Tag Archives: Patriot-News

Swimming Lesson: A brief history of Harrisburg’s public pools.

July 31, 2014 | by Paul Barker

Screenshot 2014-07-30 21.14.24 “My hungry body’s burning for a swim,” the Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay wrote in his poem “Thirst,” from his 1922 collection “Harlem Shadows.” For city dwellers in the midst of a hot summer, there’s no relief quite as sweet as jumping into a pool. And yet, for the past few summers, Harrisburg residents have had only one city pool in which to swim.

That’s expected to change this month, as the city plans to reopen the pool at Hall Manor after making some short-term repairs. The Hall Manor pool, at the end of S. 18^th Street in south Harrisburg, was closed in 2012 due to leaks, and, according to city engineer Wayne Martin, it will also require extensive concrete work and a new paint job before it can be used. The necessary repairs, which began in July, represent part of an estimated $210,000 in renovations to both pools planned over the next year, to be paid for out of federal community development funds.

The administration of Mayor Eric Papenfuse announced the renovations in late June, shortly after the launch of its “Summer in the City” promotional campaign. “We chose the pools because we consider them critical to our public safety strategy as well as our summer enrichment strategy,” Papenfuse said, when asked about the project at a press conference in July. “We need two pools just to handle the demand. But also, we want to give kids and families something productive and happy to do.”

The other city pool is on N. 6^th Street in Midtown, located behind the Jackson Lick public housing apartment towers and the Ben Franklin School. Both pools were substantially renovated in the late ‘90s. The initial investment will yield scant returns this year, as the Hall Manor opening, expected to be around Aug. 15, will only provide for two weeks of swimming before the summer ends. But, according to Martin, the repairs planned over the next year should extend the pools’ useful life by between 10 and 15 years.

“The Hall Manor pool has been closed for years, just neglected and forgotten about, and we said, ‘No, we’re gonna make fixing it a real priority.’ And it looks like we’re going to be able to get it up and running,” Papenfuse said. “We think that’s a wise investment of city dollars.”

Harrisburg undertook the construction of its two pools in the spring of 1968, under Republican Mayor Albert Straub.

“Big Al” Straub, whom the journalist Paul Beers, in a column in the Patriot-News, once described as “a senior-citizen sex symbol with a square jaw and a silver mane,” had taken office that January. Not unlike the current mayor’s initiative, the Straub administration’s efforts formed part of a citywide investment in recreation. Over the next year, the city would pledge more than $1 million—including $150,000 from a private donor—towards constructing the pools and developing playgrounds at seven city locations.

The recreation project came at a time of change and unrest. The city itself was shrinking: the U.S. census reported a loss of nearly 10,000 residents in the 1950s, and another 11,000 in the 1960s. On April 4, three months into Straub’s term, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. That summer, the school district, having been cited for “racial imbalance” by the state Human Relations Commission, drafted a plan to bus black students into three predominantly white schools. Less than a year later, pupils at John Harris High would boycott an afternoon assembly on the basis of, as Beers later wrote, “inadequate recognition of the recent Black History Week.” Harrisburg’s race riot flared only a few months afterwards.

The Hall Manor pool’s construction was delayed one year, but the Jackson Lick pool opened on Aug. 9, 1968, a Friday morning. At the time, the Jackson Lick apartment towers housed families with children, and in the days leading up to the opening, a residents’ association had raised safety questions in connection with the pool’s chain link fences, which some parents worried could be hopped by children. The association was also irked over a “complete lack of communication between the city and the tenants,” according to its president, Helen Moore. By opening day, the city had assuaged Moore by promising to post a night watchman at the pool and by inviting association leaders to sit with other city officials on opening day.

According to a report the next day in the Patriot, Straub led a 20-minute ceremony under a “hot noonday sun.” Perhaps in apology for construction delays, he announced that the public could use the pool free of charge for the remainder of the season. (Full admission prices would take effect the following summer—25 cents per visitor, or $8 for a family season pass.) While the mayor spoke, “kids and some parents stood impatiently by in swimming togs waiting for the program to end.” When it did, the report adds, “approximately 300 children entered the pool in 10 minutes.” Moore, of the residents’ association, remarked that she’d “never seen a happier bunch of children.”

On a recent weekday, during a few days’ break from summer temperatures, the men’s locker room at the Jackson Lick pool was empty. An inch-deep pool of standing water sat at the feet of a row of stalls. Outside, on the walk to the pool, a man named Andre sold sno-cones and candy out of a small garage. Andre owns a furniture store on S. Cameron Street, one of several businesses displaced by the massive fire at a nearby vehicle salvage business in May. At the snack stand, he said, he was merely standing in for the head of the operation—his 10-year-old daughter.

The Jackson Lick pool sits on a sloping rectangle of scrabbly grass in the shadow of the tinted-glass PHEEA building. On the other side is the Ben Franklin School, whose windows face directly onto the pool. In May, you would think this would prove a form of torture for the middle-school students, except that the pool isn’t filled until the school year ends. (Maybe it’s a form of torture anyway.) A pair of managers watched from under a sun umbrella, while perhaps 20 or 30 children, many from a nearby daycare, splashed around, tossed Nerf footballs, or dove from the boards. Behind them, a smaller, circular wading pool, filled, but with a broken pump, sat unused, its floor growing a brown-green fuzz.

It was a peaceful day, with lifeguards lazing at their posts and objects on the periphery—a crumpled stretch of fence, a dusty picnic table—looking quaintly timeworn. Nonetheless, the pool has seen its share of excitement over the years. Across the street, Keith Myers, a maintenance supervisor for the Harrisburg Housing Authority, reminisced about some of the wilder times. “Kids would sneak in at midnight, throw their towels over the fence,” he said. He recalled the discovery, several years back, of large bags of marijuana in the attic of the bathhouse, a gun battle that left bullets in the side of one of the apartment towers, and, most peculiarly, a deer bolting out from what used to be a woodsy patch adjacent to the parking lot.

Myers started with the housing authority in 1982. A year or two before, the organization had removed families from the southern tower, named for Alton W. Lick, and converted the building into apartments for people over 55. Before then, the tower had attracted gang activity. “Mayor Reed was calling us ‘Hall Manor in the sky,’” Myers said. The northern tower, named for C. Sylvester Jackson, was vacated in 2004 and is currently under renovation. Both of the buildings have 13 floors, which, in defiance of the superstition, are labeled 1 through 13 in the elevators. For the convenience of residents, many of whom are disabled, a wheelchair ramp was added to the Jackson Lick pool during a renovation in the 1990s.

In 1998, the city introduced a pool program that had nothing to do with swimming. Called the “Get Hooked on Fishing Derby,” it involved filling the pool with striped bass after it had closed for the season in September. In 2006, according to a press release from the office of former Mayor Stephen Reed, the city dumped in 1,100 12-inch stripers, 30 of which had been tagged with the names of various city celebrities. Anglers who hooked them would receive a special prize.

Bob Herman, the president of Capital City Bassmasters, the local BassPro Shop’s house fishing club, recalled that his members would team up with the city to help young fishermen manage their rods. “It was a mess,” he said. “You can imagine, kids around a swimming pool…we’d have, like, 20 kids at a time all tangled up.” The event was abandoned in later years, as the city’s deepening fiscal crisis led to a budgetary clampdown.

The present-day pool prices—$5 per visitor, $150 for a family of six—can make the city pools’ early years seem like ancient history. And, as far as I know, Harrisburg has no imminent plans to fill the Jackson Lick pool with stripers. But, for the first summer in a while, if only for a few weeks, it should once again have a second pool.

Harrisburg’s Mr. Lincoln: James Hayney has built a career portraying the Great Emancipator.

January 31, 2014 | by Ron Hopkins

“My mission is to keep history alive.”

So says James Hayney about his role as an Abraham Lincoln presenter. Hayney, a Camp Hill resident, has been keeping history alive around central Pennsylvania and beyond for most of the last decade.

