Philadelphia real estate developers see the writing on the wall.
As progressives have toppled centrist Democrats in nationally watched races, some local development interests are wary that the same trend could reshape Philadelphia City Council this spring, when every member is up for reelection. They see a growing progressive faction as a threat to business.
Enter the incumbent protection plan.
Nearly a dozen local developers are already pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Philly For Growth, a group that in the past two Council election cycles spent millions on advertising campaigns to back business-friendly Democrats, according to a source familiar with the planning.
Philly For Growth is an independent expenditure group, also known as a super PAC. It can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence an election, but there are rules barring super PACs from most forms of coordination with the candidates they support.
In 2023, the group was the biggest special interest group involved in that year’s Council races, and it provided a substantial boost to its chosen candidates by outspending individual campaigns.
Ahead of the May primary election, Philly For Growth plans to spend $1.5 million to support pro-business Democrats, most of whom are sitting Council members, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans. The group will not fund negative advertising about Council’s four incumbent progressives, the source added.
Councilmember Kendra Brooks, of the progressive Working Families Party, speaks during a rally outside of the School District of Philadelphia headquarters in May. At left is Councilmember Rue Landau and at right is Councilmember Jamie Gauthier. All three are members of Council’s progressive faction.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
The idea is to keep progressives from growing their power on Council instead of spending money to knock off the leftists who are already there. There are currently four reliably progressive votes out of the total 17 on Council, but some members may be more likely to vote with that faction as Democratic voters nationally revolt against incumbents.
That’s a different strategy than in 2023, when Philly For Growth backed a slate of five candidates — two incumbents and three challengers. Both incumbents won, but all three challengers lost.
Philly For Growth has previously been affiliated with the Building Industry Association of Philadelphia, an advocacy group for development interests. Mo Rushdy, the BIA’s former president who leads the organization’s political activity, declined to comment.
The source said that Philly For Growth will fund advertising to support Council members Mark Squilla, whose 1st District includes parts of South Philly, Center City, and Fishtown; Cindy Bass, whose 8th District is based in North and Northwest Philadelphia; and Quetcy Lozada, whose 7th District includes much of North Philadelphia and Kensington.
All three are seen as more centrist members and have said they intend to run for reelection. No challenger has officially launched a campaign against any of them, but candidates who are aligned with the city’s left-leaning political organizations are expected to emerge as the primary — still eight months away — draws nearer.
The super PAC is making one exception when it comes to supporting incumbent district Council members, the source said. In the 5th District, currently represented by Councilmember Jeffrey Young Jr., the group will support a to-be-decided challenger.
Councilmember Jeffery Young Jr. speaks to other members of Council during a 2025 session.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
At least five people have said they are interested in running for the North Philly-based 5th District seat, and Young has drawn opposition from development interests for pushing proposals that would slow or halt some projects in his district.
Young said in a statement that building “sensible, affordable housing” is one of his top priorities and that he has supported city programs like Turn the Key, which provides mortgage support to first-time homebuyers.
“People are free to back those who share their values. These are my values,” Young said. “I am leaving it to the residents of the 5th to determine whose values best reflect them.”
The super PAC will also fund advertising backing four incumbent members who represent the city at-large: Isaiah Thomas, Katherine Gilmore Richardson, Jim Harrity, and Nina Ahmad. That group doesn’t include progressive at-large Councilmember Rue Landau, but Philly For Growth doesn’t plan to oppose her, the source said.
Council President Kenyatta Johnson laughs inside the caucus inside City Hall on June 11.Aidan T. Gallo / Staff Photographer
A spokesperson for Landau’s campaign arm said in a statement that the Council member “stands by her accomplishments for working people, small businesses and vulnerable communities in Philadelphia and looks forward to voters having the opportunity to make up their own minds next year.”
It’s unclear just how competitive the at-large race will be, and candidates have until the spring to decide — nomination paperwork is typically due in March. Seven of Council’s members represent the entire city at-large, and two of those seats are effectively reserved for members of minority parties under the city’s Home Rule Charter.
That has traditionally meant that five seats are held by Democrats, given the party’s massive voter registration advantage in the city. In recent years, Republicans and the progressive Working Families Party have battled for the remaining two seats during the fall general election, and the WFP currently holds both.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, who is also up for reelection, and Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who insiders do not expect will see a serious challenger, will likely be on Philly For Growth’s slate, too, the source said.
Waymo’s driverless cars have been rolling through Center City for almost a year now. Still with a trained specialist behind the wheel, still without a commercial launch date.
