Every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m., three men who control a $230 million annual budget meet on the fourth floor of a brick building downtown, across Market Street from city hall. Their meeting room is circular, with wood paneling and brown-and-khaki carpet, and a peculiar assembly of light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. The men sit at one end of this room on a dais, in high-backed, maroon leather chairs, and listen as people take turns approaching a table below.

Often, the petitioners are there to massage their relationships with these men, the Dauphin County commissioners—either to thank them for past support or to ask for future money. But, on the morning of July 30, Harrisburg’s new mayor, Eric Papenfuse, attended the commissioner’s meeting with a different sort of request. Six years prior, in 2008, the commissioners had increased a tax on visitors who stay in Dauphin County hotels. Under the ordinance, a portion of the new revenues from the hike was designated for promoting tourism in Harrisburg. But, under a set of separate agreements signed by the city (Papenfuse, speaking to press after the hearing, called them “quiet, secret deals”), most of the money, for years, had been going to one place: the National Civil War Museum.

Opened in 2001, the Civil War Museum is the crown jewel of former Mayor Stephen Reed’s campaign to draw visitors and renown to Harrisburg by way of a network of cultural institutions. Perched atop a hill in Reservoir Park, the museum commands a view of the city and, to the north, the valley cutting through the mountains. It houses a massive collection of period artifacts, most of them city-owned, among them a gauntlet that had been worn by the Confederate General George Pickett and a Bible owned by Robert E. Lee.

Despite the quality of its collection, and despite its relative proximity to Gettysburg, the museum has struggled to grow the visitor base that was envisioned at the time of its creation. According to figures provided by the museum, annual attendance has never surpassed its first-year peak, of more than 96,000. The total fell every year for the next eight years and has hovered between 38,000 and 41,000 for the past five. (Gettysburg, by contrast, draws 3 million people per year.)

Seated at the table in front of the commissioners, Papenfuse, in characteristically breathless fashion, asked them to freeze the museum’s hotel tax funding. The museum, he argued, was absorbing money that was meant for marketing the city as a whole. Furthermore, the museum only paid the city $1 of rent per year, on a property with a fair market rental value of $633,000, to say nothing of the value of the artifacts on loan inside. The agreements that allowed the museum to do these things, Papenfuse said, had been undemocratically extended in the final months of the Reed administration—one of them all the way out to 2039.

“I think it is time that we recognize that we have spent millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize this museum,” he said. “We’re not only talking about the costs of building the museum and, you know, the subsidy here for tourism, but we’re talking about moneys we’ve paid to subsidize the health care of the employees over time, staffing, operational expenses. Every time we put money in a parking meter, the public should understand that we are essentially paying back the debt that was incurred for the creation of that museum.”

Outside the hearing, however, Papenfuse went further. “It’s outrageous,” he told the reporter James Roxbury, who had asked about the long-term agreements. “And I think that it’s time we end what is essentially a failed experiment and begin to move towards a redeployment of those assets. If something else moved into that building and were able to contribute rent to the city of Harrisburg, we could use those funds to fix potholes and do all the things that we’d like to do in the city of Harrisburg. If we sold the artifacts, that would be millions more dollars that the city could have to be able to invest wisely.

“I don’t think the public supports the museum, I don’t think the museum caters to the city,” Papenfuse went on. “I think, from its advertising materials alone, you can see that it could be located anywhere in the country. It doesn’t promote Harrisburg in any way.”

“The idea was to have five nationally scaled museums,” Reed said.

He was speaking to David Morrison of the Historic Harrisburg Association, who was interviewing him as part of an oral history project in 2010. The project, sponsored by Highmark Blue Shield, was created to help celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Harrisburg’s incorporation. But it also happened that the city’s sesquicentennial coincided with Reed’s departure from office, after a reign of 28 years.

