Riverfront cleanup, like last month’s knotweed-whacking in Riverfront Park, is one of several environmental jobs envisioned in the summer program.
City Council voted Tuesday night to approve a $35,000, six- to eight-week summer jobs program for Harrisburg teenagers, to be paid from “host fee” funds the city receives as the host of a privately operated trash incinerator.
The program, which was proposed by the Harrisburg Housing Authority in late May, will aim to recruit 25 teenagers, ages 13 to 16, to work on environmental projects across the city.
Under the proposal, each teen will be paid a $1,000 stipend for his or her work, which could include things like litter collection, riverfront cleanup, garden competitions and healthy eating initiatives.
The remaining $10,000 of requested funding will go towards administrative costs like marketing, insurance and transportation, the application says.
On Tuesday night, council members voiced some concerns about the program’s execution before finally voting 6-1 to approve it. Among their concerns was the projected $10,000 in administrative costs, which Councilwoman Shamaine Daniels suggested should have been covered already in the authority’s mission and budget.
Daniels wound up casting the sole vote against the project’s approval.
Council members also worried that the program would be starting too late in the summer to be successful. Bill Cluck, the chairman of the Environmental Advisory Council, which makes recommendations to council for use of host fee funds, said the EAC voted to recommend the program on June 5, in the hopes the administration would place it before council at the June 10 legislative session.
Cluck added that the proposal represented a “pilot program” that could be improved and expanded next summer, depending on how it goes this year.
Councilman Jeffrey Baltimore, who was appointed earlier this year to complete the term of the late Eugenia Smith, said Tuesday that he wanted to ensure the program would target teenagers in public housing.
Cluck said this was a priority shared by the housing authority. According to its application, the authority will “heavily promote participation in the program within its public housing communities,” but “would not limit participation to teens living in public housing.”
At its June 5 meeting, the EAC also recommended 10 other environmental projects to be paid for with close to $100,000 of host fee funds. The administration and council, however, have not yet taken action on those recommendations.
The host fee, a $1-per-ton payment to the city that is meant to offset the environmental cost of having an incinerator within city borders, first became available to Harrisburg in 2006, when a private company, Covanta Energy, took over operations at the Resource Recovery Facility on S. 19th St.
For several years, however, the city received the payment in-kind, in the form of rent-free facilities with free heating on the incinerator grounds, which housed former Mayor Stephen Reed’s vast collection of museum artifacts, among other things.
In 2012, under the direction of the state-appointed receiver, the facility replaced the in-kind contributions with cash payments of the host fee. The receiver’s final recovery plan, which was approved by a state court last fall, included a directive to use host fee money for environmental projects, to be approved by council and the mayor upon recommendations from the EAC.
Jack Lausch, the director of administration of Capital Region Water, which formerly owned the incinerator as the Harrisburg Authority, estimated that host fee payments from the facility should total around $300,000 per year.
In early May, the budget director, Bruce Weber, reported that the city had received $355,000 in host fees so far. The next quarterly payment is due in mid-July.
