Controversial City Agency Gets Name Change
By Mike Dunn
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, said Shakespeare, and that may be true at Philadelphia City Hall, where an old acronym for a city agency is getting replaced with a new one.
Mayor Nutter has renamed the Mayor's Office of Community Services, or MOCS, as the Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity, or simply, CEO.
"This is the new MOCS. And before it was MOCS, it had two other names, back from the seventies," says Nutter.
He says its more than a name change. The new CEO will have a broader mandate than MOCS to coordinate the city's anti-poverty efforts.
MOCS, created back in the 1960s, has long been viewed as a haven for patronage jobs. In fact former mayoral candidate Sam Katz at least once vowed to eliminate MOCS if elected. But Nutter denies that the name change has anything to do with past controversies.
"If you don't have a job, if you are living in poverty, you will not give a damn what the name of the organization is," says Nutter.
Still the mayor admits the alphabet is getting a workout.
"You know, we have more acronyms than there are letters of the alphabet," he says.
The new office will be headed by Eva Gladstein, former executive director of the Philadelphia Zoning Code Commission.