In the interview, video of which is still available online, Reed conveys an air of bemused resignation. Only two of his museums ever came to be, and his opportunity to realize the others had passed. Nonetheless, he waves aside critics of, for example, the National Museum of the Old West, “who were empowered by the Internet and constantly blogged and bad-mouthed it.” Then he lays out the scope of his vision—to have the museums commemorate what were, in his view, “the three most significant events in American history, aside from the American Revolution itself”: the Civil War, Westward expansion and World War II.

“If Harrisburg, Pa., was a place to go in the golden triangle region of tourism in the east coast, east of the Mississippi, where you can learn about all those things, can you imagine how many people that would attract, and the economic benefits that would accrue to the local community and the jobs it would create? That’s what this was all about,” he concludes, sweeping his arms wide. “And some laughably dismissed it.”

By then, though, the vision had been more than laughably dismissed. Two of the museum concepts had ended in ignominy, with the waste of millions in public money. One of the concepts, for a National Sports Hall of Fame, languished without any apparent progress for years, until a 2008 investigation by CBS 21 reporter Jason Bristol exposed, among other things, that its director had no idea a similar museum had already opened in New York City. The museum commemorating the Old West, meanwhile, collapsed after City Council, facing a budget crisis, ordered the sale of millions of dollars worth of artifacts that Reed had quietly acquired over many years.

The means by which Reed purchased most of the Western artifacts was an account known as the City Special Projects Reserve Fund. Reed outlined his request for the fund in a memo dated Christmas Eve, 1990. It was addressed to the board of the Harrisburg Authority, the city’s sewer authority, which had earlier that year modified its charter to become a pass-through vehicle for bond financing. The fund would be filled with fees charged for administering the bonds and would be available for drawing upon at the discretion of the mayor. For two-and-a-half years, the Authority filled the fund with fees from a handful of clients: a few thousand here, a few thousand there, until, by September 1993, the fund held nearly $150,000.

At first, the mayor drew money from the account only rarely. In the summer of 1993, he approved an expense of $5,700, to reimburse the Authority for a full-page ad it had bought in an “Economic Profile” magazine. (The profile was published by the city, through the mayor’s Office of Economic Development.) Another $2,000 was sent to the city treasurer as a contribution towards a city open house.

Then, beginning in the spring of 1994, as funds kept rolling into the account, the city started to ramp up its withdrawals. In March, the mayor requisitioned $160,000 from the fund for deposit in a city account for capital projects. In September, the city withdrew another $20,000—$10,000 of it for Penn State, for consulting on the formation of an “alternative academy,” and another $10,000 for Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Harrisburg, for developing a mentorship program. In October, Reed committed $30,000 to the Center City News, newly re-launched as Harrisburg Magazine; unable to find all the money in the city budget, which he described in a personal letter as “seriously constrained,” he provided $15,000 out of the special fund.

The first mention of Reed’s museum vision in the special projects account occurred in December 1996, when Reed requested $30,000 from the fund for “professional services for the Sports Hall of Fame and War Museum.” Then, early in 1997, the artifact purchases began to be itemized. January 8: “1 Flintlock Mountain Man Pistol w/Map and 1 1896 Sheriff’s Pistol w/Holster,” $2,535. January 15: “one Walnut and Mahogany Veneered case 8-day Regulator Timepiece,” $8,500. The items evidently covered a wider range than the Civil War period, although, curiously, a May 1997 memo collects them under the heading “Civil War Museum.” Between January and May, the mayor spent $28,283 out of the fund on such itemized purchases.

In the summer of 1997, the spending took off. The checkbook register records purchases every few days: a major general’s kepi, a “fur-era trade pistol,” a Conestoga wagon. Between December 1998 and August 2002, the city withdrew more than $9 million from the fund, almost entirely for the purchase of artifacts. At times, especially in later years, Reed would ask the Authority to advance the fund cash from its other accounts, to cover additional artifact invoices until another bond issue closed and its fees could be collected.