Some of our local elected officials have expressed concerns about driverless vehicles on Philadelphia streets. Based on what has happened in other cities, their concerns are not unfounded. When it comes to deploying robotaxis, Philadelphia should slow down, not speed up.
The pattern that has emerged across the country is that problems that should have been caught during testing are instead being confronted when the autonomous vehicles have already been deployed and are carrying passengers.
Start with what happened in Austin, Texas, this spring. When a gunman opened fire outside a bar on Sixth Street, killing three people and wounding more than a dozen, several Waymo vehicles ended up blocking the emergency response. One sat sideways in the road as an ambulance tried to get through, with bystanders shouting at it to move, while a police officer worked the car’s speaker system trying to get a human being on the line.
The safety of Waymo robotaxis has repeatedly been questioned. In December of last year, Waymo had to replace software that allowed the autonomous vehicles to pass stopped school buses in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta. And earlier this year in Austin, writes Amy Witherite, the robotaxis blocked emergency responders’ access to the site of a shooting with mass casualties.Austin Independent School Distri
In San Francisco, fire crews and other first responders have had to physically take control of stalled Waymos to move them out of the way during emergencies. These aren’t isolated glitches.
Federal regulators counted at least six incidents nationally in which first responders had to take control of a Waymo vehicle during an emergency. In July, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told the industry that emergency scenes are not rare or extreme “edge cases,” and that an automated vehicle unable to interact safely with first responders is a danger to the public.
That’s the backdrop against which Philadelphia is being asked to move forward.
Councilmember Nina Ahmad gave voice to concerns after a City Council hearing in May. “Progress for the sake of progress isn’t enough. We need to look at the impact of that progress,” she said during a news conference. She wasn’t the only Council member who expressed reservations, or whose questions for Waymo went unanswered at the hearing.
After Waymo vehicles became immobilized and helped bring San Francisco traffic to a standstill during the city’s July Fourth celebration, Mayor Daniel Lurie called for stronger statewide standards that verify that the autonomous vehicles’ systems can handle major events and emergencies before they are allowed to operate. His message was simple: “Prove it before you deploy it.”
Here is the question I’d ask before this moves one step further in Philadelphia: Have the police officers, firefighters, and paramedics who will be on the street been trained, specifically and verifiably, to handle a car that will not pull over for a siren, will not respond to a hand signal or a flare, and has no driver to negotiate with?
A first responder trained to deal with a human behind the wheel is not automatically equipped to deal with an empty vehicle that only takes instructions from a call center hundreds or thousands of miles away. Austin’s ambulance crews and San Francisco’s fire companies found out about that gap in real time, during emergencies — Philadelphia doesn’t have to.
The company cites a substantial reduction in serious-injury collisions compared with human drivers, and that’s worth weighing. But a strong overall safety record and a specific, unresolved gap around emergency scenes are not the same question, and cities where Waymo has already launched are the ones now writing the incident reports.
Philadelphia has something Austin and San Francisco didn’t have when they signed up for driverless service at scale: time.
This is the moment to apply Mayor Lurie’s standard: Prove it before you deploy it.
Amy Witherite is a traffic safety advocate and founder of the Witherite Law Group, which has offices in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia’s only free sexual assault exam center was so strapped for funding last spring that Drexel University, its former operator, started drafting a closure announcement.
The school was facing financial strain of its own, and state funding to rape crisis nonprofits was tied up amid a prolonged budget impasse in Harrisburg. Emergency funding from the city was tangled in City Hall’s lengthy contracting process.
At the time, there was no plan for who would run the Philadelphia Sexual Assault Response Center (PSARC), where roughly 300 rape survivors a year go for the sexual assault exams used to collect forensic evidence that are commonly known as “rape kits,” which often play a key role in prosecuting assaults.
Fast-forward to this month, when Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration announced the city’s public health department will assume all control of PSARC. Officials presented the news as the culmination of a careful, collaborative handoff, and one city staffer framed the transition in a news release as “seamless.”
But hundreds of emails obtained by The Inquirer through a right-to-know request and a review of public records tell a far messier story. The emails show that for more than a year the fate of PSARC lurched from one near-miss to the next and that a failed bid process forced the city to take over the center’s operations when no one else would.
Taken together, the records offer a granular view of how a critical piece of the city’s safety net for sexual assault survivors nearly broke. And they portray a chaotic process in which the city for months sought to transfer control of the center from Drexel to the nonprofit WOAR Philadelphia Center Against Sexual Violence, even as WOAR faced its own budgetary implosion.
