Northampton County Rats Feast on Taxpayer Cheese

Billy Givens

1/03/2002

On December 18, 2001, in his last act as president of Northampton County Council, Wayne Grube and his fellow rat pack gnawed a hole in the wall connecting council chambers and Community and Economic Development Chief Vincent Dominach’s conference room. Through this hole, the rat pack rolled Michael Solomon’s $111 million wheel of cheese, reeking of Limburger, from council chambers into the conference room. Solomon fancied limburger because it comes from Belgium, home of the company that insures his $111 million wheel of cheese, at a premium cost to Northampton County taxpayers of an unauthorized $880,000. This room is the nest of the Northampton County General Purpose Authority (GPA). There, on December 19, the GPA rats, led by County Executive Glenn Reibman, gnawed and pawed at Solomon’s wheel of cheese. They broke it into pieces of varying size, suitable for distribution to their fellow scavengers in corporate Northampton County; e.g., bankrupt Bethlehem Steel’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman, Robert S. “Steve” Miller. The GPA gave Miller a $13.1 million piece of Solomon’s Limburger wheel. In its rush to adjourn, the council rats failed to authorize the $880,000 insurance expense, taxpayer money the GPA rats have spent in rank violation of Pennsylvania’s Municipality Authorities Act of 1941 as amended.

Miller operates one of four landfills in Northampton County. The other three are Waste Management Inc. and its subsidiary Grand Central Sanitation in Plainfield Township, Chrin Brothers in Williams Township, and IESI in Lower Saucon Township. IESI bought the landfill from Bethlehem, which had operated it as the city dump. Bethlehem’s Mayor Don Cunningham sold the dump to IESI at a $13 million loss to the city and ultimately to Steve Miller. That’s the dollar value of the piece of Solomon’s limburger that Cunningham was going to give Miller - to build a road through the CEO’s 1800-acre Superfund site as infrastructure for economic development, through ambitious projects like BethWorks. However, Miller’s bankruptcy is under the supervision of a federal judge in New York City. Thus even if Miller gets his hot little hands on the $13 million chunk of Limburger, it’s likely to be consumed not by a road but by what Miller euphemistically calls “legacy” costs; i.e., continuing pensions and healthcare costs for the thousands of Bethlehem Steel employees who have lost their jobs there. (billybytes will report on the other three landfills in future editions, reports that will draw heavily on the research of Kutztown free-lance writer Susan Has, who writes about Pennsylvania’s landfills in “Comments”, published in the op-ed pages of The Morning Call’s Sunday edition.)

As for BethWorks, it, like the City of Easton’s Two Rivers Landing, is a corruption of the 1988 Delaware and Lehigh Canal Heritage Corridor Act, legislation sponsored by U.S. Congressman Don Ritter. The Act authorized the creation of 10 landings along the 150-mile path of the two canals, from Wilkes-Barre to Easton on the Lehigh Canal, and from Easton to Bristol Borough on the Delaware Canal. To date, only on landing has been created legally, in accordance with the 1988 Act, the one in Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk). The landing in Easton is illegal, created in violation of the Act, for the purpose of enriching the landing’s two commercial enterprises, Binney & Smith’s Crayola Factory and McDonald’s. Easton Mayor Thomas F. Goldsmith has stolen most of the congressional appropriations for the creation of the 10 landings. This theft explains why to date only two landings have been created, Jim Thorpe Landing and Two Rivers Landing, the first legal, the second illegal.

Morganelli’s Double Standard

Yesterday’s edition of The Excess Times (kisses officialdom’s ass to excess at all times) published an interview with Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, who speculated on his run for Lieutenant Governor. Morganelli can forget it. He publicly prosecuted Northampton County resident Solange Huot for alleged fraud in TE-T’s pages, and persecuted county resident Henry Rodrigues, while covering up the fraud of Michael Solomon and Northampton County’s administration and council. Since 1997, when Reibman was first elected executive, he and his county council have screwed the county taxpayer, on whom their amorous attentions were forced. The billybytes newsletter, published since 21995, has caught these gang-bangers in the act.

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