PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — It is the rare public servant who doesn’t make some enemies along the way. Anne Fadullon is a rare public servant.
Fadullon, Philadelphia’s first-ever commissioner of planning and development, has left the job 7 ½ years after her appointment by Mayor Jim Kenney. She is one of many key city figures moving on to new jobs as the Kenney administration winds to an end.
“She was phenomenally effective,” Kenney said, adding that Fadullon is smart, practical and able to see development policy from both sides, having come from the building industry to city government.
“Thank God that we had her,” he said.
The development community seems just as happy to have had her. Mo Rushdy, managing partner of the Riverwards Group, praised her even-handed approach.
“She was a problem-solver,” he said. “She understood how to get stuff done.”
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Fadullon had to create the department from scratch. She took the job right after voters approved it, in the midst of a building boom that was showing some of the weaknesses of the city’s prior, more dispersed planning and development policies.
It was a bit of a gamble, leading a new department with no blueprint to follow. But City Council President Darrell Clarke said she was the right person for the job.
“People don’t like change sometimes, in the city of Philadelphia, but consolidating those agencies made it more efficient, it made it more user-friendly. And having Anne at the helm of that, she was able to bring people together,” he said.
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Fadullon, initially, was one of the people who didn’t think creating a new department was a good idea, fearing it would slow down development, but she saw an opportunity to ease the process by helping to develop a new mindset.
“What’s challenging is trying to get people to have a mentality of how do we get to ‘yes,’ or how do we get to ‘something makes sense,’ rather than just saying, ‘Well, we have this regulation that says you can’t do it,’” Fadullon said.
“Was it hard? Yeah, it was hard,” she said, “but people were willing to do the work.”
She said a new attitude about affordable housing is one of her biggest accomplishments. “Now when you hear people talk about issues, affordable housing is at the top of the list or at least in the top two or three,” she noted.
She believes the changes will carry over into a new administration, to which she offered some advice: “Believe in this city. This is a great city, so let’s plan for our success.”
Eleanor Sharpe, who had been the deputy director for planning and zoning, will take over the job.
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