Monica Yant Kinney: DiCicco ponders possible successors
As sad as he seems about being driven from office by enraged voters, the pesky press, and his own costly miscalculations, don't weep for City Councilman Frank DiCicco.
As sad as he seems about being driven from office by enraged voters, the pesky press, and his own costly miscalculations, don't weep for City Councilman Frank DiCicco.
Just 64, DiCicco will walk out of City Hall with $424,646, courtesy of the controversial Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP). Surely that will tide him over before the fat pension checks begin arriving.
For fun, he'll travel to Italy for a month. Eventually, he'll become a "lobbyist/consultant." Big surprise.
Considering how much time DiCicco spent at community meetings where hotheads (wrongly) accused him of wearing a toupee, you'd think the guy would be thrilled to get away. And yet, he mopes about the forced retreat.
The DROP perk, which was never meant for elected officials, has now claimed five victims. Council members who thought they could pretend to retire, stash the cash, and return to entitled lives now know otherwise.
Maybe Wall Street's Gordon Gekko was right: Greed is good ... for Philadelphia voters who, thanks to DROP, get a rare chance to recast a City Council whose members typically leave only for burial or prison.
There goes the neighborhood
If DiCicco made peace with leaving, he remains uneasy about who will succeed him.
The First Council District has changed dramatically in the 15 years he has been in office. DiCicco credits his rise to Democratic machine stalwarts like the late Buddy Cianfrani and the incarcerated Vince Fumo, but concedes, "That power base no longer exists."
Today's First District, DiCicco marvels, "is a district that reads."
He's referring to the young, educated professionals planting urban gardens in places like Bella Vista, Queen Village, Old City, and Northern Liberties.
Involved as they are, few would-be reformers, DiCicco laments, want to run for office. Yet when asked to rate the field, he finds flaws in most of those who seek to replace him.
"Every four years, he restarts his civic association to put himself out there as a community leader," the councilman sniffs in dismissing Vern Anastasio, 41, the Italian Market scion who ran in 2007 and lost.
Joe Grace, 51, was Mayor John F. Street's spokesman and a tireless advocate at CeasefirePA, but DiCicco calls him "an empty suit." (He also suggests that Grace actually lives outside the district, in Mount Airy, not in Port Richmond. Meow!)
Of newcomer Jeff Hornstein, DiCicco says nothing - perhaps the worst snub of all, since silence implies that a candidate doesn't register.
But labor organizer Hornstein is exactly the kind of concerned citizen who should be running for office in this town: 44, with degrees from Penn and MIT and a Ph.D., he has fought for living wages for janitors and for smart zoning in Queen Village.
Hornstein tells me he's eager to slay the city's onerous business-privilege tax, modernize the port, and embrace entrepreneurs.
"The problems the city faces," he says, "need a different energy."
A done deal?
Reform talk aside, DiCicco's exit strategy shows that the party machine chugs on and on.
As a condition for dropping out of the race, DiCicco secured a promise from archrival John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty - head of the electricians union and First Ward leader - not to trash DiCicco's legacy.
That handshake, as reported by my colleagues Marcia Gelbart and Jeff Shields, took place at a meeting brokered by U.S. Rep. Bob Brady, Democratic City Committee chairman. That's where Brady anointed DiCicco's successor: Mark Squilla, 48, a systems analyst with the state Auditor General's Office and president of the Whitman Council neighborhood group, who already had Dougherty in his corner.
Squilla also pledged to respect DiCicco, thus earning his support.
"He's a class act," DiCicco raves. "When I look at Mark . . . I see myself."