Sam Katz Thinks Philadelphia Is Finally Ready for Him

NewsMax ^ | 10/21/03 | Dave Eberhart

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

If mayoral elections decided winners by which candidate had the highest score in training, knowledge and aptitude, perennial candidate Sam Katz would have long ago gained the office he most covets in the world: mayor of Philadelphia. Republican Katz, who even designed his own urban-studies major at Johns Hopkins University before going on to earn a master’s degree in urban affairs and policy analysis from New School University, says he has been preparing for the job all his life.

“It’s the only job I ever wanted,” he said.

On Nov. 4, after the polls close, Katz will know if he has finally won the endurance race he began as a boy.

The race has implications beyond Katz’s personal ambition. According to analysts, a Republican mayoral victory in Philadelphia could help President Bush capture Pennsylvania in the 2004 presidential election.

This latest reach for the golden ring, however, is not Katz’s first attempt.

Back in 1991, Katz sought the Republican nomination for mayor but lost in the primary.

“I thought I was ready,” he told the Philadelphia News, as if analyzing how he had failed to make the finals at an Olympic event. “I’d been training for the job for 20 years.”

Katz went on to head the campaign of Joseph P. Eagan, the Republican nominee, only to see him defeated.

As rave testimony to Katz’s expertise, however, Democrat Mayor-elect Edward Rendell selected rival Katz to serve as the city’s chief financial adviser.

At the time Katz was co-heading Philadelphia-based Public Financial Management Inc., then the nation’s leading financial advisory firm for municipal bonds.

“I don’t think there is anyone who knows the financial problems facing the city better than Sam Katz and John White,” Rendell said, referring to PFM’s two co-chief executive officers.

Katz’s first assignment: draft a five-year fiscal strategy in anticipation of a much-delayed deficit bond issue.

The story of his political life was already forming. Always a bridesmaid … Perhaps more aptly, he seemed to be slated to play the role of “Dirty Harry” in the mean, down-and-dirty task of keeping Philadelphia and other cities afloat.

Like Clint Eastwood’s city-hall-fighting Dirty Harry character, Katz over time became disillusioned with city leadership – not only in Philadelphia but in cities such as Yonkers, N.Y., and even the Big Apple, where he once had a brief stint working with Mayor John Lindsay.

“Only in retrospect,” he told the News, “did I understand that Lindsay was a terrible mayor.”

Wearing the Republican colors in 1999, Katz lost to Mayor John Street, who is black, by less than 10,000 votes, with the vote falling along racial lines.

Polls show another squeaker for Katz’s rematch with the incumbent Street, even though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the city 4-to-1.

Street Under FBI Wiretap

Adding extra flavor to the tight contest, of course, is the national story surrounding the FBI bug that was found in the office of Mayor Street.

The FBI says the incumbent is the “subject” of a probe. Authorities have indicated that the probe is not related to Street’s campaign but have otherwise been mum.

However, in recent months federal agents have subpoenaed city agencies for records dealing with city contracts, including a $13.6 million maintenance contract at the city-owned Philadelphia International Airport.

Katz has made political hay with Street’s ordeal. He said that although Street was “innocent until proven otherwise,” the mayor had fostered a corrupt city culture.

Katz has been less magnanimous about Street’s refusal to return $125,000 in allegedly fraudulent corporate campaign donations, filing a private criminal complaint along with a letter to District Attorney Lynne Abraham requesting a criminal investigation.

Almost as if he finds the probe and the campaign financing wrinkles a distraction, Katz seemingly would rather concentrate on the devilish details of managing the nation’s fifth-largest city. One visit to the candidate’s busy Web site is enough to send one’s head spinning with its potpourri of technical discussions and proposals.

A typical example from a Katz tome on taxes and incentives:

“The city wage tax and the business privilege tax contribute to the high cost of doing business in this city. A conservative solution for this problem has traditionally been to provide packages where projects have been subsidized by the city. This method has been successful to a very small extent for the reason that other communities, some of which have greater resources than we do, also provide packages, often with the same advantages. This, in turn, causes us to get into a bidding war throughout the region, which is the case right now with large companies like Aramark and Cigna. At the end of the day, the city or location with the highest bid tends to win …”

But then Katz has always had a reputation as the ultimate pragmatist, even when it comes to party affiliation.

