It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. First, the absolutely stunningly fantastic news that Mayor Nutter revoked the license the City’s Commerce Department gave to SugarHouse to begin building on riparian lands!! Inky is first up with the story.

Unfortunately, Councilman DiCicco, through the proxy of Marion Tasco, introduced CED legislation for Foxwoods. In his press release he defended this action by saying he was preempting a negative ruling on the issue by the Supreme Court. So, hopefully, the Councilman has a winning gameplan to get these two casinos resited. PlanPhilly.com has the first news on that.

Compared to a year ago, after the licenses were first announced by the Gaming Control Board, we have so much support for resiting the casinos away from neighborhoods. Nutter began his press conference today by stating that he felt both sites were bad locations for these money-sucking behemoths. We (meaning Philadelphia residents; I should also mention that I’m a delegate to the Philadelphia Neighborhood Alliance whose stated goal is resiting) have the support of our Councilman, our State Representatives and even State Senator Fumo. The only one we’re having trouble winning over is Governor Rendell, but we won’t stop trying.

Been a while. I’ve been ridiculously busy fighting the Delaware riverfront casino sites- more on that later.

For now, I’d like to crank up the old Journal with an homage to our new Mayor, Michael Nutter. Mayor Nutter made a bold promise on the campaign trail that he wanted Philadelphia to become the greenest city in the country. How will he do this? To begin with, in addition to performance, quality and diversity goals, he will ask each department in his administration to also meet sustainability goals, chief among them reducing the total amount of energy consumed. Nutter is building sustainability right into his administration.

He proposes a Sustainability Cabinet to oversee sustainable use of the City’s resources and to identify economic development and employment opportunities from ‘green’ pursuits. I could go on and on about his great ideas (and he’s not afraid to borrow best practices from other cities around the world) but there’s no need for it’s all right here in a thorough policy guide on sustainability: policy summary and link to full report.