Butkovitz Looks Likely for Mayoral Run

The Inquirer reports that City Controller Alan Butkovitz is making the kinds of moves you’d expect a mayoral candidate to make, only without quite saying yet that he’s a mayoral candidate. For example: he just hired a media strategist renowned for helping get Detroit’s mayor elected.

Butkovitz is prohibited by the City Charter from saying that he’s running for mayor without first resigning his current job. In an interview late Tuesday, he said his committee, Friends of Alan Butkovitz, had hired Joe Slade White & Company for “whatever I’m doing next.” He said he still had not made a decision about the 2015 mayoral race.

(Butkovitz, a former state representative from Northeast Philadelphia, won his third term as controller in November. It’s unlikely he would need high-powered strategists if he were only eyeing a re-election campaign three years from now.)

In 2011, Roll Call profiled Joe Slade White and the ads he’d made as a longtime consultant for Vice President Joe Biden.