Looking back at whether Mayor Jim Kenney fulfilled his campaign promises, from street cleaning to new jobs at the port

For some of outgoing Mayor Jim Kenney’s long-ago campaign promises, it’s easy to determine whether he followed through.

The mayor, alas, failed to bring street sweeping to every neighborhood.

But for other proposals, evaluating the mayor’s performance is more complicated. Kenney, for instance, once wanted to eliminate a police tactic known as stop-and-frisk. Today, Philly cops still make pedestrian stops — but experts say the practice has been curtailed.

Kenney leaves office when the calendar turns to 2024. Here’s a look at how he fared in accomplishing some of his notable policy goals:

The promise: Kenney pledged to restore citywide street cleaning to Philadelphia.

The progress: After taking office, he formed a Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet aimed at assembling a team of community leaders to identify new sanitation strategies. And in 2019, he announced the launch of a pilot program to expand and enhance street cleaning — including sweeper trucks and more controversial methods, like using leaf blowers to dislodge trash.

He dedicated $62 million over five years to the effort, which initially included seven neighborhood cleaning zones in areas with the most litter. This year, the city expanded the program to 14 neighborhoods, and plans to include six more in 2024.

The prognosis: While Kenney will leave office having devoted far more money and attention than his recent predecessors to the war on litter, the city’s “Filthadelphia” title remains, and most of the city has no street cleaning services at all.

“The global pandemic and severe financial challenges that followed unfortunately delayed the process of reaching citywide implementation of the program,” Kenney spokesperson Sarah Peterson said.

The streets department now hopes to achieve citywide street sweeping in 2026, she said.

The promise: During his 2015 campaign, Kenney said expanding the Port of Philadelphia — a state agency now known as PhilaPort — was “the most realistic and most lucrative” job creation plan. He said he was working with then-Gov. Tom Wolf to create thousands of jobs, and suggested expansion at the Packer Avenue Marine Terminal could create 8,000 to 10,000 jobs.

The progress: The port did expand significantly during Kenney’s tenure, but it added about 2,400 jobs, not 8,000. And it was the Wolf administration — which poured more than $500 million in capital investments into the port — and the federal government, which supported a dredging effort, that played the largest roles in the expansion.

Since 2016, the number of jobs supported by the port grew about 25%, from about 9,700 to 12,100 across 18 different terminals and facilities, according to the port’s most recent analysis.

One investment that came in part from the city was from Philadelphia Works, a quasi-public nonprofit that partly financed a new training facility at the port that opened in 2019.

Port spokesperson Ryan Mulvey said the Kenney administration and City Council have been “supportive” with addressing traffic flow and improving city service delivery at the port.

The prognosis: Job growth at the port is expected to continue in the coming years as the port opens a new warehouse in Southwest Philadelphia and increases its container capacity.

The promise: Kenney was clear during his 2015 campaign for mayor that under his administration, “stop-and-frisk will end in Philadelphia, no question.” It separated Kenney from his predecessor, Michael A. Nutter, whose police department used the controversial tactic at record rates.

The progress: Once elected, Kenney said his position was misunderstood and that he meant police would stop racially profiling residents and conducting pedestrian stops without legal justification.

Stop-and-frisk has not ended in Philadelphia, but it has declined by a staggering 95% since 2015, when there were nearly 199,000 pedestrian stops, according to police data. Last year, there were about 9,600.

The ACLU, which monitors police use of stop-and-frisk, wrote in a November court filing that “there is some reason to believe that there is light at the end of the stop-and-frisk tunnel.”

Kenney “shares the concerns of many advocates, civil rights experts, and residents about the harmful practice of unconstitutional stops, and the administration has continued to champion reforms to ensure constitutional use of public-safety tactics,” Peterson said.

The prognosis: Opponents of the tactic fear the trend could shift under the next administration. Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker has embraced stop-and-frisk as a policing tactic, but she has stopped short of saying that police should use it more frequently than they currently do.

The promise: Kenney didn’t campaign on opening supervised drug consumption sites. But he became a high-profile supporter of the overdose prevention strategy, embracing it as a means to combat the destruction wrought by the opioid epidemic in Kensington.

The progress: The plan, which involved supporting the opening of a facility run by the nonprofit Safehouse, faced stiff opposition from the start, both politically and in the courts. The pushback boiled over in early 2020 when Safehouse unsuccessfully attempted to open a site in South Philly, with neighbors and politicians across the political spectrum criticizing the rollout.

The effort stalled after the onset of the pandemic, and City Council this year effectively made it a nonstarter by banning the facilities in nine of its 10 districts.

The prognosis: Despite Kenney’s best efforts, Philly will not be getting a supervised drug consumption site anytime soon. And on the campaign trail this year, Parker said she opposed them.

“The administration has been very supportive of the overdose prevention center model, which is shown to save lives,” Peterson said. “Unfortunately, however, we have seen in instances across the country that it is more politically expedient to exploit stigma and fear.”

The promise: When Kenney was elected, he was seen as a historic preservation champion.

The progress: The historical commission won a larger budget and added two new planners under Kenney, its first substantial increase in staff since the 1980s. That allowed Philadelphia to begin minting new historic districts to protect properties from the wrecking ball.

Peterson noted that the number of properties listed in the local register of historic places and protected from demolition increased by at least 26% since January 2017. That’s more “than all previous mayoral administrations, combined,” she said.

But many advocates feel the city hasn’t done nearly enough to staunch demolitions of historic buildings. The recommendations of Kenney’s Historic Preservation Task Force were largely ignored, aside from a handful of policy changes, such as relief from parking requirements for historically protected buildings.

No new incentives were created to make preservation less burdensome for property owners, or to make historic district regulations more flexible.

The prognosis: Peterson said staff at the historical commission are working on some of these regulatory changes.

But advocates fear that the city’s pace of working on preservation will be far too slow for many beloved structures.

The promise: During the 2015 mayoral race, Kenney pledged to make Philadelphia’s streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians. Once in office, he signed onto a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic-related deaths.

The progress: The administration points to some policy wins, including a speed camera program on Roosevelt Boulevard, one of the city’s deadliest roadways. In a statement, the administration noted that road diets, reducing the number of traffic lanes on a given street, have resulted in 18% fewer injuries on the city’s most dangerous roads and that separated bike lanes have led to 17% fewer crash injuries for cyclists.

But in the years since the pandemic, Philadelphia’s roads have nonetheless become more dangerous. More than 120 people have been killed on the roads every year since 2020. At least 10 cyclists have been killed this year, and despite Kenney’s reputation as a bike lane-friendly mayor, there are only 340 miles of them on the city’s 3,100 miles of streets. Only 99 miles have protected lanes.

This isn’t entirely Kenney’s fault. Dangerous driving spiked radically nationwide in 2020. And Council has control over bike lane creation and other road safety measures.

But some advocates feel burned by the administration, contending that the streets department’s leadership has not been very supportive of multimodal roads, and that pedestrian-friendly pandemic-era successes like streeteries and road closures were abandoned or made burdensome with additional regulations.

The prognosis: The city is farther away than ever from its Vision Zero pledge as traffic deaths remain elevated. Parker did not prioritize street safety on the campaign trail, and there is some concern among safety advocates that little progress will be made under her administration.