Harrisburg is back in the national news again.
The 499 criminal counts against former Mayor Stephen Reed earned mention on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and even national TV. This is just a short while after our city’s brush with bankruptcy from the incinerator debacle that brought infamy and ridicule. Depending on your perspective, the criminal charges against Reed are unnecessary grave-digging into a sordid political past or (for a seemingly growing number of people) a sense of justice finally delivered. Nearly all agree that the news represents something less than our community’s finest hour.
Similar news will likely continue for quite some time. The attorney general promised additional indictments stemming from a Reed-led “criminal enterprise” that spent millions of dollars of fees derived from municipal bond financings to purchase artifacts for museums. While some of those city-owned artifacts have already been sold off at steep losses, many more are either on public display (in the National Civil War Museum, for one) or in various storage spots around the city, including, allegedly and until recently, Reed’s personal home. Regardless of the ultimate resolution and disposition of these artifacts and the wisdom or utility of a Civil War museum, it is quite clear that city residents remain responsible for paying back the bonds that made their purchase possible.
The former “mayor for life,” who served from January 1982 until January 2010, maintains his innocence and vows to fight to clear his name. The eventual trial, perhaps together with a number of others involving those who helped to facilitate the bond fee boondoggle, promises to divert our attention from things that need to be done today to things that were done years in the past. Questions about who received what money for what work on what financings will no doubt be asked and (hopefully) answered. But the questions about what needs to be done to move our city forward unfortunately will not.
Current Mayor Eric Papenfuse rightly points out that many of the things some complain about today, including high parking and trash collection rates, as well as neglected infrastructure, are due in part to the millions in bond fees that went to build museums and buy artifacts rather than to the basic building blocks for our city. Papenfuse, in turn, deserves credit for his focus on the decidedly non-sexy items of potholes, vacant buildings, trash pick-up and safe streets, all the while under-spending on shrunken city budgets. His “more with less” approach is certainly a welcome contrast to actions detailed in the attorney general’s criminal presentment.
Papenfuse also called upon the board of the Civil War Museum to close and return the artifacts on display, saying the museum serves as a “monument to corruption.” All indications are that the board has no such intention, setting up additional acrimony and potential litigation from both sides. Regardless of your view on the merits of a Civil War museum, everyone should encourage the mayor and board to not waste yet more civic energy and resources. There should be a realization that, while none of the current parties created the situation, it is their responsibility to try to resolve it, amicably, for the benefit of the city residents who made the museum possible. The mayor and board, at minimum, should pledge to resolve the issue via negotiation and cooperation, not the court system.
For his part, Reed continues to deny any ownership of the city financial problems, claiming that a contractor’s failure to perform needed upgrades to the city-owned incinerator is to blame. The heart of the legal presentment against him, however, is whether or not Reed had the right to use fees from those financings for purposes other than those stated in the bonds. Vampire-hunting kits and buffalo heads make for easy ridicule. However, the real question is, would it make any difference if the mayor had used the funds to purchase items of a less ridiculous nature?
No doubt, the law needs to answer how it is that municipal bonds are allowed to include fees that can be used for such things. Presumably, bond buyers would be less interested in buying municipal bonds if they knew that part of the proceeds would help to build a Civil War or a Wild West museum in a small Pennsylvania city that had relatively little to do with either.
But, even if that’s true, I would caution the wider community to not use this as an opportunity for easy finger pointing, since collectively we do not escape the blame unscathed. All of us need to face difficult questions of exactly how this happened on our watch and, in some sense, take ownership, even if the main protagonists will not.
What responsibility do we all bear for this civic debacle? We, the citizens of Harrisburg, with tacit endorsement from the media and the communities around us, elected Mayor Reed a remarkable seven times over 24 years. To say that he did nothing right and that we are all merely innocent bystanders is to hide from the truth. We liked him for the good feelings he gave us and the seemingly good deeds he did.
At his best, Reed gave us a collective belief and confidence, however chimerical in retrospect it may have been, that the city was heading in the right direction. Somewhere along the line, though, things began to turn, and that collective belief and confidence began to erode. Whether it was due to his overconfidence from past successes or something more pathological in nature, Reed increasingly focused on amassing artifacts for ill-conceived museum projects that would ultimately overshadow the positives. As his longtime advisor Randy King told him, according to the grand jury report, “You’ve got to stop this, you’ve got to cut it out, it’s just going to kill your career.” Indeed it did—and nearly the city, too. But few of us noticed at the time, let alone helped King make his point.
The truth is, there was no one around to make him stop. Those close to him enabled him or benefited financially from him or both. To a person, this inner circle still doesn’t own the problem. Not their fault, they say. They were just doing what they were told.
For the most part, most of us, like them, were content to see the mayor take care of Harrisburg, so that we could go on with our lives, devoid of the responsibilities of ownership of our capital city. While in office, Reed may have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so to speak, but that easy vacuum allowed many of us to avoid the hard work of real civic engagement and sustainable growth and development.
More than the artifacts, the misguided museums or the alleged criminal misconduct, that might be the saddest legacy of the Reed era—that many in the region weren’t left with any real connection or feelings of responsibility toward Harrisburg. While things were going well, he was the hero; when they went wrong, the pariah. “Let the city fail,” they say. “They elected him, and we are safe out here in the suburbs.” “The city is someone else’s problem, not ours.” If this ordeal accomplishes anything, it’s hopefully showing how wrong that kind of thinking is and that it must begin to change.
For the city to truly move forward from this, we all have to acknowledge and take responsibility for what happened to make certain that it doesn’t happen again. And by that, I don’t simply mean the alleged criminal misconduct, as important as that is. More broadly, I mean we can never allow a single person or organization or entity to hold the reins of the city while ignoring our civic duties to question, engage and, most importantly, do the hard work it takes for a community to be strong—whether that means picking up trash or fixing up a building or getting involved in city life and doing more than the bare minimum that is required. Maybe it just means acknowledging that the health of Harrisburg matters to the health of our region. Maybe it just means giving a damn.
The first step is admitting. The next step is doing. This is our collective penance, and, despite whatever Reed did, it’s the legacy that we can still leave behind.
J. Alex Hartzler is publisher of TheBurg.
