Excellent point from Patrick Kennedy. Harrisburg needs a Dauphin County-sized tax base:
Harrisburg is a city of 50,000 people. It’s also a state seat. Its boundaries are very small and its major industry is tax exempt. Most of the people that work in said state seat live outside of the city proper. Because they can. Because said state built an infrastructure availing housing opportunities at an ever increasing edge, chewing up evermore agricultural land. There is no mass transit available, and like most increasingly sprawling and disconnected places, it wouldn’t make a difference. The infrastructure is built in a way that mass transit would never be as “convenient” as driving.
The metropolitan area of Harrisburg, PA is about 650,000 people. And that doesn’t even include metropolitan York, PA nor metro Lancaster, PA. A triangle, all about 30 minutes apart. Or less than it is from Dallas to the majority of its suburbs. Combine those three metropolitan areas and Harrisburg, a city (tax base) of 50,000, as its primary job center, has to support a super-metro area of about 1.3 million people.
So you are saying that dumping $288 million into a trash incinerator was because they HAD to support burning the metro areas trash.
I don’t believe it for a minute.
The Harrisburg Authority – a separate independent government – botched the incinerator situation. Harrisburg the city guaranteed the debt, and so did Dauphin County. I don’t get why people think Harrisburg the city deserves any more blame than the County.
Anyway, the incinerator mess is a separate issue from the structural fiscal challenges discussed here.
Actually, Harrisburg COULD support itself and more is they were not cursed by the presence of the state of Pennsylvania. The amount of tax exempt land and buildings would plug the leaks in no time, check out the map of exempt property: http://www.urbantoolsconsult.org/blog/2012/08/06/Harrisburg-comeback-it-never-went-away.aspx
And of course, Harrisburg is forbidden to get revenue from the hordes of state workers who drive in everyday and drive out @ 5PM, an assault on the spirit of Act 47.
The Commonwealth has a colonial mentality towards Harrisburg, without the veneer of benevolence, like the British Empire.
There are a few common trends in failing cities: loss and non-replacement of key employers; personnel costs (current and future) expanding over 40-50 percent of annual revenue, at the cost of infrastructure maintenance; misplaced optimism in big ticket redevelopment. The last includes sports stadia– if memory serves Harrisburg owns a stadium and a team, with little public policy benefit. Nor has Harrisburg ever succeeded in diversifying its economy. The Capital moved there for interesting reasons, but small cities like it really can’t sustain state government.
I am skeptical of the NIZ, but a real case could have been made that Harrisburg should have been the test case, rather than Allentown.
Check out how much of the city land is tax-exempt at Josh’s link. It’s crazy. The state should pay the equivalent in property taxes, or at least land taxes, to the city for hosting state government.