain of the little guy, of putting the city’s interests first.
You can’t fault Street’s giddiness. There’s a lump-sum payment of $452,700 from the controversial Deferred Retirement Option Plan, or DROP, a lump payment of almost $111,000 in retroactive raises . . . and don’t forget his yearly pension, roughly $115,700.
When the pundits look back, his eight years as mayor will have been characterized by some modest successes but a largely unremarkable record of improving life and economics for Philadelphia residents and the neighborhoods where they live.
What John Street has shown everyone is that, in the end, it’s just politics as usual. It’s the hypocrisy of getting rich off programs that he once pooh-poohed as being destructive to the city’s fiscal health. It’s the heart-warming story of a brash City Council neophyte who begins a government career in 1980 and rebounds from personal financial woes and bankruptcy to hand himself the American Dream.
Be sure to thank the taxpayers, mayor. ••

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