He certainly looks the part. Hayney’s body is long and lean; he stands well over 6 feet tall and sports the trademark beard worn by the 16th president. Hayney states, with a wink, that he is about the same age as Lincoln at the end of his presidency.

Hayney took a circuitous route to the role of Abraham Lincoln, which he now plays full-time. He explained that, during his 20s and 30s, he was a telephone man, but had this dream of becoming an actor. As he approached his 40s, he saved enough to take a leap of faith and follow his dream. He resigned from corporate life and spent some time in New York, expanding his acting skills and trying to break into commercials. After a few months, he moved back to the Harrisburg area to work in the local theater scene.

“I’m a Harrisburg guy,” he explains, noting the terrific location for a professional Lincoln portrayer. “My roots are here. My son was born here.”

He began to find acting gigs around central Pennsylvania. He acted in Harrisburg’s Open Stage and Gamut Theatre. He soon began getting parts at Allenberry Playhouse and became a regular there. Then he received an unexpected break.

In 2002, the National Civil War Museum contacted him about playing the role of Lincoln for one of its fundraisers. Hayney accepted and began to research his new role, as any good actor would. He soon found that Lincoln fascinated him.

A short time later, Hayney began to look for a one-man play about Lincoln, one that spoke to him. He found it—“Mr. Lincoln”—by Herbert Mitgang. The one-man play begins at Ford’s Theater just as Lincoln is about to be assassinated. Lincoln sees his life in a series of flashbacks just as Booth pulls the trigger: from his early days as a rail-splitter to his latter years as a lawyer and politician.

Hayney presented “Mr. Lincoln” on Lincoln’s birthday and President’s Day at theaters in Carlisle and Harrisburg. As he continued to play the role, he began to wonder if he could work full-time as a Lincoln portrayer.

Jim Getty, the long-time Lincoln presenter from Gettysburg, became an early mentor to Hayney. After Hayney approached him, Getty explained the thorough research he had conducted for the role and allowed him to peruse his extensive library.

Getty also put him in touch with people and organizations that helped him make his start.

“Jim Getty is a terrific guy and was a tremendous help to me,” Hayney said.

Hayney started to build his own Lincoln library, which includes David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln,” Harold Holzer’s “Lincoln President-Elect” and “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, among many other writings and biographies. Hayney purchased the complete collection of Lincoln’s writings and studied them extensively. He discovered that, the more he learned about the Great Emancipator, the more he admired him.

“There is no point of diminishing returns with Lincoln,” Hayney states. “The more I learn about him, the better he gets.”

Hayney turned his love for Lincoln into a career in 2005. He now spends a lot of time at Gettysburg, performing or giving presentations at the Battle Theater, the Dobbin House and the Fairfield Inn, just outside of the city. He also speaks to many corporate and school groups.

He explains that he prepares for his presentations by researching the group he will be speaking to and makes sure his knowledge of Lincoln coincides with their interests and their mission. Then he takes off his wedding ring—Lincoln never wore one—and puts on the mole. When he speaks to a group, he presses forward with a two-pronged attack.

“I always try to start out with humor,” Hayney says. “Lincoln was an extremely funny guy. Back in Illinois during his circuit-riding days, people would travel from miles around to hear him tell his stories at the taverns at night. He was almost a stand-up comedian.”

Once Hayney has his audience chuckling at one of his Lincoln stories, he hits them with a finishing punch. “When I get folks good and relaxed, then I sneak in some history lessons,” he says with a laugh.

In 2009, the National Civil War Museum contacted him about a project. The museum wanted Hayney to become the Lincoln that it displays on a daily basis. The “Meet Mr. Lincoln” video, which can be found both in the museum and on its online website, is Hayney’s portrayal of Lincoln answering questions about the Civil War, slavery and his presidency.

Hayney traveled to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to film the project. “It was an exhausting experience,” he remembers. “We worked 12-hour days doing the filming. I had to be at the top of my game every minute.”

But Hayney remains thrilled about the final product, which puts his talents on full display. He is grateful that the museum gave him such an opportunity.

“The folks at the museum—Wayne Motts, Trini Nye and Kate McDermott—do such great things and have been so supportive,” he said. “I love to go there whenever I can.”

Being a Lincoln presenter has given Hayney a wide range of opportunities. He performed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., on the day of President Obama’s first inauguration. He received the key to the town of Hummelstown and, earlier this year, was grand marshal for the Pennsylvania Farm Show. He even threw out the first pitch at a Harrisburg Senator’s baseball game.

Hayney sometimes appears with other historical presenters, including a woman who plays the part of Mrs. Lincoln, a man who portrays the powerful abolitionist, Frederick Douglass and, of course, another presenter who portrays Lincoln’s favorite general, Ulysses Grant. On occasion, Hayney even gets on television. He recently completed a commercial for the History Channel.

When asked which of Lincoln’s speeches is his best, Hayney immediately points to the second inaugural address. He also considers Lincoln’s first inaugural speech important, simply because of the gravity of a nation in crisis. Naturally, Hayney admires the Gettysburg Address, as he feels the president’s “few appropriate remarks” were exactly right for the occasion.

“Of course, not everyone was thrilled with that speech,” Hayney chuckles. “Some folks didn’t like it at all, like the Harrisburg Patriot.”

Hayney remains more than a little amused that the Patriot finally apologized for bashing Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg as the “silly remarks of the President” that “shall be no more repeated or thought of.” Hayney acknowledges that pointing out the Patriot’s lack of vision gets him lots of laughs and applause.

“When I point out that editorial, I always like to add that it’s no wonder that the Patriot is only now published three days a week,” he said, smiling. “People always burst out laughing and clapping about that line.”

Hayney readily admits he has had to change with the times. When he started out doing his Lincoln research, he usually bought books, many of them hardcover. Now, he downloads them and reads them on his Kindle. When he started out in 2005, he had a brochure, with his address and phone number. Now, he has a website where people can get all his contact information, as well as information, pictures and testimonies about his Lincoln presentation.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the support Hayney gets from his wife, Beverly. Though she prefers to stay in the background, she clearly is very important to him.

“She is the love of my life,” he said. “We have been married 11 years, and I have loved every day.” Beverly is a nurse practitioner and works for the PinnacleHealth, where Hayney also volunteers one day a week.

When Hayney is asked how portraying Lincoln has touched his life, he is quick to answer. “Lincoln makes me a better person. Whether I am dressed like Lincoln or I am wearing a ball cap and T-shirt and just driving around town, I don’t want to do anything to denigrate his name.”

Spend any amount of time with James Hayney talking about Abraham Lincoln, and his admiration for the man is bound to rub off on you.

You can find out more information about James Hayney at his website, www.lookingforalincoln.com. He also appears in the video, “Meet Mr. Lincoln,” at the National Civil War Museum and at the museum’s website.

Must Love Dogs: Harrisburg’s dog laws are among the most progressive in Pennsylvania. Can the city enforce them?

December 31, 2013 | by Paul Barker

In late February of 2012, a Harrisburg patrol officer responded to a call about a stray dog on Curtin Street, in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. The dog, a tan-and-white female pit bull named Madison, had wounds to her muzzle, neck and legs. The man who found her, suspecting abuse, had brought her into his home and called the police.

According to the officer, who asked not to be named for this article, the man’s story was initially convoluted. “I think he didn’t want to be completely upfront about how he came across this dog,” she told me. But, eventually, he admitted to knowing where Madison belonged—at a house up the street where, he believed, the owners were involved in dogfighting.

In Pennsylvania, participating in dogfighting, as a spectator or as an owner, is a third-degree felony. Dogfighting investigations can be complicated—the evidence is often a live animal that may need to be held until trial. But animal welfare advocates like to point out that they also can produce convictions for other crimes. According to Janette Reever, who manages the animal-fighting tip line at the Humane Society of the United States, it’s “very, very common” for the pursuit of a suspected dogfighting operation to turn up things like drugs, guns and child pornography. “It’s one of those things that goes hand-in-hand with other criminal activities,” she said.

