Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has seen more than twice as much turnover among top officials in her administration than her most recent predecessors had at the same point in their tenures, according to an Inquirer analysis of personnel moves.
Come September, when City Solicitor Renee Garcia’s resignation takes effect, more than half of Parker’s highest-level appointees will have departed in the two years and nine months since she took office in January 2024.
Following last month’s announcement that Managing Director Adam K. Thiel and Garcia would soon be leaving Parker’s administration, The Inquirer compared turnover at the top level of city government under Parker with former Mayors Jim Kenney and Michael A. Nutter. The analysis included chiefs of staff, deputy mayors, and the half-dozen other positions designated by the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter as part of the mayor’s cabinet.
The analysis found:
- Of the 11 people Parker appointed to those jobs, six have already left the administration or are poised to leave by September. Kenney had lost three of his 11 top appointees by the same point in his tenure, and Nutter had lost two of the nine officials in comparable positions.
- Most strikingly, Parker has lost three of the top four officials in her government: Chief Deputy Mayors Aren Platt and Sinceré Harris, the architects of her 2023 campaign, and Thiel, who oversaw most of the city’s operational departments. By this point, Kenney and Nutter both had lost two of the six people who held comparable roles in their tenures.
- For the director of the Philadelphia Department of Labor, a cabinet position, Parker is on her third appointee, after her first two left city government after short stints leading the agency. (Parker has also had three directors of LGBTQ+ affairs, a non-cabinet position, after firing the first two people who served in that role.)
- In another cabinet role, that of commerce director, Karen Fegely has been serving on an interim basis since May 2025, when Parker’s original appointee, Alba Martinez, resigned to produce a musical.
Tiffany W. Thurman, Parker’s chief of staff, said the turnover has not raised “any red flags or alarms internally.”
“It’s cyclical, and it’s part of the process,” Thurman said in an interview Thursday morning, after the initial publication of this story. “The work is continuing, and it’s strong and it’s good, and the vision hasn’t wavered despite the turnover, and so I’m very, very pleased with the team that we have right now.”
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Although the top rung of Parker’s administration has seen high turnover, the analysis found that the next two tiers of city government leaders under Parker have seen less churn.
- Of 18 key department heads not included in the charter-designated cabinet under Parker, three have resigned from or been forced out of city government. (A fourth, former Fire Commissioner Craig Murphy, stepped down as part of a scheduled retirement after Parker appointed him on an interim basis.)
- Of the 76 additional political appointees, smaller department leaders, and deputies identified by The Inquirer — including all of the officials whose appointments Parker publicly announced as she filled out her administration — at least 12 have resigned, been fired, or moved to a new role in a discipline-related transfer. (Others have received promotions or switched roles to fill vacancies.)
- Major officials who remain in the administration hold some of the most critical posts in city government, such as Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, the first appointment Parker announced after her election, and Finance Director Rob Dubow, who has held his role since the start of Nutter’s administration in 2007.
While smaller in number, the departures among the second and third tiers of city government leadership under Parker have included losses in important positions, including Water Commissioner Randy Hayman, Licenses and Inspections Commissioner Basil Merenda, Chief Policy Officer Sophie Bryan, and Budget Director Robert McDermott.
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There is always turnover in administrations, but it is often clustered around the end of mayors’ four-year terms. (There are exceptions: A majority of Philadelphia city solicitors since 1992, for instance, have served around two to three years, putting the length of Garcia’s tenure on par with her predecessors.)
Traditionally, deputy mayors and chiefs of staff work most closely with the mayor, and the posts have often been filled by people in the mayor’s inner circle or top campaign aides. They often do not have deep city government experience, which was the case for Harris and Platt, both of whom have since returned to politics.
Appointments for operational positions, such as managing director and police commissioner, usually go to people with experience in their fields. Thiel led the fire department and the office of emergency management under Kenney. Bethel was a former deputy police commissioner.
Parker, at the helm of City Hall, has said she has a demanding leadership style.
“With my team, am I always stretching and pushing and requiring that homework is done?” Parker said in a 2024 interview. “Yes, but I also believe I have the best and the brightest people with me. So naturally I have very high expectations for them because, quite frankly, they’re smart.”
Candi Jones, the administration’s chief human resources officer, said that Thiel and Garcia’s tenures are roughly in line with the average length of their predecessors’ over the last four administrations.
“Turnover is not turmoil,” Jones said Thursday during the interview with Thurman. “What is of most importance is that the city has an obligation for operational continuity. … Everyday, our operations are continuing to be managed daily, weekly, monthly. There has been no gaps in service.”
She also emphasized that key officials like Bethel, Dubow, and Thurman “since day one have been in place and really have been moving the government forward.”
The Inquirer attempted to reach all of the former administration officials mentioned in this article. Many declined to comment for this article or did not respond to interview requests. Attempts to reach several others were unsuccessful.
