As Mayor Cherelle Parker has slowly rolled out her new administration, she’s made a couple big and unexpected changes in the way city government is organized.
First, she announced she was splitting the Streets Department in two. One commissioner will focus on paving, fixing potholes, plowing after snowstorms and other street-related duties, and the other on sanitation, including curbside trash collection, illegal dumping pickup and recycling.
Then last week the new mayor announced another split, this time of the critically important and often-criticized Department of Licenses & Inspections.
L&I now will have two leaders, too: one to make sure contractors and builders follow safety and construction codes, and the other in charge of business licenses and enforcing various quality of life laws.
In announcing the dual appointments, Parker pointed to a recent task force report that found that “mission creep” at the department has sapped its ability to do its job properly. L&I has for decades been accused of failing to protect workers and residents from unsafe buildings and careless construction practices, even as some small businesses and builders complain about excessively tough enforcement.
“L&I became tasked with enforcing a wide array of quality of life bills… bedbug legislation, nuisance business legislation, the plastic bag ban, and so much more,” Parker said last Thursday. Those duties took “the staff, the time, the attention and the resources away from L&I’s core mission, and that is the safe and lawful construction and use of buildings.”
Much still remains unclear about how the split will work and what other changes might be coming to L&I.
The report Parker mentioned, which was finished in December but not immediately released, also calls for pay and benefit hikes, more staff and funding for investigations, new training programs, and better responsiveness to complaints about construction sites.
It’s not the first time officials have called for deep reforms to L&I. Previous reports in 2006 and in 2014, after a Market Street building collapse that killed six people, found very similar problems, like low pay for inspectors and overbroad responsibilities.
The mayor did not discuss which of the new report’s other recommendations she wants to adopt or how much they will cost. That could become clearer when she presents her first annual budget proposal in March.
Council “must cease” giving L&I more work
The Joint Task Force on Regulatory Reform for the Department of Licenses and Inspections spent about six months conducting interviews and pulling together its report. Councilmember Mike Driscoll, who heads the council committee on L&I, sponsored legislation creating the task force last June.
The report was finished in mid-December. Driscoll’s office provided Billy Penn with a copy last week and then posted the document on the city’s website.
The task force offered more than two dozen recommendations, beginning with the suggestion that L&I should be separated into multiple departments, and that City Council “must cease passing legislation intended to be enforced by [L&I] that does not align with its core mission.”
“Simply put — and I’ve got to put myself in this category — many of these bills were unfunded mandates on L&I, and they certainly contributed to that thing called ‘mission creep,’” Parker said.
Among the recommendations regarding inspectors and other personnel:
• Hire more staff “to alleviate the overwhelming workload.”
• Consider boosting pay; research pay, benefits, and workload of similar jobs in the suburbs; offer hiring bonuses.
• Fix employee retention issues by letting field inspectors do some work from home, establishing a career ladder for unionized staff, removing degree requirements that keep workers from becoming managers, adopting residency waivers, promoting work-life balance, and other steps.
• Create a training division within L&I.
• Partner with Community College of Philadelphia or trade associations to help with recruitment.
Other key recommendations include:
• Let L&I keep more of its $88 million in annual revenue, rather than sending much of it to the city’s general fund. L&I spent $46 million in fiscal year 2022.
• For contractors and others found to have violated regulations, create a path for them to comply by applying for required permits.
• Improve coordination between L&I and the city’s 311 service request line, to make sure complaints are promptly referred to the right office.
• Improve the 311 dashboard so the public can understand how complaints are being handled.
• Make contractors and others make minimum payments toward fines and tax repayment agreements before they can get permits, licenses, and inspections. Publicize the risks of not making payments.
• Expand the Audit and Inspections unit, and the unit that handles construction complaints.
The task force was headed by Basil Merenda, a former state official who was director of the city’s Labor Department. Parker last week tapped Merenda as commissioner of L&I’s new Inspections, Safety and Compliance Division.
Bridget Collins-Greenwald, the former Commissioner of Public Property, will lead the department’s new Quality of Life Division.
Decades of chronic underfunding
Critics have been pointing out L&I’s alleged deficiencies for a long time.
Since it was founded in 1951 it’s been plagued by corruption, with hundreds of employees disciplined, fired or even charged for taking bribes. As recently as 2014, a deputy commissioner was charged with extorting more than $1 million from bar and club owners.
As development has heated up in the 21st century, criticism has focused on the agency’s inability to monitor all the buildings and construction sites under its purview and thus to prevent accidents, largely because it’s severely understaffed.
In 2006, then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz put out a “scathing” report saying the department “regularly fails to inspect dangerous buildings, follow up on code violations, or conduct yearly fire-safety inspections,” the Inquirer reported. He blamed technology problems, human error, and lack of personnel; the L&I commissioner contested some of the findings.
In 2008, Butkovitz followed up with an audit that found L&I was annually missing out on $20 million to $30 million in uncollected fees because of inadequacies in a program that managed the demolition of condemned buildings.
But the really intense scrutiny came after the 2013 collapse. During the demolition of a long-vacant building on Market Street, a freestanding wall toppled onto a Salvation Army thrift store next door. Six people died, a seventh died three weeks later, and 13 people were seriously injured. An L&I inspector responsible for inspecting the site later committed suicide.
The disaster led to lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, and several investigations and reports. A special commission formed by then-Mayor Michael Nutter concluded the department had become “fragmented by divergent mandates accumulated over decades of mission expansion, chronic underfunding and leadership with differing goals and methods. The resources of L&I are too often spent racing from emergency to emergency with little lasting impact or focus on long-term safety or solutions.”
The commission determined the department should be split in two, and “job titles, pay scales, training and career paths” of the departments should be examined “to make them more competitive with peer cities.” L&I also needed more money, the report said.
The deadly collapse also drew new attention to previous times when the city’s failure to enforce safety codes had led to deaths. They included a 1991 high-rise fire in which three firefighters died, a death from a falling sign in 1997, a pier collapse in 2000 that killed three women, and a 2012 fire in which two firefighters died.
While some recommendations were adopted, the department was never split up, salaries continued to lag, and employee retention remained a major problem.
A rash of rowhome collapses around 2019, many due to unqualified contractors digging basements, led to a new round of complaints that the city wasn’t monitoring building projects closely enough. City officials are also under pressure to respond to an epidemic of flawed new residential construction by builders looking to profit from Philly’s development boom.
And in December, City Controller Christy Brady said her office was launching a new effort to prevent hazardous building collapses by launching a review of L&I’s enforcement actions regarding unlicensed properties and workers.
