The County Council shall adopt an ordinance for any act which...

...Provides for redevelopment, rehabilitation, conservation, and renewal programs for the alleviation and prevention of slums, obsolescence, blight, or other conditions of deterioration, and the achievement of the most appropriate use of land.

Northampton County Home Rule Charter, Section 602, Ordinances

In the case of the Northampton County Prison expansion which its proponents claim will solve the problem of obsolescence, no such ordinance has been adopted. This failure has actually worsened the conditions that the ordinance is supposed to prevent or ameliorate (described above in Section 602 (a)(12) of the County Home Rule Charter) by threatening to bring about blight, deterioration and obsolence in an established, residential neighborhood - Dutchtown-Gallows Hill in the National Historic District of Downtown Easton

Originally, the County administration under Executive Glenn Reibman planned to acquire the entire 200 block of the neighborhood's South Sixth Street. Reibman planned to accomplish this without the County Council's approval.

And the Council under President J. Michael Dowd planned to let him.

Only outrage and opposition from all of Easton's neighborhoods and their elected city officials stopped Reibman's and Dowd's plan.

But not unfortunately, until Reibman and Dowd had already allowed at least four residential properties on South Sixth Street to be acquired through fraud, and the houses' families, in effect, evicted.

Dowd's Council colleagues are equally culpable.

But Dowd, besides acting as President, is also the only member of the nine County Council people representing District 2, which includes Easton.

Easton residents and city Mayoral candidate Phil Mitman have attended council meetings to request that it restore the four residential properties, which in essence Northampton County has confiscated, to their rightful owners; or, if that's not "feasible" or "practicable" at least restore them to the residential market place.

Dowd and his cohorts and Reibman, agreed, but with the unfortunate and ironic caveat that those properties not be restored until completion of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). The County plans to use the four residential properties as a staging area for equipment, materials, and personnel during PIC construction.

This complex consists of expanding the historic 1873 prison, an alteration that will require at least partial demolition of the original sandstone structure; adding new courtrooms to accommodate the increasing number of Court of Common Pleas judges; and construction of a new Domestic Relations building.

The complex lacks the number of parking spaces required by Easton's off-street zoning ordinances. This deficiency, among others (e.g., paved impervious area, stormwater runoff pollution of the Lehigh and Delaware rivers), means that the PIC must seek use variances and approval from the Easton Zoning Hearing Board.

Even assuming that the County's more than a quarter-million citizens "accept for value" the PIC, financed by the fiscal year 2001 $111-million general-obligation bond, for value, such acceptance would not include the Domestic Relations building and the $4 million parking deck.

These two projects and the three $1 million each KOZ "economic development" projects in Palmer and East Allen townships and Bangor Borough have been added to the bond without amendments to the County's General Purpose Authority (GPA), as required by the Commonwealth's Municipality Authorities Act.