Wildlands Conservancy Responsible For Fish Kill

In their indiscriminate haste to remove all dams in the Lehigh Valley, the Wildlands Conservancy is responsible for the massive fish kill this week at the Fish Hatchery. When General Trexler had the trout nursery built, they also built, just upstream,  a small dam, to insure and regulate a water supply for the nursery. Last fall the Wildlands gleefully demolished that dam, removing an important component of the trout nursery. Although the heavy storm Monday night occurred hundreds of times in the last century, this time the dam wasn't there to regulate the fast moving water. Over 1,400 fish were flooded out of the holding pools and died. Last summer, I watched the Wildlands Conservancy give a power point presentation to Allentown City Council on dam removals. When I invited City Council to Lehigh Parkway to defend the Robin Hood Dam, the Conservancy crashed my event, and asked the council members instead to come with them to the trout nursery dam, to see their wonderful plans. I hope yesterday that the Conservancy had the decency to help pick up the dead fish.

The lesson here is that not all dams are without purpose.

The Morning Call article on mcall Tuesday afternoon contained a paragraph describing how the fish hatchery workers believe that the dam removal factored into the fish kill. That paragraph was edited out of both the hard and soft copy editions Tuesday evening.  I have no doubt that that the deletion was done to shield The Wildlands Conservancy.

Reggie Rickard an Allentown resident who has been volunteering at the hatchery for 45 years said the fish kill is probably the worst in the hatchery's recent history. Initially, he estimated as many as 2,000 may have been killed, but the final tally was about 1,400.

Fish have been lost in other heavy rains storms, but Rickard said this was a major fish kill. He and other volunteers who joined city workers in collecting and counting the corpses Tuesday believe the death rate may have been exacerbated by recent upstream dam removals on small streams.

photo:April Bartholomew/The Morning Call/July15,2014

ADDENDUM: Above I have combined and reprinted two posts from July of 2014. The fish hatchery again experienced a massive fish kill in this recent storm of August 2018. The former fish hatchery dam, and its removal in connection to the fish kills, has been removed from the Morning Call archives and the memory of its news reporters. However, this blog knows the truth, and so will my readers.

Tony Phillips Reemerges

Yesterday on facebook a Hispanic woman commented that she was glad to hear that Tony Phillips was involved with the local NAACP.  Another Hispanic woman responded that although she was here for over a decade, she never heard of him... they're both correct.  Tony is a former Allentown policeman who then served on city council.  In 2009 he ran against Pawlowski for mayor,  as a black Republican no less.  Tony has always been his own man. After that election he dropped out of Allentown politics to work as an educator in the Philadelphia area.

In the NAACP demand letter about the South Whitehall shooting,  Phillips is described as the vice president of the local chapter.  Although I stand by my criticism of the demand letter,  I'm glad to see Tony reengaging in Allentown.  We worked together on a few issues back in the day, and I hope we can do so again in the future.

photo shows Tony outside my SPEAK OUT meeting in 2009. 

Local NAACP Letter Inappropriate

The local branch of the NAACP has, in my opinion, misspoken with demands concerning the South Whitehall Police Department.  Their demand letter was published even before District Attorney Jim Martin released his determination on the recent Dorney Park shooting.  The letter demanded that the police department fire the officer and hire minority officers .  It further demanded that Martin recuse himself from the case.

As it turns out Martin did determine that the shooting was unjustified, and charged the officer with manslaughter.  Besides knowing that I would not have wanted to be in the officer's shoes that fateful afternoon on Hamilton Blvd,  at this point I'll leave judgement to a jury.  

Even as a blogger who is not afraid of being politically incorrect,  I realize that this blog post will rub many people the wrong way.  I appreciate that the local NAACP fights against local prejudice, but in this instance I find them acting as the bully.  The outcome of the confrontation was indeed tragic, but the police were reacting to pleas for help from motorists being terrorized by someone apparently out of control. I see no local police pattern that mistreats minorities.

Allentown's New Park

A reader wondered back channel about yesterday's post on Allentown's trail plans.  He was perplexed about why Emily Opilo would write such a story, especially quoting no less than two people who are no longer with the city for dubious reasons.  The article mentioned that the Wildlands Conservancy donated $50K to further the project along.  It may well be a strategic investment by the Conservancy.  After volunteering to help South Whitehall develop their park masterplan,  the Wildlands was awarded the contract to build a trail along the Jordan through the township.  This is a $multi-million dollar project, and the Wildands Conservancy takes 15% off the top for their administrative fees.  By the time Allentown would have the financing lined up,  the Wildlands could claim that they have experience in trail building.

I have complained on this blog before about the newspaper qenching  my op-ed on Wehr's Dam to protect the Wildlands.  Sacred cows are not new to the valley.  With the Morning Call in business limbo, expect it to be more kitten like than ever.  Although the recently departed publisher denied it, I believe that Bill White is making the editorial decisions.  They couldn't possibly be paying him to just write another column about eating his way through another festival.

photo: the Basin Street parcel, purchased by Pawlowski and being developed by Ray O'Connell as Allentown's newest park.

