Council Will Consider PGW Sale on Its Timeline — Not the Mayor’s

CBS Philly reports that the City Council will adjourn for the summer on June 19th without deciding whether to approve the sale of Philaelphia Gas Works to a Connecticut company — even though the company can, under contract, walk away from the deal if it’s not finalized before July 15.

Council President Darrell Clarke said that deadline was agreed to by Mayor Nutter and the company, UIL Holdings. The council had no input. And that’s not the only problem, he says.

Council President Darrell Clarke says one matter delaying things is that council staffers were given heavily redacted documents by the Nutter Administration, and then forced to sign confidentiality agreements.

“That has proven to be a real problem for this whole process, because everybody was sworn to secrecy based on these confidentiality agreements.  So therefore you don’t really have a sense of what’s in these documents.  So we have to wait until all that information and all those documents are reviewed before we are able to get a snapshot of where we are.”

UIL has agreed to pay the city $1.86 billion for PGW. Much of the proceeds from the sale would be used to shore up the shortfall in pension funding for city workers.