Ghost Agencies

The Philadelphia Code still names abolished agencies — Fairmount Park Commission, Recorder of Deeds, Board of Inspectors — in present-tense language.

Philadelphia City Hall

The Philadelphia Code is, among other things, a phone book. Open it to almost any section and you will find the name of an office, a board, a commission, or a department that, on paper, has authority to do something. Read a few of them, though, and you will start to notice that the names are sometimes older than the offices they name. They belong to agencies that have been abolished and absorbed by successor bodies, but the Code still cites them by their old names.

This is not a mistake in the sense of a typo. The Code, as a single document, integrates every ordinance ever passed. It does not automatically rewrite itself when an agency is dissolved. The result is that the Code carries the names of agencies that have been gone for a decade or more — sometimes in present-tense language that does not match how the City is actually organized, sometimes in the very sections that abolished them.

I want to walk you through three of them. The Fairmount Park Commission. The Recorder of Deeds. The Board of Inspectors of the County Prison. Three Philadelphia institutions, named in the Code in sections that govern ongoing activity or that are themselves the act of abolition. The Code still names them.

I. The Fairmount Park Commission

In 2008, Philadelphia voters approved a Home Rule Charter amendment (Resolution No. 080181) and a ballot-question ordinance (Bill No. 080169) on November 4, 2008, transferring the Fairmount Park Commission’s authority to a new Department of Parks and Recreation. The merger became effective July 1, 2010.

§ 15-202 of the Philadelphia Code opens: “The Fairmount Park Commission is hereby empowered to” — followed by a long enumeration of authorities, including the power to enter into contracts, accept gifts, make rules for the use of park land, set fees, and employ police. The verbs are all present tense. The powers are all active. The Commission, in this section, is alive.

Read § 15-202 and you will find a list of duties that nobody, as of 2026, performs under that name. The Code “hereby empowers” it to act.

A reader who came to § 15-202 expecting to find the body that makes park rules would find the Fairmount Park Commission named in the present tense. The body that actually makes park rules today is the Department of Parks and Recreation. The Code’s § 15-202 names a body that no longer exists.

II. The Recorder of Deeds

Title 2 of the Philadelphia Code, titled “City-County Consolidation,” opens with § 2-101 (Declaration of Purpose). The text of § 2-101 states that the section is intended to further carry out the intent and purpose of Article XV, § 1, of the Constitution of Pennsylvania — the Home Rule provision — and authorizes the consolidation of the offices of the City and County of Philadelphia. § 2-103, § 2-104, and § 2-107 each use that authority: § 2-103 retires the Recorder of Deeds as a separately elected office and routes its powers to the Department of Records; § 2-104 retires the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison and routes its powers to the Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons; § 2-107 creates that Board of Trustees and vests it with the powers of the Board of Inspectors. The drafting pattern is consistent across these three sections: each names the office it is retiring, declares that office abolished, and transfers its powers and duties to a successor.

§ 2-103 (Recorder of Deeds) is the section that retires the Recorder of Deeds as a separately elected office. The text reads, in the present tense: “The Recorder of Deeds is abolished and no person shall be elected as such officer.” The subsection then continues: “Unless the person serving as Recorder of Deeds is appointed Commissioner of Records, that person shall serve as a Deputy Commissioner of Records until the end of the term for which he was elected and shall continue during the remainder of such term to be compensated as provided by law.” Subsection (2) transfers the Recorder’s powers and duties to the Department of Records.

The abolition is not an erasure. The Code’s own drafting shows this. § 2-103 explicitly contemplates a person who is “serving as Recorder of Deeds” at the time of the change. It retires the elective title and routes the person into the successor office (Commissioner of Records) or, failing that, into the role of Deputy Commissioner of Records. The function continues under a different name.

The City of Philadelphia’s own website confirms that the function persists. The Department of Records homepage identifies the Commissioner of Records as the office that “serves as the Recorder of Deeds for Philadelphia.” The Department’s recording page, on phila.gov, is the place where deeds are filed in 2026. So when the Code uses the phrase “Recorder of Deeds,” it is naming a function that the City itself still performs — the City just calls the office that performs it the Department of Records.

That fact — that the Recorder of Deeds has a live, current addressee in the City’s own departmental structure — shapes what the Code is doing when it uses the old name. The Code’s Chapter 2-200, “Recording of Deeds,” defines the recording function in present-tense terms that route directly to the modern office. § 2-201 (Definitions) defines “Commissioner” as “The Commissioner of Records” and “Department” as “The Department of Records.” § 2-202(1) (Requirements) says that “upon presentation of a deed for recording, the Department shall perform a records check” — where “the Department” is the Department of Records. The Chapter 2-200 framework, in other words, is internally consistent: it acknowledges the Department of Records as the recording body, while still carrying “Recorder of Deeds” in other parts of the Code that cross-reference the recording function or attach tax-collection duties to it.

