Read about the staff of Taggart Associates and you will understand why the Easton area’s representative on Northampton County Council and that body’s former president J. Michael Dowd obstructed the disclosure of the financial records of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, of which he was - and may still be - a member of the LVEDC’s executive board.

Dowd was first elected to Northampton County Council in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s, about the time Glenn Reibman was elected the county’s executive.

The Democrats elected Dowd in order to remove long-time Republican councilman Jim Hemstreet, whom Reibman and his Democratic-dominated council considered an obstructionist to the Democrats’ agenda.

However, in 2000 Dowd surprised the Democrats by voting against Reibman’s and the county General Purpose Authority’s $111 million bond issue for the county government center expansion.

Dowd was pissed because the bond issue did not include $1.7 million for the construction of a parking deck for the former Hotel Easton, whose new owner New York City labor mediator Theodore Kheel had acquired for $650,000 complete with a 12-year Keystone Opportunity Zone (KOZ) exemption from all local and state taxes, including school property taxes.

(Through the intervention of Dowd henchman Mayor Thomas F. Goldsmith and his director of Easton’s Planning and Development Department and also executive director of the Easton Redevelopment Authority, Robert O’Neil, met with state officials in Harrisburg and arranged to have the tax exemptions paid not as improvements were made to the former hotel but in lump sums in advance.)

When the 2000 $113 million bond issue failed to pass muster with Pennsylvania’s courts and Department of Community and Economic Development, and sent the issue back to Northampton County for re-work, Reibman and the Democrats bribed Dowd’s support by agreeing to include in the re-worked 2001 $111 million bond issue funding for a parking deck on the site of the former Hotel Easton.

Reibman and the Democrats bribed former Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. with a promise to restore at least three-quarters of a million State Theatre funds that had been knocked out of the 2000 $113 million bond issue.

The site of the parking garage was later moved to the parking lot behind the Governor George Wolf Building at the recommendation, no less, of the architect and Easton Heritage Alliance board member Jeff Martinson, who, though not a resident of Easton but of Williams Township, serves as the architect for downtown Easton’s Local Historic District, which must still approve the Wolf building parking lot as the site of the proposed Easton Parking Authority garage and mixed-use complex known as Riverwalk.

Donna Taggart through the influence of the Easton area’s 136th legislative district representative, Robert Freeman, and other Democratic - and Republican politicians and officials, is now the executive director of Greater Easton Partnership Development Inc. and the administrator of Freeman’s Main Street project for downtown Easton.

Taggert’s husband Glenn is an expert on brownfield re-development and liaison to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that under Secretary of the EPA Christie Whitman and the administration of Governor Tom Ridge subverted the federal statute known as CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act) with Pennsylvania’s watered-down “Brownfield Action Team (BAT) used to “remediate” the former Bethlehem Steel Corporation site on S. 25th St., site of the Home Depot and Giant shopping center, and the former 1600 to 1800-acre former Steel site in South Bethlehem.

There is more than enough evidence in the Billybytes publications to send to federal prison not only Reibman’s former director of planning and development and political guru Michael Solomon, but at least half of the corrupt so-called Lehigh Valley’s officials.

More on this subject later.