which was to circumvent so-called "councilmanic prerogative", an unspoken rule in Philadelphia that council members have the ultimate say over any project in their district that goes before the zoning board. "I would recommend that council... resist the urge to do what it's consistently done for the last 40 or 50 years, which is continually add amendments and overlays until the code is ultimately obsolete before we know it because everyone is going for zoning variances," he said. Eva Gladstein, deputy executive director of the Planning Commission, conceded that the Council had a prerogative to update the zoning code as needed, but said her department was also concerned with making modifications to a zoning code that is only a few months old. "We would have preferred that if Council had this concern, either we would have been involved earlier in the discussion or that the administration could have monitored the effects of the zoning code for one year before presenting recommendations," she said, noting that few metrics exist to shape revisions to the code at this point. Gladstein shied away from directly criticizing the Council's modifications, but said, "We [the Planning Commission] were satisfied with the zoning code the way it was when it went into effect in August." Another piece of the commission's new code seeks to reduce the number of variances required to build in Philadelphia. Variances are special permits issued by the Zoning Board of Adjustment that allow for certain violations of the zoning code after a