Candidates talk tech at mayoral forum

NOTHING ABOUT Lynne Abraham really screams "high-tech."

But, to her credit, the former district attorney was the first candidate to arrive at the Free Library last night for a mayoral forum organized by Technical.ly Philly.

Abraham sat front-and-center, flipping through well-worn pages of notes with copious highlighting and writing in the margins. She'd clearly done some homework.

"Some of our departments are online, but they're not all online," Abraham said, criticizing the city's "herky-jerky" adoption of technology. "The city has to be transparent. The way to do that is to make sure every department is connected."

Topics covered at the Philly Tech Week Mayoral Forum were outside the comfort zones of some of the Democratic candidates, but they made valiant efforts.

Former solicitor and Common Pleas Judge Nelson Diaz lamented that he rarely talks to his granddaughter by phone: "She texts me. I never have a conversation with her," he said, then regaled the tech-savvy crowd of about 350 with his bill-paying prowess.

"I don't pay any of my bills by paper anymore," said Diaz, who seems to have made a practice of speaking at Frank Costanza volume. He said that all city utilities should offer online billing.

If elected, Diaz added, he would "mandate that there be universal Wi-Fi for the entire city," challenging Comcast to partner with the city to make it happen. Looking over at a Comcast rep in the audience, Diaz said, "I don't owe Comcast a dime," another apparent reference to paying his bills.

Former Philadelphia Gas Works vice president Doug Oliver and former City Councilman Jim Kenney both said they want more government transparency. When asked whether city employees' salaries should be released as an open data set, Oliver said he would support it.

"If reporters can get my salary at PGW or other elected officials, I think it's fine," Oliver said.

Kenney said the city needs a "real open-records policy" that doesn't require people to "say the magic word" in order to force the release of records under the state Right-to-Know Law.

"We need to cut all that out and get you all the information that you need," he said.

Kenney, perhaps best known by some millennials for his prolific tweeting, said he's learning to strike a happy medium between blue-collar sports rage and mayoral decorum.

"I've gotten in a little trouble - not with Eagles fans, necessarily, but with governors who like the Dallas Cowboys," Kenney said, referring to Chris Christie.

State Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams said he'd move the city "toward a paperless government" and advocated transparency not just of budgets and salaries, but also in the planning process.

Williams, who'd like to cut the wage tax nearly in half over the next five years, said that when it comes to technological innovation, a good mayor needs to know when government should "get out of the way, because we will screw it up."