Billy Bytes Blog post titled “The Selling of Easton, Pennsylvnia’s. Environment,” dated August 17, 2006, describes the ladder at the convergence of the Delaware and Lehigh rivers.

This is not the fish ladder that enables the fish to negotiate the dam off Scott Park. Rather, it’s the ladder proposed by this public-private partnership: the City of Easton and its Parking Authority; Northampton County and LANTA (Lehigh and Northampton Transit Authority); the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC); Lafayette College and Arcadia Properties.

This ladder would enable another species of aquatic life, transit buses and automobiles to ford (no pun intended) the Delaware River and Bushkill Creek floods.

These inundations now come with increasing regularity and frequency, accompaniments to to the Global Warming and the Green House Effect.

The ladder would allow passage of the autos and buses from flood-prone Larry Holmes Drive and the narrows of Church Street.

From there they would climb the high sheer bluff to their destination, the Northampton County-owned Governor George Wolf Building.

The building, with its grade-level second parking lot, sits majestically far above the flood plain below, with a commanding view of the Delaware River.

Easton, Northampton County, and the Lehigh Valley Planning commission subdivided the lower-level parking lot. This was a political favor to Arcadia Properties as “pay for play” for its generous campaign contribution.

Easton and NORCO reeled out extra line to Arcadia Properties with the right of first refusal to buy the Governor George Wolf Building itself.
Gentler-graded access to the building exists off North Second Street. But it’s too narrow and residential to have cars and buses trundling noisily in and out of it, their exhausts belching pollutants and further befouling the air.

This traffic, besides abetting Global Warming and the Green House Effect, would degrade the neighborhood’s pedestrian friendly ambiance and quality of life.
The ladder’s first rung, the bus terminal - or “Intermodal” in bureaucratese, takes its name from the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. Legislated in 1991,
The main goal of this Act, which also goes under the name “Ice Tea,” was to reduce automotive emissions and improve air quality

But Congress, including its delegation from Lehigh and Northampton counties, continues to wield its ice pick and to chip away at the legislative iceberg in the face, again, of Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect.
Meanwhile, the only chill blowing from Inside-the-beltway and into our atmosphere remains that of Senators and Congressmen like Arlen Specter and Charlie Dent.

Their only oversight is their obdurate blindness to the fact that they are destroying the habitat of animals like the polar bears and, in the end, the bears themselves.

Returning for a moment to Ice Tea, it is also known as Tea-21. It’s part and parcel of the proposed condominium development in Independence Township, Warren County, New Jersey, by the K-Land Development Corporation.
Warren and Hunterdon and five other New Jersey counties in have been annexed and incorporated into the “Lehigh Valley” Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA.

As described by The Morning Call business reporter Gregory Karp and Newark’s Star-Ledger land-use reporter Steve Chambers have traced the history of the MSA in recent articles.
The Newark Star-Ledger has exposed the MSA and the Highlands Water Protection Act development pressures on Pike, Monroe, Northampton, Lehigh, and Bucks counties of eastern Pennsylvania.

This exposure so infuriated the law firm of Perrucci, Florio, Steinhardt, and Fader - which stands to profit from Highlands litigation - demanded a meeting with the Star-Ledger’s editorial staff.

The firm selected partner Floriowith the law firm’s incensed partner, James Florio himself, a former U.S. Congressman and New Jersey Governor, to represent its interest at the meeting.
The firm is also involved in the development of the defunct Ingersoll-Rand Corporation in Phillipsburg, New Jersey; and the bankrupted Bethlehem Steel property in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s, South Side neighborhood.

This is the proposed site of the Sands BethWorks LLP casino, of which Perrucci, Florio, Steinhard, and Fader are principals.

As such, they join company with the Sands BethWorks major stockholder, Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas.

They all join hands with Macao, Red China - which today is known euphemistically as the Peoples’ Republic of China.

America has exported its manufacturing base to China, as exemplified by Ingersoll-Rand and Bethlehem Steel.

This our country has done in exchange for the cheap goods imported from China and retailed in big-box stores like Wal-Mart.

(As the creator and editor of Billy Bytes publications, I take pride in the bumper sticker displayed on my old Volvo wagon.

(Juxtaposed next to beaming yellow smiley face are the words “WALMART, KILLING MAIN STREET ONE BUSINESS AT A TIME.”

(The sticker attracts a lot of attention from an admiring public.)

I purchased the Volvo from Integrated Automotive Services (IAS), located on Bushkill Drive.

IAS, together with 32 other private properties, live daily under a Sword of Damocles: Easton and its Redevelopment Authority threaten to seize these properties.

They lie along Bushkill Drive in the Bushkill Creek flood plain, between N. 13th Street and Larry Holmes Drive - in what the officials are calling the Bushkill Creek Corridor.

The officials are currently in the process of “taking” these properties from their owners, through eminent domain if required.

These officials are acting on behalf of Lafayette College’s expansionist incursion of its campus.

The inexorably encroaching campus already slides down its steep slopes, carried on the storm-water runoff and mud, and into the Bushkill Creek Corridor flood plain.