Allegory of Good Government
On the second floor of the Old Palace in Florence, Italy, there’s a snug, sumptuous corner room where dazzling crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling and centuries-old tapestries adorn the walls. Tuscan provincial officials hold their meetings there, and even the spectator seats—a long semicircle of mahogany desks, each with its own microphone have an air of elegance.
“Well, it’s not exactly like Harrisburg city hall, is it?” I joked while on a trip to Italy last month. Yes, both venues host the often-dull business of government. But one does so, after 700 years, in profound dignity and beauty. The other goes about its business in a leaky boat of a building that’s barely 30 years old.
And so (egads, I’m about to quote Britney Spears), I did it again.
I went somewhere, saw some stuff and compared it to Harrisburg.
In Florence, my wife and I visited the Central Market and thought about the Broad Street Market. We compared the gelato at Vivoli to that of Alvaro. We saw that Florentines keep their streets fixed and clean and lamented that Harrisburg couldn’t do the same (yes, I know, money).
The sight that had the greatest impact on me, however, came not in Florence, but during a day trip we took to Siena, a lovely walled city about 30 miles south of the Tuscan capital.
Like Florence, Siena long ago toggled between despotism and a type of nascent democracy. Today, the city is most proud of its centuries as a republic, and the grand, brown-brick city hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, built when most of Europe was mired in medieval gloom, is rightly its centerpiece.
After seven centuries, Siena still uses the palace as its municipal building, though half the enormous structure is now a museum, which is what the tourists get to see. This collection of rooms includes reception areas, a gorgeous chapel and a series of meeting rooms. For me, the highlight of the visit was a huge fresco entitled “An Allegory of Good and Bad Government” painted on opposing walls of the great Council Room.
One half of the fresco was designed as a symbolic story of good government. So, it shows a lively scene of happy people dancing and singing amidst a prosperous, peaceful city. The other half represents bad government—people impoverished, suffering, forced to pay tribute to a demonic tyrant.
These paintings were supposed to inspire the city’s nine council members as they made decisions in the room. It instructed them to be wise, to exercise power responsibly and to work for the common good. If they didn’t, all would suffer, the frescoes warn. And that’s, again, when I thought of Harrisburg.
Time Bombs
Harrisburg, of course, is no stranger to bad government. The city’s first receiver, David Unkovic, bluntly stated that the city had been misruled for 30 years, which, in my estimation, is no exaggeration.
However, looking up at the “Allegory of Bad Government,” I thought of two recent events, both of which happened as I was about to leave for my trip in late September. The first had its origins (as so many things in Harrisburg still do) in the Reed years. Former Mayor Steve Reed was a master of planting time bombs into the municipal budget, engineering noxious financial deals that coughed up some quick cash but committed the city to obligations it couldn’t afford over the long run. Recently, that unwelcome future arrived for one especially awful deal.
In 1998, Reed, as per usual, needed money. He opted for one of his classic tricks: “selling” a city asset to another city body, one that he controlled. So, the Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority “bought” the Verizon Tower (and the land underneath it) in Strawberry Square for $23.6 million. To make the matter worse, the city guaranteed $6.9 million of the bonds used to make the purchase, meaning it would be on the hook if rents did not cover the bond payments.
Reed then arranged the deal so that no payments on the bonds would be made until 2016, by which time the $6.9 million sum would have ballooned to a massive debt bomb of $41.6 million.
He did so despite the fact that Verizon’s lease on the tower ended in 2016, the very year the first bond payments would be made (how crazy is that?). And, as Harrisburg’s usual bad luck would have it, Verizon did not renew its lease, placing the city, once more, in financial peril. So, a month ago, the state again swooped in to save the desperate city from itself, scoring some cheap, much-needed office space in the process.
The state now will relocate 900 workers from the State Hospital grounds, which it’s putting on the market. The 17-year lease won’t even cover all of the building’s debt payments. After expenses, Harrisburg will still be on the hook for about $750,000 a year. In addition, after the lease’s expiration, the state will have the option to buy the entire building for a mere $4 million, which, if exercised, would make the deal less a lease than a rent-to-own.
Financial recklessness. Wishful thinking. Disregard for the future. This is bad government defined. And this was just one of Reed’s many financial schemes.
Versus Midtown
As I stared up at “Bad Government,” a second recent issue came to mind, one less financially consequential, but pernicious in its own ugly way.
Just as I left for vacation, two council members decided to use a hearing on the future of the Broad Street Market to give into rumors and spread untruths that can do nothing but further divide the people of this still-fragile city.
Among the assertions: The Broad Street Market Task Force planned to change the name of the market to include the word “Midtown”; there is no historic neighborhood called Midtown; there are no families in Midtown; there are no “generational kids” in Midtown.
All are false. I live on the fringe of historic Midtown and, just on my block, there are numerous families—black, white, straight, gay—tons of kids and several families that span generations. Not that these distinctions should matter to at-large council members who are legally and morally bound to represent all Harrisburg citizens, of every race and class, whether their roots go back a year or 100.
The Midtown pile-on also revealed an unsettling bias among some elected officials against their own constituents. They took an initial falsehood (that the market name would change) then used that to string together more untruths, all directed against the people of the sprawling, still-struggling, neighborhood of Midtown.
Harrisburg has a choice. Largely freed from Reed’s fiscal fun house, the city can come together to rebuild itself into a more welcoming, friendly and desirable place for residents, businesses and visitors. Or, like some medieval Italian city-state, it can sink into infighting,factions, bitterness and provincialism.
Anyone up for frescoing city hall?
Lawrance Binda is editor-in-chief of TheBurg.