Pawlowski's Bicycle Scam

Emily Opilo is my favorite Morning Call reporter, but she added up 2 and 2 and got 5 in her recent article about the bicycle path.  In that article she quotes Fran Dougherty as saying the two park purchases from Abe Atiyeh were a unique opportunity for Allentown.  She also interviewed Lindsay Taylor, who advocated for the trail plan.  Although she does mention that there are some brownfield issues, she has no idea how extensive they are,  and how unnecessary those useless  parcels are. There is no redeeming feature or purpose, what-so-ever, for the Basin Street parcel.  Before I dissect the parcels,  lets examine the cheerleaders.  Fran Dougherty is facing a prison sentence for his service to Pawlowski's corrupt administration.  Lindsay Taylor has been dismissed by O'Connell for reasons unknown.  At the very least she also served Pawlowski shenanigans. She was on board for the recent Cedar Beach stunts,  including Pawlowski knowingly opening a leaking pool before last year's election.

Basin and Union Street is near no residential neighborhood at all, and has housed numerous heavy industry over the years.  The ground is saturated with arsenic from thousands of railroad ties alone, much less whatever dripped from endless railcars for over 100 years. It was  the busiest train crossing in the Lehigh Valley.  The fertilizer plant on the parcel west of Schreiber's Bridge was a hell hole.

No offense to the spandex cycling crowd, but those portions of the trail plan were just a ruse to justify another Pawlowski deal.  The notion of providing Allentown a way to ride bikes to work is utter nonsense.  

Grants or no grants,  Allentown and its park system will be better served by selling those parcels and starting to operate the city with integrity, instead of taxpayer funded justifications for previous poor policy.   

Using Trump As A Local Slight

Before the mass media coined Trump Derangement Syndrome,  I had noted on this blog that people, mostly women back then, were losing their minds over Trump.  The dislike of him  spread to the media, with CNN now the leading obsessor.

Locally,  the Morning Call's Bill White has been possessed.  He now links Trump to the tragic shootings at the Gazette newspaper in Annapolis,  even though he knows that the shooter had a long term grudge against the paper, because of its reporting on harassment charges against him by a girlfriend.  Another local blogger has painted this blog and its readers as Trumpters,  because he considers that designation an insult. Those types of accusations amuse me.   My post yesterday about the shooting by Dorney Park was met on social media with speculations about my having White Privilege attitudes,  or worse,  hidden racism.  I have become somewhat immune to these types of accusations...  I understand that they're intended to intimidate me for my bluntness.  In that sense I take them as a compliment.  This ties back to Donald Trump.

One of the many reasons that Trump infuriates so many liberals is that he's not crafting his words to be politically correct.  I'll leave it to future historians to evaluate any accomplishments of his term.  However,  I must confess that it amused me that he called in to Rush Limbaugh to compliment the radio host on his show.  Listening to the liberals mutter about that will be priceless.

Shameless Over Police Shooting

It appears to me that some people are shameless about the hay they want to make out of the South Whitehall shooting. “This act of extreme police brutality is not a fluke or an accident, but part of the police system that regularly works to detain, deport and kill black and brown people across the country,” Make The Road said in the release. As someone familiar with South Whitehall, I can assure Make The Road officials that South Whitehall has no such agenda, if they have one at all. Perhaps the person trying to make the most exposure from this tragedy is Mark Pinsley, who is running for State Senate. The Morning Call describes him as a South Whitehall Commissioner. In truth Pinsley announced his candidacy for state senate before he even began serving his first term as commissioner this past January . He now is asking District Attorney Jim Martin to hand the case over to the State Attorney General's office. As someone who has attended dozens of South Whitehall meetings, Pinsley was never involved in community government until he decided to run himself. He should be ashamed of his grandstanding. 

Yesterday a liberal friend asked me why the police officer couldn't have wrestled the man to the ground, instead of shooting him. I have included a picture from the Morning Call of the shot man above, I think the answer to that question is self explanatory.

I have no opinion on the properness of the shooting. I will leave that determination to the authorities. I do have an opinion on the local haymakers, they're shameless.

photo from The Morning Call

Misplaced Anger Over South Whitehall Shooting

While a coalition of Allentown minority groups were scheduling a protest over the police shooting in South Whitehall Township,  there was at least one stabbing and a shooting in center city Allentown. Three more shootings occurred Tuesday afternoon in South Allentown. Although resident on resident violence has been commonplace,  police shootings have been very few and far between.  This is not to say that there hasn't been police overreaction elsewhere,  but not here. As for the incident on Hamilton Blvd by Dorney Park,  it is too early to make conclusions on the appropriateness of lethal force in that case.  With the incident being investigated by no less than two separate entities, hopefully a finding satisfactory to the community will emerge.

This particular protest is being organized by various minority leaders in Allentown, some of whom have been both elected and appointed to oversight functions in our local government.  I believe that by prematurely questioning and accusing our local law enforcement, they may be inadvertently sending the wrong message to their own youth.  Instead of being scared for their children about the police, they should be scared because of the violence within their own communities. While they protest against an isolated police incident, they remain silent about all their own shootings.

I expect that my politically incorrect, blunt appraisal of this situation will not be warmly received by some segments of the community.....  So be it.

photocredit:The Morning Call