PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Mayor Cherelle Parker on Monday announced the appointment of two new department heads, but she still has not appointed anyone to two major cabinet positions that have been vacant for almost a year.
The city’s human resources chief, Mike Zaccagni, got the city through the Great Resignation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was just 24 hours a day, every day,” Zaccagni said. “But it wasn’t just us. It was every municipal government. So you do what you have to do. And I think we finally turned the corner. I see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Zaccagni is taking a well-deserved retirement. The department’s first deputy, Candi Jones, will replace him.
“I’m excited to continue the important work of fostering economic opportunity for all,” Jones said.
Parker also announced that Sabrina Maynard has taken over as budget director — again. She served in that role in the administration of Mayor Jim Kenney.
Parker — now nearly a year in office — still has not named a permanent commissioner to the Department of Public Health or the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disabilities. She says she’s getting close.
“I will not be rushed,” she said. “I have watched people rush to make a decision. And if you want to see a recipe for disaster, rush to select someone for a position of leadership for something as significant as those, who doesn’t share in the vision that is before them.”
The mayor has a new vacancy to fill, too. The head of the mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, Celena Morrison, was fired last week Thursday. The city declined to comment on the reason.
Morrison invoked her city job when she was pulled over by a state trooper on I-76, last March. As the trooper detained her husband, Darius McLean, chief operating officer at William Way LGBT Community Center, she recorded video of the incident until she, too, was detained. The trooper was later fired.