Refer please to the article by reporter Tracey Jordan titled “Award? Priceless Dinner? 5 grand, published in today’s edition of The Morning Call.

To Lafayette College, Ashley Development, and Arcadia Properties, add Koehler-Kheel Realty as the consortium of developers behind the Bushkill Creek Corridor project known as Bushkill Village that extends from 13th Street not just to N. 3rd Street but along Larry Holmes Drive all the way to S. 3rd Street - a corridor located in the Bushkill Creek, Delaware River, and Lehigh River flood plain.

As we prepare to celebrate the the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth, the consortium of developers just identified and conspiring with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Northampton County, the City of Easton and its Redevelopment Authority, the quasi-judicial Easton Zoning Hearing Board, the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority (LANTA), and even the federal government as represented by U.S. Senator Arlen Specter and his former colleague Rick Santorum, are racist.

Billy Bytes’ accusation is based on the fact that one of the corridor’s property owners, African-American Easton resident and former world heavyweight boxing champion of the world and builder of the L&D Enterprises and Ringside buildings was required to meet the strictest requirements of Easton’s zoning ordinance governing construction in flood plains.

Those requirements, some of which fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Emergency Managment Agency (FEMA), have been relaxed and even ignored to favor the conspirators.

The Billy Bytes’ publications are declaring Easton, Pennsylvania, the New Orleans of the north and its floods from September 18, 2005’s, Hurrican Ivan, the floods of April and June 2006 as the equivalent, on an area and per-capita basis, of the Crescent City’s Hurricane Katrina and Hurrican Rita.

And FEMA has handled Easton’s flooding about as efficiently as it has dealt with those of New Orleans.

And nine miles to the west on PA Route 22, Easton’s sister third-class city of Bethlehem is trying to get thousands of slot machine instead of repairing the four pumps that could spare the Christmas City’s South Side neighborhood from flooding from the Lehigh River and stormwater runoff from South Mountain and the campus of Lehigh University.

Lehigh University, like Lafayette College, as well as Northampton Community College, do not support flood-control prevention because all three institutions benefit munificently from Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s and the state’s legislature from the 2004 Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ) statute.

Posts on all of these topics appear on the Billy Bytes Blog, http://www.billybytes.com/blog/, including a link to a New York Times article about a documentary of Hurricane Katrina and Hurrican Rita and the sorry role that FEMA played in that national disaster, made by the movie director Spike Lee.