Pa. GOP wants probe of ‘irregularities’ in special election

In the special election in Pa.’a 18th District, Democrat Conor Lamb beat Republican Rick Saccone by fewer than 1,000 votes



Liz Navratil reports for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The Pennsylvania Republican Party has asked the Department of State to investigate what it described as “a number of irregularities” in the 18th District special election.

Attorney Joel Frank, in a letter dated Friday, outlined five areas of concern, ranging from calls about machine errors to confusion about polling places and a dispute over whether a Republican attorney could watch part of the elections process.
“In the interest of transparency and nonpartisanship, we ask that you consider assigning this task to a Commonwealth elections official capable of conducting an impartial investigation in light of the positions you’ve taken on ongoing redistricting litigation,” Frank wrote.

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NJ Assembly committee to focus on drinking-water safety


At its March 22 meeting, the New Jersey Assembly’s Telecommunications & Utilities Committee will focus on legislation to improve the operations of water supply systems.

 “The public deserves the peace of mind to know that their water quality is not compromised or contaminated,” said committee chairman Wayne DeAngelo. 


“We need to ensure that there is a system in place to have the best qualified professionals performing critical functions and to encourage public awareness of the operations funded by ratepayers.

“Most importantly, we need to notify residents quickly so that they can take needed action to protect themselves from possible contamination without incurring additional costs.”


The committee will receive testimony from invited guests and consider the following bills:

     * A3352 – Requires public water systems to provide certain notice of boil water notices and violations of drinking water quality standards

     * A3354 – Removes certain requirements for professional engineers to take examination to operate water supply and wastewater treatment systems

     * A2429 – Requires water suppliers to reimburse residential customers for drinking water testing under certain circumstances.

The meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. in Room 9 of the State House Annex in Trenton.



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Feds give green light to Chesterfield (NJ) gas compressor

Natural gas compressor station off Bordentown-Chesterfield Road (Carl Kosola,Burlco Times)


David Levinsky reports for the Burlington County Times:

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has given a utility company the go-ahead to put its natural gas compressor station here into service over objections from the governing body and neighboring Bordentown Township, as well as residents and environmental groups.

The federal agency informed Oklahoma-based Williams Transco on Friday that it can begin operations. In its notification letter, the commission said the authorization was based on its review of the company’s recent construction reports and a Feb. 6 field inspection of the station site, which is off Route 528 near the two towns’ border.
“We find that Transco has adequately stabilized areas disturbed by construction and that (site) restoration is proceeding satisfactorily,” wrote J. Rich McGuire, director of the FERC’s Division of Gas-Environment and Engineering, in the authorization letter, which was posted on the agency’s website.
The letter did not address objections from Chesterfield, Bordentown Township, environmental groups or the nine residents who sent written comments to the agency in opposition to the utility’s request.
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New Orleans approves gas power plant over local protests

Julie Dermansky reports for DESMOG:


Despite hearing over four hours of public comments mostly in opposition, New Orleans City Council recently approved construction of a $210 million natural gas power plant in a predominantly minority neighborhood. Entergy is proposing to build this massive investment in fossil fuel infrastructure in a city already plagued by the effects of climate change.


Choosing a gas plant over renewable energy options flies in the face of the city’s own climate change plan and the mayor’s support for the Paris Climate Accord, said several of the plant’s opponents at the heated meeting when City Council ultimately voted to approve the plant.


“It is not enough to plan for how we will adapt to climate change. We must end our contribution to it,” wrote Mayor Mitch Landrieu in the introduction to the city’s climate action plan. Released in 2017, the plan calls for halving the city’s greenhouse gas pollution by 2030.


Members of a coalition opposing the plant, formed in 2016 after Entergy first announced its plans, expressed outrage that the council was unwilling to at least postpone its vote after hearing over four hours of public comments, many against it.


This coalition includes residents from New Orleans East, where the plant is slated for construction, community activists, and environmental justice groups.

