Rebecca Rhynhart is promising to make government work. Does Philadelphia want a technocrat in a time of crisis? | Meet the candidates

Rebecca Rhynhart was being drowned out.

One gray day in January, she put a podium in the heart of Kensington and unveiled a detailed proposal to tackle Philadelphia’s open-air drug market if she were to be elected mayor. She talked about “the intersection of racism and poverty” as the El rumbled above and a woman heckled her for bringing TV cameras into the neighborhood.

The news conference lasted eight minutes.

As journalists packed their vans, Rhynhart approached the frustrated woman. The pair talked about how to make it simpler for people in addiction to seek recovery, and they set up a time to meet again. Everything appeared smoothed over.

But few saw that quiet moment where Rhynhart thrived. Instead, cameras caught her on a busy sidewalk in the middle of a crisis, fighting to be heard.

The former city controller is one of 10 Democrats seeking the nomination for mayor and running on a pledge to make government work. She’s touting her bona fides as a fiscal watchdog, talking seriously about racial justice and economic inequality, and pitching herself as the candidate most prepared to tackle the city’s problems on day one.

Rhynhart, who served in two administrations before running for office in 2017, has many plans: an opioid plan, a public-safety plan, a housing plan, an economics plan, an education plan. She may not be as skilled an orator as some of her rivals in the field — which includes a government outsider and a longtime progressive activist — but she comes to the race with a blueprint for governance that feels more familiar.

Limited polling has showed Rhynhart in the middle of the pack. Her coalition is hard to define — she appeals to a mix of progressives who like how she talks about underserved neighborhoods, conservative Democrats who see her as pro-business, and good-government types who think she knows the bureaucracy.

Now the question facing Rhynhart’s candidacy is: Does the city really want a get-it-done technocrat in a time when many people don’t see a way that government could possibly work for them? And can someone without the political stagecraft of her opponents deliver the bold leadership so many are craving?

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Rhynhart, 48, says her record is clear. Her campaign message is that she’s gutsier than her rivals, saying that in 2017, she ran against and beat a three-term incumbent to become City Controller, and she publicly challenged Mayor Jim Kenney during his first term, when many in the party were still aligned closely with him.

And, for what it’s worth, no other mayoral candidate held their first big news conference in the epicenter of the drug crisis.

“Sometimes the strongest person,” Rhynhart said in an interview, “isn’t necessarily the loudest.”

Rhynhart’s political origin story traces to her early career on Wall Street — and in some ways, before that.

She grew up in Abington and was interested in politics by high school, participating in a mock government program in which students role-played as senators. The young Rhynhart thought maybe she’d work at the CIA, perhaps become a diplomat.

For a year, she studied Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont, but her grades slipped, so she switched to environmental studies and English. While getting her master’s in public administration at Columbia University, she interned at Fitch Ratings, which then offered her a job analyzing governments’ financial health.

Wall Street was intense — and male-dominated. In the mid-2000s, investment bank Bear Stearns hired Rhynhart to work as a municipal credit analyst, and she was promoted to managing director, calculating the risk traders were taking with governments.

Rhynhart said she performed well in the competitive environment. But something felt off.

“A lot of local governments really didn’t understand the trades they were doing weren’t in the taxpayers’ best interest,” she said. “Every day I walked in and felt like I was on the wrong side.”

In February 2008, Rhynhart took a pay cut and came home to Philadelphia to work in former Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration as a deputy finance director. By mid-March, Bear Stearns failed and Wall Street was in free-fall.

Rhynhart was quickly promoted to city treasurer, responsible for restructuring the city’s bonds as interest rates were skyrocketing. The administration faced a $1 billion budget hole and began severely slashing services, including libraries and pools. Nutter later called it one of his worst decisions.

By 2009, the city stopped paying vendors. It was running out of cash as a plan to increase the sales tax stalled in Harrisburg, and Rhynhart and others met weekly to decide who would get paid. If a vendor was about to go under, the city would release funds on a case-by-case basis. It was chaotic for months.

Rhynhart negotiated a deal to get a short-term, $275 million loan at a low 3% interest rate. It kept things afloat.

“The reason we didn’t run out of money was Rebecca Rhynhart,” Nutter said in an interview. (He and former Mayor John F. Street have endorsed Rhynhart.)

In 2010, Nutter asked Rhynhart to be his budget director as the city started to navigate the recovery. Two years later, he announced a controversial plan to sell Philadelphia Gas Works to a private entity, a move Rhynhart advocated, saying that appetite for utility acquisitions was high and the sale could mean lower rates.

The administration sought a buyer for two years. Organized labor rallied against the plan, and City Council roundly rejected it. One of Nutter’s would-be signature accomplishments was scuttled.

Rhynhart says she wouldn’t look to privatize PGW if elected.

Both Nutter and Rhynhart say in interviews that Rhynhart was focused on debt during the financial crisis, not cutting services. She said if elected mayor, she would respond differently to a downturn, saying decisions to cut recreation and libraries “were not good ones.”

She bristled at the idea that she could be seen as Nutter’s successor.

“I truly appreciate his endorsement and support,” she said. “But I would definitely do some things differently.”