The Civil War Museum’s collection is not exclusively bound up in the history of the special projects fund. By 1997, the city already had purchased most of the artifacts that would wind up filling the museum, and many of the purchases after 1998 were connected to the Old West. But the acquisitions for the Civil War Museum, like the others, had the same basic feature. They were purchased with public funds at the discretion of the mayor, who had set no apparent scope or limit on what he was acquiring.

There were people, though, who did speak up about the mayor’s use of the funds. One of them, in 2007, managed to get appointed to the Harrisburg Authority board, where he tried to pry open the records of the special projects account and hold them up for public scrutiny. His name was Eric Papenfuse.

Eric Papenfuse is a man of many personas. One of them, which became more developed in his mayoral campaign, is the sunny city cheerleader—the man with the toothy grin on the city website, who will bring a raft of volunteers to a press conference and will show up to a “brown bag” poetry reading in city hall with a sack lunch in tow. The other is the painstaking policy man, whose facility with budgets, contracts and legislation can lend his press conferences a classroom air.

But there’s another quality to Papenfuse that is less often seen from the podium. He can be fiercely, even stubbornly, adversarial. In April, a month after an unhappy meeting with the school district’s state-appointed recovery officer, he publicly called for the officer’s replacement. The state education secretary stood by the officer, who remained in his position. Nonetheless, three weeks later, Papenfuse raised the issue again, this time in an open letter to the secretary that accused the officer of having “watered down” the district’s academic standards.

Nothing seems to invite Papenfuse’s censure quite like the legacy of Mayor Reed. I learned of one example of this in June, after a former colleague at TheBurg, Dan Webster, published a lengthy article about Reed in his periodical, Local Quarterly. The article, which was based on an interview with the now-reclusive former mayor, included a claim that Reed’s manipulation of certain bond proceeds was “completely legal.” Papenfuse’s Midtown Scholar bookstore refused to carry the magazine. Papenfuse’s wife Catherine Lawrence, who is overseeing the bookstore in his absence, said later that the magazine was pulled from the shelves as a result of the store’s policy not to carry paid periodicals. But Webster and his photographer got a different impression when they met with the mayor at the store. According to the photographer, Papenfuse “repeated over and over, ‘I cannot allow the people of Harrisburg to think that what Reed did was legal.’”

In 2007, a faction within City Council overrode a veto by Mayor Reed, granting itself the power to nominate board members of the Harrisburg Authority. One of their nominees was Papenfuse, who, according to an affidavit that accompanied a lawsuit later filed by the administration, went directly to the Authority offices to demand copies of documents. What documents he requested, the affidavit doesn’t say, but it’s not hard to guess what he was after. In a video clip from October of that year, which is still available on Roxbury News, Papenfuse runs through Authority records of travel expenses reimbursed out of the special projects fund. They were incurred by a city employee, John Levenda, in connection with the pickup and delivery of artifacts. (Levenda, as it happens, was also the subject of Bristol’s 2008 investigation for CBS 21; he was the director of the non-profit Sports Hall of Fame Foundation, where he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and reimbursed travel expenses over the course of several years.)

In his public comments since his appeal to the county commissioners, Papenfuse has mostly focused on the best use of hotel tax dollars for the city. But it’s hard not to see his efforts as a kind of culmination of the path he started on years before his mayoral campaign. As a critic and a gadfly, he tried to call attention to what he saw as an illegitimate and abusive use of public money. As mayor, he seems to be going a step further—trying to actually undo it.

Two weeks after the mayor’s petition to the county commissioners, I met with Wayne Motts, the National Civil War Museum’s CEO, in his office above the gift shop on the museum’s second floor. Joining us were two board members—Rick Seitz, the current chair and the president of Alexander Building Construction, and Gene Barr, a past chair and the president of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, a business lobbying group.

