began to take thousands upon thousands of jobs in the cities and move them to places where they didn’t have to grapple with the unions because, praise the Lord, there were none.
IV
The pivotal mechanism that had been created to deal with the city’s enormous financial problems was a somewhat sad and sexless-sounding document called “City of Philadelphia: Five-Year Financial Plan.” (In private, Rendell at least tried to brighten it up a little bit by calling it “City of Philadelphia: Five-Year Financial Plan—No Way Out.”) Its creation was a requirement of an equally sad and sexless-sounding agency called the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, which had been set up by the state legislature in June 1991, when the city was running a deficit of more than $100 million. Empowered to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars on the city’s behalf, the state agency offered the city a way out of its crippling debt. But given the city’s history of empty promises and phantom revenue streams that never flowed, it was not going to simply hand the money over with instructions to have a good time and try not to spend it all in one place.
Accountability
wasn’t some catchphrase but was a requirement, and if the state agency didn’t like the five-year plan and thought it was financial junk, it would reject it and the city would go into bankruptcy. It was as simple and as stark as that.
On a Wednesday night in the middle of February, after a series of grueling and painful twenty-hour days, the five-year plan was finished. All the pages, several hundred of them, were neatly laid out in twenty-eight littlestacks at a ten-foot table in the conference room of Public Financial Management, each stack representing a different city department or public agency that did business with the city. The plan was so laden with charts and dotted lines that it would reduce the most earnest mind to a state of confusion. Even Cohen’s wife, Rhonda, or Saint Rhonda as she had been dubbed during the campaign because of her blissfully even temperament, could barely muster excitement when her husband brought it home enthusiastically, as if it were the newest Grisham novel. But despite its turgid weight and volume, the five-year plan did carry a manifesto for dramatic and radical and unprecedented change in an American city. “What occurs in the next five years will determine our City’s fate for the next quarter of a century,” said the introduction.
From the conference room of PFM on this otherwise dreary night came the simmering sense of something powerful. Perhaps the very setting—a conference room with blue velvet chairs the size of bumper cars, in which lawyers and financial wizards moved about with the quiet confidence of their professional pedigrees—only skewed the real sight lines. For these men, the city would always work. They would always be in a place where the air was climate controlled. If they didn’t find success here, they would surely find it someplace else. They lived in the city, and they loved the city, but they never had the sickening sensation of feeling trapped within it. And from this room, with a kind of schoolboy breathlessness, flowed a current that hadn’t been felt in the city in years, a feeling that somehow, in some way, something within it could actually be changed.
Near the stroke of midnight, Cohen and White and the others who were there decided to call it quits. Cohen’s red tie was pulled down, and the bleak stubs of a five o’clock shadow spread across his boyish face. His hair was greasy and his face puffy, reflecting the look of a man who hadn’t slept in the past twenty-four hours, which in Cohen’s case wasn’t exactly true. He had actually slept about ten hours—in the past eight days. As he left the building, he had that furrowed look on his face, the look of a man with numbers whirring through his mind, a man searching for anything that might have gone undetected—a
IV
The pivotal mechanism that had been created to deal with the city’s enormous financial problems was a somewhat sad and sexless-sounding document called “City of Philadelphia: Five-Year Financial Plan.” (In private, Rendell at least tried to brighten it up a little bit by calling it “City of Philadelphia: Five-Year Financial Plan—No Way Out.”) Its creation was a requirement of an equally sad and sexless-sounding agency called the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, which had been set up by the state legislature in June 1991, when the city was running a deficit of more than $100 million. Empowered to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars on the city’s behalf, the state agency offered the city a way out of its crippling debt. But given the city’s history of empty promises and phantom revenue streams that never flowed, it was not going to simply hand the money over with instructions to have a good time and try not to spend it all in one place.
Accountability
wasn’t some catchphrase but was a requirement, and if the state agency didn’t like the five-year plan and thought it was financial junk, it would reject it and the city would go into bankruptcy. It was as simple and as stark as that.
On a Wednesday night in the middle of February, after a series of grueling and painful twenty-hour days, the five-year plan was finished. All the pages, several hundred of them, were neatly laid out in twenty-eight littlestacks at a ten-foot table in the conference room of Public Financial Management, each stack representing a different city department or public agency that did business with the city. The plan was so laden with charts and dotted lines that it would reduce the most earnest mind to a state of confusion. Even Cohen’s wife, Rhonda, or Saint Rhonda as she had been dubbed during the campaign because of her blissfully even temperament, could barely muster excitement when her husband brought it home enthusiastically, as if it were the newest Grisham novel. But despite its turgid weight and volume, the five-year plan did carry a manifesto for dramatic and radical and unprecedented change in an American city. “What occurs in the next five years will determine our City’s fate for the next quarter of a century,” said the introduction.
From the conference room of PFM on this otherwise dreary night came the simmering sense of something powerful. Perhaps the very setting—a conference room with blue velvet chairs the size of bumper cars, in which lawyers and financial wizards moved about with the quiet confidence of their professional pedigrees—only skewed the real sight lines. For these men, the city would always work. They would always be in a place where the air was climate controlled. If they didn’t find success here, they would surely find it someplace else. They lived in the city, and they loved the city, but they never had the sickening sensation of feeling trapped within it. And from this room, with a kind of schoolboy breathlessness, flowed a current that hadn’t been felt in the city in years, a feeling that somehow, in some way, something within it could actually be changed.
Near the stroke of midnight, Cohen and White and the others who were there decided to call it quits. Cohen’s red tie was pulled down, and the bleak stubs of a five o’clock shadow spread across his boyish face. His hair was greasy and his face puffy, reflecting the look of a man who hadn’t slept in the past twenty-four hours, which in Cohen’s case wasn’t exactly true. He had actually slept about ten hours—in the past eight days. As he left the building, he had that furrowed look on his face, the look of a man with numbers whirring through his mind, a man searching for anything that might have gone undetected—a
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