Kim Gav­in’s art class from Cramp Ele­ment­ary School in West Kens­ing­ton didn’t get to wit­ness the big vote after all, the one that the grade-school­ers and their chap­er­ones had hoped to in­flu­ence when they traveled to City Hall for last Thursday’s weekly Coun­cil meet­ing.

In­stead, Coun­cil­man Bobby Hen­on delayed the vote on his bill that would es­sen­tially al­low the city to buy river­front prop­erty in Holmes­burg for the po­ten­tial de­vel­op­ment of a new pris­on. Hen­on said that new ques­tions from one of his col­leagues promp­ted the post­pone­ment, the third such delay in the re­l­at­ively brief, tu­mul­tu­ous his­tory of Bill No. 150406.

Coun­cil’s last ses­sion be­fore sum­mer break is this Thursday, June 18. Hen­on in­tends to call for a vote on the bill then. If that doesn’t hap­pen, and Hen­on doesn’t with­draw the bill, Coun­cil may re-con­sider it when the fall ses­sion be­gins in Septem­ber.

Iron­ic­ally, there is no ac­tu­al men­tion of a pris­on in the le­gis­la­tion. And the prop­erty is now zoned res­id­en­tial, hav­ing been changed that by coun­cil 10 years ago as part of a con­domin­i­um de­vel­op­ment plan that ul­ti­mately failed.

Spec­tat­ors packed last week’s Coun­cil ses­sion and con­tin­ued to line the hall­ways out­side the cham­ber after se­cur­ity guards closed ad­mis­sion, de­clar­ing that the gal­lery had reached its ca­pa­city. But only a small minor­ity were there ex­pli­citly to protest Hen­on’s con­tro­ver­sial pro­pos­al. Dozens of Ser­vice Em­ploy­ees In­ter­na­tion­al Uni­on-mem­ber air­port work­ers wore dis­tin­guish­able T-shirts and waved signs, ad­voc­at­ing for bet­ter wages at Phil­adelphia In­ter­na­tion­al, which they won as Coun­cil passed a new air­port lease.

Mean­while, the Cramp School group con­sisted of 19 chil­dren and adults, Gav­in said. They also waved signs call­ing for more school fund­ing, al­though there were no school fund­ing meas­ures on the agenda. Gav­in said that her art class took part in the meet­ing to ful­fill a re­quire­ment of a grant from a loc­al non-profit or­gan­iz­a­tion, Pub­lic Cit­izens for Chil­dren and Youth. Linda Fernan­dez, dir­ect­or of PCCY’s Pi­cas­so Pro­ject, said that a con­di­tion of the grant is that the re­cip­i­ent use a por­tion of it to ad­voc­ate for ad­di­tion­al school fund­ing.

Northeast Times – June 17, 2015 – Read article online