Mayor Papenfuse Embraces Democracy

In a stunning departure from his past positions, Mayor Eric Papenfuse has professed support for elected politicians controlling public purse strings. Could the little oligarch’s puppet be a closet democrat?

The remark came amidst the mayor’s rant against the Civil War Museum, an entity he views as unfairly benefitting from city largesse. Of the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau, he said, "It's just wrong to have millions of dollars in city assets controlled by an unelected group of self-appointed board members with no real connection to Harrisburg.”

That position is radically different than the one Citizen Papenfuse embraced when he advocated for a Midtown Improvement District (MID) to bankroll additional security in Midtown (around his business) after a well-publicized robbery.

The MID would have come into existence had the matter been placed on a ballot sent to all property owners within the District’s proposed borders. Unless 40% of property owners had voted 'no', the District would have been established with the right to levy assessments against area residents. So in the spirit of representative democracy, property owners who failed to vote would have been counted as ‘yes’ votes. The MID would have been run by an unelected board with discretion to spend the funds as they saw fit. The MID effort died on the vine before reaching fruition.

All of that is now in the past though. Since becoming an elected official, Mayor Papenfuse now sees the wisdom of leaving public spending to elected officials. What an epiphany.)

More Museums are the Answer

If, as the saying goes, government decides who gets what and how much, Mayor Papenfuse is getting the hang of being a politician, not a good one, but a politician nevertheless. Fresh from bungling the Fourth of July and presenting the school board with tax abatement figures that don’t add up, he has aligned his crosshairs on the Civil War Museum.

He claims the museum does not benefit the city and has asked the Dauphin County Board of Commissioners to stop funding it with dollars earmarked for promoting Harrisburg tourism. The Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau receives one quarter of one percent of the hotel tax to promote area tourism. Most of that money goes to the Civil War Museum under an agreement negotiated by Stephen Reed before he left office.

The Mayor notes that the Civil War Museum’s lease agreement states that it should “endeavor to operate as a self-sustaining enterprise” and he appears poised to push the fledgling out of the nest to see if it can fly. In its place, the Mayor’s spokesperson, Joyce Davis (no relation), proposes marketing the Fourth of July (we’ve seen how well that worked), Kipona, and summer enrichment programs for kids. Even if the administration actually informed people where the events were, Fourth of July and Kipona have never been big revenue generators. I’m skeptical that summer enrichment programs will help much either. Some grand plan is clearly needed.

Before jettisoning any particular museum, the Mayor should understand some basic museum economics. Single museums often do not fare well. However, cities that have clusters of museums tend to see a symbiotic effect. The new Susquehanna Art Museum on North Third Street presumably will be completed at some point. Downtown has the State Museum and the Whitaker Center for the Arts so another museum between downtown and the Civil War Museum’s Reservoir Park location could help link them. I’m not arguing for us to buy back Annie Oakley’s underwear. We are well rid of Stephen Reed and his cowboy fetishes.

No, we should build museums that reflect Central Pennsylvania culture and nothing says Harrisburg like crooked politicians. So let’s build a Political Corruption Museum. Some may say the Capitol Building already serves that purpose. Three times more tax payer money changed hands than should have when it was built in the early 20th Century and five people went to jail for graft as a result.

Recently, the brass plaques beneath the portraits of three former Speakers of the House and one past Senate president pro tempore hanging in the capitol building have been altered to include their criminal convictions for corruption.

So put all the museums on a grand tour and keep expanding it. I’m thinking a Scrapple Museum at the Broad Street Market with a stop off at that tourist magnet, The Midtown Scholar, could bridge the gap between the Susquehanna Art Museum and downtown. A trolley car could serve double duty by ferrying visitors along the museum route without forcing them to pay the parking fees Standard Parking charges.

The New American Oligarchy

Over drinks a few weeks ago, a friend of mine said, “Once you accept that America is an oligarchy, life is easier.” The statement hit me harder than the drinks --a Howard Beale moment of sorts. Over the next few weeks the evidence in favor of my friend’s statement mounted. The Supreme Court opened the door to corporate personhood ruling that closely held corporations can have religious beliefs (Not sure how that works on Judgment Day. Can God send a person to heaven and the Sub-chapter S corporation to which he or she belongs to hell?).

