“It may have been a revenge plot by Local 98, but it wasn’t to do with me,” Kenney told reporters at City Hall on Wednesday. The mayor — who has known Dougherty since childhood, attended high school with him, and came up through the trenches in the city’s political wars — said his finance director suggested the idea for a soda tax shortly after he took office in 2016. Kenney’s predecessor, Michael Nutter, had unsuccessfully floated the idea.