Question: Why the Northampton County Industrial Development Authority's (NCIDA's) rush to judgment with a third multimillion-dollar bond issue?

Answer: To pull the Williams Township BallYard's chestnut from the fire.

In so doing, the NCIDA would also pull from the fire its vice chairman Bruce Davis; his benefactor New Jersey developer Jim Petrucci; and all the so-called "Friends of the BallYard." These Friends have invested political and financial capital in the BallYard project. They include Easton Mayor Thomas Goldsmith; his confidant, J. Michael Dowd, a Northampton County councilman; and Dowd's boss, Michael Danjczek, both of the Easton Children's Home; Jeff Marsh, Williams Township manager; and Robert Freeman, State Representative.

Pitchmen Davis, Freeman, and the others are desperate to shut State Representative T.J. Rooney and County Councilman Joe Brennan out of the game. Rooney and Brennan have gone to bat for a baseball team affiliated with major league baseball, a position that Northampton County Executive Glenn Reibman once favored. That was before Mayor Goldsmith et al persuaded him to switch sides in return for the votes they promise to deliver this Fall when he runs for re-election as County Executive. The switch may turn out to be a fateful decision that will lead to his striking out come November against his opponent Ron Angle from the Slate Belt.

Uliana's Swan Dive

Reibman's fate now is that of former State Senator Joe Uliana. When Uliana, like Reibman, opposed the BallYard, Goldsmith and Binney & Smith called the senator on the carpet in Goldsmith's office in the Incubus Building. Goldsmith and a BS vice president strong-armed Uliana into a belly-flopping political flip-flop out of Goldsmith's window in support of the BallYard. Uliana landed six floors below on Goldsmith's crayon-color-coordinated faux-brick plaza leading to Binney & Smith's Crayola Factory. His flip-flop earned him only one term in office, ending a once-promising political career.

There was only one thing Uliana could thank Goldsmith and Binney & Smith for in his fleeting final moments. His two corporate hosts hadn't installed parking meters anywhere in the plaza. This was especially fortuitous for Uliana, considering it's the one spot in all of downtown Easton that the meters don't spring up from the curbs to spear hapless motorists-shoppers. He was thus spared the ignominy of being offered up like a cocktail sausage skewered to a toothpick.

Uliana was indeed luckless, missing by only feet the old Orr's Department Store Clock that once stood in the 300 block of Northampton Street, purchased by former Easton Mayor Phil Mitman and planted in the sun-baked faux-brick plaza where shade trees once grew. (The contoured clock might at least have broken Uliana's fall, even if it couldn't have saved his career.) Goldsmith agreed to let Mitman plant his clock there to settle the lawsuit that the former Republican mayor had brought against the current incumbent.

Mitman's suit alleged that Two Rivers Landing amounted to a seizure of public property - the southwest quadrant - principally for the benefit of a private entity. Mitman calls to mind the Biblical character Esau, who sold his inheritance for a bowl of oatmeal.