Ori Feibush vs. the machine

“I don’t know that I’ve offended people,” says 30-year-old real-estate developer Ori Feibush. “I’m certainly blunt in my feedback — but I think, deep down, most Philadelphians are very frustrated. Some are afraid to stand up and give candid feedback, and others aren’t. I don’t know that it’s as simple as saying it would be difficult for me to work within the system because I’ve offended someone. It’s simplifying a complex issue.” 

These are the words of a man who has offended a great many people and now finds himself running for office.

Last spring, he announced plans to run for South Philly’s 2nd District City Council seat in 2015 in a Philadelphia magazine profile in which he also made a wealth of what the writer calls “impossibly rude statements about important Philadelphians.” (That article’s subtitle: “In which a brash young gentrifier fights with the city, catches a murderer, calls Mayor Nutter a retard, accuses Jim Kenney of being drunk, and announces he wants to run for city council — all while transforming South Philly’s struggling Point Breeze neighborhood.”)

Depending on whom you ask in Point Breeze, Feibush is either improving a neighborhood that the city neglected for decades, or he’s the evils of gentrification personified. Ask any politician from the area and you’ll probably get a wince at best. Next year, Point Breeze will likely be the deciding factor when Feibush challenges incumbent first-term Councilman Kenyatta Johnson, who won the 2nd District seat by 40 votes in 2011 in a race against another developer, Barbara Capozzi. Johnson squeaked into office because of his strength in the 36th Ward, his Point Breeze home turf, which gave him a third of his total votes. 

Feibush is extremely unlikely to turn the political structure to his advantage. But it looks like he’s trying to bypass a Philadelphia political machine that wouldn’t endorse him with a 10-foot pole by recruiting more than 100 people to run for the most micro of offices in the city’s party ward system: member of the Democratic City Committee, or committeeperson. 

The humble committeeperson election rarely gets much attention, but people will be watching the one in Point Breeze this year closely, because the 36th isn’t just having a ward fight — it’s having a ward insurgency. 

First, a quick review of Philadelphia’s ward system. Take the city and subdivide it: First, 10 districts, each represented by a councilperson. One rung down are 66 wards, the basic units of taxes and voting, each with a ward leader. Each ward is made up of a few dozen divisions, tiny 2-to-4-square-block packets, each represented by two committeepeople. 

“In theory,” says City Commissioner Stephanie Singer, who herself served as leader of Center City’s 8th Ward, “the committeeperson is supposed to be the voice inside the party for voters in their neighborhood.” Each level in the ward system has the ear of the one above and is accountable to the one below: Neighbors elect the committeepeople, committeepeople elect their ward leader, and having the support and endorsement of a district’s ward leaders is crucial to winning a City Council seat. Among other things, ward leaders can arrange for “a lot of committeepeople standing outside the polls on Election Day and giving their neighbors a flyer saying, ‘Hey, vote for this person!’” says Singer. “It’s a very, very powerful thing.”

In many wards, wannabe committeepeople are expected to ask their ward leader for the go-ahead before running; there are often exactly two candidates for a division’s two seats, even though it takes only 10 neighbors’ signatures to get on the ballot. So it’s easy to tell where a battle is going down: Just count the candidates. “If, in a single ward, you see lots of divisions where there are more than two people running, that’s generally a sign that there’s some kind of battle over ward leadership,” says Singer. 

In 2010, there were 85 Democratic candidates for the 36th Ward’s 82 spots. This year, 161 candidates submitted the paperwork to run for those same 82 spots. (Feibush takes credit for about 70 of those, plus some in neighboring wards for a total of about 120.) Then, candidates in the 36th filed an equally unprecedented 76 challenges to rival candidates’ 10-signature qualifying petitions; nearly all the objections were made by new candidates against incumbent candidates, with the legal fees paid by Feibush. Thirty-four candidates, all but one from the old school, were kicked off the ballot. 

Harold James, 71, the chair of the 36th Ward and former state representative from the Point-Breeze-including 186th district of Pennsylvania for 20 years, says he’s never seen anything like this number of challenges, and was shocked to be challenged himself after nearly 30 years as a committeeman. James survived his challenge, but his committee partner, someone he’d worked with for years, was removed from the ballot. “Of course it upsets me … they prevailed.” James speaks as if it were as obvious as the color of the sky: Ori Feibush “wants to try to take over the ward, with intentions of coming after Kenyatta.”

“We weren’t looking at minutiae,” says Feibush about the challenged signatures. Reviewing thousands of 10-signature petitions, he says, “You start to see very quickly that either the entire sheet is legitimate or the entire sheet is kitchen-table signatures,” or signatures that clearly were written by a small number of people. “It had to be egregious. We weren’t trying to split hairs.”

Candidates submit their addresses along with their petitions, and the data that can be pulled from those addresses is striking. Out of the 36th Ward candidates whose family name is on the deed of the submitted address, the average candidate whose petition was challenged bought their house in 1991 for $18,934. The average person who challenged a petition bought their house in 2010 for $174,944. The average 2014/2015 market value of the house of a challenger is nearly twice that of one whose owner was challenged; the challenged also owe the city, on average, about $2,000 in back property taxes, while none of the challengers do. 

