In discussions and arguments about the 76ers’ highly contested proposal to build a new downtown arena, one person comes up more than almost any other: Councilmember Mark Squilla.
That’s because the 12-year City Council member basically has the power to single-handedly allow the arena plan to go forward or to bring it to a halt.
Squilla was re-elected in November with about 30,000 votes, or roughly 2% of the city’s population. Yet he alone will decide whether the 76ers organization and its partners get the green light to invest $1.3 billion, employ thousands of workers, potentially boost the languishing East Market area and significantly impact the city’s historic Chinatown neighborhood.
“I feel comfortable making that decision,” Squilla told the Inquirer last year, “and it doesn’t weigh on me or [make me] lose any sleep over it.”
Technically, any zoning bills the project needs will require the support of a majority of councilmembers. But the proposed arena site is in Squilla’s district, and because of an unofficial policy called “councilmanic prerogative,” the rest of council will certainly follow his lead.
While only the 10 councilmembers elected by geographic districts have that power, such votes almost always get the support of the full 17-member council, including the seven at-large members who run citywide.
For years, critics have argued that this practice of legislative courtesy gives individual elected officials too much influence and invites corruption, while its supporters say it gives residents a voice in development in their neighborhoods. Here’s a look at how it works.
The power to pick winners
Councilmanic prerogative doesn’t just mean a district councilmember decides if a bill comes up for consideration and whether it passes.
The tradition effectively gives them veto power over planning, zoning, and land-use decisions, with city officials deferring to them on every step of the process.
In some cases they effectively get to pick project developers, especially for city-owned properties.
Councilmember Cindy Bass, for example, has for years blocked redevelopment of the historic Germantown YMCA because she insists that a political backer of hers, KBK Enterprises, keep the contract to renovate it despite not making progress on the project.
Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who represents parts of South and Southwest Philadelphia, and his wife were indicted federally in 2020 in connection to his use of prerogative. The couple were acquitted of charges in 2022 alleging that his wife was paid by a developer in exchange for Johnson using his influence to help a developer maintain control of properties it had failed to develop.
Johnson repeatedly helped a childhood friend, Felton Hayman, sidestep the normal city land disposition process and acquire several properties at cut-rate prices. Hayman, who resold them for significant profit, was later charged in connection with the deals.
Johnson’s predecessor in the council presidency, Darrell Clarke, also helped a supporter get a city property at a discount.
Blocking injection sites and bike lanes
Councilmanic prerogative additionally gives members personal control over other types of land-use decisions, from street layouts to parking regulations to what kind of businesses can set up shop in their districts, leading to patchwork policies.
Last year, when council passed a bill making it difficult to open safe injection sites, the ban applied across the city — except District 3 in West Philadelphia.
That wasn’t because of input from planning or public health experts about where it might make sense to site such facilities — if they ever become legal — but because 3rd district Councilmember Jamie Gauthier was the only one who didn’t want a ban.
As it does whenever a mayor vetoes a measure involving councilmanic prerogative, council overrode then-Mayor Jim Kenney’s attempt to block the safe injection site bill.
It also override his veto of a measure banning potential recreational marijuana shops in two districts, Councilmember Brian O’Neill’s District 10 in the Far Northeast and Councilmember Curtis Jones’ District 4 in West and Northwest Philly.
Councilmanic prerogative was in play in 2022, when the city prepared to move ahead with a new, safer “road diet” design for traffic-clogged Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, following a decade of planning and intensive community consultation.
Squilla introduced a bill making needed changes to parking and loading regulations — but only for the half of the road within his district, out of deference to Johnson, whose district encompasses the other half.
Some area residents were opposed to the improvements, so Johnson refused most of them for Washington Ave’s eastern stretch, except for repaving.
Sometimes councilmembers will block a project in their district as a way to extract concessions from some involved party.
Then-Councilmember Jannie Blackwell effectively blocked the Barnes’ Foundation’s move to Philly for years because it involved relocating a youth detention facility to her district; she finally yielded when she got a $12 million grant for a community center named after her late husband.
“It’s easy to bribe one councilman”
Councilmanic prerogative has its roots in city and state laws granting council power over many sales of city-owned land, zoning, and other development matters, according to a 2015 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
While other cities with district representation like Chicago and New York have similar policies, ”Philadelphia has a more robust prerogative tradition than most cities, owing to such factors as decades of one-party rule, a large supply of publicly owned land, and a long legislative tradition of adjusting the zoning code,” the report says.
