What’s wrong with the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office?

Executive-suite misbehavior, inept management and outright corruption have been defining characteristics of this agency for years. Sheriff John Green, first elected to the office in 1987, resigned in 2010 after a federal investigation revealed that he had accepted bribes and kickbacks in exchange for granting no-bid contracts to a favored businessperson.

Then Sheriff Jewell Williams, who held the office from 2012 until January, 2020, caused the city to have to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to settle accusations of sexual harassment based on his misconduct while in office.

One possible explanation for these recurring problems: a baked-in absence of oversight. The Sheriff is an independently elected official who does not report to the Mayor and is not supervised by the Managing Director, even though the office is funded with annual appropriations from the city budget.

And now, one year after her inauguration, Sheriff Rochelle Bilal is being sued by three former staffers over “alleged financial impropriety and sexual harassment.”

One possible explanation for these recurring problems: a baked-in absence of oversight. The sheriff is an independently elected official who does not report to the mayor and is not supervised by the managing director, even though the office is funded with annual appropriations from the city budget.

Unlike public authorities such as the Redevelopment Authority and Housing Authority, the Sheriff’s Office does not have a governing board that approves policies and monitors performance. And candidates for sheriff face relatively little scrutiny prior to Election Day, when most attention is focused on the candidates for mayor and City Council who appear on the same ballot. As a result, it’s likely that many voters have no idea what the Sheriff’s Office is or does.

For years, government-reform advocates have been calling for the elimination of the office and the assignment of its responsibilities (transporting prisoners to and from the courtroom, managing courtroom security, serving warrants, and other court-related tasks) to existing municipal departments. (I myself ran for the office in 2011 with the aim of doing just that.)

A Committee of Seventy report published in 2009 made the case for dissolving the Sheriff’s Office and the other four so-called row offices that perform county government functions (Register of Wills, Recorder of Deeds, City Commissioners, and Clerk of Quarter Sessions) and integrating them into the municipal-government infrastructure.

A year later, Mayor Michael Nutter abolished the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, an office that, under the management of a ward leader, was chronically unable to uphold its primary responsibility: keeping track of court records. Mayor Nutter’s action was an isolated success, however; the other row offices have remained in place.

As part of its call for the elimination of the Sheriff’s Office, the Committee of Seventy suggested relocating most of its court-administration responsibilities to municipal government—possibly to a newly created unit of the Finance Department. Finance Department oversight would put an end to wasteful actions such as “spending millions of dollars buying ads for sheriff’s sales in community newspapers, far more than legally required,” a routine practice under the Green and Williams administrations that continued during Rochelle Bilal’s tenure, according to a whistle-blower suit filed by Brett Mandel following his dismissal as Bilal’s chief financial officer last year.

The need for change is particularly urgent now, in light of one less well-known Sheriff’s Office responsibility that has a critical impact on the well-being of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods: it’s the manager of the city’s biggest marketplace for the sale of vacant and neglected properties.

Dozens of tax-delinquent buildings and lots are advertised for the public auction known as the Sheriff Sale every month. Direct mayoral control of sheriff sales would give the Kenney administration’s planning and development agencies a central role in determining appropriate reuses for distressed properties, under the supervision of the Department of Planning and Development (DPD), consistent with DPD’s broad goal of supporting “well-planned communities.”

The Philadelphia Land Bank, which reports to DPD, possesses a powerful state-authorized tool that can be used to advance this goal: the ability to acquire a property listed for Sheriff Sale without having to bid against other participants in the public auction. Through broader use of this direct-purchase power, the Land Bank, in coordination with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (also under the DPD umbrella), can help sponsors of affordable housing, economic development, and green space projects acquire vacant properties without having to engage in competition with other participants in the auction, which, in recent years, has been increasingly populated by speculators.

In Fiscal Year 2019, according to Land Bank financial statements, this power was used to extract 378 properties from the Sheriff Sale pipeline for conveyance to developers of affordable and workforce housing, as well as for the creation of side yards and community gardens. In FY 2020, the Land Bank acquired only 119 Sheriff Sale properties, due to later-than-anticipated City Council-approval of acquisition funding—and then the pandemic arrived a few months later.

So, if the current direct-purchase approach is already working, why go to the trouble of moving Sheriff Sales into the municipal government infrastructure? Because Philadelphia government needs a major structural realignment in order to take advantage of new opportunities to strengthen neighborhood real estate markets.

 Deconstructing the Sheriff’s office and relocating its real estate functions to the Finance Department or another municipal department will be complicated and time-consuming. That’s why the present—two years before the next mayoral election—is the ideal time to begin.

During the late-20th century years in which Philadelphia’s citywide property values remained at a consistently low level, Sheriff Sale auctions attracted relatively little interest. Properties on the auction list were the junk of Philadelphia’s postindustrial economy—many of them neglected and abandoned buildings and vacant lots located in depopulated neighborhoods. Back then, Sheriff Sale was designed to try to make a little money from the sale of these properties in order to offset some portion of the tax loss associated with owner abandonment and demolition.

Things are different now. In a time when Philadelphia is experiencing unprecedented growth in Philadelphia house prices and many city neighborhoods are struggling with gentrification pressures, more strategic management of the distressed-property marketplace could produce citywide benefits.

The Philadelphia Land Bank and the Redevelopment Authority have been managed and staffed by real estate professionals for years, and the other agencies that are positioned under the DPD umbrella appear to be capable of staffing a strategy that is more appropriate than the traditional sell-off of buildings and lots to the highest bidders.

Although many properties that appear on future Sheriff Sale lists will not be suitable for anything other than the auction, other properties with greater development potential that are sold with reference to the Land Bank’s property disposition policy will be more likely to produce long-term benefits, both in terms of generating revenue to the city and promoting community- building.

From a real estate market perspective, the Sheriff’s Office is a 20th century artifact, while DPD and the Land Bank are new creations designed to pursue today’s opportunities.

Deconstructing the Sheriff’s office and relocating its real estate functions to the Finance Department or another municipal department will be complicated and time-consuming. That’s why the present—two years before the next mayoral election—is the ideal time to begin.

John Kromer, former Philadelphia housing director in the Rendell administration, ran for Philadelphia Sheriff in the 2011 Democratic primary election, pledging that, once elected, he would work to transfer the responsibilities of the office to city agencies with comparable responsibilities, after which he would close the office and resign. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, it left behind a memorable music video created by Andy Dennison.