Motts is a longtime museum man. His father, Warren, founded the Motts Military Museum in Groveport, Ohio. Wayne majored in military history and took a master’s in American history, and he has been a licensed battlefield guide, as he puts it, for “over a quarter century.” He most recently spent eight years as the executive director of the Adams County Historical Society. “There has never been a time, ever, that I haven’t been interested in the American Civil War,” he told me. His father used to read him excerpts from a Civil War diary, which he relates to the function of a museum—teaching history through contact with historical things. “My main interest is because I had a connection with the real artifact, which is what we’re doing here.”

Motts joined the museum board in 2009 and was named CEO in 2012. His predecessor, David Patterson, a former management consultant for the national YMCA, had hoped to bring his business experience to bear on the museum’s declining visitor base. But, when he left, in 2011, the dues were flat and annual attendance had dropped by several thousand. Motts, it was hoped, would improve on that record, combining museum experience with a manifest enthusiasm for Civil War history. “I don’t think there’s a better person for that position,” one Civil War artifact dealer told me.

Motts spends much of his time traveling the country, spreading the word about the museum at conferences and Civil War roundtables. He is an emphatic speaker, with a wide repertoire of punctuating gestures and a rural-flavored voice that breaks on occasion. Earlier in July, he gave a speech at the Gettysburg Foundation’s Sacred Trust Talks, where he spoke about the importance of preservation, highlighting several objects from the museum’s collection. “What if Ford’s Theatre was a Target store? Let’s talk about it. Our understanding of the war would be greatly diminished. Our empathy for it, our connection to it, would be reduced if we did not have those things.”

In his talks, Motts relies only scarcely on notes, but, when we met, he brought along a couple of pages of talking points about the museum’s position in recent years. He cited the attendance figures—around 40,000 per year for the past five years, which he described as a “very even keel.” Mayor Papenfuse, in his statements about the museum, suggested that the opportunity for growth had come and gone. The recent sesquicentennial of the battle of Gettysburg, which brought a renewed focus to the Civil War, appears to have only won the museum a few thousand additional visitors. Motts was sensitive to this. “Everybody always asks, are we satisfied with that? And the answer is no!” he said. “Every day, we’re thinking about, ‘Well, what can we do to maybe get more folks in there?’”

One of the central questions in the museum debate is whether the museum provides enough of an economic benefit to justify the public support it receives. The hotel tax is meant to create a virtuous cycle—money from tourists goes to sustain the things that will attract more tourists. Accordingly, Motts and his staff have conducted their own analysis and come up with a ballpark figure for the museum’s economic impact on the region. Relying on data they collect from visitors, and using a formula from an annual impact study commissioned by the state, they determined that the museum produces $5.7 million of spending in the region each year.

It’s a problematic figure. Motts, who said he removed student visitors from the calculation, suggested it was a conservative estimate. But he also acknowledged that the data he collects doesn’t distinguish between money tourists spend within the city and money they spend in neighboring municipalities. It may seem a small point, but it’s really the crux of the issue, because the museum’s hotel taxes come from what is designated by the county as the city’s share. It’s the share that gets spent on things like this year’s “Summer in the City” campaign. Papenfuse would like to spend more money on these sorts of campaigns, but he can’t—under the long-term contracts, nearly $300,000 of the city’s portion goes directly to the museum.

If the museum provided a regional economic benefit, didn’t it stand to reason that it should draw on the regional, rather than the city, portion? When I asked Motts and the board members about this, though, they objected to the notion that the city had any claim on the money. “It’s not the city’s pool,” Motts and Barr said in unison. “The city has their own funds,” Motts added.

Motts and the board went to some lengths to establish that, even though the funding is countywide, the museum provides an unquestionable benefit to the city. Papenfuse, in the course of his critique of the museum, had suggested that it had no meaningful impact on city tourism at all—he provided a map showing that the building was not even located in the city, but in Susquehanna Township. But Motts said the link between museum and city was beyond doubt. He produced the most recent issue of the Civil War Monitor, a seasonal magazine, in which the museum had taken out a full-page ad. “You can see what’s here,” he said. He pointed to two words in the advertisement: “Harrisburg, Pa.”