Rhynhart’s foray into politics resulted in a shock win.

She served for a year in Kenney’s administration as chief administrative officer, then left in 2016 to run for city controller, the elected watchdog that’s responsible for identifying waste, fraud, and abuse.

Rhynhart took on Alan Butkovitz, the three-term incumbent who was a ward leader backed by the Democratic city committee. She ran ads describing him as a “political hack,” and had the backing of former Mayor Ed Rendell.

The 2017 primary came just months after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and women were fired up. It was the same election that saw District Attorney Larry Krasner sweep into office on a promise of reform.

Rhynhart won, and the city’s political establishment was stunned. She easily prevailed in the general election, becoming the city’s first female controller. She vowed to work with the Kenney administration, thinking that she could make recommendations, and he would implement them.

It didn’t work out. Six months into her tenure, the office released a report on the city’s sexual-harassment procedures, and Rhynhart said it showed “a broken system” for handling sexual misconduct. Her office opened a hotline for city employees.

Salena Jones, then general counsel in the controller’s office, recalled that one employee called with a harrowing sexual-harassment experience, and Rhynhart spoke to the person herself. Jones said she couldn’t remember a time Rhynhart thought twice about releasing a finding because it would complicate her relationship with City Hall.

“She didn’t back down,” Jones said. “She wasn’t going to placate to other offices.”

Rhynhart’s relationship with the Kenney administration soured. A former Kenney administration official said her aspirations for higher office were clear when Rhynhart ran for controller. The official said Kenney had “a tremendous amount of respect” for Rhynhart at the beginning of his first term, but that evaporated when she took the controller’s office and issued reports the administration saw as unfair or exaggerated.

Members of the administration accused Rhynhart of using the office to inflate her name recognition. Kenney said her office’s findings related to poor bookkeeping were “sensationalized.” Rhynhart’s office released a damning independent investigation of how the city responded to 2020 civil unrest, and her last audit was deeply critical of the police department.

» READ MORE: Philly Police Dept. has inconsistent strategies, slow response times, and outdated systems, city controller says

John McNesby, president of the police union, slammed her last year, saying “if you want to run for mayor, we wish you luck, but don’t do it on the backs of hardworking, overworked police officers.”

Butkovitz, who is supporting Cherelle Parker for mayor, said in an interview that Rhynhart was “very political, just with different factions” than he or other past controllers might have been.

Rhynhart insists she didn’t make decisions based on politics, saying “in fact, that is something that some political insiders have told me from day one would be a problem for me.”

In her second term, she focused largely on gun violence and called on Kenney repeatedly to take a more urgent approach to the crisis. She started reaching out directly to antiviolence organizers frustrated with the process of applying for city support.

One of them was Imam Salaam Muhsin, a leader of the organization Put It Down, an intervention program for people coming out of juvenile detention. He said Rhynhart helped connect him to other funding streams.

Now, he’s supporting her for mayor. Muhsin, 71, said it may not seem intuitive for a Black Muslim from North Philly to back a Jewish white woman who lives in Center City. But he thinks she’s the most capable.

“We have to choose the best person morally and the person who is most qualified,” he said. “And Rebecca is head and shoulders above everybody.”

Rhynhart lives in Center City with her husband, who works for a wine distributor, her 13-year-old daughter, and the family’s rescue hound, Banjo.

She has been able to amass support from others in the city’s professional class and those who are close to the government and political apparatus. Colleen Puckett, who lives in Queen Village and formerly led the Second Ward, said she’s supporting Rhynhart because she “rolls up her sleeves and works, and she’s not a showboater.”

The question is whether Rhynhart can expand her base.

“It’s hard because she’s a grown-up. She’s competent. All of those things that are not necessarily so sexy,” Puckett said.

Anne Gemmell, one of the leaders of the small-business collaborative 10K Independents Project, said “telegenics” aren’t Rhynhart’s strength, but that may not be a dealbreaker for many voters.

“When you strip aside the celebrity aspects of stage presence,” she said, “there is a real confidence that Rebecca will deliver on more efficient, better processes.”

Voters who strongly value government efficiency don’t fall into traditional demographic or geographical blocs, making them harder to target. Rhynhart contends she appeals to a “broad spectrum of Democrats” and has more room to grow than her opponents.

That potential was on display last weekend when she went to knock on doors in Fishtown. One of the volunteers, Ann Martin, said that she’s a progressive and that many of her friends thought she’d back Helen Gym, one of the leaders of the city’s progressive movement. But Martin sees Rhynhart as more pragmatic.

“She is proposing things and she knows how to pay for it,” Martin said.

Rhynhart knocked on the door of Joe Vecchione, a Democrat who told her that he’s concerned about crime, drugs, and the “woke” ideology. She promised him she’d “get the city back on track” and “restore some order.”

Vecchione, 68, told Rhynhart that he is deeply skeptical of Kenney, saying: “Why don’t you ask him where all that soda tax money went?”

“He won’t call me back because I’ve held him accountable so many times,” Rhynhart said.

“Well,” Vecchione responded, “then I think I will vote for you.”