A few days ago I went to Easton Public libary and obtained a photocopy of The Morning Call’s February 21, 2002, edition article, “County solicitor OKs change in authority,” describing Northampton County Council President and Easton’s District 2 representative J. Michael Dowd’s collusive role in the county’s General Purpose Authority fraud.

Only then did I notice for the first time the article appearing directly below the one describing Dowd’s treachery, this one titled “Review finds Smith erred on election expense report,” by reporter Tyra Braden.

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Predecessor to the Department of Homeland Security was the Offfice of Homeland Security.

The head of this office, appointed by Pres. George W. Bush, was fomer Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, who resigned his position as Governor to accept the President’s appointment.

Ridge went to his new assignment in Washington, D.C., to organized the new department.

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First off, 15th Congressional District one-term incumbent Charlie Dent does not represent the “Lehigh Valley.”

No legal political jurisdiction of that name exists.  Usually the “Lehigh Valley” is defined as Lehigh and Northampton counties, but a geographic definition would also have to include Luzerne, Carbon, and Berks counties, all three of which are also watershed counties of the Lehigh River.

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Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s gift of $7.5 million to the Pennsyvania Infrastructure Investment Authority to remediate the former Bethlehem Steel Saucon Tract “brownfield” is a fraud.

The Saucon Tract is not a “brownfield.” It is an extremely toxic Love Canal Super Fund Site, for which a federal program for the costs of remediation already exists.

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Readers of the Billy bytes Blog posts, please read download this link, http://in.geocities.com/druids54408, for an alarming look at what land-based casinos portends for legalized gambling.

On January 3, 2005, I attending that year’s first meeting of Northampton County County, held in the historic Jacob Bachmann Publick House in the downtown of the county’s seat Easton, and urged it to hold public hearings on the Las Vegas Sands Casino proposed for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

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The purpose of the Warren and Sussex counities’ Paulinskill Trail, of which I was a founding member, was to prevent the 27-mile-long abandoned railbed from falling into private ownership and to maintain it for de facto public use, though legal ownership of the bed resided with the corporate City of Newark.

By contrast, I suspect that Wilson Borough’s proposed condemnation of Weis Supermarket property near the 25th St. border between Wilson Borough and Palmer Township is designed to aid the redevelopment of the Dixie Cup complex by Ashley Development Corporation CEO and President Louis Pektor.

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No amount of free publicity such as that provided by today’s edition of The Morning Call can dispel the fact that the new, extranvagana, “hand-on” National Heritiage Canal exhibit in downtown Easton’s Two Rivers Landing is too little too late.

Today’s TMC article is a direct response to the recent posts on my blog criticizing the NHC and the role played in it by former Hugh Moore Park Inc. Executive Director J. Steven Humphrey.

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As I reported in an e-mail sent to the mainstream news media (12-28-2005), Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, Controller John Schimmel, and Fiscal Affairs Director Jean Mateff and her accounting office are still dealing from the bottom of the deck regarding the swaption refunding of the county’s fraudulent 2001 $111 million bond.

These three officials already have enough on their plate trying to deal with a lawsuit brought by a county contract employee who was fired from his job in the county’s computer room because he blew the whistle that hackers had breached the county’s computers. This black-listed “whistle blower” is now without livelihood and lives, so he tells me, in terror of his life.

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The 1988 federal legislation creating the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor and 10 landings along the Lehigh and Delaware rivers in 5 counties - Luzerne, Carbon, Lehigh, Northampton, and Bucks - required that the governing body of each adopt a resolution authorizing its participation.

The first, and only, county to comply with this provision of the 1988 law was the Carbon County Commission, whose resolution included two of the 10 landings, one in the borough of Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk) and the other in the the borough of Palmerton.

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The Cinema Paradiso (former Eric Theater) and federal General Services Administration/Social Security Administration buildings owned by Whitehall Township developer Abraham Atiyeh are a fraud perpetrated on the taxpayers of Northampton County, its seat the City of Easton, and the Easton Area School District.

The Easton perpetrators of this fraud were its mayor Philip A. Mitman, members of city council, and various merchants and developers who initiated legal action against Atiyeh.

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