A series by Bill Keisling
The Harrisburg Authority’s forensic audit of its incinerator, by design, deals only with the last desperate attempts to pull a broken vehicle from the mud. It does not do much to explain how and why the vehicle veered off the road in the first place.
While the audit report spends a sentence or two on the history of the troubled incinerator going back to 1990, it is primary concerned with a period of time from 2000 to the present, when the outstanding debt of the incinerator ballooned from about $80 million to $300 million.
As such, the audit presents only a tantalizing if frantic snapshot of this past decade. This snapshot is only a piece of the larger puzzle, which began decades earlier, with the 1981 election of Harrisburg Mayor Steve Reed.
The audit documents the increasingly desperate attempts of Mayor Reed to get a broken incinerator online, and the increasingly diminished reserves of credit at his disposal to get the job done properly.
In the end, Mayor Reed was like a frantic and penniless mechanic of a broken getaway car who has badly underestimated the cost of a job, and who now must attempt to finish an all-important repair job with shoe string and gum.
Mayor Reed became like Han Solo of Star Wars fame, desperately trying to get away in his bucket of bolts Millennium Falcon before he is caught and put on ice by Jabba the Hutt.
The analogy is somewhat apt: Han Solo owed money to Jabba the Hutt.
Puckish Mayor Reed owed the bonding industry.