Over the course of the last year, the exam center never shut its doors to patients. But it came close on several occasions, a collapse that would have had ripple effects in hospital emergency rooms across the region that typically route sexual assault patients to the center.
If PSARC suspended operations, hospitals would have to find specially trained staff — of which there are few — to perform the exams.
“Philadelphia emergency rooms were not ready for that,” said Lila Slovak, director of the Philadelphia office of the Women’s Law Project, who spent months warning city officials that PSARC was in danger. “They did not know that [the center] was at risk of closing. It was not on anybody’s radar.”
Crystal Yates-Gale, the city’s deputy managing director for health and human services, said in a statement that the final outcome — the city running the center — is ultimately what is best for sexual assault survivors.
“We are proud to have secured the continuity of vital services for victims of crime in a dignified, victim-centered, culturally-competent atmosphere in Philadelphia,” she said.
The exam room at the Philadelphia Sexual Assault Response Center, in Philadelphia, Pa., on Friday Dec. 6, 2024.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
She said WOAR was transparent with the city about its financial position.
“Like most Commonwealth-funded providers, we planned on the assumption that funding would resume,” Anthony said. “The impasse instead ran 135 days. By the time it ended, we had drawn down our reserves.”
A lifeline center on a shoestring budget
PSARC, located at 300 E. Hunting Park Ave. in North Philadelphia, has two full-time staff members and a network of about 15 contracted nurses trained to perform sexual assault forensic exams, provided free under Pennsylvania law. The procedures are intended to gather physical evidence, such as DNA left behind by an assailant, and to document injuries that may aid investigators in a future criminal investigation.
Many hospitals lack the specialized staff required to perform sexual assault forensic exams, so they refer patients to PSARC or work with PSARC to have a trained nurse dispatched to the hospital.
The center is located next to the Philadelphia Police Special Victims Unit, but patients are not required to report the assault to law enforcement in order to have the free exam performed.
The Police SVU where the Philadelphia Sexual Assault Response Center, in Philadelphia, Pa., on Friday Dec. 6, 2024.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
Founded in 2011 and initially operated by the now-shuttered Hahnemann University Hospital, PSARC has been run since 2019 by Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions. For most of that time, the operation ran on a shoestring budget.
Until last year, PSARC received no dedicated city funding. The state reimbursed Drexel about $1,000 for each patient treated, with Drexel absorbing substantial losses, according to records. The exam reimbursements can take months to flow from the state.
Brian Keech, then Drexel’s senior vice president for government relations, shared a financial analysis with city officials last year that laid out an annual shortfall averaging more than $175,000.
As Drexel cut staff and benefits across the university last year amid declining enrollment and a $63 million annual operating loss, its leaders told the Parker administration that the school could no longer manage PSARC on its own.
In a series of emails last spring, Keech pressed the city for a funding commitment for the center and warned that, without one, the university would have to tell hospitals to stop referring patients for sexual assault exams.
“We’ve begun to prepare the closure announcement,” Keech wrote in a May 20, 2025, email to Adam Geer, the city’s chief public safety director. “Obviously we’re hopeful we can avoid this scenario, but we do have to adequately prepare area hospitals that they will have to begin providing sexual assault services come July 1 if PSARC closes.”
By early June, the city had found the money.
The scramble to save PSARC
Yates-Gale, the city’s deputy managing director, said in a June 2025 email to Drexel officials that the administration had identified $250,000 in emergency funding to keep the center running.
The plan was for WOAR — the nonprofit formerly known as Women Organized Against Rape — to operate PSARC. The city would support its efforts by routing those funds to WOAR through an existing health department contract.
Meanwhile, WOAR was itself under severe financial strain amid the state budget impasse that left community organizations across Pennsylvania unfunded. WOAR’s leaders told city officials that they could not make payroll without the check from the city.
PSARC was left in limbo. The handoff deadline from Drexel to WOAR was moved from Aug. 1 to Sept. 1, with Drexel agreeing to cover an extra month of payroll to bridge the gap. Then, on Aug. 28 — three days before the already delayed transfer — WOAR’s board chair, Joanne Strauss, wrote in an email to city officials that the organization “will not be acquiring” PSARC.
She provided no reason other than saying the organization was “further evaluating the proposed transaction.”
City officials were alarmed. Within an hour, the city’s victim advocate, Adara Combs, emailed Drexel officials to say she was “deeply troubled” by the sudden shift.
