On Thursday, Philadelphia City Council was scheduled to vote on Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke’s Safe Healthy Homes package. Instead, it’s headed back to committee.

By Denise Clay-Murray

It’s not every day that my Hanging In The Hall life and my president and board member of the Society of Professional Journalists life intersect. In fact, I try to keep them as separate as possible.

But on Thursday, thanks to a procedural issue that has sent Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke’s Safe Healthy Homes package of bills back to the Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless, my two worlds are going to be colliding in this column.

On Wednesday night, a lawsuit was filed to prevent the bills from coming to the Council floor by two members of the Homeowners Association of Philadelphia, or HAPCO. HAPCO testified in the committee hearings regarding Safe Healthy Homes on behalf of landlords and has opposed the legislation, which includes such things as allowing tenants to unionize, expanding the city’s Good Cause Eviction protections, and makes landlords more accountable for such things as not having a valid rental license.

Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke
Photo: Chris Mansfield & Durrell Hospedale

One of the things that the lawsuit charged was that the legislation was passed out of committee in violation of the Sunshine Act. Under the Sunshine Act, which covers public meetings or anything that involves the allocation of taxpayer funds, the public has to be able to comment on any piece of legislation before it becomes law.

Now, I saw the hearing in which Safe Healthy Homes was passed out of committee, and while what happened doesn’t qualify as a pure violation of the Sunshine Act, I could see where someone might think it does.

That’s because public comment on the package of bills was done AFTER the bills were passed out of committee. Under the Sunshine Act, the public is supposed to have its say BEFORE anything is voted on. Now, the landlords and tenant activists got to have their say during public comment, but it was after Safe Healthy Homes was already passed out of committee.

Had the bills been brought on the floor for final passage on Thursday, everything in the previous paragraph would have led to them getting overturned in court in the most simplistic way possible.

So, instead of voting on the bills, they go back to committee so that they can be reconsidered.

In all honesty, this isn’t something that happens a whole lot in City Council. Or in any municipal meeting that I’ve gone to for that matter. Most of the time, public comment is allowed to go on and on before any legislation is taken up.

I mean, heck, the Committee of the Whole hearings for the 76 Place legislation took at least three days because public comment took so long.
But here’s the thing. While sending the bills back to committee will ensure that everyone gets their say during public comment, I don’t think that landlords should consider this as a victory.

Why? Because these bills probably ain’t gonna change. At all. I say this because the reason why the committee will be reconsidering these bills has nothing to do with the substance of the bills themselves, and everything to do with procedure.

Don’t believe me? Here’s O’Rourke.

“This is a shameful tactic taken in bad faith from lobbyists who are poorly representing their clients by introducing a meaningless procedural delay,” he said. “The same bills that Council would have voted on today will come before the full body in the coming weeks.”

There’s no date set for the Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless hearing. But once we get it, we’ll make sure you do, too.

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