Philadelphia elections for mayor and City Council have gotten somewhat more competitive over the last 10 years, but there are still some legal and policy deterrents on the books that prevent them from becoming more so.

One of the biggest anti-competition charter rules we still have is known as “resign to run” — the requirement that City electeds resign from their current seat if they want to run for another office.

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That policy was instituted as part of the 1951 city Home Rule Charter as a good government proposition, and it still sounds sensible to a lot of voters on its face — why should we pay a City Councilmember’s salary while they’re campaigning for another job? — and two prior attempts to change it have failed at the ballot box.

I was excited when I first heard At-Large Councilmember Isaiah Thomas was planning to take this up again. Unfortunately, the proposal on offer does not address the problems it needs to solve.

This is a very old debate in Philadelphia politics, with two different factions supporting the repeal of resign to run: “good government” reformers who dislike the anti-competitive effects on city elections; and the nakedly-careerist incentives of our elected officials, who want to be able to run for higher or other offices without giving up their city paychecks.

Unfortunately, Thomas’s current version of the proposal, however well-intentioned, only delivers on the elected official careerism goal while doing nothing to help the cause of more competitive city-level elections.

The current proposal would only allow city elected officials to run for other higher offices in state and federal government, but not for mayor or other City Council seats. An at-large councilmember who wanted to challenge one of their district colleagues or run against an incumbent mayor would still have to resign.

So elected officials get all the benefits of being allowed to run for Congress without resigning, but voters don’t get the benefits of a more competitive city electoral environment that the resign to run reformers in civil society have been seeking from this change.

The current rule lets City Council members run for Congress while on the city payroll, and it doesn’t even fix any city-level political problems? Who could get excited to vote for that beyond the 18 most obvious people?

The reformers think it’s a bad thing that non-wealthy candidates may choose not to run because they can’t go without a paycheck for several months, and that it creates conditions that prevent people who already work in government and best understand its operations from running for other offices.

Many voters find the careerist arguments to be distasteful and they also haven’t been persuaded in the past by reformers’ arguments about the ways this policy shrinks the pool of qualified political candidates. Philly voters have twice rejected attempts to end resign to run in 2007 and 2014. The 2007 resign to run reform ballot referendum failed 45-55, and a narrower version in 2014 only improved on 2007’s performance by a single point.

I can’t prove it, but I think the careerist angle is probably what sank past attempts at a charter change, and that the only reason they even had a fighting chance was because of the other more high-minded argument about increased competition improving city politics. For that reason, I would predict the current proposal would fare even worse at the ballot box than the last two attempts. It lets City Council members run for Congress while on the city payroll, and it doesn’t even fix any city-level political problems? Who could get excited to vote for that beyond the 18 most obvious people?

But, combined with term limits?

There is one way this ballot referendum might succeed: trading an end to resign to run for new City Council term limits.

Term limits are popular with voters even though there are some good arguments against them related to the power imbalance in policy information and institutional knowledge between short-term elected officials and long-serving lobbyists. Philadelphia’s specific problems involve a lack of turnover in City Council District seats, and the anti-mayoral power effect of having Mayoral term limits but no City Council term limits.

A better approach would involve either no term limits for anybody, or equal term limits for all. The pro-Council slant of the charter is the worst of all possible combinations for governing outcomes in the city, super-charging the councilmanic prerogative dysfunction you can read about week after week in these pages.

Council briefly considered a weak term limits proposal last term that would have capped Councilmembers’ tenure at four terms after the law took effect.

That didn’t go anywhere, but if Council takes it up again, the new goal should be equalizing mayoral and Council term limits. Council shouldn’t randomly get double the longevity of the Mayor. We should think through what political outcome we’re trying to achieve, not just pick a random number. Perhaps a compromise could be found with a three-term Council limit that also extends the Mayor’s limit to three terms.

Pairing resign to run with Council term limits would also give a boost to the narrative that this change is about promoting competitive elections and empowering voters to have choices, not just furthering the ambitions of our local elected officials on the taxpayer dime, as it’s often interpreted.

If the current proposal makes it to the ballot, we will get a real test of what voters think narrowly about the elected official career-enhancement version.

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