Philadelphia: Bad News for Mayor Goode

Two years have passed since a fiery confrontation with the radical black cult known as MOVE left eleven dead and climaxed with a police bomb's destroying 61 Philadelphia row houses. Almost all the 236 surviving residents have since moved back into rebuilt homes, but the action still haunts the administration of Democratic Mayor W. Wilson Goode. Last week a grand jury investigating cost overruns associated with the $9 million home-reconstruction project recommended theft charges against two developers and blasted the mayor's office for what it termed a "morass of incompetence, ineptitude and mismanagement." The grand jury said it has discovered more than $200,000 worth of illicit funneling of funds, salaries and equipment from the reconstruction project, along with $150,000 in other questionable disbursements. Much of the blame for the fiasco, said the jury's report, "lies with the mayor and the key people on whom he relied." Replied Goode: "I wanted more than anything else in the world to get those families back in their homes, and therefore I took aggressive, unusual steps to achieve that." Philadelphians will make a further judgment in the Democratic mayoral primary next week.