Philadelphia Auditor's Race Draws Support from IBEW Local 98

Posted on Tue, May. 12, 2009
from the Philadelphia Inquirer web site


Butkovitz rivals say he's part of the problem

By Jeff Shields

Inquirer Staff Writer
This year's race to become the city's fiscal watchdog for the next four years will be a referendum on the man who now holds the job, as Controller Alan Butkovitz's challengers pose this question: Can you be part of the system and still reform it?

The practical advantages belong to Butkovitz, the first-term controller, over his two Democratic rivals in the May 19 primary. His challengers are former Common Pleas Court Judge John Braxton and Brett Mandel, the former head of Philadelphia Forward, which has campaigned for five years to reduce wage and business taxes in the city.

The winner will face Republican Al Schmidt, a former federal auditor, in November.

A Democratic ward leader in the Northeast and a former 15-year member of the House of Representatives, the 57-year-old Butkovitz has gathered support not just from establishment Democrats and unions but from the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity and Mayor Nutter, who was elected in 2007 on a promise to clean up the city.

How do you beat that? By attacking Butkovitz's strengths as his weakness, his opponents have concluded.

"If you're part of the old guard, you're not going to speak up, you're not going to stand up, and you're not going to say anything," said Braxton, 64, a Common Pleas Court judge for nearly 15 years who was thrown off the primary ballot on a technical issue when he sought the same office in 2005.

Mandel and Braxton have both accused Butkovitz of "gotcha" auditing and shameless self-promotion - tailoring audit findings to gain media attention for himself, not to effect lasting changes.

"The professional people who can do great work are being forced to do the 'gotcha' audits and political auditing, and that's causing long-term damage to the Controller's Office," said Mandel, 40, a financial analyst in the Controller's Office under Controller Jonathan Saidel. Mandel has written books on city economic policy and baseball.

Schmidt, 37, formerly worked as auditor in the federal Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, and as a consultant before moving to Philadelphia in 2005 and becoming executive director of the Republican City Committee. He left in January to run for controller.

Schmidt said he offers voters a simple choice in November - choose a minority party candidate to do a job that a Democrat will never do.

Schmidt told voters last week at a Philadelphia Magazine-sponsored debate at the National Constitution Center that he would "do something about the one-party rule that's ruining Philadelphia."

Butkovitz has embraced - his opponents say abused - the bully pulpit of his office, the main responsibility of which is auditing city expenditures by all departments.

By doing so, he has collected some considerable headlines with audits on EMS response times, the poor condition of police facilities, and a hidden $200 million deficit in the school district.

Butkovitz has won national awards, and combined with Nutter and municipal unions on a budgetsaving pension proposal to save $332 million by spreading out payments and adjusting accounting rules. But he has also been criticized for far-afield audits such as of juvenile crime in the subway system.

He has stretched the mandate of his office, speaking out on genocide in Darfur and educating low-income residents on financial services and banking.

"I want to continue fighting for the people of Philadelphia and saving taxpayers' money by eliminating waste, fraud, and mismanagement in city government - while offering new and innovative solutions to some of our most pressing problems," Butkovitz declares on his campaign Web site.

Butkovitz has emphasized performance audits, which test the effectiveness of a department, over traditional department audits, which simply make sure all the numbers line up.

Mandel says Butkovitz's failure to perform complete audits of departments yearly, as mandated by the City Charter, shirks his responsibility and compromises accountability. Butkovitz notes that Mandel's former boss, Saidel, also saw that yearly audits were not the best use of resources, and says his performance audits have revealed $413 million in savings and new revenues.

"I have been a strong and independent voice in the Controller's Office," Butkovitz said at a forum in Mayfair last week, noting that he had taken on such establishment figures as former schools chief executive Paul Vallas and convicted former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo.

Butkovitz is supported by elements of the traditional establishment, including Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other members of the building trades, and fellow ward leaders. Local 98 gave him $20,000 this year - nearly 30 percent of all his contributions since Jan. 1.

Butkovitz's two appointees on the Philadelphia Housing Authority are Debra Brady, wife of U.S. Rep. and Democratic City Committee Chairman Bob Brady, and Pat Eiding of the Philadelphia Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO; his campaign spokesman, Marty O'Rourke, has the same role for the Parking Authority, which Butkovitz is supposed to be auditing, and until recently, had it for the Controller's Office itself.

Mandel has made the Parking Authority audit a theme of his campaign, and recently held a news conference in front of the Parking Authority's Market Street office before being kicked off the property.

Following a series of articles in The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News about the Parking Authority's spending in the fall of 2007, Gov. Rendell asked Butkovitz for an audit. Butkovitz said Rendell held up the audit for six months by withholding the $80,000 promised for the audit. Butkovitz said he eventually proceeded on his own with the audit, and he asked for it to be rewritten because the findings were not as "sharp or hard hitting" as the underlying information indicated.

Braxton said the alleged foot-dragging is emblematic of the way Butkovitz does business. He said Butkovitz has largely avoided "sacred cows" such as the Police Department and the Department of Human Services, although Butkovitz said he has exposed police overtime abuses.

All the candidates have piled on Butkovitz for creating an office of community affairs, which is headed by his former legislative chief of staff, Lisa Deeley. Butkovitz said the agency is needed to reach out to the community to gather information on potential waste and abuse in city government.

Deeley serves as Butkovitz's campaign treasurer. She can hold the treasurer position because she is an employee only of the school district, one of six controller employees funded by the school district in a decades-old arrangement to pay for district audits. (Most city employees are prohibited from participating in political campaigns.)

In addition to Deeley, three of those employees are Democratic committee people, elected political positions they could not hold if they were on the city payroll. Those employees were there when Butkovitz arrived in office in 2006.

"He can't be expected to root out patronage when his own office benefits from patronage and practices patronage," said Schmidt.

"My concern is, Butkovitz is so entrenched in his political dealings that he cannot function," Braxton said.

Butkovitz has parried these attacks in public with the skill of a veteran politician. He has painted Mandel as a champion of property tax hikes; Mandel acknowledges that he would choose to raise property taxes before "job-killing" wage and business taxes, though says he is in favor of lower taxes all around.

Butkovitz has repeatedly criticized Braxton for his role as chair of the Berean Institute when the charter school in North Philly was skewered in 2008 in a state audit of the school. Braxton said the problems involved the school's management, not the board that oversaw it.