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Harrisburg Mayor Goes Mad, Spends $30M
Harrisburg, PA - Halfway across the continent from where Buffalo Bill roamed and Custer made his last stand, the mayor of this debt-ridden city spent millions in public money on everything from six-shooters to covered wagons for a museum about cowboys, Indians and the Wild West. And he did it without telling the City Council, whose members felt as if they had been hit by the swinging doors of a frontier saloon when they found out from a reporter in 2003.On Saturday, the other dusty cowboy boot will drop when hundreds of the items go on the auction block in Dallas in a sell-off ordered by the City Council. With Harrisburg hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, city officials will be watching closely to see how much can be reclaimed from the roughly $6.5 million Mayor Stephen R. Reed said he spent on the Old West collectibles. "If we get less, then it's just a big mistake and it's unfortunate for the people of Harrisburg," said Councilman Dan Miller. For sale are covered wagons, marshal's badges, boots, chaps, saddles, "Wanted" posters, letters, photographs, maps, furniture, pottery, artwork, pistols, rifles, knives and more. One item expected to fetch tens of thousands of dollars is a bright red Wells Fargo & Co. stagecoach, in working condition. When Reed became mayor of this city of 47,000 in 1982, his dream was to transform the decaying, shrinking Harrisburg into a cultural destination. Under his leadership, hotels and restaurants have opened downtown and the number of businesses on the tax rolls has more than quadrupled. A minor-league baseball team now plays in a park that rose from a trash dump. In 2001, Reed opened the National Civil War Museum, even though none of the war's major battles played out in the city. (Gettysburg, though, is 36 miles away.) As for his dream of building the National Museum of the Old West, council members were outraged _ not only by the way he bypassed them and the amount of money spent, but by the seemingly ludicrous notion of a Wild West museum 1,400 miles east of Deadwood, S.D. "I was shocked," Councilwoman Linda Thompson said. "I was shocked that the mayor would even think that this was something that would generate tourism for Harrisburg." Reed has defended his spending as perfectly legal. Asked in 2003 why a Western museum, he responded: "Why not?" As recently as Tuesday, he said, "I still think it's a good idea," but added: "We need the money right now." To buy the items, Reed tapped an account at the Harrisburg Authority, where his expenditures were approved by officials he had appointed. The agency oversees parts of the city's infrastructure and raises money by collecting fees on bond issues. At least one Harrisburg Authority official appointed by the council earlier this year, Eric Papenfuse, said some of the money should have been off limits for the museums. And he questioned whether the mayor, in a shopping frenzy, paid bloated prices for items that could be fakes.Altogether, Reed shelled out close to $30 million on Old West, Civil War and other collectibles over 15 years _ he even bought an Egyptian mummy and a 12-gun schooner that was part of Benedict Arnold's fleet during the Revolutionary War _ while the city was sliding deeper into debt, said Papenfuse, who is the authority's treasurer. The city is only beginning to catalog what Reed bought. "The spending is staggering," Papenfuse said. "It's unbelievable." About 800 of the thousands of Old West items are scheduled to be auctioned in Dallas over the next two days. Another auction is set for April, and some items will be sold on eBay. William W. Savage Jr., a professor of Western American history at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Okla., laughed out loud when a reporter described the plans for the museum in Pennsylvania. But he acknowledged that Pennsylvania was something of a launching pad for explorers, being the birthplace of the Conestoga wagon and the Pennsylvania Rifle. "I wouldn't say it was the Wild West, but it certainly figures into frontier expansion," he said. In a letter in the auction catalog, Reed says: "This is an auction like no other. ... Enjoy!" Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-11-10 |
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