On May 29, 2012, the Harrisburg Patriot-News published an article titled, “Harrisburg’s eye-popping debt total is just one piece of city’s bleak financial puzzle.”
Unfortunately, after 30 years of comfortable living with Harrisburg’s growing debt crisis, The Patriot-News still doesn’t have the entire debt story.
They write, “At best estimate … the amount of debt … stands somewhere north of $1.5 billion.” That’s not even an estimate, it’s a very wide guess. It’s also a a vague number that’s been kicked around by insiders for a year or more.
The newspaper doesn’t list which authorities owe what, to whom, and for what. In other words, it looks unfortunately like the paper did a quick job just to get something in print.
As we’ve been saying at NewsLanc in our ongoing series on Harrisburg debt, everyone should look at the total debt picture in Harrisburg (whatever that is), and view the incinerator not as the central problem, but as only a part of the problem.
The bigger story is the looming political crisis to clean up the entire mess, and not just sweep pieces of it under the carpet, like Gov. Corbett wants to do. We also wonder if other Pennsylvania cities now face similar problems, which must also be addressed by an unprepared or even complicate state government.
The story isn’t only the dollar amount of Harrisburg city debt (which will always be a moving target) but how, when and why the debt was accumulated.
This begs the larger question: why did overseers in places like the state Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) allow it to happen, and do these regulators now have a conflict of interest in overseeing the current fiasco in Harrisburg, and other places?
As many Harrisburg residents know, the Patriot-News from the 1980s onward was part of the problem, in that they never covered the growing problem well, if at all. For decades the public has been shut out, and kept in the dark.
Hopefully, in the weeks and months ahead, there will be many more Harrisburg debt stories from a growing number of publications. The more the merrier, we say.
We believe the public will be shocked as the entire story emerges. The public will then begin to understand why it has been kept in the dark for so long.
