Ellen Crist first noticed the pile last year—a mound of foam bedding, blankets and mattresses stripped of their springs, rising out of an Allison Hill backyard. You could see it from the street. You could also see it from a nearby community garden, which Crist, a respiratory therapist, had been hired to manage for the 2014 growing season. With a little sleuthing, you could determine it had been there at least a year. The previous spring, police had dug under a nearby tree for a body supposedly buried there some two decades before. In news photos, you could make out a few out-of-focus mattresses in the background, flipped on their sides.
Some gadflies agitate over public spending or political corruption. Crist goes after blight and trash. A self-described community volunteer, she posts photos on social media of derelict buildings and mounds of unattended garbage. She routinely visits the codes enforcement office at city hall, often baking cookies to accompany the filing of her complaints, as a kind of apology for their frequency. Often, she highlights disparities between what’s tolerated in her Uptown neighborhood and what’s acceptable in other parts of town. Last December, she nipped the city for using an empty lot along N. 6th Street as indefinite storage for an untidy pile of rocks and soil. “I don’t think they would put this pile in Shipoke or Midtown and get away with it,” she told me. The city removed the material within a few days.
The Allison Hill pile sat in the rear of an abandoned house on Zarker Street. Over the years, the house had become a dumping ground, too. The roof had caved in—looking at it from the street, you could see through a second-story window to the sky. At some point, someone had tried to secure it with sheets of fiberboard, but others had since removed the front door to shove mattresses and other waste inside. Crist filed an initial complaint last summer, and followed up periodically with phone calls over the next year. “How many others have made a stink of this property? Am I the only one?” she wrote to me in January. “Harrisburg residents have become so numb to this type of scene.”
Around the time Crist first noticed the dump site on Zarker, the city hired Barton & Loguidice, a Camp Hill-based consulting firm, to investigate its sanitation system. This past May, the firm presented the city with its report, in which it concluded the system was “broken and unsustainable.” It described outmoded and damaged equipment, poor recordkeeping, inadequate regulation of private waste haulers and unsuccessful enforcement against illegal dumping. The authors didn’t blame anyone in particular. In fact, they said, they were “repeatedly amazed” at how city staff coped with daily challenges. Instead, they viewed the system as “a condition that has accrued over many years and has become in a word, ‘stale.’”
The Barton & Loguidice report wasn’t the first to detail such failings. When the city was in receivership, the state recommended outsourcing waste collection to a private company, a move City Council twice rejected. According to this latest report, the city has now embarked on an adapted form of “managed competition”—the public works department must demonstrate it can provide affordable, reliable service within a couple of years, or the city will turn once again to a private bid.
After reviewing this history, the report went on for another hundred pages, documenting myriad shortcomings. There were photos of dumpsters with broken lids and wheels, photos of recyclable materials stuffed in the trash, photos of dumping grounds—much like the house on Zarker Street—where garbage was piled on porches and in yards. “When one looks back in a couple of years at the city’s progress,” the report concluded, “the result needs to be a demonstration that improvements have occurred.”
Any time a government regulates some facet of life, the people subject to those regulations seem to fall into two camps: the suckers who bear the full cost of complying and those who, through one loophole or another, opt out. For whatever reason, Harrisburg’s sanitation system seems prone to exploitation by people in the second category. Among the persistent problems documented by the consultants is a phenomenon their report terms the “mini-dump”—a pile of garbage discarded on public or private property in the city, and left as somebody else’s problem. The city “has in recent years become a magnet for mini-dumps,” the report said.
Who’s doing the dumping? Sometimes the garbage is left in front of houses, other times on the sides of alleyways. The report described one cul-de-sac, a “convenient, well-known and regular illegal drop-off,” where city employees have gone to pick up mounds of dumped waste every couple of months for years. (The report keeps the cul-de-sac’s location secret, “so as to prevent an increase in its usage.”) It’s hard to fathom why a resident would dump garbage in this way. The city accepts one bulk item set out with the trash each week, and it recently distributed new waste carts, notoriously super-sized, that can hold 95 gallons. Yet in mid-August, Crist took a series of photographs of Uptown’s Orange Alley, which was lined with piles of what looked like residential waste—among their contents were a mattress, box spring, and frame, a couple of upholstered chairs, a dishwasher and a crib. It had become so cluttered it was difficult for cars to pass through. She emailed her photos to the public works department, later posting them to an online neighborhood forum, under the heading “Why are things let to get this bad?”
Recently, I took a ride with two city sanitation workers on their pickup route, early one Wednesday morning. We left the public works building on Paxton Street just after 5 a.m., in a trash truck with several pairs of gloves on the floor of the cab and a fan mounted on the dashboard. The workers were Bill Gingrich, who has been with the city for 20 years, and Terrell Spriggs, who started one month ago. I asked Gingrich about the quality of the city’s fleet. “You hear how much the truck rattles,” he said. He was fairly certain private companies had better equipment, since the city always seemed to buy vehicles from them secondhand. He was also pretty sure they had air-conditioned cabs, since their drivers always closed their windows. I asked whether he’d consider working for a private company. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d be doing as hard of work for less money, so.”
