Mayor Cherelle Parker and Council President Kenyatta Johnson are trying to bring back the ’90s in City Hall

After it became clear last week that City Council had largely given Mayor Cherelle L. Parker what she wanted in the next city budget, it appeared Council President Kenyatta Johnson had capitulated to the mayor’s demands in their lengthy closed-door negotiations.

But in a joint news conference last week, Johnson presented an alternative narrative: He and Parker were simply in lockstep — just like former Mayor Ed Rendell and Council President John F. Street in the 1990s.

“Folks want to see us fight,” Johnson said, standing alongside Parker. “A while ago ... we had the John Street-Ed Rendell partnership when the city thrived. We haven’t seen it since then, quite frankly.”

It’s a lofty comparison. Rendell and Street famously forged an unlikely alliance to push through fiscal reforms that saved Philadelphia from the brink of bankruptcy, and they are credited with paving the way for a revitalization of the city.

Rendell went on to become governor, and Street succeeded him as mayor. Asked if, like Street, he had his eyes on the mayor’s office, Johnson demurred.

“I’m enjoying myself being the best Council president I can,” he said.

The next open mayoral election in Philadelphia would likely be six years from now, if Parker runs for and wins a second term. (If she were to resign to run for another office, Johnson would become mayor automatically.)

If Johnson is considering running, it would certainly help for him to have the support of Parker, who is the Democratic leader of the high-performing 50th Ward and a leader of the influential Northwest Coalition political organization.

It’s far from clear that Parker and Johnson will be able to maintain the relationship they have forged in the 18 months since both assumed their roles, or whether their connection will produce the same kind of results for the city as Rendell and Street’s alliance.

» READ MORE: A majority of Philadelphians approve of Mayor Cherelle Parker and think the city is on the right track, poll finds

But their comments Thursday revealed how the relatively new leaders of Philadelphia’s executive and legislative branches view their dynamic, marking a new chapter in City Hall after two decades in which the administration and Council were frequently at odds.

David L. Cohen, whose role as Rendell’s high-energy chief of staff during the ’90s was immortalized in the Buzz Bissinger book A Prayer for the City, said Parker and Johnson have both talked to him individually about wanting to emulate Rendell and Street.

“The fact that they both aspire to have this close working relationship for the benefit of the city and the people of Philadelphia is almost un-Philadelphian,” said Cohen, a former Comcast executive and U.S. ambassador to Canada. “We tend to like to eat our young to achieve our more individualized objectives.”

But there are political risks, primarily for Johnson. Some in Council do not want a leader who has tied his star to an at-times domineering mayor. Council’s influence grew under Johnson’s predecessor, Darrell L. Clarke, who often clashed with Mayors Michael A. Nutter and Jim Kenney. The outcome of this year’s budget negotiations has stoked concerns that the legislature may be ceding some of that sway.

» READ MORE: Philly City Council has approved a $6.8 billion budget for the next year. Here’s what that means for residents, workers, and businesses.

The most important negotiations, between top administration officials and the Council president’s staffers, usually take place at the end of the budget process, after Council has held weeks of hearings on the mayor’s proposal and lawmakers have submitted their lists of added funding requests to the president.

A Council source who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations said there was “confusion and dismay” about whether “there was really a venue to negotiate,” meaning some lawmakers did not realize Parker and Johnson had reached agreements on major issues earlier in the process.

To be sure, many members won individual concessions from the administration, thanks to Johnson’s negotiating, such as capital funding for park improvements in their districts. But on the big-ticket items — and on Parker’s plan to take out $800 million in city debt to fund her housing initiative — the final deal saw little movement from the mayor’s initial proposal.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Council approved the exact schedule of business tax cuts Parker had proposed in March. Substantially reducing the tax had been a top priority for Johnson and members of his leadership team, and many in the business community were disappointed to see he did not insist on steeper reductions.

At last week’s news conference with Parker, Johnson said for the first time that he had worked out the plan with Parker before she unveiled her proposal in March.

“It didn’t feel like as much negotiation or deliberation as in years past, and I think we finally saw at the news conference why,” the Council source said.

Johnson spokesperson Vincent Thompson said the Council president performs “a balancing act ... between the interests of his members and the administration, and his first priority as the Council president is addressing the needs of his members.”

Perhaps aware that it wouldn’t help Johnson to be seen as overly compliant with her agenda, Parker has repeatedly emphasized that Johnson has his members’ backs behind closed doors.

“Every time when we do our weekly meetings about this budget or anything that we’re working on, a sign of a good leader and your president is he has always makes sure he put the members first,” Parker said at the news conference.

At 52 and 51, respectively, Parker and Johnson were born 13 months apart. They both have school-age children and attend church. And the two both rose from humble beginnings in Philadelphia neighborhoods, Parker in West Oak Lane and Johnson in Point Breeze, to the two most powerful offices in city government.

Perhaps most importantly, they shared the experience of rising through the ranks as staffers — Johnson for State Sen. Anthony H. Williams and Parker for former Councilmember Marian Tasco — before serving together as state representatives and City Council members.

Parker has even publicly joked that they have each survived a period of bad press stemming from legal issues — Parker for a 2011 DUI arrest, and Johnson for his much more high-profile 2020 indictment on federal bribery and fraud charges. After a mistrial, Johnson was acquitted by a jury in 2022.

With that much in common, it may be surprising that many doubted they could work together. But there was a simple reason: Parker and Johnson hail from rival political families in a city where allegiances are paramount.