The officer ran the address the man provided. As it turned out, various members of the household had criminal records. She decided to take Madison into custody and to refer the case for a fuller investigation.

It so happened that, at the time Madison was found, the city was fresh from a barrage of embarrassing news coverage of its stray dog policy. In mid-2011, the Humane Society of the Harrisburg Area—not affiliated with the national organization—stopped accepting strays from the city, which was late paying bills. In December, the city made a catch-up payment, but, by January, officials were sparring again with the organization over terms in the new year’s contract. Meanwhile, someone had leaked an internal police department memo outlining a temporary policy for strays, which included an option to “place the animal in the prisoner van and release it in an area where it will be safe for the animal.” In a series of articles, the Patriot-News blasted the policy, at one point reporting that police had deposited a pit bull puppy in a cardboard box under a pavilion in Sunshine Park.

By the time the officer seized Madison, the contract with the Humane Society had been renewed. But it excluded holding dogs as evidence for a criminal trial, which required specialized care. So the city turned instead to the Central Pennsylvania Animal Alliance, an umbrella organization linking various animal welfare groups in the region, and particularly to its anti-dogfighting task force, which has been active in the city since 2010.

When the task force learned about Madison, it agreed to pay on the city’s behalf to board her at a nearby kennel while the investigation proceeded. “We were all excited,” Kris Baker, a member of the CPAA task force, told me recently. “We were like, ‘We know where this dog lives, we have everything we need, we have an eyewitness.’ I mean, this is it. We’re gonna get a dogfighting prosecution.”

After a month had passed, another volunteer on the task force, Michele Avery, contacted the police department about the status of the investigation. When Avery reached a police captain by phone, she said, he simply told her, “We don’t do dogs.” Rather, dogs were the province of the city’s animal control officer, Fred Lamke. Avery told him this was more than a stray dog case—Madison was part of a potential dogfighting investigation. He said he would call her back.

Eventually, Avery received a call from a police sergeant, who explained that the department would no longer need Madison as evidence. She asked for a message in writing, and on Thursday, March 29, at 11:26 a.m., the sergeant sent her an email:

Please release our “evidence” hold from the dog in case 2012-2-5386. We have photographs on file for prosecution. You may adopt or place the dog as needed. Thank you for your support.

Avery asked him to confirm the status of the investigation. The task force was meeting the following week, she explained, and she wanted to provide an update. A few minutes later, he wrote back. “I have closed it out for now but my Captain will be reviewing that order.” The detective bureau, he added, was “awash in robberies and other violent crime.”

Another month went by, and Avery contacted the department again, this time composing an email to Annette Oates, a captain who was known to be animal-friendly. A week later, in early May, Oates wrote, “This case has been assigned to Fred Lamke for follow up (FYI).”

Avery was baffled. “Fred Lamke is not a detective,” she told me. “He doesn’t even have a camera.” Baker didn’t get it, either. “Fred can enforce city ordinances and misdemeanors, but he can’t prosecute a felony. He’s not a police officer.”

They felt the department was letting a serious criminal operation slip away. “They treated me like I was crazy for thinking they would have anything to do with dogs,” Avery said.

Meanwhile, the patrol officer who had picked up Madison, having taken the investigation as far as she could, decided to let it go. “They could’ve done more,” she told me. “But I was stuck. You request, they deny, and then it’s over.”

…

Dogfighting is the most sensational form of a problem that, for some time now, has been stubbornly pervasive in Harrisburg. Every now and then, a story will surface of a dog escaping a yard, or of a dog attacking a citizen or an animal, or of a dog being put down by police. These can give a general sense of a trend borne out by official numbers. The Humane Society of the Harrisburg Area, which provides the city’s shelter services, receives between 200 and 250 dogs from Harrisburg each year.

Some forms of cruelty are more obviously malicious than others. Dogs may be given inadequate shelter, or have insufficient freedom of movement, or simply suffer from neglect. But they may also be physically abused. The CPAA, which maintains a dogfighting tip line, hears stories of puppies that are illegally bred, kept in crates covered in urine and feces, poorly fed, and sold without vaccinations. They have documented cases of dogs covered in bite wounds, dogs with exposed bone, dogs with cropped ears, dogs with their teeth ground down. In 2011, on New Year’s Eve, the group rescued a female pit bull from a dumpster where, with a prolapsed uterus and bite scars on her body, she had been left to die. In July, 2012, they responded to a call about a dead puppy, four months old, found in a trash bag with bite wounds and a broken neck.

The proliferation of neglect, combined with the abuse, has had consequences for humans. In May of 2011, a 12-year-old boy was riding his bike Uptown when he was attacked by a stray pit bull. He escaped by kicking and punching the dog, but wound up going to the emergency room for a rabies shot and stitches. A month later, an 80-year-old woman was knocked down on N. 4^th Street by a pit bull, which tore into her arm. The fall left her with a broken hip and a broken leg. A neighbor explained later that he heard someone screaming and ran outside. “It was more than a dog bite,” he says, in a video available on PennLive. “It was down to the bone.”

The city, judging by City Council’s legislative record, has been aware of the problem since at least the mid-1990s. In 1996, the city passed a major amendment to its animal code, providing a definition of a “dangerous” dog and outlining strict requirements for possession of one. The definition lists nine separate characteristics, any one of which qualifies a dog as dangerous, including “powerful jaws capable of crushing bone,” a “tendency to attack even those persons and animals that exhibit no provocative behavior,” and a “strong chase instinct.” In 2004, citing an increase in attacks, council added four more conditions, including a designation of “dangerous” for a dog that gives three unprovoked bites in a year (or one bite, if it causes substantial harm).

Last May, council extended the city’s cruelty laws. An anti-tethering ordinance, moved by Brad Koplinski, created strict regulations on the length of time and the manner in which a dog can be left tethered or unattended outdoors. It provides a number of conditions for issuing citations, including inadequate access to food and water, insufficient shelter, and exposure to the elements during weather below freezing or above 90 degrees. The penalty for a first offense is $350 and may include seizure of the animal; subsequent offenses can lead to imprisonment.

The ordinances also authorize the city to keep detailed records on dog ownership. In 1998, the city broke with Dauphin County and began administering its own licensing program for dogs. If you live in the city and own a dog over three months old, you are required by law to apply for a city license, which can be issued for a period of either one or three years. The licenses are the initial checkpoint for ensuring compliance with other laws; if you don’t have proof of a current rabies vaccination, for instance, you can’t get a license. The license application also provides the city with owners’ names and contact information and the name, breed and description of each registered dog.

Together, these ordinances should provide grounds for a comprehensive crackdown on irresponsible owners, illegal breeding and abuse. But the laws, though relatively progressive, are only partly enforced.

For one, very few owners license their dogs. Brett Miller, an animal-welfare advocate who devised the state’s formula for estimating dog populations, calculates that there are around 10,600 dogs in Harrisburg. In 2012, however, the city only issued 570 licenses—418 three-year licenses and 152 one-year licenses. At those levels, the fees are so small as to be almost nominal. According to the tax enforcement office, since at least as far back as 2001, the city’s total dog licensing revenue has hovered just above $8,000. By comparison, in 2012, the city made payments of $56,750 to the Humane Society, in addition to the animal control officer’s salary of $44,000.

In addition, since the anti-tethering ordinance is still relatively new, the police department has been reluctant to enforce it aggressively. A lieutenant explained that residents are still in a “honeymoon period.” Rather than issue a citation, officers will hand owners a copy of the ordinance and urge them to take better care of their dogs. But, in the process, he said, the department could learn “who the habitual violators are,” in order to keep an eye on them later.