The Wednesday route took them Uptown, between Woodbine and Division. Gingrich drove, while Spriggs walked behind the truck, dragging cans into the street. One benefit of the new carts is that they can latch to a lifting mechanism, so that workers no longer have to tip cans into the back of the truck by hand. The change has made the job much easier on their backs, though it has also made their routes take longer. Gingrich and Spriggs piled up the garbage, periodically activating a giant blade to crush it and scrape it up an angled surface. As the blade drew back, a putrid brown liquid would trickle down behind it. Aside from the typical bags of household waste, I saw various kinds of shelving, electric fans, clumps of weeds, a vacuum cleaner, a cage for a small pet and dozens of pizza boxes.
As the route progressed, I began to get a sense of the ways people can make life easier or harder for the workers. Loose trash, particularly if it contains any liquids, tends to stick to the sides of bins. In warm weather, food outside of bags begets maggots. “I try not to eat rice in the summertime,” Gingrich said on this subject, and chuckled. “I don’t know if I could keep it down or not.” After an hour or so, Spriggs told me to try dumping out a few bins myself, and I quickly saw what Gingrich was talking about. Any time a bin contained poorly sealed food, hundreds of maggots would be writhing inside. “You could have neat trash, if you followed the proper steps,” Gingrich said.
I asked Gingrich about the privatization effort two years ago. He and fellow sanitation workers, naturally, opposed it—because they expected to earn less with a private company and because Republic Services, whose bid the state receiver and the mayor recommended, would likely require them to commute to York to pick up their vehicles. “We make good money right now,” Gingrich said. To go to $10 to $12 per hour, the wage expected with Republic, was “crazy”—trash collection was “too much of a physical job for that kind of money,” he said. He also felt city crews gave a level of personal service that private corporations couldn’t match. “It’s just the little things we do that they would never do,” he told me. As an example, he mentioned walking up to houses to collect the bins of elderly residents who couldn’t drag them to the curb. “The other companies are never gonna do that,” he said.
At one point in the route, I headed over to pick up some garbage bags stacked along a side wall. Spriggs, noticing me, shook his head. “It’s supposed to be out on the curb,” he said. He told me to leave it, because picking it up would “spoil” the customer, who would then leave the trash in the wrong place again. The same rule applied for excessive bulk items—the city picks up only one per customer per week—and for trash set out in the blue recycling bins.
“People have been spoiled for so long, putting out trash however they want, whenever they want,” Gingrich told me. He thought a similar logic applied to illegal dumps, which the city ultimately sent workers to pick up, using a grapple truck. The people who did the initial dumping were rarely held accountable.
Later, as the truck headed north on Reel Street, we passed two bins that were clearly out of compliance. One was a recycling bin stuffed with trash, and the other an old trash bin filled with metal springs and soil. Spriggs didn’t pick them up, and a woman came out on her porch to ask why. He explained the blue bin was for recycling. Then he grabbed the recycling bin, dumped its contents in the truck, and went back for the trash can. “Do you want to keep this?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
Together, we hoisted the whole thing into the truck. “Only one time,” he told her.
“Have y’alls a nice day,” she said, and went back inside.
In February, the city sent a letter to hundreds of companies whose trash accounts it classifies as commercial: small businesses, restaurants, apartment towers, downtown office buildings. The city has more than 1,700 such accounts on record, but around one-fifth of them are designated “exempt,” meaning they are permitted to hire a private company to pick up and dispose of their trash. By law, businesses without this exemption must contract with the city for removal. Exemptions are supposed to be renewed every three years, but it appears the city has not monitored the program for some time. According to the consulting report, all of the existing exemptions were granted more than 20 years ago, and none have been renewed.
“Dear Harrisburg Businessperson,” the letter began. In late 2013, the city, as part of the court-approved sale of the incinerator, pledged to deliver 35,000 tons of waste there each year, a so-called “put-or-pay” agreement. The letter explained that, as a result of these requirements, the city would be taking over all residential and commercial accounts by the end of the year. It promised the city would “meet or exceed the services provided by private haulers and potentially save your business money.” Towards the end, it placed the move in the context of a citywide sanitation overhaul. “It is time for Harrisburg to clean itself up and stay clean,” it said. It was signed by Mayor Eric Papenfuse and the public works director, Aaron Johnson.
The city didn’t broadcast the letter at the time, but a few months later it was made public by a different route—a lawsuit filed in Dauphin County court, which described the takeover as “usury.” The plaintiff was Harrisburg Park Apartments, a low-income apartment complex near Hall Manor, on the city’s south side. The suit claimed that the city’s rates were more than triple what the owners currently paid their private hauler, Republic Services, to pick up the trash. Switching to city service would increase their sanitation bill from $26,000 to nearly $90,000 per year. The suit floated a warning about possible consequences. If the courts didn’t halt the city takeover, it said, low-income families would either see their rent increase or would lose their housing altogether when the property closed.
