David Unkovic in his own words: “What could be more important for an Attorney General of the state to do than to investigate how the financial condition of the state capital got ruined? Right?”
Last year Harrisburg Receiver David Unkovic did what few public officials in Pennsylvania have been willing to do in recent years: he called the cops.
In this previously unseen video, former Receiver Unkovic explains at length what led him to ask the state attorney general to investigate Harrisburg’s tangled finances.
If you’re confused by the current state of Harrisburg’s tangled bond debt, Unkovic, a bond attorney, wants you to know he was confused too. “Things were done in ways that are just hard to explain,” he says.
“Now, I show up, become a Receiver, and in talking to all the people in the city, they really have not been treated well over the years by their officials and by the public finance industry,” Unkovic remembers.
“I remember before I became a Receiver, around the time I was nominated, I went over to the Authority, the Harrisburg Authority, and asked them to put all the bond documents on the table for me. And I’m an old bond lawyer, so I can go through 10 feet of bond documents in an afternoon, you know, looking for specific stuff, and I did look at that ordinance that was enacted in 2007 for the city guaranty of the C and D notes, and I was reading the project description and it went on and on and on. I said, why is this project description so long? And then I get to the end and they define it all as one project.
“Defining a project as going from 1993 to 2007, it’s just illogical. There were multiple contractors, multiple boards, multiple administrations, (and) professionals. I mean, time had gone on; things had changed. … And saying all that was one project … I mean, I was just sort of dumbfounded.
“Well, that’s an absurd interpretation of the Debt Act, in my opinion. You might as well not have debt limits, if that’s what you’re saying, because that means as long as you think that the next debt that you’re going to issue is going to solve the problem, you can issue that debt. And if that doesn’t work, then issue more debt and think that that’s going to solve the problem.”
“There needs to be some fear of the law put into this statute to prevent people from going up to the line or over the line on some of these transactions.”
“Things were not done the right way here,” Unkovic says. “Things were done in ways that are just hard to explain. They’re even hard to explain to the people who have testified to you, because they point fingers at each other. It wasn’t me, it was him, or it was her. And I think in part that’s because they’re not comfortable with what happened. And some of them maybe should be a lot more uncomfortable than others that there will be an investigation of this, and I hope there will be.”
“I think it really comes down to the State Attorney General’s Office investigating the situation. What could be more important for an Attorney General of the State to do than to investigate how the financial condition of the state capital got ruined? Right? It really calls out,” the former receiver says.
What Unkovic has to say appears equally pertinent to the pending fast-and-loose bond deal involving the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Agency’s proposed $130 + million bid to buy the $50 million Harrisburg incinerator.
Readers wishing to learn more can watch the testimony, under oath, of all 17 witnesses before a state senate committee, by visiting this webpage and scrolling down to view the index.
