I’ve no doubt that Commerce Center Boulevard built for Majestic Realty of Los Angles, California, across the former Bethlehem Steel property was paid for by Northampton County’s taxpayers.

But the first demand on the $13.1 million cost of the road project, included in the 2001 $111 million omnius bond issue, was imposed by the Internal Revenue Serive (IRS).

This financial obligation arose from the sale by the City of Bethlehem of its Lower Saucon Township landfill to the private landfill corporation of IESI.

Because Bethlehem City made more profit on the transaction than IRS statutes allow, it was required to pay that agency $13 million in taxes.

The Morning Call, one of 14 newspapers as large as the Los Angles Times owned by the Chicago Tribune, has published fraudulent articles attempting to explain away the facts of this financial obligation of Bethlehem City to the IRS.

Financial wizardry of this kind has also tainted the financial transactions between Bethlehem City and its Water and Sewerage Authority, including the swaption refunding of a $94 million bond in 2004, covered up by Bethlehem City and Authority officials and Northampton County District Attorney John M. Morganelli - together with the 2004 swaption refunding of Northampton County’s $111 million bond.

The Bethlehem refunding, exposed by Mayor John Callahan’s opponent Anthony Ryback as the “smoking gun” of the Callahan Administration-City Council-Economic Development Authority-Former State Senator and Now Harrisburg Lobbyist Joe Uliana conspiracy that threw the lucrative refunding business to Merrill-Lynch - and the lobbying influence of Maurice “Mossie” Murphy, who left the employment of Raymond James, the underwriter of Northampton County’s $111 million bond, to work for Merrill Lynch.

Ryback has been made the political scapegoat for, first of all challenging incumbent Mayor Callahan and then to the Democratic Party-picked successor to District 133 Representative T.J. Rooney, John Brennan.

I remind voters that Brennan was a member of the Northampton County Council that with County Executive Glenn Reibman and his administration created the fraudulent General Purpose Authority (GPA) in 1997.
This is the authority that in conspiracy with Northampton County’s Motions Judge Isaac Garb of Bucks County floated the fraudulent 2001 $111 million bond, and before that the $30 million bond in 1998 for construction of the county’s Juvenile Detention Center on the site of the razed art-deco Easton City Hall building located at 650 Ferry Street - directly across the street from the house at 637 Ferry Street owned  by the city’s No. 1 building-code violator, Easton Mayor Philip  A. Mitman.