PhillyDeals: With borrowed cash, Philadelphia stages stimulus
Cash-strapped Philadelphia is using borrowed money from past bond issues to patch together its own economic-stimulus package. Today, Mayor Nutter goes to Northeast Philadelphia to launch an expanded version of the two-year-old "Home-Buy-Now" program. The city will give 300 home buyers up to $5,000 each, if their employers give just as much, doubling the grants, says Commerce Director Andrew Altman.
Cash-strapped
Philadelphia
is using borrowed money from past bond issues to patch together its own economic-stimulus package.
Today, Mayor Nutter goes to Northeast Philadelphia to launch an expanded version of the two-year-old "Home-Buy-Now" program. The city will give 300 home buyers up to $5,000 each, if their employers give just as much, doubling the grants, says Commerce Director Andrew Altman.
The program, started three years ago in partnership with Penn, Temple and other service employers, had given $3,000 home-purchase grants to 189 buyers so far. "We needed to up the ante," Altman said.
The city says auto-parts rebuilder Cardone Industries Inc., helicopter-maker AgustaWestland Philadelphia and other manufacturers have agreed to join the program by matching city contributions for employees' home purchases. AgustaWestland is already fielding applications from workers looking to buy, spokeswoman Jacqueline Ferko told me.
Lenders and home builders have agreed to cut fees for buyers in the program, Altman added. Big Center City employers such as Comcast Corp. and Wachovia Corp. aren't part of the program "yet," he said.
How can Philadelphia afford this when it's cutting other programs to balance the budget? The city is using $1.5 million in leftover funds from Neighborhood Transformation Initiative revenue bonds sold under former Mayor John F. Street in 2005, according to Altman's office.
The city plans to use an additional $8 million, from Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development bonds sold in 2006, to offer "gap financing" to businesses that can't quite raise enough for planned expansion from their banks, Altman said.
Last month, Nutter announced an additional $1 million for facade-improvement projects to be managed by nonprofit developers in five business strips around the city, funded from 2007 bond proceeds.
Add it up, "it's our own local stimulus," Altman said. Wish we could say for sure it will return more than the interest taxpayers are paying on those bonds.
Solar credit
Exelon Corp.'s Peco Energy Co.
told the
Public Utility Commission
it wants to buy six megawatts of "solar energy credits" under 10-year contracts from solar-electric power producers, as a way of complying "in advance" with state law and stimulating more companies to make solar electricity.
Figuring (as Peco does) that the sun shines 15% of the time, the deal would cost roughly $1.8 million a year if it were contracted at last year's solar-credit prices, as cited in a Public Utility Commission report. Actual prices may vary, a lot, notes PUC spokeswoman Jennifer Kocher.
Solar is several times more expensive than wind power, which Peco is also financing, says Peco spokeswoman Cathy Engel.
Under state law, the solar power wouldn't have to be produced in Peco's service area (Southeastern Pennsylvania) or actually used by Peco, so long as the company's helping expands solar-power production somewhere in a 13-state area tied to the local grid.
Gas fizzle?
The Toronto Globe and Mail
sent its energy writer across the national border to
Tioga County
, in way upstate Pennsylvania, to update readers on last year's
Marcellus Shale
oil-exploration boom, only to report it has "fizzled," with nobody much bidding for new gas leases and dairy farmers despairing of getting rich quick from royalty payments.
That may be bad news for Gov. Rendell, who was hoping for new taxes from trapped methane (plus new gambling revenue) to help patch the state's leaky budget.
The problem, says the Globe, is, the United States is a pretty gassy place, and when prices rise, lots of rigs get busy, and that helps drive the price back down - by more than two-thirds from last spring's highs.
We hope your gas utility has noticed this, too, and will be adjusting its prices again soon.
Should have said
In yesterday's column: Seth Lehr of LLR Partners Inc. left the ICT Group Inc. board last year, before the Aegis Ltd. bid; and Kevin Sheeron pushes the coastal-drilling agenda of the American Energy Association as a publicist, not a lobbyist.