The price increase presented in the lawsuit sounded extravagant. But in their arguments, the lawyers for Harrisburg Park Apartments revealed some interesting assumptions. For instance, they reasoned that the drastically lower private-sector cost must mean that the city’s rates were “unrelated to the actual cost of the collection and disposal of trash and garbage.” In some ways, that’s true. The Barton & Loguidice report, sketching a brief history of “legacy costs” associated with sanitation, noted the city has routinely moved money from various utility funds to cover general government expenses. (In 2012, a group of nearby suburbs sued Harrisburg for allegedly overcharging them in this manner for sewer services; under receivership, the city ultimately reached an $11 million settlement.) In the case of sanitation, the city continues to budget for a transfer of around $2 million each year from waste collection fees, though the consultants argued at least some of these expenses were justified. Around a quarter of the money covered public works overhead, they said, while some other portion of it paid for sanitation-related services like leaf collection and street sweeping.
At the same time, the private hauler’s rates may not reflect the “actual cost” of waste disposal, either. Since 2009, the city has paid a vastly higher rate to dump trash at the incinerator than other area municipalities—$190 per ton, compared with $80 per ton for everywhere else in Dauphin County. City trucks are emblazoned with the city seal, but private haulers declare the point of origin on arrival and are bound only by an honor code. A single truck may make stops both inside and outside the city and wind up dividing it by origin based on ballpark percentages. As a result, city officials suspect that some private haulers haven’t been honest about where their waste comes from. The Barton & Loguidice report estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 tons per year, and possibly more, are being picked up within the city and declared as originating elsewhere.
The Harrisburg Park lawsuit included an invoice from Republic Services, which showed the company was charging the complex $2,200 a month to pick up waste from its dumpsters. In the city’s view, the price is suspiciously low. Even assuming the dumpsters are never more than half full, and using one industry estimate that the waste weighs 200 pounds per cubic yard, the cost of dumping alone for the apartments’ trash would top $2,300 each month. But Tim O’Donnell, the general manager of Republic Services’ York division, disputes these figures. The city’s beliefs about “diverted” waste rely on incorrect weight estimates, he said; according to his company’s data, the waste in question ranges in weight from 60 to 150 pounds per cubic yard. “We are 100-percent confident that we are accurately reporting the waste we are delivering to the incinerator,” he said.
If private haulers are misattributing the origin of their waste, it would have a number of important consequences for the city. For one, as suggested by the Harrisburg Park suit, the city can’t compete with companies whose prices are based on lower disposal fees. The city also can’t rely on its data to set fair prices. Savings for exempt businesses means higher costs for the others, whose bills must support the entire city operation—including the put-or-pay requirement, workers’ wages and the “legacy” costs.
The report, siding with the Papenfuse administration, endorses bringing commercial accounts back to the city. But if that isn’t feasible, it suggests much stricter monitoring of exempt accounts, including requiring an annual certification from each business about its service provider and trash volume, accompanied by weigh slips from the incinerator showing the declared origin and amount of delivered waste. In the meantime, according to Kathryn Sandoe, a spokeswoman for the incinerator’s new owner, the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority, the system depends on good faith. “We rely upon the haulers to be honest and forthright,” she said.
Last month, I accompanied Crist one evening on a visit to the Zarker Street property. The backyard abuts a vacant lot on Market Street, overgrown with grass and weeds. The waste pile had continued growing, a discarded television among the recent additions. Some children were playing behind a wooden fence in an adjacent yard. The community garden is still there, and well-kept, and there’s a Unitarian church across the street. It was strange, in the midst of a bustling city street, to think of the huge pile of garbage sitting in plain sight, unaddressed for years.
We walked around the corner and up Zarker, getting a view from the front of the property. Across the street, a young man introducing himself as Mike came out on the porch and said hello. We asked about the house, where a mattress was spilling through the empty front door frame. Mike, who has lived on the block his whole life, said it had been a mess for at least a decade. “It just got worse and worse every year,” he said. He told us it used to be a nice house, and that he could remember when the roof gave out—he was sitting on the porch during a thunderstorm, “just hearing it, and watching it cave in.”
Walking over, we’d passed another community garden, recently built near the corner of Market and 17th streets. I asked Mike about it. “People are starting to fix, like, the neighborhood and stuff like that,” he said. “So it’ll make it better for people that do want to move here.” He said he, his mother and some neighbors get together periodically to pick up litter and pull weeds. “That house is like the only thing that’s messing us up,” he added.
In December, the city filed a codes complaint against the owner, a Mechanicsburg man named James Wright, who had bought the building in the 1980s. (Wright could not be reached for this article.) In years past, property violations tended to move slowly through the courts, but last year Papenfuse asked the county to start assigning them to a “housing court”—a pair of municipal judges outside the city, where they could be consolidated and expedited. According to the district court overseeing the citations, Wright was charged again in May, pled guilty in both cases, and has been placed on a payment plan for two $1,000 fines.
The pile, however, remained unaddressed. In August, he was cited again, and this time he entered a plea of not guilty. A hearing has been scheduled for early October. Crist has been asked to testify.
