Brady wins candidacy challenge

After a month of bumps and bruises, Bob Brady's mayoral candidacy is somehow still on the right track.

At least that's the word from Senior Judge Patrick Toole, who declared Tuesday that Brady will be allowed to continue his mayoral bid despite alleged omissions on his financial-disclosure forms.

Brady's legal hurdles, however, may not be completely over, as an appeal to the state Supreme Court is expected.

After the Philadelphia Daily News revealed earlier this month that Brady had failed to disclose city and union pensions when filing his candidacy, six Philadelphians filed suit in an attempt to remove Brady from the race.

But Toole threw out the complaint after a hearing last week, agreeing with Brady that he wasn't required to disclose his city income and that any other problems with his disclosure form were resolved when he filed an amendment to it following the Daily News article.

"Brady has at all times acted ethically" and in good faith, Toole wrote, and thus deserves the chance to make his case before the primaries on May 15.

"This challenge has energized my supporters, and now we are in a full sprint to the finish line," Brady said in a press release following the ruling.

The decision has at least two people disappointed, though.

Fellow mayoral candidates Tom Knox and Dwight Evans both came out in support of the lawsuit at a press conference March 14, with Knox providing funds to the lawsuit.

Both argued, in essence, that turnabout is fair play.

They claimed that Brady, as longtime chairman of the City Democratic committee, had supported similar efforts to end others' candidacies by finding faults in seemingly obscure paperwork errors.

Brady, however, made the case - and Toole agreed - that he was justified in leaving his city pension off his disclosure form because it represents a "governmentally mandated payment," which is covered by an exception in state ethics and elections laws.

In the end, Toole wrote that, "whenever possible, election contests should be decided by the hand of the voter in the election booth and not by the pen of the judge in a judicial chamber."

Not surprisingly, Brady was pleased with the decision, saying in a statement that "Tom Knox crossed the line with mean-spirited personal attacks on me," referring to comments Knox made after the hearing indicating that Brady wasn't qualified to run for mayor because he couldn't understand the details of his pension.

The Knox campaign declined to comment on the decision, referring all inquiries to Paul Rosen, the lawyer who argued the case against Brady. Rosen, on vacation, did not return several calls to his cell phone.

Evans's spokesman Tim Spreitzer, however, called for an appeal to this decision, saying that "judges in previous cases have ruled in a very different manner under eerily similar circumstances," resulting in other candidacies being invalidated in court.

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