When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker in September revealed the terms of an agreement she had reached with the 76ers to build a fresh arena in Center City, she promised that she would make every effort to lend a hand promote the project to the public and obtain City Council approval for it.
“We are fighting for this shoulder to shoulder,” Parker told reporters.
Turns out the 76ers didn’t have the mayor’s support.
In December, as Parker was crisscrossing the city to sell the arena, the Sixers met behind closed doors with Comcast – which, through a subsidiary, owns the Wells Fargo Center where the Sixers are tenants – to strike a very different deal: one that would keep the team in South Philadelphia and abandon plans to build a facility on East Market Street.
The panel’s announcement this week that it would do just that was a blow to Parker, who in her first year in office had spent significant political capital to tout the Center City project as “the best financial deal ever struck by a Philadelphia mayor for a local government.” sports arena.”
After publicly expressing support for the project in September, she embarked on a citywide tour to promote the agreement. She aggressively lobbied the City Council to pass legislation that would make it possible, and weathered months of public pressure campaigns from outspoken opponents of the arena.
Even before she took office a year ago, the arena was part of Parker’s political calculus. It was a major campaign issue during the 2023 Democratic primary for mayor, when she won the support of construction unions, which supported the arena to create construction jobs. She separated herself from progressive opponents, saying she would not “express reflective opposition.”
Ultimately, some observers said she and lawmakers who voted for the project looked like they were being used as bargaining chips in a dispute between Sixers ownership and Comcast leaders.
Some elected officials have said the same. Councilmember Jim Harrity, the first member to publicly support the initial arena project, said Sunday he felt like a “pawn.” Jamie Gauthier and Rue Landau, council members who voted against the proposal, said the 76ers “did not engage the city in good faith.”
Even the usually staid Council Speaker Kenyatta Johnson, who shepherded legislation through the Council last month and spent countless hours leading hearings on the issue, stood alongside Sixers owners and Comcast executives on Monday and joked: “It’s a shame you couldn’t to finalize the agreements before we actually started the process.
Parker defended her support for the Sixers on Monday, saying she called the original proposal historic and “there is nothing about that statement that is untrue.”
The mayor also suggested she was not involved in discussions between the Sixers and Comcast until they reached an agreement. She didn’t say when she learned of the Sixers’ decision to stay in South Philadelphia, but said she had discussed it with Johnson “in the last 72 hours.”
Sixers managing partner and co-owner Josh Harris said talks with Comcast began in early December. The council, thanks to Parker’s lobbying, approved legislation on December 19 to enable the Center City project.
“Did I attend the meeting before the meeting to say that these negotiations would take place? Absolutely not,” Parker said. “But guess what? I’m still the CEO of this city. … I’ll let other people play on Monday morning about how “we’re pawns in a game.”
» READ MORE: The Sixers and Comcast plan to build a new arena and event complex in South Philly
There are lots of people. Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, one of the organizations affiliated with a coalition of groups opposed to the Center City arena, said city leaders looked like they were “playing checkers while the Sixers were playing chess.”
He said the unions would still create jobs and the Sixers would still get a new arena, but Parker “was duped while the Sixers kept their options open.”
“It was a win-win deal for everyone except the Parker administration,” Holbrook said. “Chinatown wins, construction wins, Sixers wins, Comcast wins, Parker loses big. [She] he did all this by threatening to have the City Council approve the agreement and suppress any opposition. …It’s a chink in her armor.
Several Philadelphia political consultants who requested anonymity to freely criticize the administration similarly said it looked bad for the mayor and City Council members, who have made the issue a cornerstone of their agenda over the past few months.
One Democratic strategist said Parker and the council oversaw a “poor process.” Another called the result evidence of a “pretty big whiff.”
And city council member Nicolas O’Rourke, a member of the progressive Working Families Party who opposed the arena, said the ordeal made him question “the real power that makes decisions in our city.”
“Corporations seem to be calling the shots,” he said.
Some observers, however, said it was unlikely to become an issue that threatened anyone’s political position in the long term.
Phil Goldsmith, the city’s former deputy mayor and managing director, said Parker’s position from the beginning was that spurring growth on Market Street would create union jobs. Building a fresh arena in South Philadelphia will likely still involve construction work.
“Politically, she has put a lot into the unions,” Goldsmith said, “and I think the unions will do well.”
Now, he said, her challenge is focused on determining the future of the Market East corridor. The Sixers’ announcement came just days after Macy’s announced it would close its store in the iconic Wanamaker Building on Market Street.
“What are you going to do for Market Street? You just can’t rely on Comcast and the Sixers to figure it out,” Goldsmith said. “This is a public issue.”
On Monday, Parker said the city would oversee the process of planning the future of Market East and outlined next steps for the proposed new arena at the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, saying the city would “start from scratch” in the next negotiations with Sixers city officials – this time with Comcast as a partner.
“Philly, that’s a lot,” she said. “It’s a turn none of us expected. Nevertheless, we are here.”
Staff writer Jake Blumgart contributed to this article.
