(The following story by Dan Geringer appeared on the Philadelphia Daily News website on January 12.)
PHILADELPHIA — Frustrated by state legislators’ doing nothing while debt-riddled SEPTA gets ready to slash service and boost fares, a powerful coalition of labor, big- business and citizen groups hits the ground running today.
Operating out of AFL-CIO headquarters, on 22nd Street near Chestnut, the newborn Pennsylvania Transit Coalition will immediately urge thousands of citizens, whose lives would be devastated by a derailed SEPTA, to personally buttonhole their legislators and deliver this message: “Permanent funding – Now!”
“The only way to move permanent funding for mass transit to the front burner of the legislative agenda is to make suburban and rural legislators feel the heat,” said Howard Cain, longtime labor consultant and a guiding spirit of the aggressive fund-transit campaign.
“We’ll get thousands of people to call or personally visit their legislators and tell them, ‘Permanent funding – Now!’ By the time the rank-and-file returns to Harrisburg later this month for their first session, they’ll go to their leadership and say:
” ‘You got to do something! These people are in my office every freaking day, telling me,’ “Permanent funding – Now!” You got to make them go away!’ ”
Massive informational leafleting at SEPTA stops begins next week, along with the visits and the calls to legislators.
If the civilized approach doesn’t work, Cain said, the coalition’s labor heavyweights – AFL-CIO Philadelphia Council President Patrick Eiding and AFSCME District Council 47 President Thomas Cronin – will take “thousands of their closest personal friends” to Harrisburg for a Valentine’s Day intervention.
“Up to now, the SEPTA board, which is mostly suburban, has been reluctant to go out and kick the hornets’ nest and direct the hornets toward the suburban legislators. So we’ll do it.”
Cain has reason to believe it will work as he flashes back to 1994, when he helped to organize another grass-roots movement of unlikely allies that attacked quickly, loudly and victoriously.
John Street, then president of City Council, tried to change the City Home Rule Charter so he could kick the controller off the pension board and replace him with himself.
Cain and the four municipal unions – cops, firefighters, white-collar workers and blue-collar workers – banded together with a rainbow coalition of citizen groups, papered the city with thousands of yellow “VOTE NO!” stickers, stormed City Council to chant “SHAME ON YOU!” at Street – and won.
Afterwards, FOP president Bobby Hurst threw his arm around scruffy consumer advocate Lance Haver and said, “Holy smokes! Look at me! I’m so far to the right, my car won’t make a left turn. But here I am, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Lance Haver for the first time in my life. I’m breaking out in hives!”
As fate would have it, Haver is now Mayor Street’s consumer advocate, suddenly assigned to: the Pennsylvania Transit Coalition. Cronin is on board, too.
The ultra-diverse mix of member groups ranges from the Action Alliance of Senior Citizens to the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity to the Sierra Club to the Delaware Valley Health Coalition to the Clean Air Council to the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association and the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“This is labor-driven just like it was 10 years ago,” Cain said. “We united to stop a pension grab then. Today, we unite because if lack of permanent funding forces SEPTA to cut service and raise fares, the health-care worker can’t get to the hospital and the nursing home, the hotel worker can’t get to the hotel, the city worker can’t get to the city. Thousands of working families suffer.”
“The hospitality industry is a 24-7 operation,” said John Kroll, president of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association, and general manager of the Hyatt Regency at Penn’s Landing. “We have employees working here all day, all night and all weekend. Most of them take mass transit. If service is cut, they can’t get here to work. That’s why we joined this coalition.”
In the suburbs, Cain said, the mall worker – sales people, servers, day and nighttime janitors – can’t get to the King of Prussia and Willow Grove malls if the buses aren’t running or are running too infrequently or at too high a fare. That could cost suburban malls millions.
By the time the new coalition is through, Cain said, suburban legislators who think mass transit is somebody else’s problem are in for a major attitude adjustment. Whether that’s painful or painless, he said, is up to them.