Please refer to the article by procurer Tracy Jordan in today’s (November 24, 2006) edition of The Morning Call Girl, “Easton merchants to parking meters: Put a lid on it.”

Nothing symbolizes the corruption in the City of Easton, Pennsylvania, than its parking meters.

They even landed one downtown Easton resident and local restaurant employee in the Northampton County Prison - even though her alleged parking-meter-violation offenses, most of which were later found by the judicial sysem to be unfounded and dismissed - were far less serious than those of Paul Newman in the flick Cool Hand Luke wrecked a parking meter in his hick hometown and wound up on a Gerogia chain gang.

The parking-meter hourly rates, which Easton now threatens to raise to a dollar, are imposed by the still-outstanding mortgage on the Easton Parking Authority garage, girded by S. 3rd, Pine, Bank, and Ferry streets: $225,000 a year, paid in two installments of $112,500 each.

At least that’s how much the parking authority (meaning Easton’s taxpayers and meter-feeders, when The Excess-Times on Dedember 11, 1995, inadvertently published an article by city-beat reporter Josh Richman that the parking authority garage girded by four downtown Easton city blocks behind the Alpha-Building City Hall, Binney & Smith’s Crayola Crayon Factory and Store, Bixler’s Jewelers, and Express McDonald’s was no longer safely supported by the hundreds of steel cables, which Richman’s article described as “tendons,” that prevent the garage’s four massive concrete decks from collapsing and pan-caking on each other and the cars parked on them - including those of city’s civilian workers, for whom the top-most deck is reserved, and Easton’s police, who took over the first level when Easton Mayor Thomas F. Goldsmith and Easton City Council demolished Easton’s art deco City Hall Building at 650 Ferry St. and relocated it inside the parking authority garage.

This is the station that prompted by Richman’s article the Allentown branch of the federal Office of Safety and Health (OSHA) ordered shut down, which it did, but only for a day.

Panicked, Goldsmith, his direcor of public works Kristi Miers, Binney & Smith, and other corporate interests used their political influence with Easton’s Congressional delegation to get the garage re-opened.

The most prominent member of this delegation was Pennsylvnia’s senior U.S. Senator Arlen Specter and, I believe, junior Senator Rich Santorum.

I do know for a fact that both these senators flexed their poltical muscle Inside the Beltway to secure at least $2 million toward the cost for the construction of a new parking authority garage behind the Governor George Wolf Building on Larry Holmes Drive in the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek floodplains.

The Easton officials pushing this “public-private Partnership” project include Mayor Phil Mitman, his business administrator J. Steven Humphrey, and parking authority chairman Lou “Mr. Easton” Ferrone, the member of interim Easton Mayor Mike McFadden’s commission that, coming to the rescue of Northampton County’s Rube Goldberg courthouse and prison expansion financed by an illegal $111 million bond and General Purpose Authority, recommended that the prison be built without smoke and fire alarms to prevent the prison’s cost overruns instead.

As for Northampton County’s role, the general contractor it selected for the prison expansion had only recently built a parking garage in New Jersey that quickly collapsed.

(to be continued)