The city also has made virtually no effort to enforce its dangerous dog statutes, at least with respect to licensing. That’s partly a result of the laws’ questionable constitutionality. Lamke, the animal control officer, told me that, following the court’s rejection of a similar law in Erie, the city has deferred to the state law’s narrower definition of a dangerous dog.

But Harrisburg has apparently never been serious about identifying dangerous dogs or discouraging owners from keeping them by applying the much higher license fee. A secretary in the tax enforcement office, who has been working there since the city assumed licensing from the county, informed me that, to her knowledge, the city had issued only one dangerous dog license—and that was done incorrectly, by a different department. At any rate, the dog didn’t receive a special red identification tag, as specified in the law, because the office didn’t have them. According to the secretary, the city had never ordered any.

…

Last Halloween, Amy McIntire was out trick-or-treating with her granddaughter, near Chestnut and 18th streets in Allison Hill, when she spotted a bulldog chained to a plastic dog crate outside an abandoned building. For several years, McIntire has been the task force’s unofficial eyes and ears in the city, relaying messages, videos and photos when she comes across evidence of cruelty. “She’s kind of like our little informant,” one of the task force members told me. “She’s our snitch.”

As she approached the chained bulldog, McIntire saw that there was no food or water nearby, nor was there any protection from the wind and rain. In addition, the dog, a female, was about to give birth. “She was barking and carrying on,” McIntire told me. “She was scared, and she was ready to have the babies at any time.” She called a contact who runs a rescue in York Haven, and the two began mobilizing others in the network.

Over the next several hours, the group passed messages back and forth over Facebook, trying to come up with a strategy for getting the dog out of the cold. McIntire was reluctant to call the police. When she had tried give the dog food, it “went into defense mode,” and she worried police would shoot at the first sign of aggression. Eventually, the group found a rescue that would take her, but the owner didn’t want to give her up. They decided to report the case to Fred Lamke, hoping he would issue a citation the next day.

In the morning, Lamke visited the owner, handed him a copy of the ordinance and got him to take the dog inside. By the afternoon, she was back outside again. “Someone please call Fred,” somebody wrote. “Fred got off at 3 p.m. and won’t be back until Monday,” someone else replied.

The group diverged over what to do next. Some wanted to scrape together money and try to buy the dog directly from the owner: “We need the mom and pups removed for safety, as well as to prevent an entire litter of pittie pups being sold to morons, to one day have more pups.” Others wanted to add the threat of citations. Someone had heard a rumor that the owner actually lived Uptown, and, therefore, might have been using an empty lot to store the dog unattended—a violation of the anti-tethering ordinance.

On Saturday, a baby pool appeared by the dog, presumably to provide her a place to whelp. On Sunday, McIntire visited again: “[T]he SOB is sitting in his warm SUV, while the dog looks at him begging to get in the warm truck with him.” That evening, Brett Miller reached Brad Koplinski, who had visited the site Friday and Saturday and spoken with the owner. Koplinski pledged to drive by and, if necessary, involve the police.

That evening, the dog gave birth. As it turned out, she was licensed and vaccinated, and the owner was apparently willing to bring its habitat into compliance with the regulations. “The guy tried,” Koplinski told me. “He put up a decent amount of fencing, there was water for the dog, it had a wooden roof, it had a tarp on it. I think the collective effort made the guy realize—‘I could get in a lot of trouble here. Let’s just play this smart, and get the dog inside.’”

People who care about animal cruelty tend to care about it intensely. A line frequently quoted by members of the task force is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” When this sense of mission, coupled with affection for the animals, comes up against the realities of enforcement, the result is often profound disappointment. McIntire remains convinced that someone tipped off the owner on how to avoid a citation. She has continued to keep an eye on the area, hoping to spot evidence that would warrant a seizure, but the prospect seems unlikely.

Daniel Benny, a humane officer who is authorized to inspect for cruelty in Dauphin County, told me he visited the site and determined that there was no violation of the law. “You need to respect people’s rights,” he said. “I don’t put my personal view into it. It’s hard sometimes, because you see things that are heartbreaking. But my position is, we respect the law.” After his visit, he emailed his assessment to members of the CPAA, where he volunteers.

“The law basically stinks,” Zella Anderson, the CPAA’s founder, told me. She acknowledged that the weather may not have been cold enough to justify a seizure, but her concern was with the larger pattern of inaction and complacency around the problem of cruelty. When I first spoke to her about the dog on Zarker, a week after Halloween, she was exasperated.

“We don’t know what vet care she’s getting,” she said. “And now the puppies will be sold, and the cycle repeats.”

…

Initially, when the task force assembled, they saw themselves as partners of law enforcement, rather than critics of it. In the spring of 2010, the group lobbied City Council to hold a hearing on the topic of dogfighting. Soon afterward, Koplinski introduced a resolution pledging that the city would address the problem, and it passed unanimously. That September, the task force organized a seminar for police, led by an assistant D.A. in Allegheny County with a record of dogfighting prosecutions. Around two dozen Harrisburg police officers attended.

“My perhaps rather naïve thought at the time was, if they learn how to investigate and prosecute, then they’ll start tackling the dogfighting, which we knew to be going on,” Felicity Fox, a founder of the task force, told me. The response to the seminar, though, was discouraging. Advocates who attended thought the officers seemed uninterested; at the end of the presentation, no one asked any questions. In the months after the training, the task force saw virtually no movement from the department.

The group also struggled to secure any meaningful commitment from the office of the mayor. At one point, the Humane Society of the Harrisburg Area, in an effort to help the city curb the population of strays, provided the administration with spay/neuter vouchers. The vouchers would have allowed residents to bring animals in for a free procedure, but the city didn’t distribute them.

“We said, ‘OK, look, we gotta get really serious about this,’” Amy Kaunas, the organization’s executive director, told me. Since the vast majority of dogs the shelter receives from the city are pit bulls, she added a cap on the number of pit bulls it would accept each year, to spur the city to take action. (Several years ago, the number of strays or abandoned dogs was more than 300; the decrease, Kaunas said, is not a measure of improvement, but solely a result of the cap.) Yet the administration continued to deny there was a problem. Mayor Linda Thompson claimed that the dogs were not actually Harrisburg’s—instead, they were being brought in from neighboring counties and dumped within city limits.

Meanwhile, as the task force continued to catalog animal control cases, a troubling pattern emerged. Police responses were unpredictable. Sometimes, officers would defer to Fred Lamke, even if he wasn’t on duty; at other times, officers would handle situations themselves, with wildly variable outcomes.

In one widely publicized case, in March 2011, officers responded to a report of two stray pit bulls Uptown. They seized the dogs and, because the city’s contract with the shelter had expired, took them to the incinerator and shot them. Their owner, who came home to find his dogs missing from his yard, didn’t learn what had become of them until several days later. Animal advocates were outraged—state law requires that stray dogs, once subdued, must be held at a kennel for 48 hours before being put down—but the police chief at the time, Pierre Ritter, defended the action as a proper response to a threat to public safety. (Ritter was later quoted in the Patriot-News saying his officers had “handled it 100 percent correctly.”)

In another case, in February 2012, two officers checked on a dog that had been left behind in a home on Argyle Street following the arrest of its owner for drug charges. Amy McIntire noticed the dog in the window, and, for several days, she made numerous calls to Lamke that someone should collect her, but never received a reply. On Feb. 3, two officers showed up with a snare, intending to capture her, but were surprised to find the dog outside in the yard. According to the police incident report, a neighbor had opened a window, and the escaped dog lunged at one of the officers, biting him twice on the leg. They shot the dog, whose corpse was taken in for rabies testing, and the officer went to the hospital.

“She did what any dog would’ve done,” McIntire told me. “If they’d waited til Monday, for Fred Lamke, that dog would still be alive today.”

Ron Hollister, a humane officer who works with the task force, is more sympathetic to the police. “You can’t just go willy-nilly into somebody’s house. They will attack,” he acknowledged. “But if the dog’s gnawing on your leg, what are you gonna do?” he said. “I know some of these people would say, ‘I’d let it chew my legs off.’ Well, OK. But not me.”

