John Kromer '71 is running for Sheriff in Philadelphia's Primary election in May. His campaign platform? If elected, he'll close down the dysfunctional and scandal-ridden office.
When John Kromer '71 was Philadelphia housing director under Mayor Ed Rendell in the 1990s, one of the challenges he was unable to address was the need to reform the Sheriff's Office. A relic of Democratic machine politics, the office is in charge of auctioning off tax delinquent properties. That's a big job in a city where (according to a recent report) taxes are overdue on about 17,000 vacant properties . But with the Sheriff's department run by an elected official who does the bidding of the ward leaders who put him in office, it's a job that has been done poorly for decades, Kromer says.
“As housing director, I devoted a lot of time to planning and working with community groups,” he says.“And then at the same time the city had a system where thousands of properties were auctioned off every year with absolutely no attention to planning goals and priorities.”
Since then, things have only gotten worse, says Kromer, who is now a consultant, an adjunct faculty member at the Fels School of Government at Penn, and the author of the book Fixing Broken Cities. A costly forensic audit of the Sheriff's Office, which is also the target of a Federal probe, has found that it owes the city $8 million, that more than $53 million in bank accounts held by the department have vanished, and that no vacation or sick leave records exist for 17 of its patronage employees.
“The taxpayers in Philadelphia are funding a Sheriff's Office with no accountability,” says Kromer. “My goal is to change all that, by either abolishing the department entirely or making the position an appointed one that reports to the mayor.” (If the office is abolished, he says, the Sheriff's duties can easily be assigned to municipal agencies already doing similar tasks.)
Out on the campaign trail, Kromer, who is running as a Democrat in the primary, says he's been surprised by the number of voters who are aware of the issues. While Democratic Party leaders have put forward their own anointed candidate to replace the retiring Sheriff, Kromer believes he has a chance as an underdog.“The Party isn't the invincible machine it once was in Philadelphia,” says Kromer.
