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Smoke and Cheek from Fumo & DiCicco
By Lisa Parsley
Saturday, 11/23/02
(1038095015746)
I thoroughly enjoyed the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine article, "Swede Dreams." Joyce Gemperlein captured the Ikea persuasion. Too bad that it feels like an Ikea invasion to Sen. Vince Fumo and Councilman Frank DiCicco.
They utterly fail to grasp that a company with worldwide sales increases of 20% a year for the last five years is the port development that the mile high weed grown area west of Delaware Boulevard is looking for. Ikea is not angling for the adjacent land to the east of Delaware Boulevard, a shallow waterfront cocoa shipping pier. That port will continue to happily chug away as long as it can sustain itself.
Ikea needs the fallow area to the west of Delaware Boulevard, where no shipping company wants to go. Everything the port industry currently needs it is using. If Ikea's presence makes the Packer Avenue Marine Terminal CSX land too expensive for the Port Authority, then the Port Authority probably shouldn't own it. It would still have jurisdiction over the zoning and use without buying that parcel at fire sale prices. It can still protect and expand automotive shipping without owning the land.
The military uses of the closed Navy yard now provide more than excess capacity for wartime needs. Plus, the military will not dredge the Delaware to create deep sea vessel access.
Why all the smoke from Fumo and cheek from DiCicco? Why all the secrecy from the Port Authority? Who benefits from this rusty vision?
What a great vote making machine it is to merely insinuate that the ports can be what they once were. But if the North Delaware River ports can penetrate business activity to the core of South Philly, then why haven't they? In years?
Look at the Kvaerner boondoggle. Let's ask ourselves if those great union jobs of lifetime employment at high wages with a high school education are ever coming back in full force to the North Delaware waterfront.
We need self-sustaining companies in South Philly, not more vote-getting pork like the over-$400 million paid by taxpayers to Kvaerner for three ships, a quick exit, and another empty building.
It is dishonest of DiCicco to introduce "poison pill" zoning legislation that Ikea must reject because it zones a parcel much too small for Ikea's marketing strategy.
It is reprehensible that Fumo would oppose Ikea to spite Mayor Street because the developer that Ikea agreed to is a Street contributor and not a Fumo contributor. When is it OK to work together for the common good? Ever?