Once again, as Halloween approaches, scary evidence that the city of Bethlehem is ripping off its taxpaying citizens jumps out from the pages of today’s edition of The Morning Call in the article titled “Butz [Alvin H. Butz Inc., a Bethlehem construction company] payback helps city finances,” filed by reporter Daryl Nerl, and sub-captioned “Developer’s $1.9 million dollar deal repays debt, offsets Bethlehem deficit.”

This article follows several recent articles by reporter Nerl exposing the corruption gripping Bethlehem, which bills itself to tourists as the “Christmas City,” for the reason that it was founded by the 18th-century Moravian religious leader, County Nicholas Von Zinzendorf.

The article also follows by only days my comments on reporter Nerl’s articles, in the form of emails that my opponents are trying unsuccessfully to dismiss as “spam, and also as postings, with links, at http://www.billybytes.com/blog/.

A recent such posting exposed Butz Inc., the contract manager for the $42 million Northampton County courthouse expansion, which he used to chisel the county’s taxpayers out of millions of dollars through cost-plus contracts instead of more taxpayer-friendly fixed-price contracts.

Every time the courthouse-expansion construction is delayed, Alvin H. Butz, Inc., profits - and the Northampton County taxpayer - including me, whose trying to recover from colon cancer and its serious complications - and my family suffer.

This is it, the last straw. My family is through suffering.

I tried to support the Republican Party candidate for Easton Mayor in the upcoming general election in November, against Salvadore Panto, Jr., the nominee put forth by the Democratic Party, which in Northampton County and the fictitious “Lehigh Valley” has to be one of the most corrupt political franchises in the country.

Be sure that when Pennsylvania’s Franklin and Marshall College professor Terry Madonna, comes to the “Lehigh Valley” for a soon-scheduled performance, he won’t sing the lyrics that the the duet of Givens and Nerl are harmonizing.

Incidentally, Franklin and Marshall is the beneficiary of Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. “Fast Eddie” Rendell’s and its legislature’s Keystone Innovation statute of 2004.

This statute bestows lavish state grants to universities and colleges; e.g., $9.5 million to Easton’s Lafayette College to build a new urban village in the flood plain of Bushkill Creek.

Lafayette has embarked on this project in collusion with the officials of Northampton County and its seat Easton.

Another conspirator in this “public-private partnership” is Arcadia Properties, the developer of another Bushkill Creek corridor project called Riverwalk.

The is a $54 million project consisting of six stories of luxury condominiums atop a chic shopping mall atop a three- or four-story parking garage atop a bus station to a height exceeding Easton’s zoning ordinance and building codes - and in the flood plain of the Delaware River.
Butz Inc.’s grand larceny couldn’t have been pulled off without insider help, of course, such as the August 4, 2006, audit by Northampton County Controller John Schimmel.

Schimmel’s aiding and abetting of Butz Inc.’s crimes is not that his August 4, 2006, audit is not factual.

It is, which for Northampton County and its seat Easton’s officials - and Bethlehem’s - is astonishing.

More commonly these colluding official cover up sugar coat, just as The Morning Call’s publisher and editors have tried to gloss over in their futile effort to make Alvin H. Butz and his construction corporation and Mayor John Callahan and the city of Bethlehem look good.