Harrisburg Mayor Hopes Religious Fast Will Make Budget Deficit Go Away

[ensho]

http://www.businessinsider.com/harrisburg-mayor-hopes-citywide-prayer-fast-will-help-avoid-muni-bankruptcy-2011-6


Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson and the city's religious leaders wrapped up a three-day fast and prayer campaign today to help "fix" Harrisburg's daunting fiscal woes.

Amid the fast, the Harrisburg City Council passed a resolution asking the mayor to prepare documents to file for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection.

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Thompson told Reuters that she opposes the bankruptcy option approved by the Council. She added that the state "has to respect the publicly elected officials in this city.

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"Virtually every municipal official elected in the City of Harrisburg has taken an irresponsible position concerning the city's fiscal mess," State Senator Jeffrey Piccola, the bill's sponsor, said in a statement.

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see what happens when the religiously insane come into power

whoever thought something like this would happen to Harrisburg? --- well they did bungle the nuke plant event

[Mz Pip]

1. Oh, good

More food for the poor. They are donating what they don't eat to food banks aren't they?

[RKP5637]

2. I'm not a religious person in the least, but I do remember well my

childhood days in Sunday School and church wherein they used to really really emphasize god helps those that help themselves. Their point being, and well learned, prayer doesn't make things magically happen, fixing problems yourself does.

[Enrique]

3. Chris Christie should try this n/t

[JimGinPA]

4. The Previous (Former? Democratic) Mayor Screwed The Budget Up Big Time...

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_snd-harrisburg-pa.html

The Man That Bankrupted Harrisburg

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has teetered on the edge of fiscal ruin for over a year. Officials have blamed the budget problems mostly on an incinerator-plant project that became a costly boondoggle. But when Harrisburg rocked the municipal-finance world in early September by warning that it could skip a payment on its general-obligation bonds—which weren’t tied to the incinerator debt—it sent a different message about the increasingly unwise ways that municipalities use borrowing these days (see “The Muni-Bond Debt Bomb,” Summer 2010).

Harrisburg’s debt crisis stems from a long borrowing spree by its recently retired mayor, Stephen Reed, who governed the city for 28 years. Long before the incinerator debacle, Reed borrowed liberally to invest in projects that the private sector wouldn’t finance on its own: building parking garages downtown; constructing and later renovating a baseball stadium; and then buying the minor-league baseball team, the Harrisburg Senators, that played there after it threatened to bolt town. As the local newspaper, the Patriot-News, put it when Reed retired, he “never met a bond deal he didn’t like.”

What enabled the long borrowing binge was the perception that some of Reed’s early ventures were successes. The national press touted the city’s baseball purchase as a model of how communities could save their sports teams. Similarly, after Harrisburg spent $39 million in mostly borrowed money to create the National Civil War Museum, city officials hailed the effort as a successful gamble when it opened in February 2001.

After the prick lost his primary (to the even worse) eventual mayor he endorsed Toomey.

[LiberalFighter]

5. The mayor needs to be held accountable.

And should had been held accountable by the voters, city council, oversight agencies, and the state legislators.