Review the rogues’ gallery in the Lafayette College Magazine fall 2004 issue.

The gallery will greet the Lafayette College class of 2010 when classes resume this fall.

That is the date - 2010 - when Merrill Lynch can call the bond refunding $67 million of Northampton County’s $111 million bond floated in 2001 financing construction of the county’s courthouse and prison expansion in the ethnic neighborhood of Easton’s Dutchtown-Gallows: African-Americans, Hispanics, and Lebanese.

This is the neighborhood where Lafayette College’s volunteer students teach Hispanics English as a second language to better equip them for life in America - while county and state officials with the approval of those at the local level like Mayor Phil Mitman and former mayors Tom Goldsmith and Mike McFadden proceeded to destroy the very neighborhood in which they live.

Northampton County General Purpose Authority is also the one-stop shopping center where Lafayette goes to obtain low-interest loans to expand its campus on the steep slopes and in the Bushkill Creek floodplain into which those slopes descend, carrying stormwater runoff, silt, and pollution into the stream that only feet away empties into the Delaware River and its floodplain.

In the Viet Name War, students were preoccupied with more than just chic boutiques, lunxury condos, and trendy restaurants and bars built above parking garages to protect them from the floods.

At Kent State University in Ohio, students were shot down on campus killed by their young contemporaries wearing national guard uniforms and riot gear.

Now the Easton Area School District is well along toward establishing a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp (JROTC) for high school students.

And in Forks Township, where Lafayette owns adjacent to Braden Airpark 300 acres on which the college should be expanding its campus, the Lehigh Valley International Airport Authority, which owns the airfield, is expanding it.

One purpose of this expansion is to receive the huge federal grants available for airport expansions.

Another purpose is to create an airfield with runways long enough, wide enough, and strong enough to accommodate the airlifting of heavily armored and armed Stryker Force humvee vehicles housed at a nearby national guard armory on Uhler Road (the former Fancy Furrows Farm owned by Forks Township Supervisor Chairman John Ackerman) for training and readiness purposes.

Pennsylvnia has floated a three-quarter-billion-dollar bond to create Keystone Innovation Zones throughout the commonweath, including Easton and Bethlehem, centered around universities and colleges like Lehigh and Lafayette.

The KIZs create “technology transfer” centers and career opportunites designed to stanch the “braindrain” of young graduates abandoning the so-called Lehigh Valley in seach of better job opportunities.

On their face, the KIZs discriminate against Pennsylvania’s older citizens, who must pay ever-accelerating property taxes to retire the $650 million bond and other costs.
EASD superintendent estimates that building 5000 more homes in Forks Township, alone, will increase the district’s taxes by $30 million because of the cost of new schools, infrastructure, buses, bus drivers, teachers, and maintennce personnel, etc., etc., etc.

The promised revenues of slot machine gambling casinos from Act 71 and 72 will be insufficient to defray significantly the property-tax increases needed to support the schools.