This Is The Future For Many Cities, States Would If They Could!

Posted By on January 28, 2010

Pennsylvania Capital Should Weigh Bankruptcy, Controller Says


By Dunstan McNichol

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) — Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the capital of the sixth-largest U.S. state by population, should skip a $2.2 million debt service payment due Feb. 1 and consider bankruptcy, City Controller Dan Miller said.

Harrisburg faces $68 million in payments this year in connection with a waste-to-energy incinerator and should weigh Chapter 9 protection from creditors or state oversight through a program known as Act 47, Miller said today. Chapter 9 bankruptcy allows municipalities to reorganize rather than liquidate.

The alternatives are to sell assets such as an historic downtown market; an island in the Susquehanna River that includes the city’s minor-league baseball stadium; and the city’s parking, sewer and water systems, according to a preliminary 2010 budget and an emergency financial plan submitted yesterday.

“What I’m suggesting is we stop paying the debt service until we have a plan or we decide which way to go, in bankruptcy or Act 47,” Miller, a former city council member who became controller this month, said in a telephone interview. “I think it could save our assets instead of selling them.”

Mayor Linda Thompson, who unseated 18-year incumbent Mayor Stephen Reed in a Democratic party primary last year to lead the city of 47,000, didn’t return a call to her office for comment.

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