What standards do local newspapers apply when informing the public on fiscal matters such as bond issues? Our editorialist finds inconsistent, unreliable, and irresponsible commentary in one Easton newspaper...

Last Sunday, The Excess-Times editorial-page editor, Jim Flagg, urged Northampton County Council to float (float used here advisedly, as the reader will soon see) a $2.35 million bond.

This is the figure reportedly needed to float the old Hotel Easton, which sank 10 years ago, awash in mismanagement and bankruptcy debt. Ten years earlier than that, in 1982, through the efforts of then State Representative Bob Freeman and others, the Commonwealth attempted to right the cantering hulk.

Pennsylvania's taxpayers pumped more than two million dollars in ballast into the bilges in a misguided effort at salvage. Now Flagg, who's unflagging in his adoration of Easton Mayor Thomas Goldsmith and of all officialdom, wants Northampton County to throw more good money after bad in yet another effort at saving the scuttled Hotel Easton.

Off course

So Flagg wants to put the old Hotel awash in an additional $2.35 mil, a figure that has risen alarmingly from Goldsmith's original estimate of $1.8 mil. Indeed, the former banker (failed, some say) is now guesstimating the ultimate cost at $3 mil. Flagg, and Northampton County Council, are still soft-pedaling the cost at $2.3 mil, a half-mil less than Goldsmith's figure. A half mil here and there means nothing to Flagg.

Flagg is the fellow who sided with Goldsmith over his opponent Mayor Sal Panto, Jr., in the 1991 campaign, rejecting Panto's picture of Easton's finances and accepting Goldsmith's instead.

Snorkeling, anyone?

A bond for the old hotel isn't the only threat afloat. The hotel itself could float. It did just that in 1955, in the floodwaters of Hurricane Diane. Flagg knows this. It's in the archives of The Excess-Times. The Delaware River's waters reached 10 feet above its banks. The water first flooded the hotel's Riverside rathskellar, of course, and then submerged the entire first floor.

This is the boat basin in which the little boy Flagg dreams of launching a multi-million bus terminal as the pontoon for a salvaged Hotel Easton. If Flagg wants to serve the public, he could better be writing editorials inviting hotel-owners/developers Theodore Kheel and Peter Koehler to go back to New York City and the United Nations whence they came.

Just another cruise to nowhere?

The pair's restoration plans aren't novel. Easton's taxpayers have seen such plans before, from Pied Pipers like George Switlik.

Head in the clouds...

To go from under the water to above the clouds, Forks Township Supervisor Tim Merwarth is updating his pre-flight plans as his candidacy for Northampton County councilman prepares to take off down the foreshortened runway from the Braden Airpark. This is the former Braden Airport, which Merwarth and co-pilot George Doughty, Lehigh Valley International Airport exec, re-christened. Occasion for the re-naming was their decision to locate a public park smack dab in the middle of the foreshortened runway.

Land conservation

Airpark space is restricted, not just by the deed to Lafayette College's portion of the runway, but by numerous sinkholes, subterranean natural gas pipelines, trees, gullies (the college is filling these in with the debris from the vintage Victorian houses it continues to demolish on College Hill), and especially the ringing-around housing developments and industrial parks that sprout from what until recently was Merwarth's Upstream Farm.

...or heads on the playground?

As Merwarth revs up his twin-engine Gulfstream, he keeps a keen eye not just on the instrument panel, but also on the three kids playing in the new township park, dead ahead. Two of the kids rise and fall with the up-and-down motion of a seesaw. The third kid moves back and forth, up and down on a swing.

In the split instant that the seesaw is perfectly balanced (neither kid at fullest height) between Sullivan Trail to the east and Bushkill Drive to the west, and the swing stops moving toward Uhler Road to the north and starts its arc toward Newlins Road South, Merwarth must yank back on the yoke with all his might.

Above all, Merwarth can't lose his head. If he does, at least two of the three kids on the runway-playground might lose theirs.

Alternative transportation in the Lehigh Valley

This isn't the alternative transportation that Green Party Northampton County Candidate and Route 22-widening opponent Joe DeRaymond advocates.