Incidents like this have left a number of animal-welfare advocates reluctant to place an emergency call, for fear that an improperly approached rescue will end in a shooting. This is not so much a condemnation of the police, many of whom they believe to be animal-friendly, as it is a fear that, in the absence of a clear policy or support from superiors, even sympathetic members of the force will wind up needlessly killing a dog.

Kris Baker, who is friendly with a number of officers, is often surprised when she learns who was involved in an incident. After the two dogs were put down at the incinerator, she said, “I couldn’t believe it. I knew both of those officers, and they would never have done that.” The problem, she believes, is the leadership. “You don’t just discharge a weapon like that without seeking permission first. That command was coming from higher up.”

…

The walls of Captain Oates’ office are covered with pictures of cats and dogs. Many of them are photos of her own pets, all of them rescues. Behind her desk is a placard—“One cat leads to another cat leads to another…”—and on the wall, above her computer, a cartoon of a puppy in a Superman cape, with the caption “The mightiest of hearts beats within my little dog.”

Oates has straight, chin-length brown hair and a tranquil, deliberative manner. The day I visited, she walked me through the department’s protocol. When Fred Lamke is on duty, officers refer animal calls to him. When he’s off, officers will respond themselves and can issue citations, unless they feel the matter can wait for Lamke. Officers were equipped to seize dogs if possible, but if a dog attacks, they will shoot. But, she said, “We’ll do everything we can before we use deadly force.”

I asked her about the leaked memo from 2011, which she had authored. At first, she was reluctant to talk about it. “Those were guidelines,” she said. “That’s all I’m really gonna say about it.” She paused. “The situation was, we had these animals, and we had nothing to do with them.” They couldn’t take dogs to the shelter, but they couldn’t just leave them on city streets. Eventually, with the help of the CPAA, the city built a temporary kennel in a garage near the incinerator, but it was clearly inadequate to the potential volume of strays. For a while, rescues were arriving every few days, and the kennels got in the way of other police work. After several months, the shelter was taken down.

I asked Oates, who has been with the department since 1986, whether the problem had noticeably worsened in her years on the force. She believed it had, though she couldn’t provide statistics. She speculated that, in recent years, the recession had exacerbated the situation—people simply didn’t have the money to take care of their pets. She disliked that some people treated their dogs as disposable, but beyond that, she had little to say about a strategy to curb cruelty.

Before I left, Oates returned to topic of the 2011 memo. Her words, she said, had gotten “so, so twisted” in the press. “Anyone who knows me knows I would never just instruct officers to shoot dogs for the sake of shooting dogs.” Her aim was to prevent a situation where dogs were simply left to roam at large, at a time when the city’s suspended contract left the department with few options. “Our hands were tied,” she said.

After our interview, I went back and re-read the memo. “Supervisors,” it begins. “Since we can no longer take dogs & cats to the Humane Society, we will do the following.” There are three numbered items. If the animal is “vicious & a danger to the public” or “obviously sick, injured or suffering,” it may be killed “in as safe a manner as possible.” If it’s determined “to be a ‘found’ animal,” officers may ask the person who placed the call if he or she, or an acquaintance, would like to keep the animal, or the officers may adopt the animal themselves. Barring that, they are to collect the animal and release it somewhere safe. “If you choose to adopt the animal yourself or release it in a safe environment,” it adds, “DO NOT inform the complainant of your intentions.”

Criticisms of the memo reached a national audience. The Patriot-News branded the policy “shoot-‘em, adopt-‘em or drop-‘em,” which gave the impression that officers were free to choose among the options. Other outlets picked up this characterization. Cesar’s Way, an advocacy website connected to Cesar Millan, the expert trainer from the television show “The Dog Whisperer,” wrote that “officers were told that if they didn’t want to adopt the animal themselves, they should take it out of town and leave it or, failing that, shoot it.”

But the language of the memo suggests a more subtle failure. At the time, the department defended the text as a draft, and the tone is obviously provisional. It concludes, “These are the best options we can offer at this time. If anyone has any other ideas, please email me.” Above the officers, the former chief and the mayor had denied the problem, and on the ground, they were overwhelmed with other crimes. The budget crisis meant that the department had to keep revisiting its protocol. After my conversation with Oates, the memo looked not so much callous or cruel as simply hopeless.

…

Fred Lamke is a hard man to get a hold of. Over a period of several months, I placed numerous calls to his cell phone, none of which were returned. I tried to visit him at his business—when he’s not on duty, he runs the horse-drawn carriage company on City Island—but he always seemed to have just left on an errand.

Once, as he was leaving by car, I waved to him, and he rolled down the window. We chatted briefly. He said the pit bull problem was mostly about economics. It was cheaper to buy a puppy from your neighbor than to pay full price at the Humane Society. He agreed to talk more about it later. Another month went by of unanswered calls.

Finally, the new police chief, Thomas Carter, arranged an interview. On an icy morning in December, he led me to a small office room in the police bunker below city hall. Lamke, who is tall, with wild gray hair and small oval glasses, was standing in the hallway. He wore olive-green muck boots, a ball cap and a jacket with a faded animal control patch on the left shoulder. “You want me to talk to him? That OK?” he said as we approached.

“Yes, definitely,” Carter said. They discussed a shooting, the night before, of a 10-year-old boy in Allison Hill, who was struck in the face by a bullet while watching TV.

“I said to my wife, ‘The chief grew up in the city. That hurt him, to see that,’ ” Lamke said.

“Lot of dumb people doing a lot of dumb stuff these days,” the chief concluded. He headed back upstairs.

Lamke began by explaining that the number of citations he had issued in 2013 was approaching his highest total in more than 20 years. “We’ve gotten very, very aggressive,” he said. A lieutenant pulled up Lamke’s records. As of December, he had given out 89 non-traffic citations, mostly for failure to restrain an animal or for lack of a rabies vaccination or license. But, Lamke added, his priority was to get owners to control their dogs, not to cite or fine them. “If you issue the citation, it’ll take sometimes 30 to 45 days to get it in front of the district justice,” he said. “Whereas, if we can get this thing resolved in the moment, and get compliance, that’s what this is really all about.”

Lamke regards the animal control situation in Harrisburg as a function of the urban environment. High-density housing, he said, increases the volume of calls. Where an escaped dog in the suburbs might roam a large backyard, in the city it winds up on a neighbor’s porch. In addition, Harrisburg’s large number of transient residents, combined with generational poverty, leads to a high rate of abandonment. “When the economy goes bad, people lose their jobs. They can’t take as good a care of their pets. They lose their homes; they leave their pets behind,” he said.

I mentioned the “stray dog problem” in Harrisburg. “I don’t think we have a stray dog problem in the city,” Lamke said. When I expressed surprise, he clarified. In the 80s, the city was home to actual packs of wild dogs, which the animal control sector, created by then-Mayor Stephen Reed, had successfully cleaned up. Now, the problem was primarily abandonment. “A dog that’s been chained and left behind is not a stray dog. Those are abandoned pets that were owned by someone,” he said.

I asked about the anti-dogfighting seminars and whether he had found them instructive. He thought for a moment, then said that for him, “90 percent” of what was covered was review because he goes to such trainings “just about on a yearly basis.” I asked him what sort of things an officer looks for in a dogfighting investigation. Janette Reever, the dogfighting expert at the Humane Society of the United States, had provided me a long list of evidence she sought in building a case: steroids and suture materials in the owners’ possession, “break sticks” used to pry fighting dogs apart, notes recording outcomes of fights, and so-called “rape stands” used for forcible breeding.

