Being your mayor for the last four years has been the greatest honor of my life. In 2016, we embarked on an ambitious mission to bring equity and opportunity to all neighborhoods and to make the government more accessible and accountable to the people it serves. 

As I reflect on this term, I’m proud of many things that we’ve accomplished together. 

Passing the Philadelphia Beverage Tax

Together, we took on the powerful beverage industry to raise the revenue needed to create Community Schools, provide free, quality pre-K for thousands of  kids, and invest hundreds of millions of dollars in our aging public spaces. 

 

Providing free, quality pre-K to thousands of children

In 2015, more than half of Philadelphia’s three and four-year-olds lacked access to affordable quality pre-K. After City Council passed the Philadelphia Beverage Tax in 2016, we launched PHLpreK, our city’s free, quality pre-K program that not only benefits children and families but also strengthens our city’s entire early childhood education landscape. 

mayor kenney with a teacher at a table of pre-k students

To date, more than 6,000 children have received a quality, free early education thanks to PHLpreK. Currently, the program serves 3,300 students at 138 sites and will grow to 5,500 students annually by 2023.

 

Rebuilding our city’s parks, libraries, recreation centers, and playgrounds.

Made possible by the Philadelphia Beverage Tax, Rebuild is our investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to provide much-needed improvements to our city’s parks, libraries, recreation centers, and playgrounds after years of deferred maintenance. 

Today, we have 60 facilities with work underway and eight park and playground renovations in construction or completed. 

With ambitious targets for increasing contract participation for minority and women-owned businesses and a historic agreement with the building trades to offer diverse residents a new pathway to membership in a skilled trade union, Rebuild is a key component of our vision for inclusive growth.

 

Ensuring quality education in every neighborhood

The only way to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty is to ensure that all of our city’s kids—regardless of what zip code they live in—have access to quality schools in their neighborhood. 

I believe in our children and our schools, which is why our administration and City Council is providing $1.2 Billion in funding for the School District of Philadelphia over the next five years

mayor kenney surrounded by students laughing and smiling on a sunny day

We successfully returned our schools to local control after nearly two decades of being under the state-run School Reform Commission. Now, we have a new, mayor-appointed Board of Education, whose interests and expertise are about supporting Philadelphia’s students, families, and educators. 

We’ve also worked with the School District of Philadelphia to improve student outcomes by creating Community Schools, our Out-of-School-Time initiative, Philly Reading Coaches, and much more.

 

Combating the opioid epidemic

These past years we faced the stark reality that the opioid crisis was ravaging communities and costing the City tens of millions of dollars in services. In October 2018, we launched the Philadelphia Resilience Project, a human-centered approach focused on saving lives and helping people and neighborhoods recover.

Through this work, we humanely closed all large encampments and connected 75 percent of people who were living in encampments in Kensington to services. We removed 375 tons of trash and 600 abandoned vehicles, and have distributed more than 120,000 doses of naloxone, helping to reduce the overdose rate by eight percent. The work is far from done, but we are making progress.

 

Remaining a Welcoming City for all

Our diversity is our strength, and I will always protect the rights of immigrants who choose to call our city home.

We ended the PARS agreement with ICE because allowing a City database to be used by federal authorities to arrest law-abiding Philadelphians is wrong. 

We also successfully sued the U.S. Department of Justice for attempting to withhold funding due to Philadelphia’s immigration policies. 

mayor kenney holding up a t-shirt that says I stand with immigrants

From creating the Philadelphia International Unity Cup to expanding language access in City departments, I hope our immigrant residents know that Philadelphia will always be a welcoming city.

 

Reforming our criminal justice system

In 2016, Philadelphia became the largest grant award recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Safety and Justice Challenge, receiving $3.5 million to safely reduce Philadelphia’s jail population by 34 percent over three years. 

By 2018, we not only met our original reduction goal, but exceeded it an entire year ahead of schedule. This allowed the City to close the aging House of Correction, and spare taxpayers the enormous expense of having to build a new jail to replace it. 

The jail population decline continues: as of November 2019, the jail population was below 4,900, about a 40 percent decline over the 2015 baseline of 8,082. 

When I first took office, our administration had a bold vision of what Philadelphia can be. The work has not been easy, but nothing worth fighting for ever is.

Over the next four years, we will continue to fight and build on the success of our ambitious first term, work to lift Philadelphians out of poverty, fight the scourge of gun violence and the opioid crisis, and create an inclusive economy ripe with quality jobs, higher wages, and a workforce prepared for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

I look forward to working with you to make this a reality. 

Learn more about Mayor Kenney's first term reflections