Right Angle Club (RAC) Monthly Member Newsletter
for
November, 2021
Zoom Speakers & their Presentation Topics
11/5 John Kromer: An adjunct professor at Penn and former City Housing Director will speak about this work on elections in Philadelphia culminating in his recently published book: Philadelphia Battlefields-Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City.
11/12 Richard Bartholomew,retired partner at the architectural firm Wallace Roberts & Todd, Richard will talk about his experience writing his autobiography which focuses on his childhood, professional training and successes but also his poignant account of his care for his wife who suffered early onset dementia.
11/19 Eric Zillmer, formery the long-serving Athletic Director of Drexel University and the chair of the Psychology Department will talk about his study of happiness.
11/26. No Meeting or Speaker. Thanksgiving celebration.
Previous Month’s Speakers’ Presentations Summarized
(prepared by Bob Haskell)
October 1, 2021. Judge Gary Glazer, former Supervising Judge of the Philadelphia Commerce Court, discussed his experiences in the cleaning up, and the eventual abolishment of, the Philadelphia Traffic Court. The Traffic Court was established in 1968 under the Constitution of Pennsylvania to handle any moving traffic violation. It was a uniquely Philadelphia institution. Traffic tickets in the rest of the state are generally handled by District Justice courts. It was also thoroughly corrupt organization and a source of continual controversy. It was the go-to place to fix speeding tickets (except for drunk driving), the home of the politically well-connected and patronage hiring, and a haven for no-show employees. It was known for judges that were neither required to be lawyers (in fact, none were lawyers) nor to be learned in the law. The judges were bar tenders, beauticians, ward leaders, etc. It was a “pirate ship, not a court”. In 1978, the president judge was indicted and convicted of taking bribes and gifts. A criminal investigation of the entire court started in earnest in 2011 with the FBI and Department of Justice issuing search warrants and authorizing City Hall wiretaps. Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron Castille also embraced the cause. Because it was the “20th time” the Court was investigated in some fashion, nobody really believed anything would change. Judge Glazer volunteered for the effort, not thinking that Castille would accept his offer. But he did, and Glazer was appointed in 2011 as the new leader of the Court in what was a legal (or philosophical) coup d’état. He is still involved until January 2022, when he retires. This investigation is an extraordinary example where three branches of government cooperated and combined to implement change in a disastrous system that was an embarrassment and mockery of justice. The effort involved legislature, the City (mayor Nutter was very helpful), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Culture change is difficult, and required an enormous amount of work to implement, but all these changes have had significant impact. Some of the high points are: 1) New legislation established a law that all cases must be heard by lawyers (not party hacks), that the Court have gender and geographic diversity, and that appeals must be heard by a judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. By Constitutional amendment in 2016, the separate Traffic Court was eliminated and made a division of the Philadelphia Municipal Court. Traffic Court “judges” were eliminated. 2) Purely patronage hiring was eliminated. A separate committee interviews and only hires qualified people. Political pedigree is no longer required (i.e., don’t have to know Ward leaders). Employees are promoted only when deserved. 3) There was a culture change, and competent workers were relieved they no longer had to fix tickets. 4) An ethics course, and corresponding code of conduct, is now required for employees,. 5) There is a compliance program with federal sentencing guidelines. Employees can report bad conduct and be protected when they do. 6) Electronic ticketing (e-Citations) was just recently implemented through handheld computers. Previously, handwritten citations tended to disappear, but e-filed citations cannot be lost. 7) All proceedings are recorded. Lessons learned are: 1) Corruption was systemic, open, ignored, encouraged. This had implications for broader society, and was a perversion of the justice system. 2) Political patronage is here to stay. However, patronage hiring of qualified people is not equivalent to being corrupt. 3) Robust prosecution can’t solve problems like this. There are always people in line for a seat at the corruption table. 4) Top leaders set the tone, and nothing takes the place of an institutional spine. 5) Municipal Court is now better as well. The process is not perfect, but it is fair, and not the cesspool it once was. There were 27 in-person and 1 Zoom participants.