Steve Sabo, 48, a youth hockey coach and baseball instructor, challenged the signatures of three out of his four fellow candidates from the 36th Ward’s 2nd Division. He’d never met any of them, despite having moved to Point Breeze nearly five years ago. “We were living in Center City, and when it came time to buy a house, we were looking to get the most bang for our buck. We looked at Graduate Hospital … it was affordable, but we didn’t want to be house-poor, you know?”

Sabo, unlike many of the 70-odd new candidates in the 36th, was already familiar with the ward system when Feibush, a friend, suggested he run. When Sabo was a kid, the committeeman for his neighborhood lived on his block in the Northeast. “If anyone had a question or a problem, they went to him. The street I grew up on was a pretty small, two-way street, and it was dangerous. When the traffic was going both ways, people had to swerve out of each others’ way, and our committeeman was able to get it made into a one-way street.”

“When I went out to collect my signatures, I think a lot of the people were in the same boat that I was — they didn’t know who their committeeperson was,” says Sabo. “One woman I approached on Manton Street, she gave me this sideways look and said, ‘I don’t know anything about you, why should I sign your petition?’ And I asked her if she knew who her committeepeople were, and she said, ‘No, I don’t,’ and she put her hand out for me to give her the petition and signed it. We ended up having a conversation, and we shared a lot of the same frustrations about the neighborhood: Garbage, safety, generally wanting to have a nicer neighborhood.”

The current leader of the 36th Ward — ultra-old-school, 83-year-old Anna Verna, who served as 2nd District Councilwoman for 37 years and Council President for 12 — didn’t respond to requests for comment, but in March told the Daily News it was “quite evident” that Feibush was trying to take over her ward to help with his Council race next year. 

 Ward battles are nothing new. But this one is different, and it’s not just because of the petition challenges, though Harold James says he’s never seen them on this scale. “Last time I’ve heard anything done like this was 30 years ago — before my time as a committeeman,” he says. “Somebody was trying to take over the ward from Anna Verna.” 

Let's use that as a quick demonstration of who Feibush's candidates are trying to displace in the 36th. That unsuccessful somebody was David Shadding, who briefly served as state representative from Pennsylvania’s 186th district in the late ’70s — an office since held by Harold James and Kenyatta Johnson. Shadding supposedly sucker-punched his successor in the face as the two went through disputed primary ballots in 1980. Looking up the 30-year-old incident James was referring to, it was sort of shocking to realize that many names from that story were recognizable from the list of current candidates for 36th Ward committee. Shadding, James, two of the sucker-punchee’s sons, the granddaughter of the first-ever state Rep. from the 186th, and Johnson’s wife are all running for the 36th Ward committee right now.

If David Shadding don't get tossed out of the system for attempting a coup on Anna Verna's territory, punching a Democrat opponent in the face, being indicted by the FBI for bribery in such a way that the Inquirer used the headline "Client Corrupt But Not Guilty, Lawyer Tells Jury," and later being accused of literally stabbing an aide, it's tough to imagine anything that could get someone kicked out of the ward system in the 36th.

And that’s why the 36th Ward will be closely watched on Tuesday. It’s not just another intramural challenge to Anna Verna or Kenyatta Johnson from one of the old-schoolers eternally rattling around the ward system. The ward battle in the 36th isn’t candidate vs. candidate — it’s candidate vs. system. 

None of Feibush’s candidates we called got the traditional go-ahead from Verna before running, mostly because they didn’t realize they were expected to. Sabo did know, but chose not to. “I also didn’t ask my fiancee’s father to let me marry her when I proposed, because some things are old-fashioned and out of date,” he says. “That’s part of the whole problem. Everything is status quo: ‘This is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we’ll continue to do it, whether it benefits people or not.’"

Singer thinks a lot of committeepeople don’t realize “the difference between the powers that committeepeople would have if they would use them and the status quo in Philadelphia.” Much of a ward leader’s power comes from deciding endorsements, often handed out in flyer form outside polling places. But, Singer says, if a committee “wanted to pass a rule that all endorsements by the ward had to be by vote of the committeepeople — they have the power to do that! Or to pass a bylaw that says, you know, the ward leader has to do 10 push-ups at every meeting.”

Ward leaders are becoming less relevant as technology improves and the city gets younger and more broke. You can use Google instead of a committeeperson to find out how to get a pothole fixed, for example, and there are far fewer rewards for ward leaders to hand out in the form of patronage jobs and walking-around money. 

The average incumbent 36th Ward committeeperson was elected in 2010 with just 48 votes, and last spring’s primary turnout was a record low. (“Abysmal,” Singer says glumly.) But Feibush thinks it might improve this year. “When neighbors have an opportunity to vote for somebody who you know cares about the community, cares about the block, really wants to get involved — you’re much more inclined to show up at the polls. So, yeah, I’d expect there to be a much higher turnout,” says Feibush.

“There’s a lot of energy around these committeepeople races,” says Singer, part of it due to groups like Young Involved Philadelphia that in the leadup to the primaries organized talks and online guides aimed at educating some of the city’s younger citizens about how to run for committeeperson and otherwise get involved with city government. 

Feibush, for his part, has gotten much better at choosing his words. Asked whether he sees himself becoming ward leader or Councilman if his candidates sweep the 36th, he says no. “And it’d be disingenuous to suggest that these people are running to help me down the road — many, if not most, would take offense to that. I wouldn’t even suggest that these people are necessarily aligned with me. They just want to get involved, and the party never extended them an opportunity to do that.”

Read more of our primary coverage.