Guarding Allentown City Hall

I've been intrigued by a recent report, by Emily Opilo in The Morning Call, by actions seeming to complicate the paper's discovery about the Ciiber contract,  which is apparently an object of the FBI investigation.  The city solictitor, Susan Ellis Wild,  refused to release documents requested under the company's former name,  Five C. This obstacle required the paper to file a new right to know request, under the new name, Ciiber.  Furthermore,  Susan Wild then responded with a thirty day delay, to review the second request.

Wild said she canceled the city's contract with Ciiber on July 16 after the company failed to provide the city with proof of liability insurance. Wild said she contacted city directors who would have been affected. None, she said, was opposed to canceling it. Wild said she also consulted with Managing Director Francis Dougherty before pulling the plug but did not speak to Pawlowski about the cancellation. "I got concerned about their responsiveness in general," Wild said of Ciiber. "If they couldn't respond before the contract, how would they respond after [it was executed]."

What is startling about this whole sequence is that the contract was only cancelled after it became an object of interest by the FBI.  Although Wild does serve at the Mayor's pleasure, she stated when all the commotion began, that it isn't her job to defend the mayor or any person at city hall. Although I understand the technicality that  Ciiber never satisfied the insurance requirements,  decisions to institute or cancel contracts are not normally made by the solicitor, although that office might consult, and send such notices. Additionally, Wild went out of her way to not have the mayor involved with her decision.  Wild is certainly appearing to be injecting her office defensively on the mayor's behalf, against both the ill fated Ciiber contract,  and the paper's attempt at scrutiny of city hall.

As Allentown Turns

Linden Street is reduced to one lane today, as a private contractor installs stencils on the street for the bike lane. I had forgotten about this idiotic plan. Let us hope that the projections for the arena's success are more realistic than their vision for the bike lane's use. Also observed on my patrol today was the unbelievably slow progress of the 15th Street Bridge project. More concrete and steel is completed in one day on the arena and City Center buildings, than has yet to be completed on the bridge. The entire southside of Allentown remains prisoner to misplaced priorities. Talking of misplaced priorities, yesterday the Administration applauded itself for starting the eastside fire house, a year and half late.
UPDATE: ABOUT THIS POSTCARD- Earlier this week I used a postcard of Lehigh Parkway in the Give A Damn, Save A Dam post.  Both cards have a similar coloration and were photographed by Harold Becraft in the early 1950's.  Becraft was a photographer from Suffern N.Y.,  who produced many of the images used in the postcards of Allentown's parks.  These cards were produced locally by E.H. Schall Co.  In addition to Becraft's name on the front, they're also marked Kodachrome.  Although Becraft did many park scenes for Schall, the image shown above is one of his few cityscapes.

reprinted from May of 2013

UPDATE OCTOBER 15, 2015: We seem to have two types of government, slow or greedy. The entire square arena block was built before the 15th street bridge was completed. While two and four men worked on the bridge for two years, 300 men worked around the clock on the arena. The old 15th Street Bridge, built around 1953, was a study in neglect. One city administration after another deferred maintenance,  because there was a plan for a new bridge, although the plan took decades to come to fruition. Then the contract, to save money, wasn't time sensitive. The greater NIZ arena project, including affiliated buildings, which allows the developers to reap an unaccounted for money stream of public taxes, was built as if money was no object, because it wasn't.  So, while a city was inconvenienced by a snail pace public bridge project, our state taxes were used for overtime, to speed up a bonanza for the barons.

Allentown Internment Camp For Homeless

According to Rich Fegley, who is a write-in candidate for Allentown City Council this year, the city will use the Fountain Park Pool House as a homeless shelter this winter. Although pool house sounds like a cabana, it's actually a stark concrete block building from the 1940's, where you could change into a swimming suit. This barrack opens to a high fenced in area, where the idle empty pools sit in a state of dilapidation. During the day, if they're physically capable of it,  the homeless can attempt to climb the steep steps, going three block straight up toward Walnut Street. Only a few years ago, the homeless lived under the 8th Street Bridge, in a small shantytown. The First Lady of Allentown, Lisa Pawlowski, had that demolished, and the hapless homeless ended up at Alliance Hall last year, after spending a couple of winters in a church basement. For whatever reason, perhaps Alliance Hall is too close to the downtown renaissance, the hapless will now be back on Martin Luther King Drive.

ADDENDUM: The Morning Call has picked up on the story.  According to them,  the pool house is currently under renovation.  However,  the paper also had the parkway wall collapsing while under renovation.  Nothing had been done to the parkway wall for 80 years prior to the collapse, and nothing has been done since.  So far,  the same invisible city crew has been working at the pool house.

