Mike vs. Mike

There must be some process in place now. Can’t you just write it down?

“We’re still streamlining the process and working out some of the kinks,” says Altman.

The administration’s been in office for 16 months and … there’s no written guide?

“We do have written materials that we give people,” says Altman. “We can show them clearly what the steps are.”

The Nutter administration also appears confused about what parts of the government actually require reform.

Nutter has torpedoed his predecessor’s two best-liked initiatives, the Mayor’s Office for the Re-entry of Ex-Offenders (MORE), and the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). Street built MORE in 2005, putting 550 released inmates to work in two years. Nutter hired a new director, Ronald Cuie, who himself hired a bigger, more expensive staff. Cuie was quietly demoted. MORE has yet to recover. “We’ve been working a lot on getting it organized,” said one Nutter aide, “so the results aren’t really there yet. But they’re coming.”

NTI enabled the government to acquire abandoned properties and clear the land for development. Under Street, this meant tearing down crack houses and shooting galleries and replacing them with fenced-in community gardens or low-income housing. Street had committed to acquiring about $70 million in land, covering thousands of parcels. But Nutter froze the program entirely last May to begin an audit. No criminal wrongdoing is suspected. The source of his concern is an accounting lapse.

It remains unclear why current spending had to be frozen in order to audit what happened in the past. And some City Council members are frustrated. “There’s a lot of concern on Council because we haven’t been told exactly what’s going on,” says Council president Anna Verna. “It’s been a long time, and we’d like to start moving forward.”

So in the meantime, a program that was going well in Philadelphia has stopped entirely. And that hardly seems like what citizens were crying out for when they voted for Michael Nutter and hoped for change.

THERE ARE, IN a sense, two Michael Nutters — the politician who shapes himself to the moment, and the man we saw on the campaign trail.

In the past few months, we saw a lot more of the campaigning Nutter, who treated a second billion-dollar, five-year budget gap as an opportunity to make things right. Nutter turned up in churches, basements, kitchens and community centers. His staff took part in four budget workshops, sponsored by the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, in which hundreds of citizens turned out each night to try their hand at balancing the city checkbook. The process was educational and, as politics goes, beautiful: the electorate and its public officials, frankly exchanging information and ideas in a time of crisis.

In February, I watched Nutter embrace his second chance at a budget crisis at an appearance at the Dixon House, in South Philadelphia. Talking straight, he asked citizens what they were willing to sacrifice. They politely ignored his question, telling him what city services they can’t bear to lose: rec centers, libraries, programs designed to keep their kids off the corners. Nutter listened to this talk for a while, nodding earnestly. “I get it,” he said. “Every city service has advocates, people who turn out at events like this to defend their thing. But Philadelphia is facing a different sort of period in its history, a period when all of us are going to have to make shared sacrifices.”