James Francis

Education

Kenney graduated from Saint Joseph"s Preparatory School in 1976.

Career

Kenney, who was first elected to the in 1991, held his At-Large Council seat for 23 years from January 1992 until January 29, 2015, when he resigned from the City Council to launch his candidacy for Mayor of Philadelphia. He received a bachelor"s degree from Louisiana Salle University in Philadelphia. During his time on Philadelphia"s City Council, Kenney served as Chairman of the Council Committee on Labor and Civil Service.

In 2010, Kenney sided with the local firefighters’ union when Mayor Nutter took action to remove the collective bargaining rights of paramedics.

In 2014, Kenney successfully introduced legislation that ended arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The bill replaced incarceration with the requirement to pay a fine.

In advocating for the bill, Kenney had cited the disproportionate effect of arrests for small amounts of marijuana on African-Americans. On the council, Kenney enacted fiscal policies like "bonus" pension payments (distributing funds when pension plans exceed target returns in any given year even though solvency depends on the excess funds to balance underperforming years) which national economic commentators have called "numerically illiterate" and "insane" while the practice has been identified as directly contributing to the bankruptcy of Detroit.

Closer to home, Philadelphia"s own Financial Director referred to Kenney"s maneuver as merely "fiscally irresponsible.".

Achievements

• He was the Democratic nominee for Mayor of Philadelphia in the 2015 election, having won the crowded primary election by a landslide on May 19, 2015.

Membership

He was also Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Rules, Committee on the Environment, and Committee on Law and Government, and was a member of the Committee on Public Safety, Technology and Information Services, Public Property and Public Works, Fiscal Stability and Intergovernmental Cooperation, Public Health and Human Services, and the Legislative Oversight Committee.