The Code’s tax and finance provisions also name the Recorder of Deeds. Title 19 attaches specific duties to the office. § 19-1403(2)(g) (Imposition of Tax and Demolition Fund Fee) directs the Finance Director to certify demolition-fund amounts to the Recorder of Deeds. § 19-1415 (Recordation of Documents; Fees for Recording) uses a different name: it defines “Commissioner” as “the Commissioner of Records” and assigns the chapter’s recording duties to that officer. The Recorder of Deeds named in § 19-1403(2)(g) and the Commissioner of Records named in § 19-1415 are, in practice, the same person — the Commissioner of Records serves as Recorder of Deeds — but the Code uses two different titles within Title 19. The Department of Records itself is not an officer; the Code names the Commissioner of Records when it needs an officer and the Department when it needs the office.

The City’s own tax instructions reflect the same pattern. The Realty Transfer Tax page on phila.gov directs filers to include three certified checks — one of them payable to the Recorder of Deeds — alongside the completed Pennsylvania Realty Transfer Tax Statement of Value. The page addresses the Recorder of Deeds as the current recipient of recording fees, even though the only office by that name is the Commissioner of Records performing the function through the Department of Records. The Recorder of Deeds is also the named recipient of the demolition-fund fee tucked into the same § 19-1403, which I covered in The $15 with a Death Date.

So the Recorder of Deeds is a particular kind of ghost: not a body that has no addressee, but a body whose addressee the City itself has renamed. The Code’s § 2-103 abolishes the elected office in the present tense and transfers its powers. § 2-201 defines the successor. The Code still uses the old name in places, but the function is alive, named in the modern text, and unambiguously housed.

III. The Board of Inspectors of the County Prison

§ 2-104 (Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison) of the Philadelphia Code reads, in the present tense: “(1) The Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison is abolished. (2) All powers and duties previously exercised and performed by the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison are transferred to the Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons.”

Section 2-104 is, on its face, abolition-and-transfer text. It does not grant the Board of Inspectors any ongoing authority; it retires the body and moves its powers. It does, however, name the Board — twice. The section abolishes “the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison” and then transfers “the powers and duties previously exercised and performed by the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison.” That is the same drafting pattern as § 2-103: the Code names the body it is dissolving in the very act of declaring it dissolved.

The successor body named by § 2-104 — the Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons — is itself a creature of the same Title. § 2-107 (Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons) “hereby creates” the Board of Trustees as a departmental board, and provides that “[t]he Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons shall exercise all the powers and perform all the duties previously exercised and performed by the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prisons.” Read together, §§ 2-104 and 2-107 form a complete transfer: the old body is named, declared abolished, and its powers are vested in a new body that the same Title creates for that purpose.

The Board of Trustees was itself retired in May 2025. Philadelphia voters approved a Charter amendment on May 20, 2025 that repealed the Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons and established, in its place, an Office of Prison Oversight, a Philadelphia Prison Community Oversight Board, and a Director of Prison Oversight. The amendment was proposed by City Council in Resolution No. 240834-A, adopted December 19, 2024. Resolution No. 250018, adopted January 30, 2025, amended Resolution No. 240834-A to make a technical correction. The current Charter now addresses prison oversight through the following provisions:

The 2025 amendment also marked § 3-916 (Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons) as “Reserved” and marked § 5-1201 (Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons) as “Reserved.” The drafting pattern is the same one Title 2 used in its abolition-and-transfer sections: name the body being retired, declare it abolished, and transfer its powers to a successor. The 2025 amendment retired a body that Title 2 itself had created.

The Code’s § 2-104, then, is a transitional provision. It is the section that, in the consolidation ordinances, accomplished the abolition of the Board of Inspectors and routed its powers to the Board of Trustees. It does not govern the Board of Trustees today; the Board of Trustees is itself repealed and replaced, by the 2025 Charter amendment, with the Office of Prison Oversight and the Philadelphia Prison Community Oversight Board. § 2-104 names the Board of Inspectors only because the section that abolished it had to name what it was abolishing.

