Last evening’s Northampton County Council meeting was rigged.

Whether it was the result of a conspiracy between Northampton County Executive John Stoffa and his Democratic county council collegues will come into shaper focus after my press conference in Centre Square, in the county seat of Easton, at 12:00 noon ET.

At a minimum, serious irregularities marred last evening’s meeting, including possible meeting of Pennsylvania’s Open Public Meetings statute, known more commonly as the Sunshine Law.

Council’s first official act of the meeting following an opening prayer by County Council District 2 representative and United church of Christ minister and the pledging of allegiance to the flag was to retire behind closed doors into “executive session,” an act whose legality was questioned by District 4 representative Ron Angle.

Dismissing Angle’s concerns with no discussion or debate by his eight colleagues on council was an attorney substituting for council’s appointed solicitor, former Northampton County Court of Common Pleas Judge Zito.

The absense of Solicitor Zito who as an attorney and judge presumably more knowlegeable of and experience in the law than his substitute was not explained.

The substitute admitted that he did not know the answers to the questions that concerned Councilman Angle. Solicitor Zito would have answered Angle’s questions or, at the very least on an issue affecting $2.2 million of county taxpayer money, would have deferred a decision and recommended tabling a vote until such time had given him the opportunity to research the issue, including a review of case law and legal precedents, as Angle urged.

The issue was that of $13.1 million dollars allocated in the $111 million megabond that the controversial Northampton County General Purpose Authority bond floated in 2001 for the construction of a private road not built to PennDoT specifications traversing 126 acres of former Bethlehem Steel Corporation property first sold to steel-producing corporation owned by manufacturing magnate Lakshmi Mittal, a native of the country of India.

Mittal sold the property to Wilbur L. Ross, the major stockholder of the International Steel Group headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, who then sold to Lehigh Valley Industrial Parks Inc., which in turn sold to Sands BethWorks LLC - the all the tortuous result of the sale of the 1600-acre Bethlehem Steel Tract disposed of in a New York City bankruptcy court/
Bethlehem Steel Executive Robert Stevens “Steve” Miller, representing his employer, negotiated the terms of the disposal, terms never revealed to the public.

Today’s on-line edition of The Express-Times, rushed hurriedly to publication unusually early following a public meeting unless it serves other corporate interests and is designed to get in the first punch in influencing public opinion, is filled with slanted news favoring Sands (Las Vegas Sands Casinos) BethWorks LLC.

Stoffa and Councilman Lamont McClure, under pressure from Easton resident Billy Givens who insisted on being allowed to speak was still in the public-comment segment of the meeting, elicited from the two officials details regarding the $2.2 million funding for Commerce Center Boulevard.

Stoffa is suspect because he was an early advocate of Act 71, “legalized” casino gambling in Bethlehem, when he was a member of the Northampton Area School board, the only school district in Northampton County except the Easton Area School District that also voted for the gambling bill’s corollary, Act 72, the specious legislation that “promised” substantial school property-tax relief from unreliable slot machine-gambling revenue.

The only predictable certainty of last night’s county council meeting that in February it will vote to keep $3 million of the $111 million bond for construction of a road from Wind Gap Borough to the Waste Management-Grand Central Sanitation Landfill and Wal-Mart store in Plainfield Township.

Stoffa also rushed to buy unreliable touch-screen voting machines that are now being rejected by states like Florida and Ohio, as reported in today’s edition of The New York Times.