Reading mayor funneled city tax money to ex-consultant Mike Fleck

by Steve Reinbrecht

The Reading Eagle’s big Sunday package about the federal corruption investigation of Reading City Hall focused on campaign contributions.

The newspaper noted that thousands of dollars from Mayor Vaughn Spencer's supporters went into the pockets of his former political consultant, Michael Fleck.

But the Eagle failed to note that Spencer used city tax money to pay Fleck for his services as quasi-administrator.

The story Sunday said Fleck “was probably the biggest immediate beneficiary in the web of political contributions and expenditures that spanned the two cities [Reading and Allentown] since the start of 2011.”

Spencer’s and Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski’s campaigns paid Fleck and his employees at least $421,000 over that time, the Eagle calculates.

But Fleck not only worked to get Spencer elected in November 2011. After the election he worked to influence Reading laws and policies and was paid from city funds.

In 2012, Reading taxpayers paid Fleck $24,000 as an administrator after Spencer put Fleck in charge of five initiatives, according to the Eagle story at the time:
• a tax amnesty program
• broadening the amusement tax
• creating a community development fund as a tool to attract businesses
• studying the Public Works Department to see what it ought to be doing and ways to save money
• finding better ways to collect other city taxes.

City taxpayers also paid Fleck Consulting $24,000 for Michael Dee, the husband of a Fleck staffer, to work as Reading City Hall's media spokesman. I wish I had saved some of his news releases – he was comically illiterate.

In January 2012, Fleck helped present Spencer’s budget to City Council.

"It's because that's the team the mayor has chosen to implement his vision for Reading. The staff in the mayor's office is one of the most qualified staffs in city history.”

"Do you appoint your friends? Of course you do. These are people who are going to implement your policy when you get to City Hall."

His name dropped out of the Eagle after a Berks County elections board report said that Fleck was intimately connected with what it concluded was a scheme with Spencer to give illegal campaign contributions to a labor union in Philadelphia. State Attorney General Kathleen Kane eventually cleared him.

"FVS (Friends of Vaughn Spencer), Spencer, Fleck and [campaign treasurer Greg] Walker aided and abetted Local 98 in exchange for a $10,000 contribution (the money left over from the $30,000 donation)," the report says.

Spencer, Walker and Fleck recalled very little about getting the $30,000 contribution, the committee's largest, it says. They also couldn't remember who deposited it or how the two $10,000 checks got to Rubin and Green, the report states.

In January 2012, Fleck explained his efforts to reorganize City Hall, including outsourcing the computer and human resource offices.

A quote from the Eagle:

“Let’s be real,” Michael Fleck, Spencer’s political consultant, said last week. “We’re Democrats. We have certain policies. We like to in-source things, if we can do them for the same amount of money or less.

“But at this point, we can’t do that short-term. We have to outsource a couple years.”

Besides, he said, referring to the computer office that has nine employees, comparable cities have better service and fewer people.