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Re: Disaster Named Harrisburg, Kudos to Judge John McNally

Dauphin County Judge John McNally made me feel so proud the other day, because he held the City of Harrisburg liable for all the major bullhooey it has poured onto mere citizen Mike Brenner. Brenner has literally been fighting City Hall because City Hall brought the fight to him.

Brenner made the mistake of leasing his property to the Harrisburg City Public Works Department, where men and machines are stored. After the city stopped paying rent to him for the use of his property, but nonetheless occupied the premises and allowed it to fall into disrepair like the rest of Harrisburg has, Brenner went to court.

Who wouldn’t go to court in these circumstances? The law is the law is the law, and no one is supposed to be above the law. The law is supposed to apply to everyone equally, and especially to government agencies and entities.

Well…the temerity of this citizen! Who is he to expect just compensation from the City of Harrisburg?! Who is he to expect the city to live up to its legal obligations?

So instead of being a standup guy and paying Brenner what he has been long owed, Mayor Eric Papenfuse decided that the city would not only renege on its signed lease with Brenner, but then commence eminent domain proceedings against him to take the property by force.

So here we have a county judge who recognizes corruption and evil when we and he sees it, as personified by the sweaty faced lump of Jello that is Eric Papenfuse, and he issues a decision that the city must actually live up to its lease terms and pay Brenner what the city owes him. Never mind that what the city is doing, what Eric Papenfuse is doing, is downright evil and the very definition of abuse of official power.

Does anyone wonder why Harrisburg has fallen to pieces over the past four decades, with most taxpayers fleeing to better locales? All my life I have either visited my family here, or lived here, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.

Thanks only to Judge John McNally, Harrisburg City’s mayor is getting the comeuppance he has long been due to receive. Now let’s see the citizens of Harrisburg wake the hell up and begin voting for better human beings to make our city’s official decisions for us. We cannot afford losers like Papenfuse to continue to bankrupt Pennsylvania’s capital city with petty coercion and minor league control games.

p.s. When first elected as mayor, Papenfuse swore that people would go to jail for the fraudulent incinerator debacle that bankrupted the city. Several years later he has swept it all under the rug. Eric, you are an incompetent, lying sack of sh*t, and you cannot go back to running your used bookstore soon enough. Then let the federal charges begin to rain down on his sweaty, greasy head.

p.p.s. I am a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit against my beloved city over its patently illegal anti-gun ordinances it passed several years ago. Papenfuse has also engaged in a lot of virtue signalling with that unnecessary lawsuit, while costing us taxpayers yet more money. The guy is a disaster.

Harrisburg City: One Political Party’s Complete Catastrophe

Harrisburg City is a complete catastrophe.

By any measure, my beloved city and the home of my father’s family in an unbroken chain since 1745, is now a non-functional wreck. A shambles. A disaster.

Our combined city millage rate is an incredible, unbelievable, phenomenal record of 71 Mills! See the official Dauphin County millage rates below. Harrisburg City is at the bottom.

Those readers who do not understand what millage is, it is the local tax rate for public services like fire, water, police, sewers, and sometimes schools. Most Pennsylvania communities have a millage rate of about 6-10, total.

Millage rates are supposed to reflect the quality of public services that taxpayers receive. After all, we are paying these incredibly high tax rates for a reason.

But here in Harrisburg, we taxpayers have no such illusions or expectation of receiving much of anything in return for our hard-earned money. Most of our city taxes are squandered by unaccountable bureaucrats and politicized mayors who come and go, come and go, spending all the way. Our city council is completely non-functional, filled with bitter personality disputes and zero achievements for the actual people underwriting the bills.

And then there is the Harrisburg School District, a study in unabated and completely open incompetence and corruption. Our city school district has been run by the state, only to be set aside and allowed to fester and rot, for the whole public to see. And still nothing is done to fix it. The school children here, mostly black kids, suffer the worst, because for all their time spent inside four classroom walls, they actually get very little education.

And now the latest example of just how badly Harrisburg is run is revealed in a lawsuit by Michael Brenner, owner of the building where the Harrisburg City Public Works Department is housed. Brenner has leased the building to the city for many years, and he is owed $717,000.00 by the city in back rent, unpaid taxes, and damage to the building that the city cannot or will not fix.

For those readers who do not understand what a city Public Works Department is or does, it is the one place where taxpayers expect to see something happen, because it is all about the roads, streets, sidewalks, potholes, etc. No matter where you go in America, the city’s Public Works Department is the place where the can-do guys work, the guys who know how to fix things, weld things, bend metal, pour concrete, and operate machinery to get snow plowed and fallen trees out of the roads.

Except here in Harrisburg, it seems our city Public Works employees don’t do much of that kind of work on their own building. And it turns out the city won’t pay the owner the rent the city agreed to pay.

Folks, this is a failed government. This is a failed city. When the government cannot or will not pay its most basic bills, or properly run its most basic departments and school functions, then we have a failed government. Plain and simple.

And like almost every other American city with high taxes, poor services, failed schools, and bad government, Harrisburg shares the distinction of being overwhelmingly Democrat, black, and poor. And yet… black people run very few of the city’s functions! Those jobs are reserved for the oh-so-sophisticated White Liberals, who lord it over their Democrat plantation serfs like they are running one of their old Democrat plantations back in the 1850s Deep South.

This abject failure is the price of having just one political party in power, endlessly and forever. That one political party is the Democrat Party.

At some point, city residents will begin to ask the simple question: “What have I got to lose by voting for a different political party that has different ideas of how to run things?”

To my black city neighbors, all I can say is that the solution to this bad situation is fully in your hands. You are the majority of the voters here. If you want things to change for the better, and we know you do, then you can start voting differently. Vote for candidates who represent different values and behaviors than the same-old White Liberals who have led you down this proverbial garden path for how many decades….

Dauphin County 2018 Millage July