Very good reporting by AlJazeeraEnglish on Detroit’s financial crisis, and the history leading up to Governor Rick Snyder’s appointment of Emergency Financial Manager Kevin Orr, a former partner at the Jones Day law firm, and described by Governor Snyder as an expert in restructuring debt.
Category: Planning
Complete Streets for Philadelphia
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The Complete Streets bill passed December 6th by Philadelphia’s City Council requires streets that accommodate all forms of transportation: transit, cars, bikes, and pedestrian. It squares municipal regulations with the state’s rules of the road, and is a huge victory for cyclists in the city. As people have become more conscious about cutting their contribution…
Screwed Locally and Globally on Climate Change
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The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the agency in charge of the Delaware River as it winds through four states, conveniently sidestepped taking responsibility for overseeing the cumulative effects of the many natural gas pipelines being built around or through the Delaware River watershed by saying, essentially, “that’s not our job.” It’s a tried-and-true political…
Philadelphia City Council Upholds 50-foot Stream Buffers
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Finally, and for the third time, City Council upholds 50-foot stream buffers in Philadelphia. Part of the zoning code recommended by the Zoning Commission and passed by Philadelphia’s City Council in 2011 included a 50-foot setback from rivers and streams for future building. This is a commonsense precaution against disaster, discouraging development in the floodplain,…
Pier 11 Designs Displayed Wednesday
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The Planning Committee of the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) will present the designs of the four finalists being considered for creating a public park at Pier 11, as part of a larger design including a municipal building and the intersection of Race and Columbus Boulevard. The event takes place Wednesday, June 17th, from 6…
Philly On Wheels
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Think transit, not recreation. That’s the paradigm shift cities like Lyon, Paris, Minneapolis and Miami made when instituting their bike sharing systems. In Philadelphia, where the average person views biking as a potential blood sport, the ground is being well prepared to take it to the next level. Bicycling has doubled in Philadelphia over the…
Future Cities
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by Walter Libby – No doubt, we are in recession. And our prospects for recovery look grim. Already we’ve seen nine straight months of jobs losses. And it seems likely that they will continue, and get worse. We are caught in what economists call a liquidity trap. Here, despite the Fed driving interest rates ever…
City and State Talk Resiting
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Today, Governor Ed Rendell and Mayor Michael Nutter convened a meeting with local elected representatives and Foxwoods Casino to discuss the possibility of resiting their project. Foxwoods has agreed to look at alternative sites, not on the riverfront, within the City of Philadelphia. It will be all over the news tomorrow: Daily News, Inquirer, planphilly.com.…
GAO to Review Deepening Again
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Riverkeeper Press Release – Washington, D.C.- In response to a request by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D, NJ) the Government Accountability Office has agreed to conduct an updated review of the Army Corps’ proposed Delaware River Deepening project. In a letter to Senator Lautenberg dated May 15, 2008 the GAO wrote, “We received your recent letter…
Bitter In Philadelphia
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I think Obama is right on when he describes voters in our state as frustrated and bitter. I know I am. I’ve been fighting the location of two state mandated casinos on our Delaware waterfront for the last two years, along with countless other residents who don’t want to see their family-friendly neighborhoods decimated because…
