Former Harrisburg Mayor Steve Reed, left, and former Harrisburg Authority board member Fred Clark at a Senate hearing on the incinerator financings in 2012.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane briefly addressed the progress of the probe into Harrisburg’s incinerator financings Tuesday morning, saying her office hoped to bring the case to a conclusion “in the very near future.”
The remarks came at a budget hearing before the Senate appropriations committee in response to a question by Sen. Rob Teplitz, D-Dauphin, whose district includes Harrisburg.
Teplitz brought up the investigation as a prelude to a question about funding for a military and veterans affairs division in Kane’s office.
It was critical to his constituents, Teplitz said, to find out “whether that debacle was the result of criminal activity on the one hand or just bad government or bad lawyering on the other hand.”
In response, Kane said she understood the importance of coming to a conclusion, adding that “dedicated agents” had been working on the investigation “since its inception.”
“All people want is the truth,” she said. “We’re hoping to draw to a conclusion in the very near future. And we understand that no stone will be left unturned.”
Teplitz is also the Democratic chair of the Senate local government committee, which held hearings on the incinerator financings in the fall of 2012.
Those hearings sought to shed light on how a series of borrowings in the mid-2000s related to a retrofit of the city’s trash-burning facility had ballooned to a more than $350 million debt that pushed the capital nearly to bankruptcy.
A host of witnesses testified, including Harrisburg’s first receiver David Unkovic, former Mayor Stephen Reed, future Mayor Eric Papenfuse and a number of past board members from the municipal authority that approved the borrowings.