Lamke mentioned none of these things. “You look for multiple dogs in multiple houses, dogs on short chains, pit bulls that don’t get along,” he said. Pit bulls used in dogfighting, he added, “don’t like each other, so they’re not able to interact with each other.” I asked if he had ever pursued anyone for dogfighting. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and mentioned a case from 15 years ago. The problem, he said, is that fighting is very hard to detect, and none of the department’s recent cases were strong enough to make it to the courts. He mentioned the officer involved in the Madison case, who had worked with him in her investigations. “She came back to me after it was all said and done, and said, ‘Fred, I’ve been trying, I can’t get nothing.’”

I brought up the Humane Society’s free spay/neuter vouchers. Lamke said that, though he tries not to be cynical, most animal control programs he has observed over the years are simply not successful. “Put it to you this way,” he said. “We tell people not to smoke. We tell people not to drink. We tell people all the behaviors that are bad for you, but they just don’t listen.” (One exception was the CPAA’s “trap, neuter and release” program for feral cats, which he described as “an astronomical program.”) I asked how many vouchers he handed out per year. “It depends on how many they give me,” he said. “It’s somewhere around 30.”

Later, when I mentioned this to Kaunas, the Humane Society of the Harrisburg Area’s director, she was flabbergasted. The arrangement with the city, which she had explained to both the mayor and police chief, was that the shelter would provide unlimited vouchers. Once Lamke distributed the ones he had, he simply had to ask for new ones. “Let me tell you something,” she added. “In all the years we’ve done the free voucher program, I have only gotten one filled out spay/neuter voucher from the city. And you know whose pet it was for? Fred Lamke’s!”

At one point during our interview, I asked Lamke for his assessment of the Zarker Street case, where the pregnant female pit bull was found on Halloween. He mentioned Daniel Benny, the humane officer—a “very good, balanced investigator, in my estimation”—and his report that there was no evidence of cruelty.

What about the rumor that the owner was living in a garage? I asked.

“Not privy to that. Don’t know,” Lamke said.

“Did you see evidence inside of the garage, like a bed?”

“Once the dog’s inside his place of business, like I said—he took the puppies inside, and, after that point, it’s none of my business.”

The gap between Lamke’s approach and the hopes of the animal-welfare advocates became suddenly clear. The advocates, with their memories of each rescued dog, wanted an all-out approach to put an end to the problem. Lamke, however, wanted basic compliance and deference to people’s privacy. I asked about the possibility that the Zarker Street puppies might become next year’s abandoned dogs, each one costing the city $265 to drop off at the shelter.

“There’s a really good possibility that that could be the case,” he said.

…

This fall, the task force grew hopeful again that the city would get serious about combatting animal cruelty. As the mayoral election approached, Brett Miller arranged meetings with Republican candidate Dan Miller and Democratic candidate Eric Papenfuse, who both gave indications that they would work to address the problem.

After Papenfuse was elected, the team prepared a list of objectives, including the establishment of a mayor’s animal advisory board to examine ways to improve licensing and education. They will also urge the new mayor to authorize three regional humane officers to enforce the anti-tethering ordinance in the city. (Lamke maintains that, between him and the city’s 120 officers, the department has enforcement covered. “If you have a lot of other folks coming in, they may not be doing it the right way,” he said.)

In July, the Humane Society of the United States hosted an anti-dogfighting seminar at the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg. Lamke and a supervisor attended, as did a deputy district attorney for Dauphin County, who has since put a stronger focus on building animal cruelty cases.

Last spring, a couple of advocates got a tip about an owner who was beating his dog in an apartment on 2^nd Street. Ron Hollister, the humane officer, got a statement from a neighbor describing sounds of abuse. Eventually, the landlord entered the apartment and discovered feces and urine on the floor, along with what appeared to be marks from where the dog had been thrown against the wall. The dog itself, a 40-pound pit bull, was enclosed in a small crate with a broken leg. The owner was out of town. Hollister involved the D.A., and, in May, a judge issued a fine of nearly $1,100, in addition to veterinary fees.

Madison, the stray pit bull found Uptown on Curtin Street, is now in a program called HOPE, for Hounds of Prison Education, where she will be trained as a service dog by inmates at the Camp Hill prison. Other dogs are not so easy to rehabilitate. Hollister, who runs his own rescue, has developed something of a specialty handling difficult cases. After years of abuse, he said, some dogs require an enormous effort to be kept under basic control.

“The animal has just, like, totally lost trust in man,” he said. He has 14 dogs in his rescue and is at capacity, but he continues to respond to calls. “They keep telling me I can’t save ‘em all. But I can try. I can try to save at least this one dog.”

Smell Ya Later! We bid adieu to the Harrisburg incinerator–40 years, many breakdowns, a botched upgrade, dubious financings and a near-city bankruptcy later.

November 28, 2013 | by Paul Barker

Later this month, about a week before Christmas, Harrisburg should complete its sale of the facility that the journalist Paul Beers once called the “infernal furnace.”

The Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority (LCSWMA) will pony up somewhere between $126 and $132 million for it, helping the facility shed the $350 million or so in debt it accumulated over the years. The purchase will also, it’s hoped, help ditch the adjectives—“troubled,” “ill-fated,” “botched,” not to mention “infernal”—that have historically preceded its name.

In the meantime, though, those adjectives will continue to amuse employees like Guy Lefever, who started working at the incinerator in 2009 and has always known it as a functional facility.

“People come up here, and they’re blown away,” he told me one morning in late September. “They’re thinking it’s just gonna be a run-down building, and trash laying all over the place. And it’s not.”

We were standing a few dozen yards from an ash heap, where the scorched remains of solid waste from households in Pennsylvania and New Jersey arrive fresh from the burners all day. A couple of ravens scavenged for surviving morsels. The land around the incinerator is close to capacity, so a pair of trucks spends most days at this heap, loading ash onto haulers that will take it elsewhere.

Lefever, a solidly built man in a clean, blue dress shirt, with a doughy lower jaw like Bill Murray’s, starts many sentences with, “So basically,” in the manner of someone whose job often involves translating technical terms. “So basically,” he said, as we watched the vehicles work amid a thin cloud of ash, “the truck comes up, dumps it out, they spread it out, stockpile it, and then load these trucks to go out to the different landfills.”

According to Lefever, “troubled” is not the only misnomer attached to his place of work. The incinerator is also not technically an incinerator. Covanta Energy, its operator, prefers the term “EfW,” for “Energy-from-Waste,” although the amount of stock you put into this distinction probably says something about your industry. The Harrisburg incinerator achieves the “E” in “EfW” by using the heat from its burners to produce steam, which, in turn, powers a turbine, producing electricity. Nonetheless, some environmentalists have condemned incineration as a wasteful and hazardous method of dealing with trash.

Reconciling the claims of energy companies and their watchdogs can be an exercise in futility. Covanta’s website refers to EfW electricity as “clean, renewable energy,” relying on a definition of “renewable” as “derived from natural processes that are replenished constantly.” But a fact sheet from GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, contests this pretty much absolutely. “Municipal waste,” GAIA says, “is non-renewable, consisting of discarded materials such as paper, plastic and glass that are derived from finite natural resources such as forests that are being depleted at unsustainable rates.”

Tours of the incinerator start in a squat, brick outbuilding, where a colorful graphic mounted on the wall of a conference room provides an overview of the facility’s moving parts. We stood in front of the graphic for about 40 minutes while I tried to picture the combustion process Lefever was describing within the abstract boundaries of a line drawing. Then we put on hard hats and safety vests and headed for the entrance.

People like Lefever often refer to “feeding” the incinerator, and the first stage in the long meal occurs on what’s known as the tipping floor, where garbage trucks pull up one at a time and “tip” their cargo out onto a cement bay. As we approached, a short line of trucks curled back from the entrance, waiting their turn. Inside, the floor was loud with the grumble of diesel engines and the warning peals of heavy machinery going in reverse. It smelled like wet garbage, but not in an oppressive way. “It gets better over the winter,” Lefever said. We watched as a large hauler backed up and tipped its load. As it drove forward, a block of dripping waste slid out, in the exact shape of its container. Then it settled, its edges melting away, until it was just another pile of trash.