My egalitarian delusions crashed completely when I read that Amazon has won the rights to operate the cloud computing system for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Reminiscent of Mr. Jensen’s sermon, Amazon promises bureaucratic peace through shared data. The turf wars that led to intelligence failures will be morph into a new pax intelligentsia marked by enhanced data sharing and perfectly scalable harmony. Yes, it will be a digital Age of Aquarius where our best and brightest can stop fighting amongst themselves and concentrate on real and imagined terrorists not in government service.

That’s right, the company that wanted to deliver your books via drones now operates the CIA computers. Amazon outbid Microsoft, IBM and others to get rights to build the intellicloud. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, also recently purchased the Washington Post. After all you’re no one in the oligarch set if you don’t have your own media outlet.

Currently, Amazon’s omnivorous algotrithms digest and redigest its ever-growing sales data in hopes of making the company a smarter seller. Fair enough, that’s business. Now those same people will be building the intellicloud. NSA analysts will likely pull up a file on a given terrorist complete with a pop-up window that says, “Analysts who studied this terrorist also looked at weapons of mass destruction and dirty bombs.” Perhaps the program will rank each terrorist according to the number of analyst hits in each category something like “Hassan al-birkabommer ranks #2 out 102,640 jihadists.”

Remember the brouhaha when the Bush Administration attempted to obtain book sale and library data in the wake of 9/11? How hard do you think it will be now? Will there be a firewall between the Amazon cloud and the intellicloud when the same people are working on both? How would we know? Who is watching the oligarchs?

Inside the Papenfuse Echo Chamber

On July 4^th, a line of traffic stopped in the eastbound land of the Harvey Taylor Bridge to watch the fireworks from City Island. They were in for a long wait. As part of its ‘rebranding’ of the city, the Papenfuse administration had expanded the Independence Day festivities to include two other locations, Reservoir Park and Italian Lake. In the process, the City Island fireworks were moved to the 5^th to coincide with a Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra riverfront concert. The problem, of course, was that many people did not get the memo, or in this case, the tweet.

City of Harrisburg Communications Director, Joyce Davis (no relation), explained the city’s publicity campaign in an online forum on PennLive.com. The city sent out a bulk mailing detailing the changes, but many appeared to have arrived after the event. Davis also claimed notices were enclosed in city water bills, but no one has found such a notice yet. Perhaps it will be in next month’s bill. Finally, Davis claimed that she tweeted news about the event to 1,000 or so followers, but sent a minimal number of tweets rather than multiple posts. The tweets directed tweetees to the city’s Facebook pages, the city’s main page and “Stay and Play Harrisburg”.

The Independence Day celebrations traditionally have attracted many from surrounding communities to come into the city. They, clearly, would not have been reached through the city water bill stuffers even if those notices did in fact exist. Inexplicably, many West Shore residents do not rise each day and perform a twitter search for “Harrisburg”, “Stay and Play Harrisburg”, or “City Island Fireworks”. If they are not part of the city’s rabid 1,000 twitter followers, they could have completely missed the great fireworks tweet amid the torrent of 140 character missives that flood the twitosphere. Clearly, these folks should have retroactively followed the directions they received in the direct mail flyer that arrived a week after the event.

Like spawning salmon, many city and suburban residents attend Independence Day fireworks out of instinct to “ooooh” and “aaaah” at the night sky. Perhaps no one can fault the Administration for moving the event to the 5^th to cut costs. Although in fairness, the Thompson Administration always found corporate sponsors to fund the fireworks and this one has not.

Papenfuse’s minions were quick to point out that the election was held in November and they did not take office until January. Clearly, they had other more pressing issues than fireworks. Fair enough, but raising corporate donations was no problem for the Papenfuse campaign when it raised more that $330,000. Perhaps the same effort on behalf of city’s image that many of those donors wish to burnish would be appropriate.

Don't Take the Tax Abate

Mayor Eric Papenfuse has leaked his tax abatement proposal to the Harrisburg Patriot and other media outlets. Although, the amount of tap dancing coming from city hall suggests this was not a planned leak. The proposal calls for a 10-year tax abatement on improvements made to vacant lots and existing structures.  The new administration gets points for persistence, not for originality.

The mayor apparently never heard the old saw that trying the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result is insanity. Or has he? At heart, I don’t like disparage people, so I’ll assume this administration doesn’t really believe that this round of tax abatements will produce anything other than the real estate carnage the previous abatements have. I’m much more comfortable being a cynic. So let’s assume someone is benefitting from this failed policy maybe, say, um…real estate developers?

