As reported by The Morning Call reporter Tracey Jordan in today’s edition of that journal, public oppostion to the downtown Easton Riverwalk project is building, however belatedly - though this is a boondoggle that the Billybytes blog has long warned its readers about.
This boondoggle traces its roots to Easton Mayor Thomas F. Goldsmith’s administration and his sycophant cabinet members Easton Planning and Development Director Robert O’Neil and chief planner Barbara Kowitz - who succeeded O’Neil after his sudden departure from city government not only as director of plannning and development but also as the executive director of the totally courrupt Easton Redevelopment Authority (on the same level as the equally corrupt Easton Parking Authority under the current chairmanship of Lou “Mr. Easton” Ferrone, mentioned in Tracey Jordan’s article of today’s dateline.
As a gauge to Ferrone’s corruption, he was a member of the Easton Commission of erstwhile Mayor Michael McFadden that recommended building the Northampton County Prison expansion sans water-sprinkler and smoke-alarm detectors as a cost-savings expedience to the county.
(This is the county whose former administrator Jim Hickey raided the prisoners’ emergency medical fund for the cash needed to buy the private residences in the 100 block of S. 6th St., the predominantly African-American and Latino of downtown Easton’s Dutchtown-Gallows Hill neighborhood for the govenment center expansion. Northampton County Council, led by its president J. Michael Dowd who also represents Easton District 2 on that august body, defrauded county taxpayers with the unneccesary expense of a voter-referendum amendment to the county’s Home Rule Charter. Dowd and his cohorts did this to cover up the fact that the county’s purchase of the private Dutchtown-Gallows Hill neighborhood was illegal.
The Riverwalk site in the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek flood plains was the choice of the Easton Area Land Development and Industrial Corporation, the same organization that with the Northampton County HIstorcal and Genealogical Society recommended the former Sigal’s Bridal Salon in the 300 block of Northampton Street as the official site of the county’s archives building, torn down as part of the ravaging of the Dutctown-Gallows Hill neighborhood.
Easton city government and the county of which Easton is the seat are among the most corrupt municipalities in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Please continue to follow the sordid story of Rivewalk and its corporate partners like Acadia Properties and Lafaytte College as the Billybytes blog continues to expose the corruption.
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Copyright © 2006-2008 Billy Givens
Billy Givens said,
November 8, 2006 @ 8:53 am
Yesterday, election day, Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell personally accepted $60 million from the Mohegan Indian Tribe of Connectecticut for a casino gambling license on the site of the former Pocono Downs race track in the Wilkes-Barre area.
Meanwhile, Rendell on behalf of large corporate landowners in Forks Township, Northampton County, fought the efforts of Pennsylvania’s and New Jersey’s Delaware Indian Tribe’s and Lenni Lenape Tribe’s to reclaimn land in Forks Towship that the tribes allege were seized by fraud and other forgery by William Penn’s son Thomas in the notorious Walking Purchase of 1737.
Governor Rendell and the Pennsylvania legislature have now introduced organized cr crime to Pennsylvania through Act 71 and Act 72, the former creating the corrupt Pennsylvvania Gaming Control Board, the second act creating the so-called backend referendum ostensibly providing school property tax relief through gambling proceeds.
Because of long inactivity on my Billybytes blog for health reasons, my email appears not be working properly, so that so far I have been unsuccessful in notifying my readership of the lastest Billybytes blog.
Please do whatever you can to help me disseminate this notificaton to my readership.
Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands and Venitian casinos in Las Vegas and as far away as the Macao Province of the People’s Republic of China is using his gambling proceeds to creatre private Lubavicher schools including one in the Pocono Mountains area.
His gambling proceeds will accomplish nothing in the way of meaninful school propety tax reform for public schools but instead will be used to build additional provate religious schools.
Adelson has personally finance trips of at least 75 U. S. Congressmen to Israel in an effort to persuade the Israeli government to legalized gambling in that country.
Billy Givens said,
November 8, 2006 @ 10:12 pm
Two million dollars in Congressionally appropriated pork-barrel funds were obtained by Pennsylvania’s U. S. Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, the latter defeated in yesterday’s general election by Pennsylvania State Auditor Bob Casey Jr.
Voters in Easton, the seat of Northampton County, should repudiate Santorum again by demanding that he - and his collegeague Spector - that the two defunded the $2 million appropriation for the transportation intermodal proposed for construction in the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek floodplains by real estate developer-speculator Arcadia Properties and its CEO and president Richard Thulin and his vice president of marketing Shawn Langen.