Members of the New Orleans East Vietnamese community waiting to get into the New Orleans City Council meeting


























New Orleans regulates its own utilities, giving the City Council direct oversight of Entergy, the company that provides power to the city. The council’s Utility Commission voted to approve the project on February 21, weeks ahead of a Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) hearing on March 6 which considered Entergy’s air permit application and the full City Council vote on March 8.


Before the public weighed in at the council meeting, the City Council’s energy consultants from Dentons US LLP, a Washington, D.C.-based utility law firm, concluded that the project was in the city’s best interest. The consultants determined that the proposed 128-megawatt plant and its seven natural gas-fired engines would ensure the city has enough power at peak energy times and avoid outages that have afflicted the city.


The plant will be built in New Orleans East, home to predominantly African-American and Vietnamese communities, an area that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has designated as a flood zone.


Among those speaking before the council vote were a few who favored the project, citing jobs and energy security as their reasons for supporting it.

Representatives of Entergy in the front row at the New Orleans City Council meeting.



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Gentrification: From slums to sleek towers in Philly


Society Hill view from Society  Hill  Tower  Photo by, Kimberly Payton  WHYY

Jake Blumgart and Jim Saksa report for WHYY News:

Harry Schwartz, 84, remembers when his neighborhood, Society Hill, was one of the poorest parts of Philadelphia. But by the time he moved there as a young lawyer in 1969, things had changed. City planners had fixed up crowded blocks of crumbling old houses and razed a congested, old wholesale produce market to make way for majestic modernist towers. Schwartz and his pediatrician wife were attracted to Society Hill’s architectural gems, tucked among its cobblestoned, walkable streets. Soon, they found themselves surrounded by a community of artists, activists, and young professionals like them.
They loved
it. Society Hill allowed them to bike to work and walk to friends’ houses for
Julia Child-inspired dinner parties. Today, Schwartz lives in an airy, sun-lit
condo in the soaring towers that replaced the old Dock Street Market. His
living room windows overlook some of the city’s most coveted addresses.Philadelphia’s Dock Street Market in 1928. Photo: Philadelphia Evening BulletinThe
reinvention of Society Hill in the 1960s is widely considered one of the first
instances of gentrification — although no one called it that at the time. The
term was coined in 1964 by a British sociologist to describe the nascent
phenomena of the middle-and-upper-class moving into the meaner parts of London.
Since then, the term has only become more fraught, hard to precisely define,
and often racially loaded. No one wants to identify themselves as a gentrifier,
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In Hudson Yards dispute, far more than cost is at stake

A power struggle at the largest private development in the country markks a turning point in NYC’s consruction industry 
Joe Anuta and Daniel Geiger report for Crains:
One construction worker is accused of logging 12-hour shifts seven days a week for an entire year, an improbable schedule that earned him $600,000. And two senior tradesmen making $42 an hour to swing hammers were instead selling coffee and snacks full-time to laborers on break.
These and other abuses by union workers building the massive Hudson Yards complex were alleged in a lawsuit filed last week by the megaproject’s developer, a partnership led by The Related Cos. The suit asserts the schemes inflated costs by $100 million over the past five years at the nation’s largest private development—a $20 billion, 18-million-square-foot undertaking.
But the case is not about recouping lost money so much as it is an effort to break the grip of the most powerful labor organizer and lobbying group on the city’s unionized construction industry.
Related wants to exclude the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York from labor negotiations for the second phase of Hudson Yards, which includes millions of square feet of residential and mixed-use space over the western section of the rail yards as well as a soaring, 3-million-square-foot office tower at West 33rd Street and 10th Avenue.
Led by its imposing president, Gary LaBarbera, the trades council has responded with a smear campaign against Related that is nasty even by labor-dispute standards. LaBarbera, a close ally of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has called the developer “greedy” and a “union buster” at union rallies and has described Hudson Yards as a “prison.”
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