The Pattern

Three agencies. The same drafting pattern of dissolution in each: name the body, declare it abolished, transfer its powers to a successor named in the same act. The Recorder of Deeds, abolished as a separately elected office by Title 2 of the Philadelphia Code (§ 2-103), with the function now performed by the Commissioner of Records within the Department of Records. The Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison, abolished by § 2-104, with its powers transferred first to the Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons (§ 2-107) and, since the May 20, 2025 Charter amendment, to the Office of Prison Oversight and the Philadelphia Prison Community Oversight Board. The Fairmount Park Commission, named in § 15-202, uses the same present-tense empowering language — “The Fairmount Park Commission is hereby empowered to” — even though the Commission no longer exists. All three are still named in the Code. The Recorder of Deeds appears in § 19-1403(2)(g); the Commissioner of Records (who serves as Recorder of Deeds) is the officer named in § 19-1415. The Board of Inspectors, in § 2-104, is named in the act of being abolished. The Fairmount Park Commission, in § 15-202, is “hereby empowered.”

The pattern is not that the Code names bodies that have no addressees. In all three cases the addressee exists — the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Department of Records with the Commissioner of Records serving as Recorder of Deeds, the Office of Prison Oversight and the Philadelphia Prison Community Oversight Board. The pattern is that the Code keeps the old name in active use, in the present tense, alongside the name of the successor body. The Code does not always cleanly update its references. It carries the names forward in statutory language, sometimes in abolition-and-transfer sections and sometimes in sections that govern ongoing activity.

This is a feature of how the Code is structured. The consolidation ordinances — the source material for what is now Title 2 — were the mechanism by which the City and County offices were retired. They necessarily named the offices they were abolishing. The Code, in turn, carries both the abolition language and the old names forward into present-tense text. That is how you end up with a section like § 2-104 that names the Board of Inspectors in the act of declaring it abolished.

What the Code Is For

A reader who comes to the Code without historical context will find these names unfamiliar. The Fairmount Park Commission is “hereby empowered” in a section that has not been retitled since the Commission was abolished. Title 19 names the Recorder of Deeds as the recipient of Finance Director certifications for demolition-fund amounts (§ 19-1403(2)(g)), even though Chapter 2-200 of the Code separately identifies the Commissioner of Records and the Department of Records as the recording officers. The Board of Inspectors is named in a section that is also the section abolishing it. Each of these textual facts is, on its own, a place where a citizen reading the Code has to reconcile two different names for the same function.

The Code is, however, also a record. It records, in the present tense, what the law has done: abolished a separately elected office, transferred its powers to a new department, renamed the recording function, restructured a prison oversight board. The Code does this by retaining the old names in active-voice language and then pointing the powers to the new bodies. § 2-103 names the Recorder of Deeds and points the powers to the Department of Records. § 2-104 names the Board of Inspectors and points the powers to the Board of Trustees of Philadelphia Prisons (and, by the 2025 Charter amendment, to the Office of Prison Oversight and the Philadelphia Prison Community Oversight Board). The Code’s drafting logic is: name the old body, declare it abolished, name the new body, transfer the powers. Both names are preserved. The old name is preserved because the abolition section has to name what it is abolishing. The new name is preserved because the successor section has to name where the powers go. That is why I argue, in Give Every Law an Expiration Date, that the Code would be cleaner if every section were forced to come up for renewal on a clock — so the ghosts cannot accumulate without a Council vote.

For someone trying to determine which office holds a particular authority, the Code is more usable than it first appears. The abolition-and-transfer sections are explicit about where the powers went. The Department of Records is the place where a Philadelphian files a deed — and the Code’s § 2-202(1), the modern recording-requirements section, says so in the present tense. The Code’s Title 15 still names the Fairmount Park Commission in § 15-202 — an inconsistency with how the park system is actually organized.

A Code That Remembers

The Philadelphia Code is not a clean document. It is a record of every legislative act the City has taken, in the order the acts were taken, integrated into a single body of text. The consolidation ordinances and the 2025 prisons amendment — each of these was a substantial reorganization. Each of them necessarily produced abolition-and-transfer language, because that is how powers move from one body to another in a single legislative act. The Code, in preserving the old names in its abolition sections, is preserving a record of the reorganization itself.

The result is that the Code carries the names of bodies that no longer exist. § 15-202, in its present tense, empowers the Fairmount Park Commission. § 19-1403(2)(g), in its present tense, names the Recorder of Deeds as the recipient of Finance Director certifications — a separately elected office that Title 2 abolished, even though the function continues under a different name. § 2-104, in its present tense, names the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison in the very act of declaring it abolished.

What the Code is, in 2026, is a record that preserves the names of the bodies it has reorganized. The names are sometimes in present-tense empowering language that has not been retitled. The names are sometimes in abolition-and-transfer sections that record, in their own text, the path by which the present government came to be. In each case, the Code is doing what consolidation ordinances do: naming both the old body and the new one, in order to move powers from one to the other.

The ghosts are part of the record. The Code names them in the present tense, in sections that govern ongoing activity or in sections that are themselves the act of abolition. The names are preserved because the Code’s drafting logic preserves them.