Last night, in a four-hour session, City Council voted to approve 11 pieces of legislation connected to the Harrisburg Strong Plan.
The voting itself was anticlimactic, since council members had largely broadcast their intentions in statements earlier in the meeting. But that’s not to say the evening didn’t have its drama.
It started with a press release, around 2 p.m., from the office of the city controller, Dan Miller, the erstwhile Democrat turned Republican nominee for mayor. Miller, who last week sent a cautionary letter to council, had concluded his review of the plan’s finer details and would be presenting his findings that night in City Hall.
Shortly after 6 p.m., Miller took the microphone and narrated as a slideshow played on one of the walls. “The Poor Pay More,” his first slide read. “No Shared Pain in the Receiver’s Plan.” Miller had organized his critiques into three main points: that the city’s poor will disproportionately bear the plan’s burdens; that the plan results in a “significant lack of self-governance” for Harrisburg; and that it calls for insufficient concessions from creditors.
So much for the merits of the plan itself. But Miller also had critiques on the process. He observed that, although the receiver’s team had spent two years crafting the plan, council—actually, his word was “we”—had “less than 30 days” to review it.
“I hope council will move slowly,” he advised. “We are trading democratic rights for a few pieces of silver.”
In the public comment that followed, several Harrisburg residents echoed Miller’s concerns. One, Brooks Mountcastle, taped a sign to the microphone stand comparing the incinerator’s tipping fees for city residents ($190 per ton) to suburban ones ($80). (“Really???????” the sign said at the bottom.) Bishop A. E. Sullivan, Jr., president of the Interdenominational Ministers Conference of Greater Harrisburg, objected that the plan had received no “independent cost-benefit analysis.”
“Please slow down until there’s a chance to go through the plan with a fine-toothed comb,” Sullivan said.
And Alan Kennedy-Shaffer, the founder of the community group Harrisburg Hope, worried that the plan was “moving forward without community input.”
To the receiver’s team, and to members of City Council, this must all have seemed a bit baffling. The past two weeks have been filled with hearings on every piece of the plan. Each hearing included a portion devoted to public comment, where residents were invited to voice their concerns. City Council did not have “less than 30 days” to review Harrisburg Strong; as members pointed out last night, the receiver’s team presented them with an outline in February, which was itself a development upon the already-public proposal wrought by the previous receiver.
On top of all this, and despite having a go-ahead from their attorney Neil Grover, whose credentials as an advocate for the city are nonpareil, council voted to retain independent financial advisors to review the receiver’s plan. The advisors, Alvarez and Marsal, reported back that “the receiver and his team are giving it their best to help the people of this city,” according to Council President Wanda Williams.
What, then, could possibly be fueling the perception that the democratic process is being subverted, and that citizens are getting a raw deal?
I suspect, in part, it’s a misunderstanding of council’s legislative procedure. Bills, once proposed, are pushed into committee, where they are discussed in public hearings. By the time they reach the floor for a vote, their fate has mostly been decided. Several members of the public, and some members of council, lambasted residents for “not being there” over the long course of recovery. But I wonder if, for many who showed up last night, it might simply have been a matter of not knowing when to get involved.
It’s also a result of a long-standing sensitivity to unfair treatment in the city-county divide. City residents see a disparity in fees, and automatically suspect foul play. In the case of the incinerator, though, this reflex is unwarranted. In 2003, when Dauphin County guaranteed the borrowings for the incinerator retrofit, one of the trades was a long-term contract for the county with a locked-in low rate. The county also delivers a much higher volume of trash—some 130,000 tons annually to the city’s 38,000—which contributes to the lower fee.
In addition, the city’s rate is actually being negotiated down, from $200 to $190, as part of the recovery plan. It had to stay high, according to the office of the receiver’s Steven Goldfield, in order to secure the best price possible for the incinerator sale. But by helping to eliminate the incinerator debt, he said, the sale will release “$13 million per year in general fund revenues” that would otherwise need to go to debt service.
On top of all this, it bears mentioning that, unlike a tax, the tipping fee distributes over a much wider base than just city residents. Anyone who disposes of trash in the city—including non-profits, corporations, and the oft-maligned tax-exempt state buildings—pay fees into the city’s sanitation fund. Contra Miller’s broad claim that the “poor pay more,” the actual amount paid for trash by city residents is positively impacted under the recovery plan.
“Trash fees for residents absolutely should go down next year, and these tipping fees are locked in until 2018 with no right to increase them,” Goldfield said.
One of the most frequent observations last night, on behalf of the recovery plan, is that it’s not perfect, but that it may be the best offer Harrisburg will get. It should be added that, in a modern democracy, policy is not only apt to be imperfect, but also to be imperfectly understood. (How many of us, either for or against the Affordable Care Act, can actually explain what’s in it?)
The claim that the plan has somehow proceeded “without public input” founders on the fact that its provisions, in the form of term sheets, executive summaries, proposed budgets, and council legislation, have been publicly available in far greater detail than the average citizen could possibly want or have time to review. We have placed our fate in the hands of others, directly, by way of elections, and indirectly, by way of the professionals they’ve retained to assist them.
Last night, after two years of rejecting inadequate plans, and consulting with the best experts available on how to solve a historically wicked problem, City Council offered its informed assessment that the Strong Plan might just succeed. It strains good judgment to conclude that, through all this, democracy has somehow been subverted. For the residents of Harrisburg, long in the dark about what would become of their city, might it be that democracy has started to work?
