Lafayette College President Arthur J. Rothkopf is an adept aviator. He learned to fly as a Deputy Secretary of Transportation under President George H.W. Bush, who appointed him to the job.

Upon Bush’s November 1992 defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, Bush dispatched Rothkopf to Lafayette College as its president (Rothkopf was an alumnus of the the class of 1955) to lay groundwork for the Presidential election of 1996, who turned out be Senator Bob Dole, of course, who, upon his failed run, was hired by Pfizer to hawk Viagra.

Because of Rothkopf’s transportation experience, Northampton County Executive Bill Brackbill, the only Republican ever to hold that office, before or since, appointed him to the Lehigh Valley (Lehigh and Northampton counties) International Airport Authority (LVIAA).

This was a strategic political appointment, designed to help Rothkopf recruit the Republican candidate for the 1996 Presidential match-up.

As an LVIAA member, Rothkopf was instrumental in adding to this bi-county-operated airport, Braden Field, a small airfield privately owned by the Reverend Paul Braden family.

This, too, was a political strategy. The Reverend Brady was a Lehigh Valley mover and shaker as a board member of the Lehigh Valley Health Foundation.
The foundation, and Braden, exercised considerable political influence over Northampton County’s Easton Hospital Authority (HEA) that administered the non-profit Easton Hospital.

That influence continued until the hospital because of mismanagement and Medicare/Medicaid fraud-related fines was sold to a for-profit hospital chain out of Brentwood (a neighborhood of Nashville) Tennessee, Community Health Services (CHS).
The HEA should have been dissolved and ceased to exist as required by the Pennsylvania Municipality Authorities Act of 1945, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, President Judge Robert Freedberg of Northampton County Court of Common Pleas and Pennsylvania Attorney General J. Michael Fisher effected the transaction in the county’s Orphans Court to ensure that the Lehigh Valley Health Foundation received its share of the divvied-up spoils.

As for the HEA, it was never officially dissolved, only replaced, in effect, by the General Purpose Authority, created illegally by Executive Glenn Reibman and his administration and county council in 1997.

The Lehigh Valley Health Foundation and the non-profit Weller Health and Wellness Center jointed forces and are now working to create a “regional health department” bureaucracy comprised of Lehigh and Northampton counties.

Another motive of Rothkopf as an LVIAA Board of Govenors member active in the acquisition of Braden Field was that it lay adjacent to 300-plus acres owned by Lafayette College.

The Lafayette Panthers football team practices there, at Metzgar Field, but that didn’t bother Rothkopf because he wanted to take his college’s sports programs out of the Patriot League anyway.

The ensuing revolt of alumnae prevented his success in that field (no pun intended), but he succeeded in helping the LVIIA acquire Braden Field anyway.

Rothkopf wanted Braden Field to expand as an excuse not to build a second campus on its 300-plus adjacent acres. He wanted to remain exclusively in Easton, where he had influence with the city’s Mayor Thomas F. Goldsmith.

Goldsmith had influence with Philadelphia Mayor Edward G. Rendell. Rothkopf needed Goldsmith’s influence with Rendell, whom Rothkopf intuited, rightly, would succeed Tom Ridge as Pennsylvania’s next elected Governor.

Rothkopf also wanted LVIAA ownership of Braden Field in order to expand it with generous grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation, over which, under George H.W. Bush, Rothkopf had been Deputy Secretary and also legal counsel, having earned his LLB at Columbia University following his graduation from Lafayette.

This success put Rothkopf in good stead with the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce (GLVCC) and prepared him, after retiring as President of Lafayette College, for positions both as counsel and vice-president of the National Chamber of Commerce, back in Washington, D.C.

There he’s working for President George W. Bush’s Security and Prosperity Partnership Act (SPPA), or North American Union (NAU), which he had worked on while still in the Lehigh Valley on what’s known her as the Free Trade Agreement, or FTA, on 126 acres of Sands BethWorks LLP in the South Side neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

When Rothkopf took off with wife Barbara to return to Washington, D.C., he at some point between here and there reached the point of no return”

That point was the $9 million gift that Governor Rendell in August 2004 gave Rothkopf and his alma mater for a new urban “Bushkill Village” in the flood plain of Bushkill Creek - and, in fact, the flood plain of the Delaware River.

For the village, planned for construction in the Bushkill Creek Corridor, has the shape of a fishhook, roughly, extended as it does west from North 13th Street, through the eastern edge of the college campus, through North 3rd Street, through Nevin Terrace, through the State Routes 22, 248, and 611 interchange, and, finally, to the intersection of Larry Holmes Drive and Church Street and the parking lot behind the Governor George Wolf Building on North 2nd Street.

I call it the “point of no return” because this new urban village was thrust upon the unwitting citizens of Easton, and Northampton County, of which Easton is the seat, with no planning.

This “point of no return” has also created an identical one for Easton’s Mayor Philip B. Mitman, City Council, the Easton Parking Authority, and Arcadia Properties, the private partner in this public-private partnership to build a bus terminal Intermodal/parking garage/shopping center/luxury condominiums in the Bushkill Creek flood plain.

This public-private partnership project, which I have elsewhere dubbed a fish ladder for automobiles, would enable them to reach the Wolf Building 12 stories above the flood plain.

It would also upstage the fish ladder for shad located a few yards downstream that enables shad to ascend the dam that separates the higher-level Lehigh River from the lower-level Delaware.

Rothkopf, Rendell, Mitman, Goldsmith, Reibman, and other dignataries may be seen in www.billbytes.com/blo/ post #200, dated December 21, 2006, and titled “Pennsylvania, Northamton County, and City of Easton Scoundrels.”

Just click on the link Gateway.

Rendell’s $9 million “gift” is Lafayette College’s “pay for play” for its support of his and the Pennsylvania legislature’s Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ) statute to aid colleges like the University of Pennsylvania enmeshed in the student-loan scandals and to charge students usurious interest rates through the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA).

And there are other institutions ensnared in the net of this scandal, like the one from which Rothkopf received his LLB, New York City’s Columbia University.

It, too, can be added along with the University of Pennsylvania, to the creel.