Set a standard for ethical, moral, and transparent business practices in Harrisburg.

Pennsylvania Counseling Services, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation company brand new to Harrisburg, rapidly and unexpectedly bull dozed down the LAST playground in South Allison Hill, an inner city neighborhood with one of the highest densities of children from single parent homes in the entire nation! Hundreds of high risk children played at that park every day. The adjacent building to this playground was a shuttered school and it and the park together were zoned institutional. In order to receive the zoning variance for a drug and alcohol counseling service in a residential community, this company had to prove that they had community support. They initially garnered support by offering a vision of restoring the playground and having a postive impact on the immediate community. Instead, without any warning to the people that his plans had changed, the new owner decided to “go another way,” which was his way of saying he was forcing the children out into the streets to play. He did this in order to put in a parking lot of almost 100 parking spaces. The children will be fenced off from the blacktop where they rode their bikes, played organized sports, and nightly organized old fashioned group games and ran happily. To add to the the atrocity, they began their demolition of all the playground equipment and basketball courts by cutting down down a thriving 60 foot maple that grew in the middle of the asphalt. The children loved that tree. It was the only tree they interacted with and because of its location, it was always 'home base'. It bloomed flowers in the spring and had stunning crimson leaves in the autumn. Generations of children sat in its shade and climbed up to read in its branches. They butchered it down in a couple hours and the children watched in shock, feeling marginalized, helpless, and victimized by the adults in this city. In addition, this created a tremendously negative community impact. Directly across the street from the park sits a free library, where there is a safe house and free books and food and snacks and playground equipment that the teachers who live there provide year round. The retired couple who have run the library for years had utilized the park to reach out to the children almost no one else can reach, working for free where no one else wants to go. That decades old heart of the city that tunneled children toward their safe house was taken in 36 hours, before anyone, anywhere had time to react and now they have to be seriously concerned with all that traffic coming into the easement sitting just about 20 feet from the free library steps where, for years, there has occurred heavy child pedestrian traffic. There wasn't so much as a construction courtesy notice. These children and good adults lost this park to a developer that made decisions about profit over people. He used insurance costs as an excuse but he was entirely aware of the playground and library and the condition of the community before he began gathering signatures for zoning variance. He should never have continued with his efforts to acquire the property once he realized he might have to eliminate the playground. He began to discuss that concern in the first of the zoning meetings but we cannot find where it was ever officially stated, in the many months of process and permit applications, that he had decided his company couldn't afford the insurance and was intending to tear down the only playground these children had. He never reached out to the community to partner to save the park, though meetings for collaboration were requested by local activists on more than one occasion. As a Dr. of Psychology he must certainly have realized the negative impact this would have on the morale of the community, on the effectiveness of the Stone Soup Library, and on the already traumatized and under served children of this neighborhood. The honest businesses and good people are working hard in this city, giving all they have to pick these kids off the street one hard case at a time, and this man instantly put hundreds of our youngest and most at risk kids on the streets. He had no right to make this unilateral and anti-transparent decision for this city. He never gave a single meeting or community gathering to make the decision WITH the residents, he never warned any of us. The city cannot allow this kind of abusive landlord behavior to continue, to be welcome in Harrisburg. We need to show our ethical businesses and our good people, that we won't let bad business and bad people continue to ruin our city and give us all a bad name. Please sign this petition to request the revocation of Pennsylvania Counseling Service's business privilege license. It is called that because it is a privilege to do business in our city and our investors should treat it as such. It should be wrong to make money at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. Let's send a message that we won't settle for bad business here. Thank you.