Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse.
The new HBO miniseries “Show Me A Hero,” David Simon’s take on a desegregation battle that roiled the city of Yonkers, N.Y., in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, is full of scenes that squeeze high drama out of the most tedious of municipal exercises. Roll call votes are cast before crowds of screaming protestors. A councilman, running to unseat the incumbent mayor, asks to use a city hall photocopier and is told stonily—faint hearts, plug your ears—it’s “gonna be a while.” In the fourth episode, the city manager hands a brown paper package to the outgoing mayor, Nick Wasicsko. Inside is neither money nor drugs but, rather, a framed copy of a recent amendment to the Yonkers charter. “You really fucking shouldn’t have,” Wasicsko says, as he tears the package open. The city manager, not to be out-cussed, replies, “Because of you, this place won’t be half as fucked up as it is now.”
Is there anything more boring than a local government charter? The things local governments do are often viscerally affecting—raising taxes, hiring and firing cops, bulldozing churches or, in Yonkers’ case, erecting public housing in middle-class neighborhoods. But charters concern what local governments are—whether they’re run by a manager or mayor, how many councilors oversee them, what day the budget is due. Even profanity can make them only so stimulating. The piece of the Yonkers charter that scored an HBO cameo eliminated the position of city manager and extended the mayor’s term from two to four years. Who fucking cares?
This week, at an annual “State of the City” address, Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse did his best to spice up his own charter initiative. The proposal has to do with home rule, the designation for a local government that opts to replace the state’s cookie-cutter municipal code with a charter of its own crafting. To date, Pennsylvania has 72 such “home rule” municipalities, including large cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Allentown as well as Harrisburg-sized cities like Lancaster, York and Wilkes-Barre. A municipality seeking home rule must first elect a commission to study its form of government. State law is poetic about this commission’s duties; among other things, it is to determine whether the local government can be “made more clearly responsible or accountable to the people.” It should also ensure the “widest possible public information and discussion” about its work, though it has some latitude in deciding how to do that. The commission for Carlisle, whose voters approved a home rule charter just this past May, published a monthly newsletter.
Papenfuse gave his address in a ballroom at the Hilton hotel downtown to an audience largely composed of local business owners. How they reacted to his speech depended, in part, on how accustomed they were to his taste for citing American history. He opened with a story about a James Earl Jones speech on the U.S. Constitution and went on to describe a “prize-winning” essay he wrote in graduate school on the Anti-Federalists and the path to the Bill of Rights. One’s reaction also depended on one’s comfort with Papenfuse’s tendency to lob grenades. At one point, discussing businesses that don’t use the city’s sanitation services, he noted he was “sorry to say” they included the event’s host, the Harrisburg Regional Chamber. (“It’s up to my landlord,” Dave Black, the chamber president, told Papenfuse on the ballroom floor after the speech. “Not really, though,” Papenfuse replied.)
The Constitution reference set Papenfuse up for his speech’s central analogy. Like the country’s founding document, he said, the state’s financial recovery plan for Harrisburg—stay with me—was imperfect as originally passed, and needed to be amended. “I say to you this morning: now is the time for we the people to work in unison to amend the Harrisburg Strong Plan,” the mayor said. Specifically, he called for three adjustments. The first was to raise the so-called local services tax, a flat tax on employees making more than $12,000 per year, from $1 to $3 per week. The second, more vaguely, was to “continue to invest in and improve” sanitation services. The third was to shift the city to home rule.
At base, all three proposals are about money. The so-called Strong Plan contains several hundred pages of initiatives for improving Harrisburg government, yet the mayor’s objections centered on only two problems: income taxes and parking revenues. The original plan’s projections were off, Papenfuse said, and the city now expects to fall $6 million short of the hoped-for revenues in 2016. The local services tax would obviously address this—according to the mayor, the proposed hike would rake in an extra $4 million per year. Less obviously, expanding sanitation is about money, too. City trash bills, Papenfuse said, are the one source of revenues that are “out-performing expectations”; adding accounts will allow the city to hire more workers, who can in turn provide “much-needed neighborhood services” like filling potholes and trimming trees. (He also suggested the sanitation fund could provide low-interest loans to other parts of city government, though here he drifted into dangerous territory. The city is currently facing a lawsuit claiming its trash rates are excessively high, allegedly to help fund unrelated government functions.)
What about home rule? Papenfuse discussed the prospect only briefly in his speech, describing it as “Harrisburg’s only real way out” of the state’s program for financially distressed municipalities. Short of specific proposals, how a new charter might provide that exit is not exactly clear. David Greene, assistant director and legal counsel to the Pennsylvania Local Government Commission, said a home rule charter can provide the “broadest quantum of powers to the municipality” of any form of local government, including greater freedom to define and increase the local tax base. Under the state distress program, Harrisburg was permitted to increase the income tax on residents to 2 percent; a home rule charter could make the authority for that increase permanent, or potentially authorize further increases. There are, however, limits to such home-rule powers, including limits on the taxes imposed on nonresidents, which might pose a problem for the mayor’s proposed tripling of the local services tax once Harrisburg leaves state oversight.
If home rule appeals to Harrisburg, it may be for reasons of principle as much as for reasons of practicality. Papenfuse, introducing the concept in his speech, said it would “transfer basic authority back from the state” to the city. In the wake of financial disaster and aggressive state intervention, there is something romantic in the concept of Harrisburg voters going back to the drawing board to design a government structure that may better suit them. The city of Nanticoke, in Luzerne County, became a home rule city in 2013, and left the state distress program earlier this year. At the top of their new charter is a brief preamble: “The citizens of Nanticoke City,” it begins, “have the privilege, right and responsibility to participate in all aspects of City government and have come together with a desire and willingness to improve their government through the enactment of this charter.” It concludes with a pledge by “We, the people of Nanticoke City” to uphold its laws. Papenfuse is not the first to look at local government and think of the U.S. Constitution. You can see why someone might want a framed copy.
