by Michael J. Mishak

A Molotov cocktail here, a race-baiting mailer there, and a federal bugging in the mayor's office everywhere. That's not to mention entrepreneurial drug dealers, terroristic threats and alleged illegal campaign contributions.

In a heated mayoral contest that is expected to be at least as close as the last outing in 1999, the candidates' positions on the issues have often been drowned out over the roar of a thoroughly entertaining, yet uninformative sideshow of distractions.

Was it really a firebomb or just a discarded Mystic Ice Tea bottle? Is there a vast right-wing conspiracy to use the Justice Department to oust a black mayor?

These scenarios make for great political theater, but fail to approach a reasoned debate about the issues affecting Philadelphia and which candidate is better suited to steer the nation's fifth-largest ship for the next four years.

The Pennsylvania Economy League (PEL), under the leadership of Chestnut Hiller David Thornburgh, has launched the IssuesPhiladelphia Web site [www.IssuesPhiladelphia.net] to help Philadelphia voters tone down the noise and focus on the issues.

Thornburgh, PEL Eastern Division executive director, hopes that the city's electorate will find IssuesPhiladelphia their one-stop insight shop along the information superhighway, complete with an inviting customer-friendly design.

"I think that people appreciate that there's some place to go without the distractions of political campaigns," Thornburgh said.

Prompted by the success of its IssuesPA Web site during the state's last gubernatorial election, PEL started developing IssuesPhiladelphia for this year's hotly-contested mayoral race in mid-August after receiving a grant from the William Penn Foundation.

The site positions views of both incumbent Mayor Street and his Republican challenger Sam Katz on economic growth, education, community vitality and city management side by side.

"Both candidates want the same end — for the city to prosper — but they differ on the means," Thornburgh said.

After wading through the candidate's political positions, voters can access a "Scorecards" section that allows access to the facts with by-the-numbers comparisons of Philadelphia's performance with the nation's leading cities. Trends in city employment and job growth, population shifts and local tax burdens are made easily accessible and intelligible through color-coded graphs.

Reports from the Center City District, the City Controller's office and the Brookings Institution, among others, are available for further study on the site's research tab.

Regardless of political rhetoric, the research points to an urgent need for change, Thornburgh said.

Philadelphia has been on a "steady downward glide" for about the last half-century, he said. Even throughout the economically fertile 1990s, Philadelphia managed to miss the growth wave other cities caught, he said. In light of waning job opportunities, the city saw a significant number of its educated youth leave the area. "The numbers are sobering in terms of migration," Thornburgh said.

Quoting Albert Einstein's definition of insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results," Thornburgh believes that while the city's efforts to grow its tourism and hospitality industries are "on target," Philadelphia must enact reforms in its tax structure and commerce marketing to remain competitive.

He takes aim at the city's wage tax, the highest municipal tax of its kind in the nation.

Created to fill the revenue gap resulting from the Great Depression, the city wage tax was originally enacted in 1939 as a temporary measure. Sixty-four years later, Philadelphia is nationally unique in its reliance on the wage tax and its high tax burdens, Thornburgh said. Detroit is second in its dependence on wage tax as revenue-generator. ("I don't think we aspire to be Detroit," he said."

While Philadelphia depends on the wage tax for more than 50 percent of its revenue, most cities rely on property taxes and operate without taxing a city worker's wages. Even suburban commuters are zinged, routinely paying about $325 million into the city's coffers annually.

The wage tax and the city's business tax burdens contribute to the city's decline while strengthening the surrounding region in places like Fort Washington, Blue Bell, Norristown and Plymouth Meeting, said Thornburgh.

According to Thornburgh, the Philadelphia region is home to 21 out of the 100 fastest growing private companies in the nation — but not a single one is headquartered within the city's limits.

"Philadelphia is the hole in the donut," he said. "It shouldn't make as much of a difference" to locate in the suburbs, "but it does."

But would a proposal like the Katz economic stimulus package — borrowing $750 million to replace the lost revenue of cutting the city's wage tax and phasing out its gross receipts tax — ring effective?

Thornburgh said that research from PEL and other policy research organizations find a link between cutting taxes and creating jobs. Unlike the city's past investments, which created a relatively small number of jobs, a large investment in tax cuts would have a "substantial impact," creating tens of thousands of jobs, he said. For example, the Kvaerner shipyard project, a $450 million deal, involved about 1,000 jobs.

Thornburgh points out that the Rendell administration borrowed funds to pay off a city deficit, but did so without a forward plan to improve efficiency and identify additional sources of revenue.

"This is a different kind of proposal," Thornburgh said of the Katz plan. "This is intentional deficit financing with a plan — not just on a wing and a prayer."

Careful to emphasize his organization's nonpartisan status, Thornburgh adds that PEL had devised similar models to the Katz plan previously and that the proposal is only one option among many, including asset sales, to improve Philadelphia's solvency.

While political leadership can affect the economic psychology of a place, Thornburgh said, it's not powerful enough to work against certain cycles in the economy. "But if you have a poorly run city that's filled with red tape and day-to-day irritants — death by a thousand paper cuts — it's going to have a long-term negative impact," he said.

PEL, as part of the IssuesPhiladelphia project, will be sponsoring a televised forum concerning the mayoral race on WHYY at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, October 28. The participants had not been confirmed as the Local went to press.

"There are limits to face-to-face debates," Thornburgh said. "They hold entertainment value, but we want to do something more focused."

"People vote for a lot of different reasons, but there's nothing like sticking a camera in front of somebody and letting them talk," he said. "By the end, I think you'll get a pretty good sense of who that person is."