PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A well-known fact about Mayor Jim Kenney is that he loves children.
“They’re perfect,” he likes to say.
So when he would get that French bulldog frown on his face, the staff would quickly schedule a visit to a preschool.
“It was soulfully uplifting for him,” said Jim Engler, his former Chief of Staff. “He could see that this work that he prioritized was making a difference and changing lives in a way that’s not always evident in meetings or statistics.”
You could see it on his face, just as you can see every internal emotion on his face. This one was joy.
But the mayor does not dwell in joy. He’d get back to City Hall and Engler would ask how it went.
“He’d say, ‘it was fine but I traveled up North 16th Street and it was covered in potholes. When is that street getting repaved?’” Engler recalls. “That’s just the way that he’s wired.”
Indeed, interviews with a dozen past and present administration officials and eight years of observation reveal the uncommon level to which Kenney seems to embody the city he governs — as if there is no border between him and the rutted streets, the litter, the unsheltered people, the COVID deaths, the gunfire, the homicides, or anything about the city that needs to be fixed.
And much as the city, collectively, often cannot see past its flaws and disappointments to its own finer qualities, Kenney refuses to trumpet his successes but will internalize criticism.
“He’s really in it because he cares a lot about people and it makes his job really hard,” said Engler’s predecessor, Jane Slusser. “He doesn’t focus on the things that are going well, he focuses on the people that are still struggling.”
Engler, Slusser, and others in the administration agree that Kenney’s self-effacing nature has led to a narrative, at least in the media, that he is unhappy and ineffective, despite a record that shows he has made improvements across the city that will impact generations to come.
Kenney doesn’t care about that.
“I don’t like when politicians brag about themselves and I’m not a person who brags about themselves,” said Kenney in an interview with KYW Newsradio in the final weeks of his administration. “I’d rather brag about the people who work for us rather than, ‘look at me, look at me, look at me.’ I’d rather you not look at me, to be honest, and maybe that’s not a good attitude for a job like this, but it’s who I am.”
‘Drinking from a fire hose’
Slusser joined Kenney’s mayoral campaign in 2015, drawn by his focus on reducing poverty.
“That was his guiding force,” she says.
A self-described Type A, Slusser was a good complement for the shoot-from-the-hip Kenney.
“One of the best things about Jim is when he is unscripted,” Slusser says. “He really cares a lot. It’s why he connects with people, so we tried to have as many ‘glasses off’ moments as we could” (moments when Kenney takes his reading glasses off and speaks from the heart) “but also to work in ‘here are the points you need to hit before you take your glasses off.’”
When Slusser agreed to move from politics to become Kenney’s chief of staff, she describes it as “drinking from a fire hose.”
“The first month of the administration we had a police officer shot, a four-alarm fire in Center City, we had a massive snowstorm,” she recalls.
It would have been easy to become immersed in emergencies, but the Kenney administration was buoyed by its long-term vision: A soda tax to pay for the mayor’s poverty alleviation plan of universal pre-K, community schools, and a rebuild of city facilities, including parks, rec centers and libraries that would also serve as a generator of family-sustaining jobs for people in the communities those facilities served.
It was bold and ambitious but, as Kenney told City Council in his first budget address, the city was never going to move the needle on poverty without challenging the status quo.
In a tumultuous four months, the soda industry spent millions of dollars lobbying against it while citizen advocates — Friends of the Parks, moms with pre-schoolers, and labor unions — fought for the mayor’s plan.
While the mayor railed about “big soda” and wrangled votes behind the scenes, he says he never doubted the outcome.
He said he told the politically connected Frank DiCicco to go ahead and take a contract from the soda lobby because he knew there was no way they could win.
“You’re not going to beat these moms. You got a mom with a baby in a backpack and pushing a stroller, they ain’t backing up,” he said.
But the soda lobby did set him back. Bottlers sued after the tax passed, 13-4, delaying the programs the tax was meant to fund.
“They didn’t care about the kids at all,” Kenney said.
Still, at a City Hall news conference in the waning days of his administration, Kenney celebrated the 17,000 children who’ve gone through pre-K, the improvement in preschool quality, and the expansion of opportunity for the largely minority-and women-owned providers, among other benefits. He even touted an increase in third-grade reading scores last year when the first cohort of pre-K students hit third grade.
Sean Perkins, who oversees the program now, says the real benefits are still years down the road, predicting higher rates of high school graduation, college degrees, employment, and home ownership among those who attended pre-K.
“Mayor Kenney will be long gone by then,” he says, “but we hope he will see these headlines 10 or 15 years from now, when these children are adults.”
Beating Trump
The first term was a whirlwind. After the soda tax and the programs it funded, Kenney tackled returning the School District to local control, appointing a board, and increasing funding to schools. He also started lowering wage and business taxes (often against the wishes of City Council), increasing assets in the pension fund, and improving the city’s fund balance, or cash on hand, which allowed for greater stability and helped raise the city’s bond rating, meaning the city could borrow money for less.
His administration got a MacArthur grant for criminal justice reform and began reducing the prison population. He created a program, the Catto Scholars after African-American civil rights activist Octavio Catto, that pays full tuition and provides multiple supports for students at Community College of Philadelphia.
Perhaps his proudest accomplishment, though, was his legal victories over the Trump administration.
