Philadelphia Mayor Parker touts intergovernmental collaboration

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s $6.3 billion budget, the first of her tenure signed into law in the summer, represents her administration’s commitment to making Philadelphia “the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation, with access to economic opportunity for all.”

Parker, who became Philadelphia’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold the position in the city’s 341-year history, said that fulfilling that vision “will take consistent and substantial investments in our infrastructure, which we are clearly committed to doing.”

“But this is what we understand. We, the city of Philadelphia proper, we can’t do it alone,” Parker said in a keynote address at The Bond Buyer Infrastructure conference Tuesday. “We are grateful to our state and our federal partners, as well as the bond market.”

Parker highlighted the funds the city has received from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Together, these two powerful tools for government have helped the city of Philadelphia position itself to tackle major problems that we would never alone be able to address,” she said.

Philadelphia has received more than $650 million in grants alone this year from the two programs, which Parker called “once-in-a-generation opportunities to invest in our communities.”

“We want to ensure that the funding Philadelphia secures is not just a way to fund our deferred capital needs, but that we’re thinking bigger, and we want to make transformational investments in our neighborhoods now,” she said.

Parker laid out several of the ways in which the city has invested the funds, including a $42.6 million award in federal infrastructure funding to upgrade Philadelphia International Airport terminal facilities, with energy efficient improvements and runway enhancements. 

“At our water department, we have a $340 million multi-year agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, and it is helping to lower costs while allowing us to upgrade our water system,” she said. “We’re the birthplace of democracy, so like many others, we of course have an aging infrastructure.” 

Parker said she wants the city, led by its Infrastructure Solutions Team, “to ensure we are spending these dollars as efficiently as we possibly can” to be recognized as “a shining example of how intergovernmental collaboration can ensure a cleaner, greener and safer future for all Philadelphians.”

Parker said also noted the city was years ago “on the brink of receivership and bankruptcy, and we had some of the best minds come together to find out how to ensure that Philly would never again be a in a position where our budget was not balanced or we could not pay our bills the next year or we were not making the payments necessary for pensions.”

Parker noted the city has allocated supplemental operating funds as pay-as-you-go dollars to support its capital investments. Additionally, she noted, the city’s pension fund, which just reached a 62% funding level, is at the highest in decades.

“And even better, we are scheduled to hit 80% by fiscal year 2029 and 100% by fiscal year 2033,” she said. 

Those efforts have led to better ratings, she noted.

“I’m proud to say for the record that the city of Philadelphia has its highest combination of credit ratings in more than 40 years, and this room knows better than most how exciting that is for me as the mayor,” Parker said. “We’ve worked hard to improve our fiscal health while making critical investments across Philadelphia.” 

Philadelphia is rated A1 by Moody’s Ratings, A by S&P Global Ratings and A-plus by Fitch Ratings.

“We are a textbook case study on how you stabilize municipal finance in cities across the United States,” she added.