Mayor Cherelle Parker delivers her first budget address, promising to ‘enforce the law’ and clean up the city

As she has done hundreds of times as a staffer and a lawmaker, Cherelle L. Parker on Thursday morning strode into the ornate chambers on the fourth floor of Philadelphia City Hall for a meeting of City Council.

But for the first time, she was hailed by the sergeant-at-arms: “Council president, the mayor has arrived.”

The first for Parker was also a first for Philadelphia. Parker is the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold the office, so her budget address to Council — Philly’s version of the State of the Union — represented a milestone.

With a booming voice and forceful rhetoric, Parker gave a rousing 75-minute speech outlining her “big and bold” $6.29 billion budget proposal to a packed chamber, earning frequent standing ovations for her plans to bolster street paving, increase “affordable luxury” housing opportunities for low-income residents, and spend $36 million on “clean and green” initiatives such as cracking down on illegal dumping and towing 10,000 abandoned cars.

And she led with the issue that was central to her history-making campaign in last year’s election: public safety.

“We will enforce the law right here in the city of Philadelphia,” Parker said.

In the coming months, Parker will negotiate with Council members over the budget, which must be approved before the next fiscal year begins on July 1. Potential sticking points include her tough-on-crime approach to public safety, which has already drawn criticism from progressives, and the wage and tax rates, which Parker has proposed leaving unchanged despite some lawmakers saying further cuts are needed.

To bring down crime, Parker pledged to accelerate police recruiting, dedicate 100 officers to “community policing,” and fund millions of dollars worth of technological upgrades. She recalled standing last week on Rising Sun Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia after eight high school students were shot at a bus stop — two days after another bus stop shooting left five people shot.

And she sometimes strayed off-script, including one instance in which she defended her approach to end the open-air drug market in Kensington with policies that are more aggressive than her predecessor’s and have been criticized as lacking compassion. She said Thursday, for example, that “not one city dollar” will fund syringe exchange programs — a departure from prior administrations — but that she still believes they’re “an important part” of the strategy.

“I’m not going to allow anyone to put us in a box trying to suggest that we do not care. We care deeply about every person in addiction,” Parker said during an emotional peak of her speech. “When it touches your immediate family like it did with me, you know that people, places, and things are what impact people in addiction.”

Parker said after the speech that she has lost several family members to addiction, including two uncles, adding, “I know this ugly monster up close and personal, and I’ve known it since I was a very, very little girl at a time when I shouldn’t have known.”

Criticism of the administration’s approach to Kensington, however, is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Amistad Law Project policy director Nikki Grant on Thursday praised Parker’s proposed investments in libraries and other city services, but said she is “deeply concerned about the Parker administration’s choice to defund harm reduction strategies,” referring to public health strategies such as needle exchanges that are aimed at keeping drug users alive until they are ready to enter treatment.

“We urge her to listen to people doing this work. We ask her not to discard decades of proven, evidence-based public health strategies,” Grant said. “The city cannot claim to care about people who use drugs while refusing to invest in harm reduction.”

Parker said that public safety is the No. 1 issue and that her “clean and green” initiatives are “1A.” She said her administration would fund 100 new sanitation workers, create 10 dedicated residential street cleaning crews, and allocate $11 million to pilot twice-weekly trash collection.

To address trash and litter, the mayor said she’d create a new illegal dumping collection crew and buy 1,500 new public trash cans.

Parker’s plan leaves all city tax rates unchanged, but it increases the share of property tax revenue that goes to the School District of Philadelphia, from 55% to 56%, which will give the district an estimated $119 million in additional revenue over five years. The remaining 44% would go to city coffers.

While discussing education policy, Parker emphatically praised Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr., saying, “You’re my guy. You have my support, and I’m looking forward to working with you.” Parker is in the process of selecting her nominees for the school board, which oversees the district and hired Watlington in 2022.

Parker last year campaigned on creating a system of “year-round schooling” — a goal shared by Watlington, who has included it in his strategic plan for the district. She said Thursday that a pilot program will begin in 20 schools this fall.

“This budget includes a plan for full-day and year-round schooling, offering students educational enrichment throughout the year, with schedules that work with working families,” Parker said.

Budget proposals involve scores of new programs, many of which get overlooked. After the speech, Parker said in an interview that she hoped two that were near to her heart didn’t get lost in the shuffle: a $3.2 million allocation to support youth sports, and the creation of a Community College of Philadelphia program that would train students for city jobs.

The “municipal college” would be the first in the nation, Parker said, and it would create a pipeline for Philly residents to get family-sustaining employment opportunities with the city.

“If you ask, ‘Cherelle, what’s your baby in this budget?’” she said. “This municipal employment college — that’s my baby.”

City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who like Parker took office in January, said the mayor put forth a “comprehensive budget” and predicted some individual members will raise issues they want to see addressed through the negotiation process.

He wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some Council members will seek out modest cuts to wage and business taxes, for instance.

”This will be a long, robust discussion between members of Council, as well as the administration,” Johnson told reporters. “And we’ll see where we end up.”

Johnson said he felt emotional presiding over the chamber as his former colleague delivered her first speech to Council as mayor, saying, “I’ve known Cherelle.”

”So when I see her come inside this room and begin to give her presentation, I thought about my mother, I thought about my grandmother,” he said. “I had an opportunity to see the great things that the city of Philadelphia can do with a new woman mayor.”

Parker’s proposal was praised by lawmakers in a series of speeches after she left the chambers. Even some progressive members, who are likely to clash with the administration over her public safety plans in the coming months, refrained from criticizing her plan.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, for instance, said she “couldn’t be more excited” about Parker’s plans to improve quality-of-life issues like illegal dumping and cleanliness and is “optimistic that this budget will be one of the most equitable and impactful in our city’s more than 300-year history.”

“It’s exactly what our neighborhoods need and deserve,” Gauthier said. “I will continue to be the mayor’s biggest cheerleader around cleaning and greening.”

And Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. praised Parker’s public safety plans and proposals to address the drug market in Kensington, likening her approach to tough love.

“It felt like my auntie way back in the day,” he said. “You don’t always like what she said, but you respected it and it came from a place of love.”

Parker began her speech by noting that her path to becoming the city’s first female mayor began in Council’s chambers about 34 years earlier, when as a high school student she won a citywide speech contest and delivered her address to Council. That day, she met her mentor, Marian Tasco, who helped Parker launch her career and whose Council seat Parker would later occupy.

“It’s good to be back home. This Council chamber is where my journey to public service began,” Parker said. “I stood right there and gave a Black History Month speech. ... I remember being so nervous then and, look, I got the same butterflies right now that I had when I was 17 years-old.”

She ended her address by noting her history-making moment.

“My name is Cherelle L. Parker,” she said, “and I’m the 100th mayor and first woman to lead Philadelphia.”