Last Tuesday of this week, November 29, 2006, the Easton, Pennsylvania, Parking Authority’s five members voted to purchase the former Simon Silk Mill located on S. 13th St. and has made an offer of $2.5 million to the building’s owner, James Garofalo, a price the authority offered previously and that Mr. Garofalo refused.

The authority also warned Mr. Garafalo that if he doesn’t accept this latest offer, it or Easton’s Redevelopment Authority will seize the property through eminent domain.

The parking authority members are volunteers, not elected, and the fact they are volunteers implies that their appointments to the authority, presumably by Easton Mayor Philip A. Mitman, were not officially sanctioned by Easton’s governing body, City Council.

Further, there is a flagrant conflict of interest here in that the major beneficiaries of the silk mill purchase with public taxpayer funds would be Lafayette College in partnership with  Arcadia Properites, both private enterprise entities, for the development of a project known as Bushkill Village.

The conflict of interest arises from the fact that the Easton Redevelopment Authority’s solicitor, a downtown Easton attorney and College Hill neighborhood resident, is a Lafayette College alumnus and was previously his alma mater’s general counsel - and sill may be.

The parking authority’s chairman is an Easton civil engineer, Lou “Mr. Easton” Ferrano, who was a volunteer to former Easton Mayor Michael McFadden’s commission that approved the expansion of Northampton County’s prison sans the protection of smoke and fire detection devices in order to save the county’s taxpayers money.

The parking authority owns and operates Easton’s existing parking garage that is still threatened with imminent collapse from an unknown number of the hundreds of steel cables, or “tendons,” that have rusted and snapped from the rain, snow, and sleet that have infiltrated the countless fissures and cracks in the garage’s massive decks since the facility’s construction with substandard concrete 30 years ago under direction of the authority’s chairman, Andrew “Andy” Daub.

The parking authority’s independent, out-side engineer, Ramp Associates of New York, warned it and the City of Easton that the garage was dangerous and in need of extensive testing and repairs in the late fall or early winter of 1995.

But authority and Easton officials disregarded the warning because the massive, and expensive, marketing, publicity, and other ground work for the grand opening of Two Rivers Landing with its Binney & Smith Crayola Crayon Factory and Store and Express McDonald’s hamburger outlet had already been approved.

Parking meters for downtown shoppers had also been removed to accommodate B&S and McCD, Bixler Jewelers, and Easton’s new City Hall relocated from 650 Ferry Street to the southwest quadrant of Centre Square.