“There were plenty of skeptics and naysayers out there predicting that we would fail,” Parker said. “‘The mayor and the Council president are from different political factions,’ they said. ... I’m glad we didn’t listen to the skeptics.”

» READ MORE: From 2023: Philly’s Northwest Coalition has elected mayors. Will it determine the next one?

Johnson and the other members of his group — the South and Southwest Philly-based organization founded by the late State Sen. Hardy Williams — were among the only prominent Black politicians in the city who did not endorse Parker’s 2023 mayoral campaign.

And in the 2015 mayor’s race, Parker’s Northwest Coalition did considerable damage to the candidacy of Anthony H. Williams — who inherited from his father the most prominent role in Johnson’s group — when it backed the eventual winner, Kenney, providing critical support in high-turnout Black neighborhoods for a white candidate who needed to expand his base.

That history matters, and the rivalries between their allies could still impede the relationship Parker and Johnson are trying to build. That’s why they are consciously trying to keep those forces at bay.

“I get a couple calls from folks who say, ‘Well, you can’t let her get a win. Can’t let her get a win,’” Johnson said at the news conference. “This is a win for that mother that comes in our district office looking for housing. This is a win for that young man or that young lady who’s a returning citizen looking for housing.”

It has likely helped that Parker’s policy goals so far — combating the Kensington drug trade, improving public cleanliness, and funding housing programs — are intuitively popular. That wasn’t the case for some of her predecessors’ policies that caused friction in Council during Clarke’s tenure, such as Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages and Nutter’s unsuccessful attempt to privatize the Philadelphia Gas Works.

George Burrell, a former Council member who ran against Rendell in 1991 and later served in the Street administration, said Clarke used dissatisfaction with mayoral policy to grow Council’s power relative to the administration.

“There is power in the presidency of City Council today that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago, and I think mayors have to respect that,” said Burrell, who praised Parker and Johnson for striving to work together. “The mayor has in fact served in the state legislature and in City Council, so she has a pretty good understanding.”

Parker stayed out of the 2023 Council president race, which Johnson won, although many suspected she would have preferred Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr., who endorsed her mayoral bid.

Similarly, Rendell did not get heavily involved in the Council president race while he was mayor-elect, but it was well known his preference was for Tasco to beat Street.

“It didn’t take long for them to submerge that entire history and simply to take the position that their job was to do good for the city of Philadelphia and that required them to work together,” Cohen said.

Rendell, a reformist former district attorney, and Street, a rabble rouser-turned-institutionalist, were both outsiders in their own ways. That independence, plus the fiscal crisis facing the city, created urgency for them to work together.

“It makes the Cherelle Parker-Kenyatta Johnson [relationship] even more compelling because it’s not being driven by a crisis,” Cohen said.

For their weekly in-person meetings, Parker meets Johnson in Council’s offices on the fourth floor of City Hall, as Rendell did for Street, in a show of deference to the legislature.

Despite Parker and Johnson’s aspirations to emulate Rendell and Street, there will be notable differences in the new dynamic. Johnson is less combative than Street, who imposed his will on often-bitterly divided Councils as president and mayor. And Parker is not Rendell, who was famously conciliatory.

At last week’s news conference, Johnson stood by while Parker — in one of her patented lightly coded broadsides — made clear without using names which Council members had gained and lost favor with her during the budget process. At one point, she excoriated a lawmaker she said was too willing to please interest groups by vowing to win deep tax cuts to the business leaders and more money for schools to education advocates.

“Every constituency that comes to you, you say ‘yes’ to them,” Parker said. “You can’t lead ... and then say things where you’re only going to get a huge round of applause. You have to make some decisions, and that means tough decisions.”

It was a clear reference to Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, who is deputy majority whip, Education Committee chair, and a top proponent of reducing the business tax, who made a last-ditch effort to shrink Parker’s signature housing bond request. The mayor made clear she was not going to forget it — and she did so with a dressing-down Rendell likely would not have delivered and Clarke likely would not have stood for.

Johnson didn’t object to Parker during the news conference. And Thomas declined to fire back at the mayor.

“As a member of the leadership team on City Council, we’re always looking to make sure that there’s a fine balance between having a working relationship with the mayor and representing members,” Thomas said Friday.

It hasn’t been completely smooth sailing for Parker and Johnson so far, either.

Johnson is a major supporter of the school choice movement, and Council last spring attempted to block Parker’s reappointment of a school board member seen as hostile to charter schools. The mayor used a procedural loophole to keep the appointee — Joyce Wilkerson, who coincidentally was a chief of staff for Street — on the board.

» READ MORE: What a fight over school board nominees told us about the Parker-Johnson era in City Hall

And Parker last fall pushed Council to approve the 76ers’ proposal to build an arena in Center City, a controversial vote that turned out to be unnecessary after the team walked away from the deal weeks later. Johnson does not appear to have held the embarrassing chain of events against the mayor.

The fact that Parker and Johnson were able to de-escalate after the school board showdown and other dustups proves they are committed to making their partnership last, said Joseph P. McLaughlin, who served as a lobbyist on behalf of the city under Rendell and other mayors.

“They had some rubs at the beginning,” said McLaughlin, a retired Temple University public policy professor. “There’s a willingness to recognize that there’s not going to be 100% [agreement]. There’s going to be things they disagree on, but the fundamentals of their relationship look pretty deep.”