“Donald Trump being elected was one of the worst moments of my political career, and then living through four years of him,” Kenney said.
Kenney did not help his own cause at that moment, taking a belligerent stance, suggesting that the then-president should “put on his big boy pants,” ending the city’s cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), effectively daring the Trump administration to come after the city. And it did.
The Justice Department sought to claw back federal funds because of Philadelphia’s “sanctuary city” policy. The city sued and won in federal court.
After an easy reelection in 2019, city finances on a sound footing, his anti-poverty programs off the drawing board and taking shape, Kenney looked forward to a less tumultuous second term.
Then COVID hit.
‘What mayor ever had to do that’
So much happened in the early days of 2020; it’s difficult to summarize the city’s response. A Health Department seminar in January showed pictures of a shut-down Wuhan, China, and invited participants to imagine such a thing in Philadelphia. It was unfathomable. The city had detected its first case, from a returning overseas traveler, and hoped that with contact tracing and isolation, it could contain the spread.
Daily briefings in the Mayor’s Reception Room charted the geometric rise in cases. When the governor shut down schools, an outraged Managing Director Brian Abernathy blasted the decision.
“The schools are really the lifeblood of our communities. They are a primary source of breakfast and lunch. They provide an opportunity for parents to go to work and I'll be damned, we're going to do everything we can for our community and our neighbors, and we're going to rise above it,” he said.
Ten days later, though, on March 23, the city succumbed to the inevitable and shut down everything except vital services.
“There was no playbook for it and no script,” Kenney said. “I couldn’t call Ed Rendell and say, ‘What did you do during the pandemic when you were mayor?’ You just had to do your best.”
He still remembers with awe, standing up an emergency hospital (which turned out not to be needed) in Temple’s Liacouras Center. “What mayor ever had to do that?” he asked rhetorically.
There were not enough tests, there was no treatment, and the health commissioner warned that a vaccine, likely years away, would be the only remedy to the euphemistic “social distancing” he prescribed as the sole preventative. With the economy in free fall, Kenney cut the budget and laid off workers. A gun violence and homicide epidemic, that would plague the city for years, began to emerge. And social forces were roiling unseen.
That summer they burst into the streets after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, with daily marches through the streets, looting, arson, and anger like a weapon.
This is the point at which the mayor seemed to spiral. He could seem to do nothing right. Even he was unhappy with his government’s response to the protests and his response to the pandemic was coming under increasing criticism.
Kenney got into squabbles about establishing testing centers and was outshone by the Black Doctors Covid-19 Consortium, established to ensure equity for the minority community in testing.
Then there was a ray of hope. Dr. Drew Weissman at Penn and his research partner Katalin Kariko had developed a vaccine in record time. With production just ramping up through the pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer, the challenge for the city would be distributing the vaccines.
Philadelphia was one of a few cities given its own supply. The Health Department made a critically bad choice in awarding the first contract to administer it, choosing a fledgling company started by a young recent college graduate, Philly Fighting COVID.
The relationship didn’t last long, but the company performed so badly in that short time, it overshadowed everything the city had done to address the pandemic.
“By all accounts, we had one of the best, most efficient, and most equitable vaccine distributions of any other city or state that had responsibility for doing vaccines,” Engler said.
That’s not the way it’s generally perceived, and this is where the mayor’s reluctance to boast, to be out front, turned into a liability.
Beset on all sides, the mayor seemed to withdraw. Always a delegator, his reliance on the health commissioner now seemed like disengagement. Citizens were looking to him for hope, for reassurance, and they weren’t
finding it.
What they also didn’t see were the long, dark nights that Kenney lay awake with the weight of all of their well-being on his chest.
“My problem is probably I’m too engaged, that I internalize this, that I lay in bed at night and look at the ceiling wondering what we’re going to do tomorrow,” he said. “When I get this criticism, it’s always strange to me because I don’t understand what alternative should I have done. Should I have been a one-man band with a drum? Should I have told jokes? What?”
‘I’ll be happy when I’m not here’
If there’s no answer to the mayor’s question about what he should have done, there is a groundswell of opinion on what he should not have done.
When two police officers were grazed by falling bullets on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway as the city was celebrating the Fourth of July in 2021, it is generally agreed the mayor should not have been so honest about his own feelings at that moment:
“I’ll be happy when I’m not here, when I’m not mayor,” he said.
Kenney walked it back the next day and apologized for saying it but, to this day, he doesn’t see what the big deal was. And he believes Philadelphians understood. He said he gets heckled but he feels affection and appreciation from his constituents much more strongly.
Slusser sees that.
“I think his sometimes gruff nature comes off differently in the press than it does with everyday people,” Slusser says, “and it’s probably because Philadelphians are kind of gruff folks, so maybe he gets a pass on that because it’s more relatable.”
In any case, Kenney doesn’t want to be misunderstood. He did like his job.
“It was a privilege to be mayor,” he said last week. “It’s been rewarding.”
And on poverty — his guiding force? Philadelphia is still the poorest big city in the country but the gap has narrowed considerably.
Poverty went down by four percentage points in the last eight years.
He will accept partial credit while allowing that it’s not enough. His ambitions haven’t changed.
“I just want people to be safe and happy, educated and productive and fulfilled in their life.”