WPA Labor Bears Fruit

I can't exactly tell you how long I have been advocating for Allentown's WPA structures, probably at least a decade. I can't tell you how many blog posts I've written, many dozen, or letters to the editor, dozens also. I have conducted meetings at the library, given tours of the structures, and excavated structures buried in the 1980's. I have lobbied several city councils and am currently tormenting a third park director. I'm now pleased to announce that for the first time in many years, some work is occurring on these irreplaceable icons of our park system. The stone steps have been reset and re-pointed in Irving Park. Currently, the missing steps at Fountain Park are being replaced, and by next week, I believe that the Union Terrace staircase wall will be repaired. I'm not known for praising, but next week I will try to properly thank the people authorizing these repairs.

reprint from The Morning Call, May of 2009

Another Morning Call Infomercial

As an advocate for the park system, seeing the above photograph from the Morning Call article on the Lehigh River parks, was a harsh joke.  The article is subtitled, Insider's Guide To The Lehigh Valley. It actually is an outsider's guide. The reporter states that he has never been to these parks previously, and his tour gulde is Pawlowski.  I'll go further, and doubt that any of recent park directors have ever been to Canal Park, which is in a condition somewhere between neglect and hazard.  Before I go further, let's be clear that the Morning Call asked Pawlowski, whose negligence allowed the iconic Lehigh Parkway entrance wall to collapse, to be it's tour guide in the parks.  Nothing has been done in Canal Park since Pawlowski was elected as mayor in 2005, or before that, when he served as Community Development Director, under Mayor Afflerbach.  Pawlowski even refers to the train line through Canal Park as a problem.  Someone should inform him that it is the main west line of Norfolk Southern, and more relevant to Allentown than he is, certainly at this time. As if that wasn't enough irony, Pawlowski is considering a new park to neglect,  for boat launching. All this attention about the river is part of the paper's hype for the new NIZ construction, soon to begin by the Tilghman Street Bridge. In a recent exchange with a Morning Call writer/editor, he defended the informercials
concerning the NIZ. Although I have been sending notes to the paper about the deplorable conditions in the existing parks, they choose instead to engage in a puff promotion for the NIZ, featuring a future indictee. Pass the Tums.

ADDENDUM: In regard to an earlier post, regarding emergency repairs needed at Union Terrace, shared by somebody on facebook,  Joe McDermott commented, "Fine, who is willing to pay more taxes to make those repairs, Mike Molvinsky, maybe?"  This is disturbing, because McDermott is a former Morning Call reporter who now pens for Pawlowski.  So, although this administration paid Abe Atiyeh $1.4 million dollars for land it's not using or needs for the park system, it employs a hack to link park maintenance with higher taxes.

photo by April Bartholomew/The Morning Call

Shame on LCCC, Again

When the NIZ was in the planning stages, before we, the unwashed public, knew about it, Lehigh Carbon Community College was already playing ball with the big boys, at the expense of their students. Those compromises started when their dean didn't object to the bus stop being removed from in front of it's Hamilton Street building. The college had no problem with their students walking from the transportation interment camp on 7th, beyond Linden. I phoned their dean at the time, and posted about it here on molovinsky. My next post concerned their willingness sell out to Reilly's plans to own the entire 700 block of Hamilton Street. They justified that compromise by saying that the building no longer served their needs. Now, that Reilly really has slowed down, seems that the building is again adequate enough. Although J.B. put on the smiley face about Talen going Jaindl, he's really not a happy baron about that. What has irritated me enough to write this third complaint about LCCC, is their program to train workers for the new NIZ restaurant jobs. I'm a proponent of community colleges, I see them as an opportunity for more students to continue their education. Although, I expect to see a lower bar on student admission standards, I expected that the deans and administration should be professional. Colleges, even community colleges, shouldn't stoop to training peanut vendors for the arena.

The NIZ As Etch A Sketch

When I sat down with Alan Jennings last month, he complained about the things mentioned yesterday in his resignation from the NIZ board. Other NIZ news besides Alan, is that the board cleared the way for Talen to move to the waterfront. What that means is that they unilaterally declared that state income taxes from Talen employees can be divided for both the arena debt, and for Jaindl's debt service by the river. Pat Browne, author of the NIZ stated;

"This is the result of a many-months-long public-private collaborative effort to balance the language of the NIZ program with its financial expectations,..."

Normally, if a law seems to have some leeway, I might say that it was written in pencil. However, in the case of the NIZ, it's an etch a sketch, they make it up as they go. Who knew that you could arbitrarily balance the language of a law? One of the reasons that Jennings resigned from the NIZ board is the lack of financial reports. State taxes will be diverted to pay for $1 Billion and counting in development, and nobody is counting the beans. Bills are accepted as presented, and the public coffer is dinged accordingly. Even Alan, whose own organization spends $millions of public money each year, was offended by the lack of accountability. According to Jennings, the Allentown NIZ is essentially a one man show, run by Sy Traub. The idea of a question seems to offend him. Personally, I don't solely blame Browne or Traub, I also blame the worms in Harrisburg called state representatives. They passed a law that they didn't know anything about, and continue to sanction an obvious work in progress, which works for the progress of just a few connected individuals.