There is also a case to be made for the museum that transcends economics. At one point, Barr, who has worked on transportation issues, compared museums to mass transit. “A lot of people say, ‘Don’t fund mass transit, because it’s not self-sufficient.’ And in reality, there’s not a single mass transit system in this country that is self-sufficient. But people believe it’s important because it’s part of the fabric of the community.” In a similar fashion, places like the National Civil War Museum were “part of the culture of a community.”

The museum may be part of the city’s fabric, and it may also draw at least some of the outside interest and prestige that Reed had envisioned. But it’s difficult to assess whether the benefits really merit the price—especially because neither the museum nor the public seems to have ever completely reckoned with what that price was. Motts provided me with a 2012 article by the president of the American Association of Museums, which details the breakdown of revenue streams for museums in the United States. The average American museum, according to the article, receives 25 percent of its funding from the government.

That’s not terribly far from the museum’s current proportion of government support. Last year, the hotel taxes it received under the city agreements represented around 26 percent of its $1,109,128 in revenues (although, if you count other grant support, the amount climbs closer to 40 percent). The trouble is that the museum has required such support from the beginning, and, in the early years, the proportion was even higher. According to its 2003 federal tax form, for example, revenues identified as “government grants” accounted for 58 percent of its budget. In 2005, the figure was 64 percent.

I asked Motts and the board members if they knew where these funds had come from, since the tax forms don’t disclose the government sources. It had happened before their time, they said, and they didn’t know. (I subsequently requested the museum’s audited financial statements, but the museum declined to provide them.) I also showed them a printout, provided by the city’s budget office, detailing payments directly from the city to the museum between 2000 and 2008. They included several large grants, a few short-term loans, and regular monthly advances, ranging between $5,000 and $10,000, out of the city’s direct share of hotel tax funds. They added up to more than $1.2 million.

Again, Barr and Seitz didn’t know the full details of the payments, though Barr believed several of them were the city’s contribution to health insurance for museum employees, a practice that had since ended. “Look,” Barr said finally. “The reality is Steve Reed wanted to create this. I mean, yeah, we’ve had all those debates. Steve Reed wanted, I think as he termed it, a critical mass of museums to get more and more people here. That’s what Steve Reed wanted to do. Steve Reed has been gone now for quite a while. And the rest of us are left here, pushing along, trying to make sure that we make this the best possible facility we can.”

A few days after his announcement to the commissioners, Papenfuse went on a two-and-a-half week vacation. In his absence, people speculated on exactly what he wanted to achieve. His comments to the media had suggested he would like to see the museum closed, its artifacts sold off to provide the city with cash. He had even floated the idea that the building might be a suitable site for city hall. The dispute began to take on an all-or-nothing quality—either the county would let the museum continue with the status quo or the mayor would liquidate it completely.

But the extremes left some wondering if there might be a middle road. I spoke with Jeb Stuart, a former board secretary at the museum who has worked on tourism and development in the region for the better part of 30 years. Through the last decade of the Reed administration, he was a full-time consultant to the city, overseeing projects like the directional signs and placards that identify heritage sites across Harrisburg.

Stuart was pushed out of the museum board in 2008, at a time when new leadership, responding to the Western artifact fiasco, sought to put some distance between the museum and city employees. But he has maintained an active interest in the city’s Civil War heritage, and he still believes the museum could serve as a vital link in the region’s offerings. Several years back, the state launched a “Civil War Trails” initiative, mapping out road trips that visitors could take from one heritage site to the next. (The Papenfuse administration’s tourism director, Lenwood Sloan, worked closely on the project.) Harrisburg, Stuart said, formed a perfect bookend for one such trail, running north from Gettysburg and culminating at the museum. “The Civil War Museum has always kind of been the anchor,” he said.

