Steven Reed

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Steven Russell Reed, the longest serving mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was born in 1950, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and moved with his parents to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as a young man. Active in the Democratic Party as a teenager, Reed headed the Teenage Democrats of Pennsylvania, was Vice-President of the College Young Democrats of Pennsylvania, and was active in many civic activities. Among his early work experiences was a staff job for the Democratic Caucus in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

In the Watergate Democratic landslide year of 1974, at the age of 24, Reed campaigned hard for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and upset four term Republican incumbent George Gekas, later a Pennsylvania state senator and U.S. Congressman.

Working in the state capitol, Reed became Harrisburg's first full-time state representative, and set new standards of constituent service, voter accessibility, and information sharing with his constituents.

Re-elected to the state house in 1976 and 1978, Reed was elected Dauphin County Commissioner in 1979 and Mayor of Harrisburg in 1981. Having spent his career parlaying one office into another, Reed then impressed his early critics by not running for anything else and winning re-election as Mayor of Harrisburg in 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, and 2001. Governors came and went, while Reed became the personification of a growing, thriving city that had risen from the ashes of massive debt and abandonment.

His three decade mayoralty was distinguished by a rapid transformation of Harrisburg from an old, largely abandoned inustrial remnant to a modern, attractive post-industrial city serving as a regional magnet as well as a state capitol.

Reed brought jobs, restaurants, museums, and construction of large office buildings and new residences to Harrisburg. A can-do visionary, Reed brought numerous parades, competitions, hotels, and businesses to Harrisburg. He was instrumental in the city getting its first minor-league baseball team in decades, and then led the city to purchase the team when it was sold to a buyer who intended to move it out of Harrisburg.

He conceived and developed Harrisburg's National Civil War Museum as well as other museums for Harrisburg. He conceived and developed the Harrisurg University for Science and Technology, and a high school that accompanied it. His hands-on excellence of results led the Republican dominated legislature to encourage him to take over Harrisburg's poorly performing school district, where his choice as Superintendent, Dr. Gerald Kohn, made numerous educational improvements.

His popularity and extradordinary record of accomplishment led him to both stave off black challengers in his majority minority city, and to repeatedly avoid Republican challengers. His legendary workaholism and dtermination to achieve results enabled him to gain a high degree of influence with a City Council that became entirely African-American. His delivery of jobs, housing, recreational opportunities and basic city services won the admiration of people thoughout the 500,000 person Harrisburg metropolitan area, as well as the 50,000 person city.

"It's not just a job, it's a lifestyle," he said of his service as Mayor. A late riser, he would work through the day and long into the night during the regular work week and on weekends.

A longtime Pennsylvania state legislator who had first known Reed as a leader of the College Young Democrats, and who worked in Harrisburg for over thirty years, State Rep. Mark B. Cohen of Philadelphia, said that "Reed's record as Mayor of Harrisburg is extraordinary. The spectacular transformation of Harrisburg that he produced is a national model of effective and visionary government."