I have come to the interesting conclusion that no one — the public, the state, no Harrisburg city or state official — knows how much debt Steve Reed ran up in his tenure as mayor of Harrisburg.
What we should be doing is telling our readers just what the bottom line debt is — and no one seems to know.
In other words, as far as I can tell, no one has a handle on the total indebtedness of the City of Harrisburg. I also believe it is in no public official’s interest to break this troubling news to members of the public.
This is not only about the debt. Harrisburg’s public got into this mess precisely because they were left in the dark, and out of the loop. This bad practice of intentionally leaving the public and the taxpayers in the dark continues to this day.
It is not only about debt incurred with bond issues, I’ve learned. Mayor Steve Reed, it seems, attempted to leverage and borrow on just about anything that was and wasn’t nailed down. He sought loans on the ground UNDER buildings. He attempted to sell things like tax liens to third parties — at great disadvantage to taxpayers over time, but with the advantage to Reed of receiving temporary cash flow.
All this becomes important not only to our overall story, but also our attempt to figure out the mess Harrisburg is in — as well as the personality of Steve Reed.
In the book Catch-22, Joseph Heller writes of First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, and his Milo Enterprises, which sold and borrowed just about every piece of equipment and property he could get his hands on. Is that what we have with Mayor Reed? It is the reasonable question.
