The mayor and 2 rivals battle for the right to run bankrupt Chester: ‘It’s high drama’

A Chester political patriarch and his two challengers are battling vigorously for the privilege of running a city that the state warns might cease to exist by year’s end — a campaign that might well be without precedent in American politics.

“It’s high drama,” said Bretton T. Alvaré, a Widener University professor who has been active in Chester civic groups.

After a stunning, decades-long economic decline, Pennsylvania’s oldest town — where William Penn first set a boot on New World soil — is deep into a rare bankruptcy proceeding. It was initiated by Michael Doweary, the receiver whom the state appointed to help rescue Chester from a fiscal quagmire.

The bankruptcy is the source of the chasm between Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland, 68, who is seeking a third term, and his Democratic rivals in the May 16 primary: Councilperson Stefan Roots, 62, a surprise winner in his 2021 council bid; and Patricia Worrell, 63, a real estate broker and longtime member of the city zoning board. No Republicans are running.

» READ MORE: Chester's fiscal troubles were seven decades in the making.

In court documents and testimony, Doweary says his efforts have been sabotaged by Kirkland’s obstructionism and intransigence. A Commonwealth Court judge called the city government “dysfunctional” and stripped council members of some duties. They were restored on appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Doweary has warned that if the city’s fiscal crisis, accelerated by the administration’s failure to make pensions payments, isn’t resolved by the end of the year, Chester could be “disincorporated.” That means that its government, even its very boundaries, would evaporate.

Roots and Worrell say the threat is real. “It has people alarmed,” said Alvaré.

Kirkland, who served 24 years in the Statehouse, calls disincorporation a scare tactic. “It is not going to happen,” he said in an emotional closing speech at a Council meeting last month. “Chester is always going to be a city.”

Nearly 30% of Chester’s 33,000 residents live in poverty. The median household income is about $35,000; compared with $80,000 in Delaware County overall. Its tax base is depleted, and it has the state’s second-highest non-resident wage tax at 3.75%. It has relied on the slot machines at Harrah’s Philadelphia and the controversial Covanta incinerator for about 25% of its revenue.

» READ MORE: Chester's incinerator has long been a source of revenue ... and controversy.

The city’s other concerns notwithstanding, however, Alvaré said, the primary vote is “going to be a referendum on Mayor Kirkland.”

Politics in Chester, once a Republican autocracy where Democrats now hold a 5-1 advantage in voter registrations, have always been about personality rather than ideology, he said.

Kirkland has heralded the city’s dramatic drop in gun-violence incidents after a partnership with the Delaware County’s Gun Violence Task Force. Shooting incidents fell from 119 in 2020 to 53 in 2022; homicides declined from 32 to 19, according to the task force’s Matt Krouse.

Kirkland has held steadfastly that he inherited, not caused, the city’s financial problems.

“But he’s never had an intention of fixing them,” said Roots, a Chester native and author of the popular “Chester Matters” blog that Alvaré says has become a local newspaper for many Chesterites.

During an often tense League of Women Voters of Central Delaware County debate last week, Roots and Kirkland exchanged barbs, all but ignoring Worrell. Worrell, who has run unsuccessfully for state House and county council seats, said those frequently acrimonious exchanges made a case for her candidacy.

“Those two gentleman have to go back to work together,” she said. “I don’t know how they’re going to do it.”

Bankruptcy isn’t resonating with the voters, said Duane Lee, the chair of the city Democratic Party, which is backing Kirkland. “It’s just business as usual,” adding that in Chester, which has been a Pennsylvania “distressed city” since 1995, people are accustomed to financial crisis.

Alvaré said that is true to an extent: “A lot of people accept it as a matter of course.”

One who doesn’t is Halley Gerena, 27, who lives in the city’s north end. “By fighting bankruptcy and denying accountability, council is willing to sacrifice the city,” she said at a council meeting, generating applause.

The receiver’s office holds that Chester has redefined distress.

The state appointed Doweary in 2020 as the fiscal situation was worsening. He learned in October that the city had lost $400,000 in a phishing scheme and he filed for bankruptcy three weeks later.

» READ MORE: Chester’s stunning economic decline: How it went from a factory boom town to bankruptcy

Thus, Chester, an industrial powerhouse during the world wars, became a rarity: It is one of only 31 of the nation’s 38,000 municipalities to enter bankruptcy in the 85 years since Congress offered the option as a last-resort lifeline.

Chester’s underfunding crisis is among the worst in the nation, say municipal-finance experts.

The receiver’s office said that with pension underfunding, the city’s deficit, over $45 million, rivals the size of its budget, about $58 million.

Most of the deficit is the result of the city’s failure to meet pension obligations for several years. Kirkland said he was unaware the payments were missed. He testified at a court hearing that he has “a lot” of responsibility and that some things “fall through the cracks.”

“That crack is as big as the Grand Canyon,” said Les Neri of the Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police, who is representing the local police union in the bankruptcy proceedings.

» READ MORE: A state court judge called Chester's government 'dysfunctional'

Kirkland was responsible for seeing that the payments were made, the FOP noted in a brief to the state Supreme Court in support of that lower court decision to take away some of council’s powers.

“The mayor has been living in a fantasy world,” said Neri. Neri said that while it was safe to say the unions weren’t backing Kirkland, they didn’t know enough about his rivals to endorse either of them.

Halley Gerena said she hopes this election bring about real change in Chester.

She says she is voting for Stefan Roots. “I’ll be knocking on doors,” she said she told him, “but you get in and make a mess, I’ll be knocking on doors again saying, let’s vote him out.”