The price the haulers pay to deposit their waste is known as a tipping fee, and it’s the primary source of income for the facility. It’s also the subject of a fair amount of controversy. Different municipalities are charged different rates, for reasons having to do both with volumes of trash and other, more political considerations. Historically, Dauphin County’s fees have been drastically lower than the city’s; last summer, the city’s fee was $200 per ton, while the county’s was $77. Under the terms of the sale to LCSWMA, the fees will gradually become more equitable over the next couple of decades, until both the city and county are paying $115. But, in the short term, the city’s fee will remain much higher.

Preserving the disparity is one of the less savory requirements of the state-appointed receiver’s recovery plan for the city. Higher fees mean more revenue for LCSWMA, which, in turn, translates to a higher sale price for the facility. The receiver’s team viewed the higher sale price as critical, because the proceeds will help pay down the incinerator debt, but many residents are still unhappy about it.

In addition to paying more to dump, the city will also be contractually obliged to deliver 35,000 tons of waste to the incinerator each year. Many residents aren’t particularly happy about this, either. But if trash is the facility’s food, then the burners, like teenagers, need to be constantly eating. If there isn’t sufficient trash to keep the fires burning, they must be restarted with gas, at cost to the owners. The demand for trash is so great, in fact, that Lefever must occasionally bid for waste from outside municipalities. (In the olden days, he said, some incinerators may have even accepted trash for free, because “they were making a god-awful amount on their electric side.”)

From the tipping floor, we headed to the control room, where a shift supervisor named Troy was watching a set of big-screen monitors. “So if this was MTV Cribs, you remember that show?” Lefever said. “Well, this is where the magic happens.”

From this station, Troy could keep an eye on temperature levels, burn rate, flame height, steam output and just about everything that happens to the trash once it enters the burners. Some screens showed color-coded blueprints of the equipment, spotted with lines of data, and some provided live camera feeds from inside the facility. On one feed, lead-colored ash trundled along on a conveyor belt. On others, unbelievably, you could watch the garbage actually burning. Tiny fisheye lenses, cooled by constant air streams, provided the images: ghostly orange-and-black blurs, smoldering at temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees.

Troy, like Lefever, spoke in industrial shorthand. (“So here’s your pit, crane operator feeds grapples in here, trash goes down the chute, and here you got feed rams that are pushing your fuel off, you know…”) They talked about “wet stuff,” meaning moist, slow-burning trash, which produces dark spots in the flames on the video feed. Whoever is manning the control room must monitor the amount of wet stuff in each burner, in order to ensure a well-paced, thorough burn. “If your fuel would be a consistently steady fuel,” Troy said, “you wouldn’t have to do much. But trash is trash. One load comes in, it’s all paper, and the next load comes in, and it’s restaurant waste. You got a constant different waste stream.”

From the control room, we headed out to observe the crane operator, who spends the day plucking up trash from the tipping floor and feeding it to the burner.

He was sitting inside a glass box, manipulating an enormous grappling claw. Essentially, his job is to manipulate a smelly, 70-foot tall teddy picker. He dropped the claw, closed it around a massive clump of trash, and then hoisted it to one of the chutes and let it spill. Occasionally, rather than empty his claw into a chute, he’ll unload it on one of his stockpiles along the edges of the floor. The stockpiles keep the tipping floor clear for incoming trucks, but they also allow for the mixing of wet and dry waste to achieve a more consistent burn.

We passed back along a catwalk between the boilers and stepped outside. Lefever pointed out the baghouses: big, funnel-shaped filters that strip particulates from emissions en route to the smokestack. The effectiveness of these filters is something environmentalists also question, although the state Department of Environmental Protection, which monitors the facility’s emissions, has issued few violations, and the ones it has have been minor. “Really, you don’t see anything coming out of the stack,” he said. “It’s all being captured.”

I looked up. The stack seemed to be emitting nothing more than little white wisps of cloud.

—

The things that have troubled the incinerator in recent years have afflicted it almost from the beginning. In September 1966, City Council approved a project that, at the time, was projected to cost $4.5 million. By the time the facility came online, five years later, that cost had nearly tripled. After repeated breakdowns, it nearly tripled again.

Then, as now, the incinerator became a measure of the office of the mayor: both the scale of its ambitions and its command of city finances. Paul Beers, surveying the facility’s early history in several columns for the Patriot, recalled that Mayor Al Straub called it “the Rolls-Royce of incinerators” in 1969. But his successor, Harold Swenson, condemned it as “a facility that far exceeds our needs and our ability to pay.”

And then, as now, the trouble came mostly from two quarters: the difficulty of securing a sufficient waste stream and the need for its technology, never quite ready for prime time, to comply with environmental regulations. Beers reported that, in order to pay for itself, the incinerator needed to run at 85 percent of its capacity. It routinely ran at 60 percent. Neighboring municipalities, Beers wrote, could not be cajoled into committing to the city’s project.

In addition, the incinerator was continually plagued with mechanical problems. In 1978, it caught fire. In 1979, there was a cave-in, the aftermath of which, Beers wrote, “epitomized all the comedy and tragedy” of the facility. Its manager, Jack Karper, “hurriedly rescued the garbage reserve so there would be trash to feed the flames and make steam…Explained a jubilant Karper, ‘Thank God we saved the garbage. It represents dollars.’”

In 1984, after years of regulatory violations—mostly over where the city was storing waste after burning it—Mayor Stephen Reed corralled the operation under a newly minted “Department of Incineration and Steam Generation.” Some improvements were made, including the addition of a new steam line, but the compliance issues persisted. In 1985, an inspection revealed the city was burning a greater-than-allowable quantity of sewer sludge. In 1988, a succession of tests on the smokestack discovered emissions violations, and ash repeatedly escaped the site and landed on private property. Eventually, the city reached a consent agreement with the state Department of Environmental Resources and completed major capital repairs in 1990 and 1991.

In 1993, Reed engineered a sale of the facility to the Harrisburg Authority. The deal ushered in what you might charitably call an era of creative financing. The “sale,” to an authority of the city’s own making, drew revenues to the city of around $27 million, and, at the same time, saddled the incinerator with an additional $34 million in debt—the acquisition price, plus $7 million in bonds for capital improvements. In other words, the incinerator acquired substantial debt that had nothing to do with expanding its operations, ensuring its regulatory compliance or improving its equipment. The pattern would be repeated throughout the 1990s, until the debt load had climbed to nearly $100 million.

2003 was something of a watershed year. Dauphin County had pledged its waste stream to the incinerator, promising revenues that might have been sufficient to pay its bills, except that the federal Clean Air Act threatened to sharply limit the facility’s capacity. The city faced a choice. It either could shut down the operation, assuming its debt, or it could borrow once more to retrofit the incinerator and increase its capacity, with the hopes of generating enough revenue to cover the cost. The city opted for the retrofit.

City officials, for several years prior, had been eyeing a potential contractor that could upgrade the facility at the lowest possible price. The contractor, Barlow Projects, had installed a burner in Perham, Minn., using “churn-and-burn” technology that used forced air to circulate the waste, rather than moving grates, which were constantly breaking down in the Harrisburg facility. The Perham installation’s capacity was 50 to 100 tons per day—far short of the 800 tons the city required. Nonetheless, Barlow concluded it could complete the retrofit. The upgraded incinerator, in Barlow’s projection, would produce a cash surplus of $57 million by 2028.

Barlow, though, did not complete the project on time or on budget, and ultimately the firm was fired. The company’s projections of a cash surplus relied on dubious assumptions about electricity prices and interest rates, not to mention its own construction costs. A forensic audit, commissioned by the Harrisburg Authority and completed in 2012, pointedly questioned why Barlow was even allowed to submit a financial analysis of its own project—which, furthermore, was not subject to a public bid. The decision “to allow Barlow to certify the feasibility of its technical approach, to estimate the project’s cost and purported financial benefit, and then to obtain the contracts to actually conduct the work, appears questionable at best,” the audit says. “There are no indications that the City, the Authority or their advisors identified the conflict or potential problems.”

