These receipts, with Mayor Stephen Reed’s handwritten notes in the margins, are among the decade’s worth of purchase records for which Reed sought a $33,000 reimbursement.
The receipts were from antique malls, book stores and outfits with names out of a Zane Grey novel—Bischoff’s Shades of the West in Scottsdale, Ariz., Arrowsmith’s in Santa Fe, N.M., and Garden of the Gods Trading Post in Manitou Springs, Colo.
They tracked purchases from the summer of 1991 through mid-2001, for items as varied as an 1896 Swedish bayonet, a Jesse James “fake rifle,” a Southwestern medicine pot and a Civil War daguerreotype.
And in 2003, more than a decade after the earliest purchases, they were collected to justify a $32,928 reimbursement to the man whose name is on virtually all of them: former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed.
The receipts, along with other records of the reimbursement, are a token of city government under Reed, a mayor who has been both hailed for his work ethic and vision and criticized for reckless spending and an autocratic governing style.
They may also feature in an ongoing probe into the city’s recent debt fiasco. A witness who testified before a state grand jury, and who asked not to be named, said they were among the files presented during testimony.
The probe is reportedly looking into risky borrowings related to a retrofit of the city incinerator in the mid-2000s. The reimbursement records, though apparently not related to those borrowings, give a brief glimpse into Reed’s spending habits and his control of theoretically independent city entities.
If they are indeed among the documents being aired before the grand jury, they suggest the probe has expanded into other areas of city government during his tenure.
Reed asked for the reimbursement in a memo dated May 20, 2003, explaining he’d bought the items for the city and its museum projects using his own money.
He addressed the memo to the Harrisburg Authority, the former all-purpose municipal authority that served as a financing vehicle throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
The memo, receipts and other reimbursement records were provided to TheBurg by Capital Region Water, the successor agency to the Harrisburg Authority, in response to a right-to-know request.
Reed had come across the receipts, he wrote, while “pulling files that have been set aside in storage, for the purpose of making room for future files.”
Though he was aware of “past personal expenditures” he’d made on behalf of the city, he said, he “was astounded to find the extent” of the purchases recorded.
Former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed, left, and former Harrisburg Authority board member Fred Clark at a Senate hearing on the incinerator financings in 2012.
The items, bought from collectors across the country, were all part of the city archives, he said. They were distributed across sites including city hall, the National Civil War Museum and “the suite of the Office of the Mayor.”
In the memo, Reed noted that federal tax rules precluded him from claiming a deduction on the items, but that it was “fiscally unfeasible to simply donate them absent deductibility,” which is why he was seeking reimbursement.
Nearly all of the purchases were physical artifacts, though the reimbursement also covered $350 in expenses from a trip to Gettysburg in the summer of 2001, including $283 for three rooms at a Holiday Inn Express and a $66 tab for a five-person dinner at General Pickett’s Buffet.
The receipts also reflect a certain degree of meticulousness, as Reed’s handwriting appears on many of them, identifying which items are to be reimbursed and which are to be excluded.
On one 1991 receipt, from a vendor called Covered Wagon in Albuquerque, N.M., Reed circled $2,180 worth of items for reimbursement, but left out an item identified only as “2 Snake Dancers,” listed at $995.
On another, he calculated the exchange rate from peso to U.S. dollar, noting the receipt was from a “trade mission to sister city, Pachuca, Mexico” in 1996.
It’s not clear whether the reimbursement would constitute an ethics violation under state law. Rob Caruso, executive director of the State Ethics Commission, said that his agency’s policies precluded him from commenting on specific cases.
But he said that, in general, the ethics act covers cases involving a conflict of interest, which he defined as a public official using his or her office for personal enrichment.
Reimbursement of goods bought on a municipality’s behalf, Caruso said, would seem not to be a case of enrichment, though there are also considerations about whether those expenses were approved in advance by the municipality.
“If the public official bought those goods on his own, without the authorization of the municipality, that puts it in a different category,” he said.
In Reed’s case, reimbursement was to be paid out of a special Harrisburg Authority fund filled with fee proceeds from various bond financings throughout the 1990s. Reed claimed sole authority to requisition payments for city projects out of the fund, pursuant to a resolution the authority board adopted in 1991.
In his memo, Reed seemed to suggest the special fund was not the typical source for the request he was making, noting that “normally” he would have submitted it for payment from the city’s general fund.
But, he wrote, the “2003 fiscal constraints on the City preclude this now.”
At least two officials signed off on the reimbursement payment, which was made by check dated May 20, 2003. The check, from an account labeled “City Special Projects Reserve Fund” at M&T Bank, bears the signatures of Leonard House, then an authority board member, and Thomas Mealy, then the authority’s executive director.
Mealy, reached by phone, declined to comment, saying he had been advised not to answer questions about his time at the authority.
Though the grand jury proceedings are secret, there have been a few hints about the duration and scope of the probe. Current Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse and Steve Goldfield, a financial expert who worked on a 2012 forensic audit of incinerator financings, previously acknowledged testifying before the grand jury in early 2014.
Last month, Attorney General Kathleen Kane, whose office is overseeing the investigation, said during a Senate hearing that she hoped it would draw to a close “in the very near future.”
More recently, the Patriot-News identified a series of potential witnesses arriving this week in Pittsburgh, where the grand jury is seated, including former Mayor Linda Thompson, Dauphin County Commissioner Jeff Haste and Robert Kroboth, a finance director under Reed. On Wednesday, the paper photographed Reed himself outside the attorney general’s office there, accompanied by midstate lawyer Allen C. Welch, Jr.
Welch, reached Thursday, confirmed he is representing Reed but said neither he nor his client could comment on the reimbursement records. He could not even confirm whether he knew of their existence, he said, citing a judicial gag order.