He worked for Democrat Lou Hill in 1975, then for black insurgent congressional candidate Bill Gray in 1976 and Senate candidate Bill Green that fall, all unsuccessful campaigns, before making a political right turn in the 1980s.

In 1990 he changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican, eschewing the predictable charge that the change of heart was owing solely to the political calculus that a white candidate could win a Philly mayoral race only as a Republican.

Instead, Katz points to factors such as his turbulent connection to longtime friend W. Wilson Goode, whom he had supported to become the city’s first black mayor in 1983.

Katz could never forget or forgive the MOVE crisis of May 1985, when the city, led by Mayor Goode, dropped a bomb on a row house in an attempt to evict members of a radical back-to-nature organization who had holed up inside.

The explosive used to create the bomb, which destroyed 61 homes and devastated 100 more, leaving 250 people homeless, was obtained illegally by the Philadelphia Police Department.

Goode's debacle left him “feeling that the Philadelphia Democratic Party and Sam Katz were not in the same place,” he concluded.

In any event, Katz evolved to an about-face from the legacy of his liberal Democrat parents. There have been morphs in his anti-war views of the 1960s and '70s as well.

In college Katz became a student spokesman for getting recruiters off campus and successfully got a medical deferment to avoid the Vietnam draft.

But Katz maintains that his experience with the counterculture was just a fling. “I was never a wacko liberal,” he told the News. Nowadays he admits to feeling tear-wrenching guilt about his deferment.

The truth was that the man on a mission had little time to develop as a hippie, although he admits to smoking - and inhaling - marijuana in college. With his grail of being mayor of his beloved Philadelphia always in mind, he got a hair cut and shipped off to Harrisburg to intern as a legislative aide.

Rapidly, the halcyon days on campus receded, with Katz establishing himself in business and shouldering the sobering responsibilities of making payrolls and providing for a wife and four children.

Leaving PFM in 1994, Katz has remained an active business leader, serving as a partner with Wynnefield Capital Advisors Inc., a private equity fund management firm. He also serves as a director of Erie Insurance Group, Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Co. and GCom2 Solutions.

While with PFM, he developed and implemented landmark finance plans for major public and private projects including airports, highways, power facilities, water utilities and convention centers. His most notable projects include Orlando International Airport, the Los Angeles Transit System, the Washington METRO, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, First Union Center, Jacobs Field, Coors Field and America West Arena.

His busy civic commitments included serving as a member of the Philadelphia Board of Education (1981-85). He serves on the boards of City Year, Children’s Scholarship Fund of Philadelphia, Greater Philadelphia Salvation Army, University City Science Center, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, BioAdvance Greenhouse of Southeastern Pennsylvania and the National Museum of American Jewish History.

And the candidate has parlayed his pragmatic, detail-oriented campaign into a bevy of endorsements, including: the Gas Works Employees Union, Communications Workers of America, Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance, Fraternal Order of Housing Police, Association of Catholic Teachers, Collaboration of African Communities, Carpenters, Teamsters, Firefighters, Koreans, Asian-American Leaders …

Katz has managed to turn heads with his ideas, all under his theme banner of “One Team, One Philadelphia.”

Among a huge catalog of same, he has promised to:

Place kiosks in publicly accessible locations throughout the city so that all residents have convenient access to online city services.

Establish a 311 call center to handle calls and complaints about city services, questions and other information.

Create neighborhood service centers that allow residents and business owners to identify priorities for change and renewal.

Implement CitiStat, a system of performance measurement and efficiency for city services. In examining candidate Katz, one is left with the indelible impression that this time out nothing will be left to chance. If all the sweat and preparation results in but a last hurrah, it won’t be on account of not giving all there is to give.

And one other thing. If Democrat stronghold cities can elect Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani, Brett Schundler and Richard Riordan, who successfully turned their cities around, the City of Brotherly Love can take a chance on Sam Katz.