Rebecca Rhynhart thinks of City Hall as home

Rebecca Rhynhart admits that when she first moved back to Philadelphia in 2008 to work for the Nutter administration, she didn’t get out very much.

“I was working 12, 14 hour days,” she said, mentioning that she picked her apartment at 8th and Chestnut Streets mainly because it was a short walk from City Hall and the Municipal Services building.

Philly was reeling from the global financial crisis, and as the City Treasurer and later the Budget Director, Rhynhart was in charge of putting Philly’s finances back together.

“When I got there, they were still using the precursor to Excel,” she told The Inquirer. “There were tens of thousands of dollars being wasted. It was a time that was very, very intense.”

Rhynhart grew up in Abington, and first came to Philadelphia in the late ‘90s after she graduated from college. “The diversity and vibrancy of the city compared to the suburbs, [that’s] what really drew me to Philly,” she said.

She lived in a studio apartment at 12th and Pine Streets, working as an editorial assistant and sales rep in the college textbook industry for a couple of years before moving to New York City for graduate school.

Then, she spent several years working on Wall Street before accepting her position under Mayor Nutter. And in 2018, Rhynhart became the first woman to be elected City Controller in Philadelphia, serving as the city’s chief auditor.

While Center City and city government has always been her home base, if you ask Rhynhart how she’ll be able to address the needs of people living in very different parts of Philadelphia, she says — “just look at my track record.”

“I’ve managed a thousand employees as the chief administrative officer. I ran the controller’s office, I called out the issues. Now I can actually fix it.”

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