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Eleven years ago, Carlton Williams was, to some, a symbol of government dysfunction.

He was leading the troubled Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, an agency engulfed in controversy over safety lapses and staffing issues following the deadly 2013 Market Street building collapse. The city controller called on Williams to resign, and Jim Kenney, then a candidate for mayor, promised that he’d get rid of him.

And yet Williams remained.

In July, he was named Philadelphia’s managing director, one of the most powerful positions in city government, second only to the mayor. He is assuming responsibility for L&I again, plus dozens of other agencies and thousands of employees who carry out the day-to-day operations that make the city run.

It is perhaps an improbable outcome for a longtime city employee who absorbed a level of scrutiny that could have easily ended his career.

But Williams proved durable, cycling through leadership positions across several departments while establishing himself as a City Hall insider. He has politically powerful allies and a reputation among City Council members as someone who will quickly act on their needs. That goes a long way with 17 politicians who value responsiveness and omnipresence, traits that they did not see in Williams’ predecessor, Adam K. Thiel.

Perhaps most importantly for Williams’ ascent: he is all-in on Mayor Cherelle L. Parker.

The ties between Parker, 53, and Williams, 57, stretch back to their childhoods in Northwest Philly — he played football for the Oak Lane Wildcats, and she was a cheerleader. The team remains a part of both of their identities: Williams has led the Oak Lane Youth Association for 20 years, and the mayor often says proudly that she is a “Wildcat for life.”

Later in life, both found allies in the storied Northwest Coalition, a powerful political family. Williams said that he has known for 20 years that Parker would one day sit atop City Hall. And he most recently led Parker’s Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, overseeing the implementation of some of her key campaign promises.

“I’m bringing the ‘One Philly’ brand to the managing director’s office,” Williams said in an interview, echoing the mayor’s oft-used slogan. “Not to say it wasn’t being done under my predecessor. But I want to make sure it’s completely aligned with the mayor’s goals, because I believe in that vision.”

His appointment as managing director marks a new stage for the Parker administration that has seen significant turnover at its highest levels. And it is indicative of what Parker values in her inner circle: vast institutional knowledge and loyalty.

For the mayor, trust in Williams’ ability to operate within the bureaucracy and advance her priorities may outweigh his mixed record of management.

“Whenever we had a crisis of any kind in this city, he has been on my speed dial,” Parker said when she announced Williams’ appointment last month. “No matter who’s been leading, I’ve always called him for his counsel.”

Overseeing ‘a very broken’ L&I

Parker’s bet on Williams would have seemed almost unimaginable a decade ago.

A year after Williams was appointed to lead L&I, an excavator demolishing a wall on Market Street in Center City toppled the building onto an adjacent Salvation Army store, killing six people and injuring a dozen more. The inspector responsible for the demolition project died by suicide a week later.

Calls for reform abounded and questions swirled about whether the city’s agencies were responsible. There were multiple investigations launched and commissions convened to probe the disaster, and within days, Council members were pressing Williams to institute reforms that would bolster safety on private construction sites.

In response, Williams sought to hire more inspectors, increase their training, raise demolition standards, and create new specialized units within L&I.

Today, he says the collapse on Market Street was “one of the saddest moments” of his time in government.

“You have to lead through some tough challenges when you’re a leader,” he said. “You don’t get to pick and choose when you lead.”

But it was not the only controversy he faced.

The Inquirer reported that, in 2014, Williams personally intervened in the demolition of a Point Breeze building and allowed it to proceed without the requisite permits.

And in 2015, L&I was forced to reorder hundreds of inspections after sending unlicensed and unqualified inspectors to examine unsafe buildings across the city.

By fall 2015, then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz was calling on Williams to be fired. He said at the time that L&I had long been troubled, but that his office’s audit of the agency found that Williams had not made enough improvements.

Butkovitz now says that he blames former Mayor Michael Nutter instead, and that Williams was “caught between the mayor and me.” He said Williams had promised to provide the controller’s office with documents to assist in an audit, and then did not.

“I took it out on Carlton Williams at the time,” Butkovitz said. “His inclination was to cooperate with me, but at the time, it looked to me like duplicity. And I don’t think it was. I think he was overridden by higher authority.”

Nutter did not respond to a request for comment.

Estelle Richman, a former Philadelphia managing director who has held a variety of roles in local, state and federal government, said L&I is “one of the most difficult city departments.” She noted that past agency leaders have been pushed out, fired, indicted, and jailed.

“We can go back and say ‘maybe [Williams] should have done this or that,’ but the reality is it was a very broken department,” she said. “I think he did more to try to get it restabilized and back on track than any other commissioner at that time could have done.”

‘You have to be accessible’

Before taking the helm at L&I, Williams was a career bureaucrat.

Born in North Philly and raised in West Oak Lane, Williams started with the city at age 19, working in Fairmount Park as one of the first-ever members of the Philadelphia Ranger Corps. The program paid for part of his tuition to attend Temple University and marked his foray into public service.

Jeffrey Montague, who led the Philadelphia Ranger Corp. and has been a mentor to Williams for decades, said that at a young age, Williams showed potential.

“He didn’t try to fit in. He always stood out on his own independence,” Montague said. “He wasn’t trying to fit into a crowd.”

After working as a ranger, Williams spent three years running a Harrisburg youth program for AmeriCorps — the first and last time Williams lived outside the city.

He returned to Philadelphia to work for the Parks and Recreation Department, rising to become a deputy commissioner in both the recreation and streets departments.

Then came the four-year stint leading L&I, and when Kenney took office in 2016, he moved Williams back to his old job as a deputy in the streets and sanitation department.

