Harrisburg’s Environmental Advisory Council is calling for applications for up to $100,000 in grant funds for environmental projects across the city. The EAC will use the applications as the basis for recommendations to City Council and the mayor, who will ultimately decide how to appropriate the funds. Bill Cluck, the EAC’s chairman, said that applications will be evaluated on the criteria of environmental benefit, community benefit and sustainability.
Applications are due May 31, and can be picked up in the city clerk’s office, at 2 N. Second Street, or can be downloaded here.
The funding for these projects comes with a bit of history. The grant money will be provided out of so-called host fees the city receives as the site of the Susquehanna Resource Management Complex, also known as the Harrisburg incinerator. In the 1980s, as part of a comprehensive bill to improve waste management and recycling in Pennsylvania, the state legislature created the “host municipalities benefit fee,” a form of recompense for local governments with a landfill or trash-burning plant within their borders. But the fee—$1 for every ton of solid waste received—didn’t apply if the host municipality owned or operated the facility.
Harrisburg operated its incinerator until December 2006, when the Harrisburg Authority appointed a new private operator. The city would have started receiving its host fee the following year, but then-Mayor Stephen Reed engineered a different form of compensation, as permitted by the law. Under the agreement, instead of passing along a cash fee, the Authority would make certain facilities on the incinerator grounds available to the city rent-free, along with providing these facilities with free heat. Among the facilities were the city’s vehicle maintenance center and storage for certain city possessions, including artifacts Reed collected for his hoped-for Wild West museum.
In 2012, David Unkovic, the city’s first state-appointed receiver, updated the city’s recovery plan to include the restoration of cash host fee payments from the incinerator. The plan called for the money to be used for environmental projects in the city, and it encouraged the formation of an advisory group to help guide the use of the funds, which led to the reestablishment of the EAC.
The total in host fees to the city should now be between $290,000 and $300,000 per year, according to Jack Lausch, director of administration at Capital Region Water, which was formerly the Harrisburg Authority. Before April 2009, Lausch said, any fees would have been significantly less, because the plant was not fully operational. Lausch estimated the value of the heat provided by the Authority to city facilities in lieu of host fees at between $90,000 and $100,000 per year.
Bruce Weber, the city’s budget and finance director, said the city has so far received $355,000 in host fees—about a year’s worth of back payments by the Harrisburg Authority, plus just over $125,000 from the incinerator’s new owner, the Lancaster Solid Waste Management Authority. The fees are held in a separate deposit fund, established last October and advised, Weber said, by the controller and finance department of the previous administration, who thought that would be the “most transparent and accountable way to do it.”
This story has been updated to include figures provided by Capital Region Water about the value of the host fee and in-kind payments in prior years.