Tax abatements benefit developers and few others. Because they shift the tax burden to existing homeowners, abatements depress existing home values by making the tax-abated properties more attractive. The developers, however, take blighted properties, raise the value of the properties they develop while paying below market taxes, and then sell the properties at a higher value. The buyer gets a new property and a ticking tax bomb with a timer set at ten years.

Harrisburg has been through this before. The Capitol Heights development offered ten-year phased-in tax abatements. The homeowners paid 10% of the property tax the first year, 20% the second and so on. As the tax bite escalated, so did the foreclosures.

Exacerbating the situation is Dauphin County’s tax assessment process. New homes are assessed at current market rates while older homes hold values from the year the last assessment was performed. State law only permits a county-wide reassessment. Obviously, those with older assessments are anxious to hang on to the lower figures as the new buyers are saddled with higher assessments, and when the abatements abate, disproportionately higher tax bills. In at least two cases, it has taken court orders to compel counties to reassess their properties.

Struever Brothers, Eccles and Rouse, the Capital Heights developers built the properties and sold them. They kept the profits from the sales and paid virtually no property tax on the properties while they owned them. Now, other developers including J. Alex Hartzler, whose Harrisburg Capital PAC donated $103,147 to Papenfuse’s campaign, are lining up for more public money seemingly unconcerned or willfully ignorant of Harrisburg’s tax abatement track record. One of my sources quotes Mr.Hartzler as claiming to know nothing of the Capital Heights foreclosures.

Hartzler and other abatement plan proponents point to similar programs in New York and Philadelphia. Hartzler is dismissive of those who try to make the common sense argument that Harrisburg is not Philadelphia. In a tweet on June 19, he stated “economics and math are not subject to geographical or political boundaries. ‘HBG is not Philly’ demonstrates ignorance of both.” Hartzler’s argument discounts both the amount of untaxable property within Harrisburg and the assessment issue outlined above. Philadelphia is its own county and Harrisburg is a part of Dauphin County.  A county-wide reassessment is far more likely in Philadelphia than Harrisburg. In fact, Philadelphia began its reassessment process last year. Philadelphia also has several programs of assistance to senior citizen and low-income residents. The report calling for the Philadelphia abatement plan cites local economic conditions such as high construction costs versus relatively low median income as justification for the abatement program. While Harrisburg does have a relatively low median income, its construction costs are nowhere near those of Philadelphia. For more reasons than scale, Philadelphia is a very different animal than Harrisburg.

Raising the city’s minimum wage would raise the median income, but that would not benefit those who finance mayoral campaigns.  So I can guess its likelihood of passing.

Again, I do not wish to think ill of Mr. Hartzler. He could not possibly be as stupid as his tweets suggest.

Craven images

There's much craziness coming out of Oklahoma these days. Seems the Governor can't control her batty daughter who insists on insulting that state's Native American people with feathery fake headgear and offensive fake ceremonial dances. Hell, she can't control her corrections department either if the recent botched execution is any measure (Note to the Guv - executions aren't executions if the condemned dies from a heart attack.) 

Come to think of it, she's having trouble controlling something as simple as what statuary belongs in the state house. Seems a state rep paid for and donated a statue of the Ten Commandments for installation in the capitol building. Now, constitutional scholars know that if you open the door for one religion, you open it for all. Enter a group of civic minded Satanists. They've raised enough money for a Baphomet figure, hired an artist and come up with the mold. Soon it will be bronzed and ready for installation. I guess they figure it will look swell next to those Ten Commandments.

Oh, they have a website, naturally.

Talk about polarization. 

Dumbest Cop I Ever Knew

I traveled to Savannah, Georgia recently to visit some friends. It’s a truly beautiful city, and I had a great time, but the politics down there is Flannery O’Connor meets Franz Kafka these days.  Governor Deal, a name straight out of Dickens, signed the nation’s most permissive (or aggressive) gun law recently. Peach state residents can now pack heat when they go to bars or churches. Apparently, Georgia legislators think it’s a good idea to escalate barroom brawls to saloon shootouts.

While the gun law is interesting, another legislative marvel caught my eye down there. A driver who impedes another vehicle by moving too slowly is now breaking the law. This is where it gets weird.

