Mayoral candidates face off in last debate

It was the perfect end to a campaign marked by soap opera scandals and overshadowed by personal attacks.

The final debate between Democratic Mayor John Street and Republican challenger Sam Katz began with numerous questions about the listening device found in Street's office and the continuing Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry, and never quite got past it.

Even in the second half of yesterday's debate -- which aired on Channel 6 and was sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters -- each candidate kept returning to the topic of corruption and charging his opponent with dishonesty.

Throughout the debate, Street repeatedly tried to cast doubt upon Katz's claim that he is a corrupt official.

A bug was found two weeks ago in the mayor's office and since then, the FBI has raided numerous businesses and residences, and most recently was reported to have subpoenaed financial documents belonging to Street's family members.

But, Street said, "Just because there is an FBI investigation does not mean that anyone has done anything wrong."

He also re-raised concerns about the timing and nature of the investigation, saying that these types of inquires are supposed to be private, "but this has been conducted in such a way that breaks almost all of the rules."

However, Katz dismissed Street's claims that the inquiry might be a Republican conspiracy. He said that, in order to obtain permission for the bug, the FBI needed to convince a judge that there was "probable cause. That's the reason that the device was installed."

Probable cause is a legal term concerning the minimum amount of evidence needed to conduct a search or otherwise investigate a suspect.

"This puts an exclamation point on 100 years of a city corrupted," Katz said. The issue is "how are we going to end the culture of cronyism?"

Katz also returned a number of times to his anti-patronage campaign theme. He questioned the manner in which Street gave out contracts, and specifically why Street's brother, Milton Street, was awarded a no-bid contract at Philadelphia International Airport worth $1.2 million annually.

"We've never hired an unqualified person," Street responded, as he adamantly defended his handling of the city's contracts. "We've never paid too much for a service, and we've never paid for a service we didn't need."

But Street wasn't the only one under the scrutiny of the ethics police.

Katz faced a few questions about embezzlement charges that have been levied against him.

He claimed that he was the victim of "a frivolous lawsuit" from one of his former employees, which he characterized as an unfortunate side effect of the American legal system.

But when Street called Katz "hypocritical" for not releasing legal documents about the embezzlement case, Katz shot back with a quick retort.

"Let's both go down to the U.S. Attorney's office tomorrow and make ourselves available," he said.

Street also tried to cast the FBI corruption investigation in racial terms. He said that "people are very justified in thinking that something is just not right. This is not an accident."

But Katz responded that corruption investigations were nothing new -- in 1978, a number of Philadelphia officials were found guilty in an FBI probe -- and that this investigation was not racially motivated.

"It's not black, it's not white, it's green, and green is the color of greed," Katz said. "That's what we need to root out in City Hall."

But race, and the racial polarization of Philadelphia, did play a large part in the debate.

Panelists continued to press both candidates for their views on the racial tensions in the city, and how best to deal with them.

However, neither candidate responded with a concrete plan to minimize racial polarity.

And, on the topic of crime prevention, Street categorized Katz's call for a new prison as being too narrow-minded.

"I think we should be building schools and not prisons," he said. "I don't believe that if we had another 1,000 jail cells that would be the answer to [the] violent crime" problem.

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