He asked me to open Google Earth on my computer. We zoomed into Harrisburg, where a 3-D model of the museum can be viewed (and virtually entered, in the form of a panorama image that Stuart helped photograph). Zoom out, and you see an entire field of icons spread across the city. Many are linked to other sites related to the Civil War. He held up photocopies of the covers of two recent books about Harrisburg’s role in the Civil War. One is about the Confederate advance towards Harrisburg; the other is called “Civil War City.”

“What we’re trying to do is to show that Harrisburg should be branded as a Civil War destination, which can emanate to other destinations within the city, whether it be the state Capitol, whether it be City Island, to pull folks from Gettysburg to Harrisburg as part of the linkage,” he said. He wondered if perhaps the mayor’s comments stemmed from a sense that the museum had failed to integrate itself with the city’s other assets. “There are all sorts of things that can happen here,” he said. “But the museum has not stepped up. And that’s where Eric, I think, has viewed that as being a, quote, ‘failed experiment.’”

When he got back from vacation, Papenfuse seemed to have retreated from some of his statements, or at least to have refocused his message. Responding to questions by email—he had begged off a planned interview, citing a busy schedule—his spokeswoman, Joyce Davis, wrote that the mayor had “never proposed closing the museum.” Rather, she said, he objected to having “such a large amount” of hotel taxes go “exclusively to the Civil War Museum.” If the administration had access to its entire share of hotel taxes, she wrote, it could work with the visitors bureau to “develop a strategic marketing plan that would effectively promote Harrisburg and stimulate economic development and tourism in the coming years.”

She also contested the museum board’s account of their meetings with the mayor. In our interview, Barr had said the board’s efforts to negotiate had been “flat-out rejected” because Papenfuse was unwilling to entertain the idea of forwarding the museum reimbursements for capital repairs. (The museum cited a figure of $150,000, owed for renovations the city is supposed to cover under the lease.) But Davis instead put the onus on the board, saying that Papenfuse had tried to negotiate a step-down of hotel tax subsidies over the next three years. “The goal was to get to zero so that the museum would stop being a drain on the city,” she wrote. “The museum representatives were unwilling to negotiate and unwilling to entertain the idea of ending dependence on city resources.”

The museum, meanwhile, has tried to move forward with improving its exhibits and growing its base of supporters. During our interview, Motts mentioned a $45,000 matching grant, recently awarded by the Kline Foundation, to fund a labeling project that will allow the museum to display more of its artifacts, many of which have been tucked away in storage since its opening. Because it is a matching grant, the museum must come up with an equal amount in donations by November in order to receive the money. Motts and the board also point to their efforts to keep the museum’s costs down. Citing figures from their tax forms, he noted in an email that the line for salaries and wages, which was listed at $1,435,745 in 2002, was reduced to $381,161 by 2013.

The question about the museum’s reliance on city support, both past and present, is really about two possibilities. One is that the museum is a Reed-era white elephant—never appropriately vetted, lavished with public money without public scrutiny, and unlikely to escape the legacy of its founder’s bizarre ambition. The other is that the museum, however it came to be, really could be a first-class institution, if only it could be integrated with the city’s offerings as a whole.

Earlier in August, I reached Al Hillman, whose company produced the museum’s audio-visual exhibits. Their work included a sequence of video segments, playing on loop throughout the museum, which followed the lives of fictional Americans from the beginning to the end of the war. During a visit, I had found the sequence to be one of the museum’s most compelling features, offering a full range of perspectives on the conflict—from a freed slave to a small-time slave-owner to a trio of brothers split by their separate loyalties.

“We got actors who could really fall in love with what they were doing,” Hillman said. “Some of them did some really fine work, there.” It was odd to think that, less than 15 years after being created, the exhibits stood at risk of being shuttered as a waste of money and time.

He hoped that, regardless of the museum’s past, people would slow down and really consider what they wanted its future to be. “It’s way too important to just allow to crumple,” he said.