I grew up in the small town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania population at the time about 18,000 and plummeting. One day in the early 80s a cow got loose from a local farm and wandered into town. A town cop, Officer Kaiser, was dispatched to corral the wayward bovine. He located the cow, unholstered his weapon, and called out “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Not surprisingly, the cow did not heed the warning and Officer Kaiser blew away the cow in a stunning piece of police work.

A few weeks later, Officer Kaiser stopped in for a coffee break at a restaurant I frequented. As the caffeine kicked in, he pontificated. “If a car is going the speed limit, it is denying me my right to drive the speed I want to drive.” The irony of a policeman arguing he had a right to break the law was lost on “the dumbest cop I ever knew.” Little did I imagine that thirty years later enough people to constitute a legislative majority would think such a concept would make a good law.

Traveling

I’m blogging from a small restaurant in Willow Hill, just off the Turnpike in Path Valley. Franklin County. Although I’ve worked as a reporter in Harrisburg for many years, I grew up in Franklin County near Chambersburg. Either for work or pleasure, I’ve traveled to many of Pennsylvania’s small towns. They often fill me with a nameless  dread.

Those dark Pennsylvania mountains we see in Harrisburg from our perch on the piedmont, epitomize the boom and bust cycles of a state so tied to its mineral wealth. Because so much of life along these ridges is lived in the present, education and other foundations for the future are given little emphasis. You’ve gotta work that coal vein while it is there. Tomorrow it may be gone. Little changes in those hills.

At the end of the Great Gatsby, the narrator, Carraway, speaks of the America where “the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.” But Carraway, like Fitzgerald, was a Midwesterner, a flatlander. His dark fields outran the light. He no doubt never wandered the Appalachian valleys where a cloying brand of darkness roams the ridges with a presence so palpable it almost creates its own gravity.

As I sit here in Path Valley, I recall a conversation I once had with a local historian. He noted that the crest of Sidling Hill, the mountain forming Path Valley’s eastern border was the Proclamation Line of 1763. As part of the peace treaty ending the French and Indian War, the English King agreed to keep English settlers east of that line to avoid provoking the French and their allies. Ten English families had already settled in Path Valley and were evacuated by English soldiers enforcing the treaty. He noted that nine of the ten names were still common names in the valley. The darkness pulled them in and has held them here for two hundred and fifty years.

Harrisburg - Theater of the Absurd?

Sometimes, one needs comic relief. Today is such a day. It helps if one simply accepts - at least for a few moments - that Harrisburg is the Theater of the Absurd. What else would explain the on-again, off-again efforts to rehabilitate the Broad Street Market? Like so much about Harrisburg development/redevelopment, this effort represents a one step forward, two steps back approach. Plans are paid for and made, only to be blocked for unexplained reasons. Litigation ensues, mainly to the benefit of the lawyers. And the cultural treasure and source of fresh food in a food desert downtown with no major full-service grocery store within walking distance of thousands of residents (many without transportation) continues to deteriorate.

But, hey, developers are busy creating a playground for the new hip inhabitants who drive to Wegman's for their groceries from their KOZ tax-free rental apartments or tax abated renovated homes, leaving long-term renters without valuable housing stock and long-term owners shouldering an increasing tax burden for the municipal services newcomers and old-timers alike use. To top it off, developers like Alex Hartzler use their newly purchased paper and mayor to further their agenda and criticize anyone who doesn't march lock-step to their tune as elitist/privileged voices to be ignored. It's ironic, given that the elitist/privileged are the developers themselves whose skin-in-the-game represents a tiny fraction of the skin older long-time homeowners have in said game as a percentage of total net worth. Me thinks there's a lot of projection at work.

Is it Journalism if all that counts is speed to publication?

Here I thought that my employer (Babylon Media) was pushing the envelope when they required us beat reporters to post to the Tribune's official reporter blog page three times a week. Turns out, there are other media companies (can't call them newspaper companies anymore) that have even more draconian rules in place for reporters.

Consider Advance Publications, which runs the Oregonian out on the West Coast (and coincidentally also owns the Patriot News and Pennlive.com). Word has leaked out that now their reporters' evaluations will be measured largely by how much of their work is online as opposed to print, and  according to the leaked PowerPoint slides, 75% of a reporter's evaluation is based on online work.

Willamette Week, an alternative weekly, broke the story, writing that:

"The new policy, shown to the editorial staff in a PowerPoint presentation in late February, provides that as much as 75 percent of reporters’ job performance will be based on measurable web-based metrics, including how often they post to Oregonlive.com.