Two weeks later, WOAR appeared ready to operate the center again. The group’s board of directors voted unanimously to approve the acquisition, and money from the city began flowing to WOAR to operate the rape exam center — more than $80,000 in total.
Anthony, of WOAR, said in a statement the board’s approval of the acquisition of the sexual assault center came as the nonprofit thought the state budget impasse would come to an end and was “contingent on conditions related to funding and our ability to responsibly take control of PSARC.”
“It became clear that those conditions were not resolved,” she said.
Drexel continued to pay to operate the rape crisis center, and WOAR wired the university the city funding it had received. Drexel operated PSARC, with an additional $167,000 in help from the city, until June 30.
The 15th Street entrance to Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions Feb. 19, 2020. The college has the largest bachelor program in the three-state region.TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer
The back-and-forth saga highlighted a central question: Why did the city seek to transfer a critical service to WOAR despite the nonprofit’s existing financial problems?
Slovak, of the Women’s Law Project, said it made sense that WOAR stepped up to take over the center’s operations, given its mission to treat and prevent sexual violence. It is common in other cities for rape crisis centers to manage forensic exam facilities.
But overseeing hundreds of sexual assault exams each year, she said, would have been a major expansion of WOAR’s scope because it “is about more than just providing emotional support or accompaniment for survivors.”
Yates-Gale said WOAR was a natural choice to assume operations of the center. The group had an existing contract with the city and its mission aligned with that of PSARC.
“Drexel agreed to continue operations until another suitable alternative organization could be identified,” she said, “and the entirety of the funds for the program were transferred back to them.”
Britt Faulstick, a Drexel University spokesperson, said the school “worked closely with city leadership to ensure a smooth transition.”
Another failed effort to find an operator
The city’s $250,000 in emergency funding bought PSARC time. But the same question remained: Who would run it long-term, and where would they find the money?
This spring, Parker’s budget proposal, which was approved by City Council in June, included $300,000 for the center. The city put the operation out for bid, seeking an outside organization like another hospital or nonprofit to run it.
City officials met on April 13 with potential operators, including representatives from area hospitals that depend on the center, such as Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia. Several expressed concerns about PSARC’s finances.
According to a public recording of the meeting, multiple attendees suggested that $300,000 a year in city funding would not be enough to cover PSARC’s operations and salaries for medical staff who must be available 24-7.
The exam room and desk space when patients are in at the Philadelphia Sexual Assault Response Center, in Philadelphia, Pa., on Friday Dec. 6, 2024.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
“This has never been something that’s been profitable, so it’s always needed another source of funds to keep it stable,” one hospital representative said. “It’s the money, right, to keep it open and to be able to run this as a service for the city and keep it maintained so you’re not back in this ‘we don’t have it’ in six months.”
Combs, the city’s victim advocate, told potential bidders that they were welcome to “reimagine” how PSARC operates and propose new funding streams.
But hospital representatives remained skeptical and pressed the city to find a different solution, citing a moral urgency.
“It would be a tremendous tragedy if we lost the resources of PSARC in the city,” said a representative from Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital.
“I think we all agree,” said Azucena Ugarte, director of the Philadelphia Office of Domestic Violence Strategies. “That’s why we’re doing this.”
But following the meeting, no one bid.
The city takes over
With no outside bid to operate Philadelphia’s only free rape exam center, the options in front of city officials were either to let it close or to take control themselves.
The city chose the latter. Parker administration officials framed it as a lasting solution.
Faulstick, of Drexel, said the school will continue to train nurses in sexual assault examination to help ensure the care is available. He said PSARC is “positioned for continued growth and long-term sustainability.”
Others have questions about the stabilization plan.
City Councilmember Nina Ahmad, who represents the city at-large and held a hearing earlier this year about PSARC funding, said that the $300,000 annual allocation to the center is likely inadequate and that she will push for more dollars in future city budgets.
Councilmember Nina Ahmad in chambers as City Council meets Dec. 11, 2025.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Ahmad also said she expected more buy-in from hospitals, noting they would have been saddled with the responsibility of providing sexual assault exams if PSARC had shuttered.
“I am not surprised,” she said in an interview, “but I’m still disgusted that we have not come together on this. … This is evidence being collected, [and] this is how we prevent future rapes.”
Slovak said ensuring PSARC’s financial survival will take more than a change in management. It will require cooperation, including from hospitals, the city, and the state, to work together “so that survivors aren’t sacrificed in the budget gamesmanship.”
Still, she said, the city “can really be this positive, central, coordinating force.”
“And I do feel confident at this point,” Slovak added, that the center “is going to move in a good direction from here.”
