
Timeline
On January 27, 2021, Mayor Jim Kenney signed Executive Order 2-21, which made two changes to the list of City Holidays. The City of Philadelphia will once again recognize Juneteenth (June 19) as a holiday; and, for the first time, the City holiday celebrated on the second Monday of October will be recognized as Indigenous Peoples’ Day rather than Columbus Day. These changes, instituted via Executive Order 2-21, will be in place at least through the end of the Kenney administration.
The City and PIDC announced the Philadelphia COVID-19 Restaurant and Gym Relief Program, a $12 million grant program from the City and PIDC designed to provide financial relief to small businesses that were among the most adversely affected by the latest round of pandemic-related restrictions enacted in November 2020. Priority will be given to businesses that are located in high poverty areas or on neighborhood commercial corridors, are minority-, woman-, or disabled-owned, provide jobs to Philadelphians, or suffered damage in 2020 due to civil unrest.
The Kenney Administration and Philadelphia City Council announced a new commitment of $7 million in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding to aid small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is in addition to the $30 million the City previously directed to the program, for a total of $37 million.
Led by the City’s Budget Office in partnership with the City Planning Commission, Philadelphia is launching Participatory Budgeting, in which Philadelphians will generate ideas for infrastructure investments and vote directly on how to spend $1 million dollars on capital projects. The City plans to call for spending ideas from the public in the early spring, with the final vote happening in June 2021, around the same time that City Council will vote on the FY22 budget.
911 call takers and dispatchers are receiving a modified Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training to identify crisis-related calls so that calls are more efficiently directed to CIT trained officers in the field. The planning for this training has been underway since late August 2020.