|
A Committee of 70 interview with Anne Dicker
 As part of our spotlight on hot election contests in the April 22 primary, the Committee of 70 has asked the Democratic candidates for the 1st District Senate seat to meet with us for short question-and-answer sessions about the issues and the campaign. We'll present these in the days leading up to the vote. (Links to ongoing media coverage of the campaign are on this page.)
Anne Dicker spoke with us over coffee at Java in Queen Village:
70: You're known mostly as the anti-casino activist in the race. That's a tough battle to win as your primary issue. Once casino projects advance this far, it seems like they usually become inevitable.
Dicker: I think there are many other issues that I'm very different from the other two candidates on. But certainly in the media the one I'm known for is my work on the casino issue. It stems from research that I've done. I'm an economic analyst, and I was a site-selection analyst [in the retail industry]. I knew that the casinos were going to suck money out of our historic neighborhoods.
My argument with the casinos is two-tier. Number one, I think it's horrible economic policy. When you look at the data, you see that for every new slot machine, you're losing one $50,000 family sustaining job....Most of their profits are going to be from Philadelphians. There was a study done that was never released to the public, that basically said Pennsylvania was a 'keystone' state to increase slots parlors throughout the United States. So what we're already seeing, in Ohio and Maryland, even to some degree New Jersey, they are expanding their casino operations so they can pick up some of the market. I guarantee you that if we put two casinos on the river, New Jersey will do the same thing. And we'll have casinos in Camden.
My argument is also process-based, in that we had a completely clandestine process. We gave a license to a guy who was indicted for perjury because of his mob connections, and we also have the former head of the gaming control board who took a job with [law firm] Cozen O'Connor, which is now representing the SugarHouse casino and the Mount Airy casino, which is now under a shroud of suspicion because of the connection to [indicted casino owner Louis] DeNaples and organzied crime. The more you get into this issue, you see it as bad for the state in terms of corruption and in terms of its economics.
Are they inevitable? Well, they were supposed to be inevitable when they were announced in December of 2006. The casinos are supposed to be built and up and running already. They're not.
70: What issues motivate you besides casinos?
Dicker: Issues that really excite me are infrastructure issues, and education is our number one infrastructure issue. There was a costing-out study done last year by the Department of Education in Pennsylvania. It said we were shortfunding our Pennsylvania public schools by $4.81 billion and schools in Philadelphia by $1 billion. Some people say you've gotta change the funding formula. But that is just divvying up a really small pie. We have to find new funding for education.
I have three layers of ideas. Number one is to make funding more equitable. We need to move away from property tax to an income tax and a sales tax basis for funding education. Second, we need to find new funding. Short term, there are a couple of things I've proposed. One is combined business tax reporting. It's supported by Gov. Rendell. It closes the tax loophole that allows large corporations to set up a P.O. box in Delaware or any other state to lower their Penmsylvania taxes. That's $615 million of new funding per year. The other chunk of money is to reduce the amount of money the state legislature spends on itself. We spent $500,000 on political polling. That's outrageous. We have $500 million spent on the state legislature -- that's the highest overhead in the whole United States.
Longer term, we have literally a colonial era tax system in Pennsylvania. We have a clause in our constitution called the uniformity clause which mandates flat taxes, mandates regressive taxation. If we had a graduated income tax we could tax people who can afford it more, just like we do on the federal level.
In schools, number one, we need more teachers. We have 1,800 fewer teachers today than we had three years ago. Number two, we need books that kids can take home with them and do their homework. We have some of the best high schools, and at some of those high schools kids can take home their books, and at some they can't. Number three, everyone talks about wiring up classroms for the Internet, and bang, everyone's going to have all this information in their heads. But we don't have air conditioning and we don't have working water fountains.
70: Can Philadelphia realistically get control of guns?
I'm from the Midwest, from a town where my teachers took off weeks to go hunting. I understand the Midwestern value system that we're operating under. For years, we've had a battle between the rest of the state and Philadelphia, and I want to call a truce. I want to have an open and honest and respectful relationship with my colleagues. I think that by building that trust, we're going to be able to get through the insidious lobbying efforts of the NRA.
But guns aren't the only reason for crime. We have a horible recidivism rate in Philadelphia, 71 percent. We keep on building prisons. We've got $600 million in the budget for prisons right now. We need to put offenders, especially nonviolent offenders, into programs that will retrain them so they can go back into society. There's a program called New Directions for Women, it's a model program that we contract out for nonviolent women offenders, and it teaches them to read and tell time and be ready for the workplace. A lot of women offenders have kids, and if we don't do anything about training them to be moms the cycle is just going to continue.
70: Any candidate who wins this election will be a first-term senator, but your opponents claim to have more political experience than you. How are you going to be able to make an impact in Harrisburg?
Dicker: What makes me different from the other candidates is the approach I bring. I'm not a smoke-filled back-room dealer. I operate in a very transparent, open, and rational way. I always do my math, and I like to bring people in from all places. I build coalitions, particularly on the casino issue: I'm a liberal democrat and my best friend on the casino issue is Rep. Paul Clymer, who is a very conservative Republican. Every single group that I've founded or joined, I have taken a leadership role. So Larry [Farnese] may have a law degree, but I was the one who organzied all the lawyers to create three constitutional lawsuits on the casino issue.
70: You are unique among the candidates in saying universal healthcare in the state is possible. How?
Dicker: I know that we can pass single-payer, universal healthcare. It cuts out insurers entirely and reduces the cost we are paying for healthcare in Pennsylvania every year by $12 billion. For employers it reduces their healthcare cost by $4,000 per employee. We would have employers from all over the United States pouring into Pennsylvania. It's funded through payroll tax and it covers everyone.
70: You're running against another candidate, John Dougherty, whose career has been in labor creating jobs. How do you compete with him on the jobs issue?
Dicker: We've relied on big-ticket ribbon-cutting promotions [to create jobs] for decades, whether it's pumping in $700 million for the construction of the Convention Center, or $10 million for the soccer stadium, or it's pumping in money for Penn's Landiong over the last 40 years, millions and millions of dollars. But look at the jobs that we've lost over the decades. We lose and we lose and we lose. You've got net job losses. I would de-emphasize the big-ticket ribbon-cutting items, which clearly have not generated a net job gain -- the return on investment is so low it's laughable -- and instead concentrate on infrastructure issues. My plan for jobs it to foster enterpreneurship, number one. We've never been a hospitable city for entrepreneurship. I told Mayor Nutter when I talked to him a couple weeks ago that I want to be your partner in Harrisburg and I will do everything I can to help eliminate the Business Privilege Tax. Business is not a privilege. People my age, we're contractors, we're consultants, and that's how we live. We have no assurance of healthcare, and we have to pay the Business Privilege Tax in Philadelphia. If I want to have a small business, I have to put the money up front -- and eventually I'm going to get squeezed out, either go out of business or move to Jersey.
We have to pour money into infrastructure, we have to make sure we have safe streets. We can make sure we have an well educated workforce by pouring money into schools.
At the same time I believe the Penn Praxis [waterfront development] project is an amazing way to create 30 years of new jobs. If we extend the street grid out to the Delaware river, we create 30 years of new construction jobs.
Number three, I know this is a little farfetched, but as a State Senator I'm going to ask the governor to put me on the SEPTA board. If we can get a serious investment to expand SEPTA, put a circle route on SEPTA, do you know how many more people are going to come to live in Phialdelphia if we have a city that's accessible? Every major city has a circle route....The most expensive real estate in the world should be right here. And instead we have the world's only waterfront Wal-Mart.
|
