Andrew Stober, who recently stepped down as Chief of Staff at the Mayor’s office of Transportation and Utilities, will soon announce an independent bid for an At-Large City Council seat, PlanPhilly has learned.

Prior to serving as Chief of Staff to Deputy Mayor Rina Cutler, who also recently departed the Nutter administration for a job at Amtrak, Stober was the Director of Strategic Initiatives at MOTU from 2008 to 2010. He moved to Philadelphia in 2008 from Colorado, where he was a manager with the Colorado DOT’s Investment Analysis Unit.

Stober is a household name around this site, frequently appearing as a source in our stories about Nutter administration transportation initiatives large and small, particularly recently during the roll-out of the Indego bike share program.

For a brief moment, there came a flash of excitement that Stober might be the only City Council candidate running this cycle able to boast of having his very own PlanPhilly directory profile out on the campaign trail, but it appears Paul Steinke also has that notch on his belt.

An independent Council bid is an intriguing and unusual political strategy, and I’m curious to see what readers make of his chances. If Stober is able to collect enough valid signatures to get on the ballot as a first-time candidate as an independent, he would enjoy the much lower bar of competing for one of the two At-Large Council seats that’s guaranteed to a non-Democrat, rather than competing for one of the five majority party seats.

Philadelphia’s city charter bars the majority party from holding more than five of the seven At-Large Council seats, reserving two seats for non-majority candidates. Those seats are typically claimed by Republicans, as the city’s second-largest organized political party, but nowhere does it say that a non-affiliated candidate can’t hold them.

General elections in municipal years here typically feature much lower turnout than the spring Democratic primary, which is seen by voters–not incorrectly–as the election of greatest import. That means Stober would need to hit a lower vote target in a smaller field than if he had run in the spring. To provide some context, in 2011 Denny O’Brien received 48,675 votes (6.25% of the vote) and David Oh got 38,835 votes (4.99% of the vote). Denny O’Brien got less than half the votes that the fifth Democrat, Bill Greenlee, received (110,544) so the bar for success drops dramatically outside the top five.