Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Files for Bankruptcy, City Council’s Lawyer Says

The city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, facing a state takeover of its finances, filed for bankruptcy protection following a vote by City Council, according to a lawyer for the council.

Mark D. Schwartz, a Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-based lawyer and former head of municipal bonds for Prudential Financial Inc.’s mid-Atlantic region, said he filed the documents by fax to a federal bankruptcy court last night. The filing couldn’t be confirmed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Harrisburg.

The state capital of 49,500 faces a debt burden five times its general-fund budget because of an overhaul and expansion of a trash-to-energy incinerator that doesn’t generate enough revenue.

“This was a last resort,” Schwartz said in an interview after the council voted 4-3 to seek bankruptcy protection. “They’re at their wits end.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-12/harrisburg-city-council-votes-4-3-to-seek-bankruptcy-protection.html

After they and their teabagger Governor schemed to change state electoral college rules to ensure an Obama defeat?

the city, not the state.

my beautiful mountains; acres and acres and acres of public areas; preserved to hike and walk and hunt; will be sold, fenced and raped.

nt

The city of Harrisburg, Pa., is in trouble — big trouble. Like so many American homeowners, Harrisburg is underwater and deeply in debt with no easy or even clear way out.

And most of its financial troubles can be traced to the city’s incinerator.

Officially called the Harrisburg Resource Recovery Facility, the incinerator converts trash into power. But over the years what it's done best is burn cash.

"There's nothing in the industry that even reflects the kind of financial structure that this facility is in," says Jim Klecko, a regional vice president for Covanta Energy – the company under contract to operate the facility.

While many of the nation's incinerators are nearly paid off, the one in Harrisburg is roughly $300 million in the hole. It's the result of years of bad decisions and bad luck. Klecko says the facility is working better now than it ever has, even operating at a profit. That is, if the debt is not calculated in.

"If you ran at peak efficiency, 100 percent all of the time, just by pure volume, you couldn't process that much waste in a facility of this size to make their debt service," he says.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127865023

And you won't be happy until all of the PA Gamelands are sold off to the highest bidder and fences go up everywhere.

That's where this is headed - sell to pay the debt. Assholes.

Many other cities in Pennsylvania have been running multi-million dollar deficits for a couple years in a row, such as Reading, Allentown and Bethlehem. Bethlehem would really be in trouble if they didn't have a big influx in casino revenue.

However, the Harrisburg situation is much much worse because of the incredible amount of debt that the city's authority undertook to build and then rebuild a trash incinerator. Some of that debt was also guaranteed by the surrounding county.