David Ellis was the president of Lafayette College and an enemy of historic preservation.

He was succeeded by President Robert Rotberg, who refused to live in the Victorian mansion on College Drive, insisting instead on a modern ranch-style house East Paxinosa Drive.

He lobbied Easton City Council in his short tenure to rezone the 100 or so taxable residential properties abutting the tax-exempt college campus along McCartney, Hamilton, and Cattell streets and the cross arteries of Clinton Terrace and Hart, March, Parsons, and Monroe streets.

Rotberg wanted these properties rezoned CCE (Community, Civic, and Education), which would have removed them from the tax roles of Easton, the Easton Area School District, and Northampton County.

The tollege’s board of trustees soon got rid of Rotberg, unpopular with the school’s faculty, study body, and blocks adjacent to the campus zoned residential and neighborhood-business.

The trustees replaced him with a Lafayette College alumnus, class of 1955, Arthur J. Rothkopf, who earned his law degree at Columbia.

Armed with the LLB, he became counsel to the U.S. Department of Transportation, and later a deputy secretary of the department, under President George H.W. Bush.

Upon the elder Bush’s defeat in 1992, Rothkopf came to Easton to be installed as Lafayette College’s president.

Because of his transportation experience, and for political reasons, Northampton County Executive Bill Brackbill appointed him to the Lehigh Valley International Airport Authority Board of Governors.

In that position Rothkopf plotted with the LVIAA, the Forks Township supervisors including Tim Merwarth and Henning Holmgaard, and State Senator Lisa Boscola to sell small, privately owned Braden field to the LVIAA.

Billy Bytes newsletter, website, and blog creator and editor forced Rothkopf off the board of governors by exposing his inherent conflict of interest: Lafayette College owned 300 acres adjacent to the airport.

Some of the 300 acres Rothkopf transferred to LVIAA with deed restructions prohibiting their use for airport purposes, deed restrictions that the college ignored.

Rothkopf then wormed his way into so-called “Lehigh Valley” Chamber of Commerce and through a series of power plays began consolidating local chambers like TRACC (Two Rivers Area Chamber of Commerce) into the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce.

Aided by the larger chamber’s president and vice president Tony Iannelli and Marta Boulos Gabriel, respectively, Rothkopf, upon his retirment from Lafayette College, parlayed his “Lehigh Valley” chamber of commerce contacts into positions as both counsel and vice presidency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, back again with his wife in Washington, D.C., under Resident George W. Bush.

There rothkopf conspires with the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Intermational Monetary Fund (IMF), and the National Association of Manufactures (NAM) to tear down trade barriers protecting the U.S. economic interests and sovereignty from those of its neighbors to the north and south, Canada and Mexico.

Billy Bytes publications’ editor is sure that Rothkopf was working on the “Lehigh Valley’s” Free Trade Zone and the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement expanding NAFTA and CAFTA to include all of Latin America when he left Easton and Lafyette College to return to Inside the Beltway.

One thng this editor knows for sure: Rothkopf was working with Pennsylvania’s Governor Ed “Fast Eddie” Rendell and the state legislature in enactment of the Keystone Innovation Zone statute that has broght at least $9 million in Pennsylvania taxpayer subsidies to Lafayette College’s hegemony in Easton, including the construction of a new urban village in the flood plain of the Bushkill Creek Corridor between N. 13th St. and Larry Holmes Drive..

NUE serves Lafayette College’s expansionist goals perfectly, as it continues through its inexorable incursion off its tax-exempt CCE (Community, Civic, Education) zone into the neighboring public revenue-producing residential and neighborhood-business blocks, demolishing historic, taxable buildings in its wake and building new, architecturally intrusive new buildings on the razed sites - while all the while benefitting from low-interest loans arranged for by Northampton County’s illegal General Purpose Authority.

The GPA, a function of the county’s Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) by County Executive Glenn Reibman ub 1998 following his election in 1997, has as a member Lafayette College neighbor Shawn Langen, an intimate of DCED administrator John Kingsly and a vice president of Arcadia Properties, the developer with its partner Lafayette College and the Easton Parking Authority of Riverwalk, proposed for construction behind the Governor George Wolf building parking lot.

This lot, accessed from Larry Holmes Drive and lying in the Delaware River-Bushkill Creek flood plain, was subdivided from the Wolf building at the instigation of Northampton County Council’s District 2 representative J. Michael Dowd.

Dowd’s ordinance also gave Arcadia Properties the right of first refusal to buy the Governor Wolf Building itself, at a time when Northampton County, already severely strapped for space to expand, is, like Easton’s other largest institution, Lafayette College, is buying up taxable private property like the parcel as 670 Wolf Street, located like many Lafayette College on a steep slope, pitchng down to the Lehigh River, and costing too much money.

Besides building on steep slopes, Lafayette College also proposes building in the Bushkill Creek Corridor flood plain between N. 13th St. and south of Northampton St. including Larry Holmes’ Rignside Building.

The assertion by Lafayette College and the City of Easton that the 200 block of N. 3rd St. constitutes the eastern terminus of the Bushkill Creek Corridor is a deception. The college has already acquired buildings in Nevin Terrace, which is located east of N. 3rd St.

The college has also acquired at least four taxable properties on N. 2nd St.
All of these acquisitions are require the collusion of the City of Easton, its Parking Authority, Northampton County, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Lehigh and Northampton County Transit Authority (LANTA), the Warren County town of Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC).

At the behest of Lafayette College President Arthur J. Rothkopf, one of the most dangerous threats to open, democratic government in America, Pennsylvania Governor Ed “Fast Eddie” Rendell appointed retired Lafayette College Dean of Students Herman Kissiah to the DRJTBC to help fashion the $40 million bond designed to foster “economic development” in the downtowns of Easton, Pennsylvania, and Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

(To be continued)