Mayoral Transition Sessions

Beginning in the fall of 2023, with the support of the William Penn Foundation, the Committee of Seventy organized a series of briefings to help manage upcoming transitions into office for the Mayor and City Council. For a mayor, the task can be daunting, with a government to organize and hundreds of senior staff and government board members to appoint. Seventy organized a similar set of briefings for Mayor Kenney when he was elected in 2015, and we engaged Jane Slusser, Kenney’s campaign manager and first Chief of Staff, to manage this new round of mayoral sessions. She assembled a wide array of experts to offer their experience in four sessions. Aren Platt, co-director of the Parker transition said the process was “incredibly helpful…it gave us access to a lot of people who think about municipal government, who think about transitions in a lot of different ways from around the country.” We asked veteran Philadelphia journalist Dave Davies to interview participants and share some of their insights. He’s written four columns on the Mayoral transition sessions and two on the City Council presentations, which can be found here on the Seventy website. 

The sessions themselves were closed to media. All comments attributed to participants in the columns are from Davies’ interviews, not the sessions themselves.