But it didn’t last. Five months after Kenney took office, the streets commissioner was arrested for assault. Williams ascended to the role, and suddenly, the person who Kenney said he wouldn’t retain to lead L&I was in charge of one of Philadelphia’s most visible departments, overseeing transportation and sanitation operations citywide.

It was there where Williams solidified himself as a City Hall fixture. He said that as an administration staffer, he has “one primary that I listen to” — the mayor — but he has always tried to be attentive to Council.

That may be a key difference between Williams and Thiel, his predecessor. Thiel was the former fire commissioner and a nationally recognized expert in emergency management who was seen as a skilled behind-the-scenes operator.

But Council members said that Thiel did not foster close relationships with members of the city’s legislative body who are often conduits between residents and the mayor’s administration.

In addition, Thiel was often absent during major events in the city and he was frequently on leave — he joined the Army Reserve eight months into his tenure, and held several jobs outside city government, including as a consultant and professor.

That was a departure from prior administrations, when the managing director was often the public face of city operations.

On several occasions during the Parker administration, it was Williams who was in the spotlight. As director of the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, he played a key coordinating role during the eight-day municipal worker strike that halted city services — most visibly, trash pickup.

And he oversaw the city’s response to a severe winter storm earlier this year that left much of the city encased in ice, despite weather emergencies typically falling under the managing director’s purview.

City Councilmember Anthony Phillips, whose district includes Northwest Philadelphia, said that prior to Thiel’s resignation, members of Council were “gravely concerned” about his frequent leave. Some members said that, in Thiel’s absence, Williams was their primary contact among Parker’s top staff.

“You can’t get certain things done and you can’t expect an efficient and effective city when you’re not present,” Phillips said. “Carlton is going to be the complete opposite of that.”

Williams said that his role as managing director is his only job aside from volunteering.

“It’s a full-time, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job,” he said. “You have to be accessible.”

Williams’ coziness with elected officials has also drawn criticism.

A former city employee who previously worked for Williams said his relationships with Council amount to a “favor machine.” The staffer spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to preserve relationships.

“There is this cycle of Council getting calls from constituents, like ‘there’s a pothole,’ and then they get it fixed, and that’s the main work,” the former staffer said. “It’s not actually setting up systems that are solving the problems. It’s reacting to them.”

But Williams said some of his proudest achievements have resulted in systemic change: he led the installation of some of the first spraygrounds in the city, overhauled the recycling program, had BigBelly trash cans placed throughout Philadelphia, and started the annual Philly Spring Cleanup.

“He is probably one of the most well-prepared managing directors that the city has had,” Richman said. “He knows not only how operations work within the city departments, he knows the political structure of the city. And I believe a managing director has to know both.”

Testifying in the Johnny Doc trial

Williams’ close relationship with a Council member also came under a microscope in a federal courtroom in 2021.

John Dougherty, the former leader of the politically powerful Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and his ally, ex-Councilmember Bobby Henon, were on trial for bribery and other corruption charges. Prosecutors accused Henon of taking official actions as a Council member at Dougherty’s behest in exchange for a salaried, no-show job with the union.

One of the schemes prosecutors presented during the trial focused on efforts by union officials in 2015 to halt the installation of an MRI machine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a project that was being completed with nonunion labor. Williams, at the time, was at the helm of L&I.

During the 2021 trial, Williams was called to testify. He told the jury that Henon called him in August 2015 to report that an unlicensed contractor was working at CHOP, and that he dispatched an inspector to investigate.

The inspector, Williams testified, issued a stop-work order on the construction of the MRI machine. But he insisted that he did not direct the inspector to do so, and told the jury that responding to complaints from Council members was a routine part of his job.

Ultimately, L&I reversed the stop-work order, and the MRI machine was built.

Prosecutors said Dougherty paid Henon to be his “man on the inside” in City Hall and used the episode at CHOP to establish evidence of a corrupt agreement between the two.

“You heard what happened,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Costello told the jury during closing arguments. “Henon contacted Carlton Williams, Carlton Williams sent inspectors out and they issued orders — they issued orders to shut the job down.”

But defense attorneys said one public official asking another to take action doesn’t constitute a crime.

“Carlton Williams was the recipient of information just passed on to him about the MRI and the unlicensed contractor,” said defense attorney Brian McMonagle. “That ain’t a crime.”

Dougherty and Henon were both convicted. Henon was released from prison last year, and Dougherty remains incarcerated.

Carrying out Parker’s vision

During the 2023 mayoral campaign, when a half-dozen Democrats could have plausibly won the party’s nomination, Williams nearly left the city.

He said he got a job as the public works director in San Francisco, but before he accepted, Parker won the primary election. Williams decided to stay.

“I wanted to work for Cherelle Parker,” he said. “I believed in her vision.”

Parker took office in 2024 and created a new role: director of the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives. Williams would carry out her campaign promise to rid the city of its “Filthadelphia” moniker by implementing twice-weekly trash collection, an expansion of illegal dumping enforcement, and a biannual citywide program to clean every block.

As managing director, Williams’ portfolio will grow substantially. He will be responsible for the city’s response to public health and homelessness, as well as overseeing large agencies like the fire department and the prisons.

He will also coordinate the city’s strategies in Kensington, the beleaguered neighborhood and the site of an open-air drug market that the Parker administration has spent more than two years working to shut down. Williams said there is inherent pressure that comes with being responsible for addressing such long-entrenched issues.

“But I work best under pressure, and so I take that as a badge of honor,” he said.

Williams said he intends to prioritize communication with residents because they “understand that everything can’t get fixed at one time.”

“But at least we can say what needs to be done, when it’s going to [be] fixed, what’s the timeline,” he said. “I manage through the eyes of everyday citizens. I want what they want.”