Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
City Controller Christy Brady, seeking her first full term as Philadelphia’s independently elected fiscal watchdog, is being challenged by Republican Ari Patrinos in the Nov. 4 general election. The controller’s office is charged with auditing the city’s finances and investigating fraud, waste, and abuse. But despite that critical role, there hasn’t been much drama in this year’s race. Patrinos, a former stockbroker and Philadelphia public school teacher, acknowledged the odds are against him in heavily Democratic Philadelphia and said he has no particular complaints about Brady’s performance. Instead, he said he ran because “it was important that somebody run on the ticket.” “The truth is nobody wanted to run, and my ward leader asked me if I would run,” said Patrinos, who has not reported raising any money for his campaign. “I didn’t have any specific attacks on Brady. My concern is that the city is too single-party, and I think the city functions better when you have a two-party system.” Brady, a Democrat who has a $250,000 campaign war chest she likely won’t need to use this year, has the support of much of the local political establishment, including the Democratic City Committee and the building trades unions. A 30-year veteran of the office, Brady has struck a notably conciliatory tone during her tenure, striving to work collaboratively with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration rather than butt heads with the executive branch, as many of her predecessors have done. “Because of my experience when I took office two years ago, I hit the ground running,” she said. She pointed to her office’s audit that uncovered that the Philadelphia School District had made about $700,000 in payments to fake vendors as part of a cyber scam and to her investigation finding that fraudulent use of the property tax homestead exemption was costing the city and school district about $11.4 million per year. Brady was first appointed as acting controller in 2022 by former Mayor Jim Kenney when Rebecca Rhynhart resigned from the post to run for mayor. Brady then won a 2023 special election to finish Rhynhart’s term, which ends in January. Seeking a full four-year term for the first time, Brady this year ran uncontested in the Democratic primary. “The biggest question I get [on the campaign trail] is: What does a controller do?” she said. “And so I’m getting out there and spreading the word of what we’re currently working on and what we do in the office.” The controller earns an annual salary of $171,000 and oversees an office with more than 120 employees and a budget of about $11.8 million. Patrinos also had no opponent in the May primary. He said he has been spending much of his time on the campaign trail promoting Pat Dugan’s district attorney campaign. Dugan, a self-described “lifelong Democrat,” lost to District Attorney Larry Krasner in the Democratic primary but has accepted the GOP nomination to take a second swing at the incumbent in the general election. “I spend like half my time when I campaign advocating for Dugan because I’m very concerned about the crime,” Patrinos said. From Philly to Harvard and back Patrinos, who lives in Chestnut Hill, said he was a Democrat until about four years ago, adding that he voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. His conversion was prompted primarily by his alma mater, Harvard College, which he felt had too enthusiastically embraced a “woke” stance. “The immediate driving factor was on the cultural front. It was what was going at Harvard,” he said. “I’m a little bit of an anti-woke warrior. ... 2020 was peak woke.“ Academia’s leftward trajectory and the Biden administration’s “terrible” handling of the pandemic combined to leave Patrinos with the feeling that he had no place in the Democratic Party, he said. “These Ivy League liberal types who really don’t have a sense of what’s going on in the lives of average Americans — they seemed to be so indifferent to the negative effects of their policies," he said. He became involved in local Republican politics and helped boost President Donald Trump’s Philadelphia campaign in 2024. “I’m not a MAGA guy, so I didn’t join [the GOP] because of Trump,” he said, “but honestly I’m very happy with the higher education stuff, the hardcore stand he’s taken with Harvard.” Patrinos, a Central High School graduate who also has a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago, was a stockbroker in New York City before moving back to Philly about 15 years ago. He then became a math and history teacher and worked at West Philadelphia High School and Strawberry Mansion High School. Patrinos said he suffered a seizure several years ago that temporarily limited his employment opportunities, but is now seeking other jobs should he come up short against Brady. If elected, Patrinos said he would audit the Department of Licenses and Inspections, examine whether SEPTA could do a better job preventing fare evasion, and push the school district to prepare more students for careers in information technology. Controller and mayor on the same page Brady’s approach to the mayor’s administration is the exception when it comes to the recent history of her office. A decade ago, then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz’s relationship with Mayor Michael A. Nutter became so toxic that Nutter at one point issued a statement calling Butkovitz “a sad and sick person.” Their successors, Mayor Jim Kenney and Rhynhart, started off with widespread expectations that they might have a better working partnership, given that Rhynhart served as a top executive branch official under Nutter and, briefly, Kenney. But the relationship soured in a matter of months after Rhynhart publicly criticized the administration’s bookkeeping, prompting a call from Kenney that reportedly “got personal” and the cancellation of their planned monthly meetings. That outcome doesn’t appear likely with Brady and Parker. Brady shares many political allies with Parker, especially the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council, a coalition of unions that spends big on elections and has reason to be pleased with both Brady and Parker’s tenures so far. Brady, for instance, touts her office’s audit of the Department of Licenses and Inspections that revealed that inspectors often failed to confirm that construction sites were being run by licensed contractors — providing ammunition to the trades unions, which often rail against “fly-by-night” contractors that don’t employ their members. And the mayor last year split the department into two agencies, with one focused largely on enforcing construction regulations. Brady said her healthy relationship with the Parker administration shouldn’t be confused with a reticence to call out fraud and waste. “I am an independently elected official. I am not afraid to stand up for what’s right,” she said. “I believe in the rules and regulations in city government.” Her approach to the executive branch, she said, is designed to advance the aim of any auditor: ”getting management to implement your recommendations.” “In my experience in the controller’s office, when you fight, they’re not going to listen to your recommendation,” said Brady, a certified public accountant who graduated from the Philadelphia College of Textiles & Science, now Jefferson University. “When we issue our reports, the mayor has been thanking me for the recommendations. And I really appreciate that relationship because I believe that we can make change.”