‘Big Three’ loses two
Even before Parker took the oath of office, intrigue over personnel matters became a defining aspect of her administration.
After winning the mayor’s race, Parker announced in late 2023 that she would appoint a “big three” of senior advisers to lead her administration, rather than a single “big mahoff,” an all-important aide who touches almost all major decisions, as had been the case in past administrations.
“No one like me has ever been elected mayor of our city, and no one has ever organized their senior staff this way,” Parker, the city’s first Black female mayor, said at the time.
It didn’t last.
Platt resigned unexpectedly in October 2024 after just 10 months on the job, and has since returned to Parker’s political campaign as executive director. Harris stepped down in March to join the political consulting firm GPS Impact.
Parker tapped City Hall veteran Vanessa Garrett Harley to fill Platt’s role, while Harris has not been directly replaced.
Despite Parker’s initial vision for a triumvirate of top aides, Thurman has by all accounts become Parker’s indispensable No. 2. Parker has referred to Thurman as her “chief air traffic controller.”
Thiel’s tenure with the city, meanwhile, has been one of the most perplexing sagas of Parker’s first term. In the administration’s early days, he often appeared alongside the mayor at news conferences during emergencies and major announcements.
But his public role overseeing many of the city’s day-to-day operations faded over time, and his obligations outside City Hall grew. In addition to working as a high-paid consultant and adjunct professor — as he had since the start of the administration — Thiel joined the U.S. Army Reserve in 2024 and took multiple leaves from the city for military service, including during this winter’s prolonged snow and ice emergency.
In July, Parker announced Thiel’s resignation, noting that he is leaving to “reenter the private sector.”
New positions, new faces
Parker, who has also greatly expanded the mayor’s office staff and increased salaries, created numerous new roles after taking office. Several people left those positions shortly after becoming the first people to hold them.
Kafi Lindsay resigned as director of the Philadelphia Office of Strategic Partnerships just nine months after being appointed, according to her LinkedIn profile. Rachel E. Branson resigned as the director of the Philadelphia Office of Minority Business Success after a year and three months, according to her LinkedIn profile. And Hassan Freeman last fall was let go as director of neighborhood and community engagement after an altercation with Councilmember Isaiah Thomas outside City Hall.
Some signs of strain within the administration emerged during Parker’s second year in office.
Parker last summer fired Brandee Anderson, who was the chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, and Tyrell Brown, the director of LGBTQ+ affairs, amid a thorny personnel issue that also led to the deputy chief of staff, Chris Dailey, moving to the managing director’s office in a disciplinary transfer.
Last month, Anderson sued the city, alleging her termination was part of an effort to “suppress” DEI work in the administration. Around the same time, Shania Bennett, Parker’s former director of youth engagement, a non-cabinet position created by Parker, posted on social media that her time with the mayor’s administration was “the worst experience of [her] life” and that she resigned due to “unprofessional harassment” from a fellow staffer.
‘What’s the bench?’
George R. Burrell, a lawyer and former City Council member who held senior roles under two mayors, said the personnel churn under Parker will test the leadership skills of the behind-the-scenes city officials who have been elevated to fill vacancies.
“The question you have, when you have this kind of turnover, is, ‘Well, what’s the bench?’” said Burrell, who served in the administrations of former Mayors William J. Green III and John F. Street. “The question of what happens next and the quality of what happens next is the quality of the bench.”
Veteran city staffers now occupy four of the six top roles originally held by Parker appointees who have since left City Hall. Harris’ position was not directly replaced.
The exception is former Assistant U.S. Attorney Monique Galloway, a newcomer to Philadelphia government, who will replace Garcia as the city’s top lawyer next month.
Burrell said he expects longtime city bureaucrat Carlton Williams, who has replaced Thiel as managing director after serving as Parker’s director of clean and green initiatives, to succeed in his new role.
“I watched him evolve into what is a productive public servant,” Burrell said. “So I think that’s a bench member who is going to perform at the level that’s needed.”
Once in office, Parker took nearly a full year to fill out her administration with appointments to key positions. She did not announce her selection of Kehinde “Kenny” Solanke to lead the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, or DBHIDS, until July 2025, a year and a half into her tenure.
During that process, Parker said she was seeking the “best and brightest” and conducted national searches for some roles. A vast majority of her appointees, however, had strong ties to Philadelphia.
In 2024, when Parker was filling out her administration, she said she attended a training for new mayors at Harvard University. Some leaders from other cities, she said, were interested in recruiting Hayman, who had been appointed water commissioner by Kenney in 2019.
When Parker took office, it was unclear if she would keep Hayman in command of the water department. She announced she was retaining him in March 2024, and relayed the Harvard anecdote to demonstrate how Philly already had some of the country’s top public servants.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Parker said at the time. “We were able to hold on to some of the best talent in the nation.”
In July 2025, Hayman left Philadelphia to become the executive director of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board.
Staff writers Ryan W. Briggs and Anna Orso contributed to this article.
