A Note from BillyBytes, Environmentalist and Preservationist
Please refer to today’s The Excess-Times (kisses officials’ and politicans’ asses to excess at all times) artice by reporter Sara K. Satullo, “Star-crossed museum stymied again,” subcaptioned, “Transportation heritage center finds proposed site comes with unanswered questions about ownership.”
Phillipsburg native, lawyer, and BethWorks LLC partner Michael “Boss” Perrucci owns the 70-acre site, just as he also owns the 70-acre site at P’burg’s Howard and Stockton streets, originally slated for the museum’s site - and just as Perrucci also got him gloms on the 388-acre Ingersoll-Rand site in P’burg and ther 126-acre former Bethlehem Steel Corporation known as BethWorks for a Las Vegas Sands casino, of which with former New Jersey Governor Jim Florio, Newmark & Co. Realty of New York City, Barry Gosin, and Jeff Gural, and the law firms of Fischbein, Badillo, Wagner, and Harding, also of NYC, and Cozy O’Connor of Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board’s Thomas “Tad” Decker.
The Las Vegas Sands casino is not going to be built in Bethlehem, or anywhere else in Pennsylvania, and, in fact, Act 71, “legalizing” gambling in the state, and Act 72, Act 71’s corollary promising the KY-Jelly of property-tax relief are going to be repealed.
Copyright © 2006-2008 Billy Givens
Billy Givens said,
December 21, 2006 @ 12:20 pm
Of the 10 “landings” created by the federal Delaware & Lehigh Navigation Canal National Heritage Corridor statute of 1988, only two have opened, one in Carbon County’s Jim Thorpe Borough (formerly Mauch Chunk) and the Two Rivers Landing in downtown Easton, Pennsylvani’s Centre Square.
No other landings have opened along the 150-mile corridor since. The available Congressionally appropriated funds were stolen by the Easton site in the square’s southwest quadrant comprised of the Easton;s new City Hall located in the Alpha Building, the Binney & Smith Crayola Crayon Factory and Store, Express McDonald’s, and Bixler Jewelers, of which Easton’s current mayor is part-owner.
Whatever funds were not stolen for TRL went toward acquisition of the former Bethlehem Steel Corporation track in South Bethlehem for the planning and creation of an $879 million mixed-use development centered on the Las Vegas Sands Casino.
The Sands had been pre-selected as early as the 2000 selection of resident King George Bush, to whose January 2005 coronation in Washington, D.C., Sands owner Sheldon Adelson together with wife Miriam donated $1 million - and 2002, with the election of former Philadelphia Mayor Ed “Fast Eddie” Rendell as Governor with a heavy Republican vote over Republican opponent Pennsyvania Attorney General Mike Fisher.
Fisher was only a token candidate, as was Lynn Swann in the 2006 gubernatorial cycle, who was rewarded for his role with a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania, joining on the bench judges like Rendell’s wife Margorie.
Casino opponents’ first order of business should be to persuade the losing applicants for casino licenses to appeal to Pennsylvnia’s Supreme Court.
J. Williams said,
February 6, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
On December 21, 2006 at 10:07 am, Billy Bytes says:
“The Las Vegas Sands casino is not going to be built in Bethlehem, or anywhere else in Pennsylvania, and, in fact, Act 71, “legalizing” gambling in the state, and Act 72, Act 71’s corollary promising the KY-Jelly of property-tax relief are going to be repealed.”
From your blog to God’s ears. Only downright professional grade self-delusionists believe that casinos will cut property taxes. The BethWorks developer looks like he’s already backing down on the promises that led many in Bethlehem to think there was hope that the ugly, decrepit, blast furnace relics along the Lehigh River would be coming down as the gambling parlors were built..
Suddenly, however, these visual nightmares have been elevated to monuments of our glorious industrial past and are to be preserved. Yeah, sure. More likely is that removing them would uncover a cauldron of toxic waste that somebody would have to clean up.
The re- industrialization of the former steel company lands to the east of the Minsey Trail Bridge is proceeding remarkably well and is real growth that will benefit the area. It should be allowed to continue right through the casino property.