But the city, the authority and its advisors, following the pattern set by the 1993 sale, were far past the point of measuring debt against any future capacity to pay. Like the incinerator, which fed new trash to old trash to produce electricity, they were issuing new debt to pay for old debt. By the time Covanta was hired to finish the project, the facility’s debt totaled $280 million. The authority could no longer service it, and the city, which had promised to pay in its place, was on the hook.

—

The trick of municipal finance—in a sense, the trick of finance generally—is how to make something out of nothing. A city wants to build an incinerator, but it has no money. What should it do?

If the city were like me, and followed the advice of my old boss (“stay out of debt, kid”), it would sock away a little bit of each year’s revenues until it had enough for an incinerator. The problem with this method is that it would lead to the building of exactly zero incinerators.

An alternative is to borrow now and pay the bill later. The favored tool of municipal borrowing is the bond issue. A bond is a promise to pay, and in the case of a capital project like an incinerator, it comes with a certain built-in elegance: the promise sows the seeds of its own fulfillment. The debt builds the thing that earns the revenue to pay the debt. Between the tipping fees and the electricity sales, the incinerator should be able to pay all of its workers and still have enough left over to pay back what’s been borrowed. The city comes away owing nothing, and, in the meantime, careers have been made, families supported, kids sent to college, and everyone has avoided being drowned in garbage.

The term for debt that can be paid back with user rates is “self-liquidating.” When a local government classifies debt as self-liquidating, it’s essentially reassuring taxpayers that their taxes will never be raised to cover the debt, because the project will pay for itself. It’s important for governments to make this classification, because state law imposes strict limits on how much a municipality can borrow, based on its revenues. Self-liquidating debt doesn’t count against the limit, which frees up the municipality to borrow for other projects.

In Pennsylvania, the entity charged with watching the taxpayers’ back in the municipal borrowing process is the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED). When a local government wants to issue new debt, it must submit a five-page statement to DCED tallying its various outstanding obligations. The third page of this statement, known as an 8110(b) certificate, requires the government unit to sign off on a one-sentence pledge that says, in essence, that any debt that was classified as self-liquidating in the past is still self-liquidating. A government that gives this assurance is said to have filed a “clean” 8110(b).

On Oct. 4, 2012, the Pennsylvania Senate held the first of two hearings to try to determine what, exactly, had gone wrong in Harrisburg. In a period lasting just under 20 years, the debt load on an incinerator that the city had bought for $27 million had ballooned to nearly $350 million. Huge portions of the borrowings were used to refinance prior debt and generate “working capital,” to cover the costs of operation. A remarkably small portion of the debt went towards actual improvements on the facility, which should have been an indication the project had ceased to pay for itself. Yet each time it borrowed, the city filed a clean 8110(b).

One question for the legislators was how the city was permitted to keep classifying the incinerator debt as self-liquidating. Steve Goldfield, a financial advisor to the state-appointed receiver who contributed to the forensic audit, raised this question during the hearing. In addition, he asked, if the debt didn’t go towards improvements, what was it spent on?

Goldfield’s testimony lasted two hours. After Goldfield, the senators listened to representatives from DCED, to former board members of the Harrisburg Authority, to former Mayor Reed, and to a handful of lawyers and financial advisors, among others. Most of those involved at the time of the borrowings came supplied with reasons why they weren’t to blame. DCED was desperately short-staffed and could rarely give more than a cursory review to the assurances made by local officials. Local officials relied on the advice of professionals, not being qualified themselves to assess technical projects. The professionals, for the most part, fobbed off culpability onto other professionals.

Goldfield, in his testimony, was careful to point out the many factors outside the city’s control. Revenues for an incinerator project were particularly volatile: there was the unpredictability of electricity prices, the unreliable flow of trash, the need to comply with environmental regulations. But Goldfield also described the disturbing pattern that emerged with each new bond issue. Harrisburg wasn’t just borrowing to fix the incinerator; it was using the construction project as a back door to extra debt above its limit.

Each time the Harrisburg Authority issued new debt, it sought guarantees from Harrisburg and from Dauphin County, and in most instances, the guarantees were provided. There’s nothing irregular about guarantees in and of themselves. Municipal bonds, like any other form of debt, have interest rates tied to the amount of risk the bondholder assumes in purchasing them. To reduce the amount of risk, and therefore the interest rate, the borrowing entity can seek a guarantee from a municipality, which pledges to pay bondholders in the event of default.

But the city and the county also charged the authority fees for those guarantees, in the several millions of dollars. In his testimony, Goldfield was quick to note the suspect nature of these charges, especially as applied by the city. In 23 years of working in municipal finance, he said, he had only seen one other instance of a municipality charging its own authority a fee for a bond guarantee.

In addition, there was something peculiar about the way the fee amount was calculated. “The guarantee fee, through serendipity or something else, matched the structural deficit in the city’s budget,” Goldfield said. In short, each time the authority issued new debt, the city sliced off a piece exactly large enough to fill a hole in the general fund.

It has occasionally been said that, under receiver William Lynch’s plan, various creditors and professionals will receive what they’re owed, while the city’s taxpayers receive nothing. Particularly in regards to the incinerator, this interpretation has some intuitive appeal. The facility, the thinking goes, was built with Harrisburg-taxpayer-backed borrowing, but now it will be sold to enrich the coffers of some other municipality.

The problem with this argument is that it skips over everything that taxpayers received under Reed. Tax revenues were insufficient to cover the budget, yet, for years, tax rates stayed low. This was true, in fact, for rates across the board, including water and sewer rates and fees for using public parks. Part of the reason there’s been so much grumbling lately is that prices that ought to have gone up gradually each year are now playing dramatic catch-up.

It’s one thing to be cheated and lied to, of course. The state attorney general has announced an investigation of whether any of Harrisburg’s officials or their advisors cheated or lied, and the receiver’s plan includes a hope for some civil claims from the professionals who escorted the city down a financial hole. But the borrowed money didn’t all just go to a few suits in city hall. Might some part of the deal reflect Harrisburg’s payment for two decades of willful ignorance?

—

A very small portion of the incinerator’s revenues has nothing to do with burners or electricity. It comes, instead, from scrap metal recovered from the waste. The ash, leaving the boilers on a conveyor belt, passes beneath a big, spinning magnet that sucks metal up from the stream and whisks it onto a mound of salvaged scrap.

Towards the end of my tour, Lefever led me up a ramp, to a point from which I could peer into a large cement box. The magnet, like a giant spool, revolved at the leisurely pace of a paddlewheel. Bed springs, chicken wire, coffee cans and oil pans piled up below, effaced to an identical smoky blue-gray.

We climbed some stairs to the room where the turbine, a dull nest of pipes and dials, sits underneath a high ceiling. It was about as large as a mid-sized Winnebago. I was struck, again, with a sense of disbelief: how could such an extraordinary amount of debt be saddling a facility that was, in physical scope, so comprehensible?

Outside, we pulled out our earplugs and shed our safety jackets and hats. On the perimeter of the facility are a couple of capped landfills. They used to be more of an eyesore (“I think people were calling it ‘Mount Ashmore,’” Lefever said), so they seeded them with temporary grass covers. Now they look like ancient burial mounds—hills too square-shaped to be naturally occurring.

We walked to the active part of the landfill. Between the boilers and the ash heap is a span of city garages and, beside them, a lot that amounts to a graveyard for retired city vehicles. We passed some garbage trucks, still in use, and an outmoded fire truck, long abandoned. At the end of a gravel road, a truck was depositing a load of new ash, water-soaked for cooling purposes, and spreading it out to dry. It will remain there a while, picked at by scavengers. Then haulers will come and take it away, and it will cease to be Harrisburg’s concern.

Tag Archives: Patriot-News

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