“How did a city of this size, not a large city, end up with so much debt?”
Harrisburg receiver David Unkovic asked that question at a recent community forum, perfectly capturing the nugget of the city’s dilemma.
Population: 49,500.
Debt: about $1 billion*.
Unkovic didn’t want to know how it literally happened. He has the numbers in front of him and, no doubt, a good understanding of the deals that went down, who got paid and how each layer of new debt was piled on.
The question seemed more rhetorical, in the incredulous sense of–how in the world could this ever have happened?
Here’s how: ambition, hubris, over-reach–and it’s been a part of Harrisburg since its beginning.
The city’s founder, John Harris Jr., himself practiced the art, brazenly suggesting, in the late 1700s, that his speck of a settlement should become capital of the second most populous state in the new nation.
By 1810, Harris’ offer of free land actually succeeded in luring lawmakers from far more populous Lancaster, even though muddy, ramshackle Harrisburg lacked nearly every amenity needed to serve as a seat of government.
Other ambitious plans followed. In the early 19th century, Harrisburg’s reformers decided they no longer could tolerate sewage flowing in open gutters, garbage chucked into the streets, roads still made of dirt and shacks teetering on the riverbank. So, they initiated an enormous civic improvement program that gave us many of the amenities we still enjoy today: sewers, parks, paving and the beautiful river walk and steps.
Unfortunately, that was the last time Harrisburg could afford its lofty dreams, its grand ambitions.
As former Patriot-News columnist Paul Beers describes in his book, “City Contended, City Discounted,” Harrisburg never really recovered from the Depression, and, afterwards, suffered one misbegotten grand plan at revival after another.
In the post-war period, it endorsed a Paris-like scheme to level an old, dense neighborhood near the Capitol and build marble edifices, wide boulevards, a manicured park and a new bridge as tribute to political boss Harvey Taylor. That was actually the second time the city had enthusiastically razed an entire neighborhood and evicted its own residents en masse to accommodate the voracious land appetite of the state government.
Downtown suffered a similar fate, as swaths of gorgeous 19th century buildings were destroyed in support of sprawling, suburban-style structures, soulless malls and ugly high-rise apartments. In so doing, Harrisburg destroyed its historic patronage, which can never be replaced, as well as the urban charm that now attracts people to cities.
And, when Harrisburg needed a new way to get rid of its trash, what did it do? It went big.
Foregoing a simple, inexpensive facility, the city built what then-Mayor Al Straub called “the Rolls-Royce of incinerators,” with wide-eyed plans to attract trash throughout central Pennsylvania and turn it into electricity, spinning garbage into gold.
Unfortunately, the opposite happened. From its first firing, the incinerator was a leaden weight dragging the city down. Four decades of breakdowns, malfunctions, controversies, bad decisions, short-term thinking and dubious financings led to a city bankruptcy filing, a state takeover and $317 million up in smoke.
When your lofty visions flounder, you don’t admit your mistakes, cut your losses and move on; you throw good money after bad.
And then you find new ways to over-reach, each one increasingly ridiculous.
You give millions of dollars in loans to private businesses, which often never pay them back.
You buy a baseball team and build a stadium.
You envision grand city gateways, a series of oddly misplaced museums, a hydroelectric dam, a wind farm.
You stuff the government with patronage jobs and dole out gold-plated benefits packages, good for a lifetime, to ensure loyalty.
You take over the school system, burying it in debt.
Wherever was tiny, poor Harrisburg supposed to get the money to fulfill these grand ambitions, this reckless over-reach?
And, as officials dreamed of going into the garbage business or the electricity business or the baseball business or the museum business or the parking business, the basic, boring duties of local government often fell away.
Today, a walk through Harrisburg is an exercise in navigating an obstacle course of broken sidewalks, crumbling curbs and incipient sinkholes. And, oh, the deplorable state of the once-stately river walk.
Ambition and over-reach, fueled by greed and borrowed money and enabled by yes men, exact a crippling cost. That’s the answer of how a city of of this size ended up with so much debt.
*Incinerator debt: $317 million; general obligation debt: $30 million; guaranteed stadium debt: $8 million; guaranteed Parking Authority debt: $112 million; guaranteed Redevelopment Authority debt: $83 million; water and sewer upgrades: $72.3 million. Source: Act 47 Plan.
Other Post-Employment Benefits: $184 million. Source: City Controller Dan Miller.
School system debt: More than $500 million by 2020. Source: Rep. Ron Buxton.