Beat reporters will be expected to post at least three times a day, and all reporters are expected to increase their average number of posts by 40 percent over the next year."

Did you get that, my friends? And it gets better. Again, according to the paper that broke the story, it gets worse. Reporters aren't just supposed to report the news and get it online, but they are supposed to badger their readers into making comments in the commentary sections. As in "“On any post of substance, reporter will post the first comment,” the policy says. “Beat reporters [are to] solicit ideas and feedback through posts, polls and comments on a daily basis.”

Oh, and reported will earn bonuses for meeting these new metrics. 

Reporters are no longer reporting the news, they are instigating it, commenting on it and pushing readers to comment. This won't end well. 

Want more? Email me and I will send you the Power Points describing this brave new world of journalism. Meanwhile, below is a sample of the kind of engagement they expect from their reporters. Now, I'd better go post some tripe on my official blog. On second thought, it's Shady McGrady time.

Lazy Journalism, Government salaries

What's the deal with the competing paper in town? Have they gone all soft? Can't they sniff out a story anymore? Seems like some of the reporters are too glued to their electronic screens to bother actually doing some investigation. Take today's reader quiz - asking folks to guess how many public servants made more than 100 grand last year - as if that number is any secret - and then teasing with tomorrow's supposed big story about who's making the big bucks in state government.

Hello! There's a data base for that, courtesy of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and it's aptly named information service, PennWATCH. A reporter doesn't even have to leave his or her desk to find out what so-and-so's supposed mistress over at the Office of General Counsel makes. Oh, wait. A real reporter has to actually find out who that mistress is - the old fashioned way - before typing her name in the database. Maybe hang out down at Shady's and talk to a few folks at the bar for that kind of info. Just sayin....

New Age Comes to Midtown

Oh joy, there goes the neighborhood. We can't have a new convenience store where this reporter can get his beloved smokes and pork rinds, but New Age is in - as in a brand new 'spa and full service salon' specializing in nonsense like aromatherapy and natural healing. That's what's going in where Breads and Spreads was located on Third Street until it closed a few years ago. 

Officially, it will be called Emma's on 3rd. That sounds innocuous enough until you research further and discover it will be run by one Emma Newman, an "Ordained Minister, Certified Holistic Health Practitioner, healer, teacher, business mentor and spiritual advisor." The lady also is the founder of "The Appalachian Institute of Awakening."  

God save us from pseudo-religion and pseudo-science. According to her website, Emma has amazing abilities as she "completes the circle of body, mind and spirit work offering anointing with sacred oils, and laying on of hands." Want to learn more? Here's her website - http://www.emmascenter.com/about_us  

Is the Enlightenment coming to an end?

You can't buy city hall?

We all knew when Harrisburg sold off most of its assets that there would be budget problems. With a new sheriff in town, there were also bound to be personnel changes - maybe even new or reconstituted positions. And the money to fund those has to come from somewhere.

What no one knew was that one of those "somewheres" would be a group of businesses that stand to profit from development in the city. That's right, one of Mayor Papenfuse's right hand aides will have her salary paid for by business donations funneled through the Capital Region Economic Development Corporation (CREDC). And CREDC plans on raising the money through donations from the business community. Already onboard are entities like Capital Blue Cross, PPL,  Alexander Building Construction and a host of other companies that stand to gain from economic development. Funding is contingent on a specific individual holding the job - former Lebanon Mayor Jackie Parker will become Harrisburg's economic development director.

Inquiring minds want to know whether it's legal to have an outside entity fund a city position. Or is this akin to putting the fox in the henhouse?

This is just one of many stories I am working on here in Harrisburg as the chickens come home to roost after the massive sell-off to pay off the ill-fated Incinerator debt.

A New Age for Harrisburg?

The first thing someone returning to Harrisburg after a few years' absence will notice is the caffeinated buzz.  Don't get me wrong - it's a good thing. Used to be, a tired reporter couldn't get a good cupa in this town unless he could afford dinner and an after meal espresso at Mangi Qui. Now, coffee is everywhere, courtesy of developers like Alex Hartzler and the apparent insatiable thirst for caffeine so common among Harrisburg's hipster continent. And good coffee it is, thanks to Little Amps' two locations. And let's not forget the new Mayor's coffee at the Midtown Scholar. 

But what price, this sudden infusion of caffeine? That's just one of the many stories this intrepid (and happily caffeinated) city reporter is working on.