Prerogative gave residents and their elected councilmembers a tool to fight the kind of disastrous urban renewal efforts in the mid-20th century that decimated whole neighborhoods, according to Akira Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the impact of government policy on marginalized communities.
An outdated zoning code also couldn’t accommodate proposals for condos and other new types of projects, requiring council to grant variances and shifting power away from planning officials. In the 21st century, rising property values and a boom in housing construction increasingly made council a target for developers eager to acquire and build on city land.
“It’s easy for developers to bribe one councilman. It’s much harder to bribe the redevelopment authority, the planning commission, all the registered neighborhood organizations and neighborhood groups,” Rodriguez told WHYY News in 2019.
From 2008 to April 2014, council passed 730 prerogative bills, all but four of them unanimously, per the Pew report.
Usually nothing improper occurred, but the report notes that council’s control over land use played a role in all six cases of councilmembers being convicted of wrongdoing between 1981 and 2015.
They include Rick Mariano, who was convicted in 2006 of taking bribes to help a businessman buy city land and win contracts. Another, Leland Beloff, went to jail in the late 1980s for trying to shake down developer Willard Rouse, who needed city ordinances passed to get funding for a project at Penn’s Landing.
Resistance is (usually) futile
Every once in a while, someone pushes back against councilmanic prerogative.
At least once, it’s been successfully challenged in court. When Ori Feibush ran against Johnson in 2015, the councilmember allegedly retaliated by killing the sale of two properties to the South Philly developer. Feibush sued Johnson and won a $34,000 judgment against the city.
Helen Gym, at at-large councilmember at the time, got some attention in 2019 for voting against her colleague Jannie Blackwell’s bill banning food trucks on Market Street near Drexel University. The measure passed.
The Pew report notes a handful of other dissenting votes on prerogative bills in the 2010s, all of which became law. In one case then-Councilmember W. Wilson Goode Jr. voted against a bill from Squilla allowing a digital billboard at a performance venue; it passed, the mayor vetoed it, and Squilla didn’t push for an override.
One of the biggest violations of councilmanic prerogative occurred in 2002, when at-large member Thacher Longstreth intervened in a complicated political battle over a CSX Corp. property in South Philadelphia where IKEA wanted to build a store. Although it was in his colleague Frank DiCicco’s district, at Mayor John Street’s urging, the ailing Longstreth introduced a bill rezoning the site.
“You know, councilmatic prerogative — no one would introduce a bill in somebody’s district,” DiCicco recalled in an interview as City Council convened for its first session last week. “It was introduced to break me into moving forward with that legislation. But I held my ground and we got what we wanted from IKEA and the railroad.”
A tradition that isn’t going away
Councilmanic prerogative has been exhaustively written about, analyzed, criticized, and been the subject of calls for reform for years.
The consensus is that it isn’t going anywhere, in part because it’s difficult to ban a policy that isn’t explicitly written down anywhere and would probably require changing the city’s Home Rule Charter, at the very least.
It’s also stridently defended by councilmembers who argue it’s a powerful way to make developers pay close heed to the wishes of neighborhood residents and push back against the overarching visions of planners and mayoral administrations.
“Today, it’s my district. Tomorrow, it will be your districts,” Councilmember Jones said last June, after council overrode a veto of a nuisance-business bill, per the Inquirer. “If we cannot self-govern in various districts around the city and begin to determine what is acceptable, then why are we here?”
When Kenyatta Johnson was running for reelection in 2019, challenger Lauren Vidas attacked him for supporting councilmanic prerogative, saying it engendered a pay-to-play culture between elected officials and developers.
But Johnson defended the policy, and went on to win another term.
“Councilmanic prerogative is a tool we can use to protect neighborhoods from gentrification and from out-of-town developers who don’t know anything about the neighborhood,” Mark Nevins, a Johnson campaign spokesperson, told WHYY’s PlanPhilly. “Removing council members from the conversation about how city-owned property is sold and developed would basically prevent local residents from having a say in the future of their neighborhoods.”
WHYY News reporter Tom MacDonald contributed to this article.