October 8, 2021. Anne Gemmell, former Director of Special Initiatives at the City of Philadelphia and founding director of Future Works Alliance PHL, discussed the future of Philadelphia’s work force (and work in general). The basic problem is that rapid technological change and other powerful economic, political, and cultural forces are leaving many behind. The future will be incredibly different. The economy is changing more rapidly than our institutions can respond. Business models and businesses are being left behind. The post-pandemic environment will not go back to way it was. Businesses need to quickly react to and rethink remote work. Because people can work and be effective from anywhere, there are growing talent wars. Employees can’t be forced to come into an office five days a week from 9-5. Performance evaluations should be based on results, not how they are achieved. Automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics are also all gaining speed. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, which discusses change and what happens to people: how they do and don’t adapt, is an appropriate reference for today’s world. People need to learn how to pivot. For example, from 2015 to 2020 in the Philadelphia area, retail sales jobs have declined by 33%, and cashier jobs have declined 19%. Jobs of this sort tend to be held by those who are in their late 20s early 30s, may or may not have a high school education, are without college degrees, are women with children, or are heads of household. On the other hand, an example of what jobs are being created is Uber-Lyft drivers, which grew by 298%. These jobs are generally 1009 workers out on their own with no health insurance, workmen’s comp, or unemployment insurance. In Philadelphia region, 40% of prior small businesses will not be coming back. But Philadelphia itself is well-positioned for the future. Offices are not distinct from the neighborhoods. There is richness and diversity at the street level. Affordable housing is mixed with office buildings. There is ample green space (parks), access to rivers and ocean, an international airport, a quality food scene, and a pedestrian lifestyle. The City needs a strategy and plan to leverage these benefits and to retain its people. But governments are generally not up to the task. Attention is focused on perpetual campaigns to get reelected, resulting in very short-term thinking. Therefore, solutions are better left to the private sector. In this regard, corporations are evolving from shareholder capitalism to a new philosophy of stakeholder capitalism, where business is about more than profits. It is about valued employees and customers, and an image of doing social good. Future Works proposes using software technology and a problem-solving methodology to facilitate collaboration across the spectrum stakeholders necessary to create the ultimate solution. The process attempts to get the most out of available talent and expertise. They use SchellingPoint in West Chester, PA, which provides a single, common strategic collaboration process and augmented software to support the methodology. Important to the methodology is online crowdsourcing, which gathers opinions about the workforce and economy, and uses collaboration software and process to make sense of the resulting cacophony of input to create a solution and project plan. The process was used recently to create a five-year future strategy for the state of Pennsylvania. The opinions of 60 people were crowdsourced, and a project plan for relevant departments was created. The focus of the plan is the “be people”, who are the professionals that have been there and will continue to be there to execute such a plan. Political leaders come and go. There were 21 in-person and 1 Zoom paticipants.
October 15, 2021. Jonathan Goldstein, a founding partner of Goldstein Law Partners, provided a postmortem of the Pennsylvania 2020 election litigation, which challenged the validity of ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election in Montgomery County and other counties in eastern Pennsylvania. Three topics were presented: Pennsylvania Act 77, the impact of the perfect storm of COVID 19 and an activist PA Supreme Court and governor, and how to prevent a repeat. Pennsylvania Act 77 was passed by General Assembly on October 29, 2019 and signed into law on October 31, 2019. Before passage, it was known as the universal mail-in ballot bill. It passed because the Democratic governor and Republican legislature each got a win: Democrats won universal, no excuse mail-in ballots; Republicans won removal of straight-line voting. Straight-line, aka straight ticket/party voting, allows voters to choose a party’s entire slate of candidates with just a single ballot mark. Republicans didn’t favor this because of Democrats in Pennsylvania having 1M more registered voters. Mail-in ballots supplement the many other types of already existing balloting: in-person, absentee, provisional, military, etc. The law states that a citizen can apply anytime up to 50 days before election, must complete the ballot and place it in a secrecy envelope, must place the secrecy envelope in an official pre-paid postage envelope that the voters signs and dates, and that all mail-in ballots must be received by 8:00 p.m. on election day. The 50-day window for mail-in ballots changes the cadence of an election. Instead of timing campaign activities to maximize impact on election day, they must be spread out to impact voters throughout this window. The law also states that mail-in ballots