Arcadia Properties’s public-sector partners ate the City of Easton, the Easton Parking Authority, the Lehigh and Northampton Transporation Authority (LANTA), and Northampton County under County Authorities’ Cordinator John Kingsley.
Arcadia Properties is also a partner of private-sector Lafayette College in the continuing development in the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek floodplains.
The City of Easton and the Easton Redevelopment Authority have threatened the 33 private-property owners in the Bushkill Creek corridor with having their property condemned and seized thourgh eminent domain unless they surrender their properties to the Bushkill Corridor projects, a joint public-private venture.
Billy Givens said,
November 9, 2006 @ 10:38 am
There is another article in today’s edition of The Morning Call by reporter Tracey Jordan about the proposed Delaware River-Bushkill Creek floodplain Riverwalk project of developer Arcadia Properties, whose CEO and president is heavy Republican Party campaign contributor Richard Thulin and his his marketing vice-president Shawn langen of College Hill.
This explains why Easton Mayor Phil Mitman and Easton Parking Authority chairman Lou “Mr. Easton” Ferrone, a professional engineer who should know better, are such ardent supporters of the project.
Billy Givens said,
November 9, 2006 @ 6:22 pm
Despite Tuesday’s political revolution, the specious “Lehigh Valley’s” state legislative and Congressional delegations have no inclination to change their past and current fiscal priorities: U. S. Congressman Charlie Dent, State Senator LIsa Boscola, Representatives Bob Freeman and Rich Grucela, U.S. Senator Arlen Specter and even lame-duck Rick Santorum and all the other members of those legislative delegations intend to continue their log-rolling, pork-barrel legislative agenda of bringing home the bacon from where it hangs in the Great Smoke House in Washington, D.C., to be doled out to local communities by the White House and the capitol building - especially to the real-estate developers/speculators like Theodore Kheel and his Easton partner Peter Koehler, Arcadia Properties, Scuy-Rhys Developers, Ashley Developer, Nic Zawarski and Sons, Lafayette College, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
This absence of fiscal responsibility is why U. S. Senator Arlen Specter came within the breadth of a red pubic hair in losing his seat to fiscal conservative U. S. Congressman Pat Toomey.
Spector’s ass was saved only by the rallying of supporters like capo Easton lawyer and College Hill resident and former Lafayette College general counsel Danny Cohen - who, in the manner of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s endorsement of Charlie Dent over his Demcratic opponent Charles Dertinger, joined Rick Santorum in working for the re-election of Specter.
Billy Givens said,
November 9, 2006 @ 11:47 pm
Easton Mayor Phil Mitman has made the same deal with Riverwalk developer Arcadia Properties as he made with Easton City Council, the Easton Zoning Hearing Board, and the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas with the intervention of Judge Emil Giordano. These officials denied the public including Easton resident Billy Givens the right to appeal the zoning board’s decision that allowed Allentown-Whitehall Township developer/speculator Abraham Atiyeh to build the new federal General Services Administration-Social Security Administration building on S. 4th Street.
At the meeting with Mitman, Atiyeh, and Judge Giordano, Atiyeh was represented by his paid political consultant, former Easton treasurer and controller and mayoral candidate and current Easton Area School District (EASD) Board of Directors member Pat Vulcano Jr., the husband of Easton City Council president Sandy Vulcano.
Billy Givens said,
November 10, 2006 @ 7:13 pm
When the Billybytes’ publication’s learned that Northampton County Executive Glenn Reibman and county council under the presidency of Easton’s representative on council, J. Michael Dowd, was determined to retain the county’s Director of Community and Economic Development Department, Vince Dominach, despite his wife-swapping with a New Jersey dentist and his wife in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, motel rooms, it published a cartoon depicting the director and the dentist’s wife in flagrante delicto and distributed it throughout downtown Easton and the county government center at Washington and 7th streets.
By the close of county business that day, the director had cleaned out his desk and departed the governmnet center premises.
Reibman replaced him with the department’s assistant director, Drew Lewis, who, when asked asked by county council at his confirmation hearing to divulge the names of his clients that Lewis operated on the side as a private consultant.
Lewis refused to divulge the names, one of whom was Arcadia Properties, the developer of the Riverwalk project, Lewis’s choice.
County Council also accepted Lewis’s proposal that Arcadia Properties be given the right-of-first-refusal for development rights of the project, including trendy boutiques and luxury condomibiums.
BillyBytes » The National Museum of Industrial History and SteelStax Scam said,
February 16, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
[…] Prompted by an e-mail from Diane Berlin, an executive of the Natiional Coaiition Against Legalized Gambling, Billy Bytes’ editor Googled on “Riverwalk Casino.” […]