Mayor Parker defends Kensington plan at neighborhood meeting: ‘I’m building the plane while I’m flying it’

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker acknowledged Tuesday night that the rollout of her strategy to dismantle the entrenched open-air drug market in Kensington won’t be perfect, likening the effort to “building the plane while I’m flying it.”

But one day after lawmakers criticized her administration for presenting what they said is a vague plan, she stood in a Kensington community meeting and defended her approach, saying she’s trying “to do what this city of Philadelphia has never done before.”

“We made consistent investments in Band-Aid approaches to something that has been systemically occurring year and year after year,” she said, “and we’ve done nothing to change the trajectory of people’s lives to really try to put them on a path of self-sufficiency.”

She vowed that, under her administration, that would change.

The mayor addressed a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people who gathered Tuesday night at the Rock Ministries, a chapel on Kensington Avenue that sits amid the neighborhood’s infamous open-air drug market. It was part of a series of “town hall” events that the mayor is hosting throughout the city to tout her first budget proposal, and it took on added significance, given that the mayor has made ending the drug trade in Kensington a key part of her pledge to address what she describes as “lawlessness” in the city.

The meeting — the second time Parker visited Kensington in a month — came at a critical juncture.

Just two blocks from where the mayor addressed residents, the city is scheduled to dismantle an encampment Wednesday morning where a few dozen people have been living along a small stretch of Kensington Avenue.

Administration officials say the encampment clearing will be led by social service agencies and assisted by the Police Department. Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel has said about 75 people were living in the targeted area, but that number has dwindled significantly over the last several weeks.

The clearing of the encampment is separate from the mayor’s longer-term strategy to stabilize the neighborhood, according to officials. Parker’s broader initiative includes a police-driven enforcement phase that is expected to begin within weeks, which will include arrests for narcotics, prostitution, and other “quality-of-life” crimes.

Through her in-the-weeds explanation Tuesday of the budget, including such items as the stabilization reserve and an impending pension balloon payment, Parker often leaned on personal experience while touting her proposals. She talked of using food stamps while growing up and watching a close family member battle substance use.

“When you know poverty and addiction because you read it from a white paper, it’s different than when you’ve experienced it,” Parker said. “It’s different when you’ve been a child and you couldn’t stop an adult who you loved.”

The crowd was a mostly friendly one, with residents delivering a standing ovation when she entered the room. They broke out in cheers as Parker laid out her public safety proposal, including ramping up hiring in the police force and modernizing department technology. Buddy Osborne, the lead pastor at the Rock, opened the meeting by saying Parker’s leadership gives him hope.

“When we all do our job,” he said, “the community is going to buy into that, and then we’re going to have a community that’s going to be a national model.”

Parker also on Tuesday addressed one of the most controversial proposals in her budget plan: to strip nearly a million dollars worth of funding from Prevention Point Philadelphia, a Kensington-based nonprofit that, among other social services, provides sterile syringes to drug users. Health experts in her own administration have said syringe exchanges prevent the spread of HIV and other blood-borne illnesses — and that they’re preparing for a spike in disease.

The mayor has said syringe exchange services are “an important part of the harm reduction strategy,” but that her administration will not fund them.

“You haven’t heard me refute any medical professionals, you haven’t heard me argue against the science,” she said. “To me, if you care about somebody who is suffering, then you’ve got to believe they can beat it with access to the right kind of care.”