When Don Cunningham as county executive many moons ago brought Nestle to the Lehigh Valley, I realized that it wasn't really the prize plum he was bolstering his career with. We have been fortunate not to have been victim of a drought, because they suck a lot of water out of our aquifer.
He rode that deal to head the county development agency, where he then brought us the cranberry juice company from New Jersey. Turns out that New Jersey had become fed up with their polluting, and New Jersey isn't known to be fussy about such things.
Donny is now bragging about bringing us a yogurt company, which was shopping for somewhere to tolerate their wastewater requirements. All these companies always promise to invest and hire big, and Lehigh Valley gobbles up the bait. Now that we have a regional water authority operating both the supply and waste, the taxpayers will be unknowingly subsidizing these new industries, who found a waiting patsy. Fortunately for Donnie and these companies, pushback over the years has been limited to this blog.
CLICK HERE FOR MY BABY BOOMER MEMORIES OF ALLENTOWN AT AMAZON BOOKSTORE... 36 SELECTED POSTS FROM THIS BLOG
The LCA water deal with Allentown never should have happened.
ReplyDeleteThe city went ahead with the sale despite objections from the LC Commissioners, and the sale to the LCA removed any natural protection that having two competing water suppliers would have given.
But Ed Pawlowski had higher aspirations than being Allentown’s mayor, and he needed to create the illusion that he had “solved” the city’s fiscal problems.
Next time you bump into Pawlowski, you should thank him for your ever-increasing water bill. We all should, along with Peter Schweyer, Mike Schlossburg, and the rest of the rubber stamps who were then on Allentown’s city council and enabled the corrupt Pawlowski’s scheme.
It is not my intention to defend Pawlowski, but Afflerbach's police pension contract created a financial burden, which hatched the subsequent water sale.
ReplyDeleteContrary to the “official record” Ed Pawlowski was 💯 supportive of the APD pension scheme. Anyone who will bear the cost of a top flight lie detector operator can hook me up to verify the accuracy of my claim - Ed was totally in on the police pension deal.
DeleteTotally.
Consider this a standing offer on my part.
The LCA water contract could have, should have, resulted in another dozen federal corruption charges. It was a bid rigging scam of the highest level.
mj adams
Pawlowski’s water lease deal between the LCA and the city took place 8 years after Pawlowski was first elected. During that time, he repeatedly lied and raised taxes (LST, EIT, etc.) and fees, each time supposedly to “solve” the police pension crisis.
ReplyDeleteHe never did.
Then Pawlowski pushed the city into the long term lease with the LCA to cover up his failure to solve the ongoing problem. Worse than that, it was soon found after the lease was finalized that the city water department covered and subsidized many needed services in the city, like paying for snow plow operators in the winter and lawn mowing along the city’s waterways in the summer. These services (and their costs) then had to be picked up by the general fund, or cut.
It’s a very large part of the reason why the so-called riparian buffers (weed walls) were expanded, instead of the traditional mowing up to the stream banks. The city had to try to save on the costs that Pawlowski and his cohorts gave away with the lease deal.
What else did Allentown residents get for Pawlowski’s criminal attempt to pad his political resume? Water rates that have quadrupled in the 13 years since the deal was finalized.
Ed had always figured that he would be long gone by the time the truth came out, although that didn’t turn out exactly how he planned.