be kept under lock and key until election day, that poll watchers are permitted to be present when the mail-in ballots are counted, that the county must strike a mail-in ballot from a voter who dies before election day, that they meet at 7 a.m. on election day to pre-canvas the ballots, and that ballots are tabulated no later than the third day following Election Day. Then COVID hits and the Democrats sue, asking that (a) mail-in ballots can be delivered to mobile offices and drop boxes, (b) deadline can be extended for ballots to be received, (c) voters whose ballots are defective can be contacted so that the voter can cure the defect, (d) the secrecy ballot requirements cane be ignored, and (e) that poll watchers must reside in the county. The Supreme Court ruled that drop boxes are necessary, the three days post-election is necessary, voters do not have to be notified of defective ballots, ballots had to be in secrecy envelopes, and that poll watchers could be required to be county residents. In heavily Democratic Philadelphia, Mark Zuckerberg funded an effort to notify people of defective ballots so they could come into the office to fix them. Also, another Supreme Court ruling stated that nothing in Pennsylvania’s Election Code compels or allows a county board of elections to disqualify a mail-in ballot based on a signature analysis of a voter’s mail-in ballot declaration. There was an issue regarding what “filled out” means. If a ballot is signed and dated, but address is missing, should it be considered invalid. In general, everyone should feel an election was fair, and the law must be made unambiguous for that to happen. Inconsistencies in how counties across the state were able to execute these changes created feelings of unfairness (e.g., Philadelphia cured ballots, other counties did not). There were 20 in-person and 1 Zoom participants.
October 29, 2021. Daniel Richter, the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, introduced and discussed the book Philadelphia Stories People and Their Places in Early America by C. Dallett Hemphill, which he edited for Penn Press. Dallet Hemphill (1959-2015) was a fixture in the Philadelphia community for almost thirty years as a professor at Ursinus College, an associate of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and as the editor of Early American Studies. At her death, she had a largely complete manuscript. To complete the work, each chapter was completed by a volunteer. Philadelphia Stories chronicles twelve interconnected, but standalone, lives to explore the city’s people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War. This collective portrait includes men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born who represented society during the formative years of Philadelphia. It does not include the familiar names such as Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush. These lives are presented in four groups. 1) Colonial Men of Faith: Anthony Benezet (1713-1784) – one of the early American abolitionists, who founded one of the world’s first anti-slavery societies, the first public school for girls, and the Negro School at Philadelphia. Henry Muhlenburg (1711-1787) – German Lutheran pastor sent to North America as a missionary, and considered to be the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in the United States. William White (1748-1836) – the first and fourth Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States. 2) Revolutionary Wives: Grace Growden Galloway (1727-1782) – the wife of loyalist Joseph Galloway, who left a detailed diary documenting her daily life and her fight to regain her property; this diary has been a strong source for historians to learn from and grasp what it was like to be a female loyalist, and provides a fresh perspective into a side of the Revolutionary War that was previously often omitted from history. Anne Shippen Livingston (1763-1841) – wife of Colonel Henry Beekman Livingston, she wrote a journal that gives an insight into her social life of the time and later her thwarted attempts to obtain a divorce from a failed marriag. Deborah Norris Logan (1761-1839) – wife of physician George Logan, grandson of William Penn’s secretary James Logan, who entertained a wide circle of politicians, artists, writers, and businesspeople; and had “a strength of intellect, a copiousness of knowledge, an habitual dignity of thought and manner, and a natural justness and refinement”. 3) Self-Made Men: Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) – painter, soldier, scientist, inventor, politician, and naturalist. Stephen Girard (1750-1831) – philanthropist, banker, and slave owner, who personally saved the U.S. government from financial collapse during the War of 1812) and established The City Trust. Joseph Hemphill (1770- ????) – ancestor of author C. Dallot Hemphill, and politician who served as a Federalist member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district from 1801 to 1803 and from 1829 to 1831. 4) Aspiring Antebellum Lives: Francis Johnson (1792-1844) – pioneer in not only black American musicianship, but in American musicianship as a whole; founding member of the Philadelphia school of composers. Sarah Thorn Tyndale (1792-1859) – made enough money on her porcelain business to retire to a life as a reformer, abolitionist and Fourierist. William Darrah Kelley (1814-1890) – abolitionist, and one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854. There were 25 in-person and 0 Zoom participants.
Carter Broach
Corresponding Secretary
broach@udel.edu
