Atlantic City agency still out to take piano-tuner’s home

   File photograph shows the three-story, long-held family home, center, of Charlie Birnbaum  (Mel Evans, AP)

A court fight continues over a development agency’s attempt to take an Atlantic City piano tuner’s house through eminent domain, even after a judge recently ruled that it doesn’t have a viable plan to do anything with the building in the shadow of the closed $2.4 billion former Revel casino.


Josh Cornfield reports for the Associated Press:




The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority has spent at least $184,700 on outside lawyers in its more than three-year effort to take Charlie Birnbaum’s family home, which it once tried to buy for $238,500, according to data provided to The Associated Press through an open records request.

The lawyer representing the agency says the battle is about more than just the one house and goes to the core of the authority’s responsibility to redevelop the city, but Birnbaum’s lawyer says there’s no reason for the agency to continue trying to get the house.

“Charlie wouldn’t take a million dollars for this piece of property,” said Robert McNamara, of the nonprofit Institute for Justice. 


“At this point, this is just a struggle about the limits on government power. … They believe their power is unlimited and are willing to spend any amount of money to try to prove their power is unlimited.”


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Study zeroes in on old, methane-emitting gas wells in Pa


Certain types of Pennsylvania’s scores of abandoned oil and gas wells are associated with higher emissions of the greenhouse gas methane, according to a study published Monday that could help government agencies prioritize efforts to plug the biggest leaks.

Laura Legere reports for PowerSource:

The study of 88 wells across Western Pennsylvania led by Mary Kang, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, revealed that high-emitting wells tend to be natural gas wells that are either unplugged or that are plugged but vented in coal-rich areas.
Abandoned oil wells had consistently lower emissions than the abandoned gas wells in the study. Proximity to active natural gas storage fields or new shale gas wells appeared unrelated to methane flow rates from abandoned wells, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The highest emitters are a particularly valuable target in efforts to curb releases of the powerful greenhouse gas, which has 86 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over a 20-year period.
Researchers found that wells with high methane emissions were leaking at steadily high rates across years of sampling, indicating that they “may have been emitting at these levels for many decades and will likely continue for decades into the future.”
Ms. Kang and her fellow researchers first reported the significant but largely uncounted contribution that abandoned wells can have on total methane emissions in a 2014 paper. That drew the attention of both state and federal regulators, who are now trying to begin to account for abandoned wells in their official inventories of emissions.
The earlier paper also showed that the bulk of measured emissions was coming from only 10 percent of the smaller sample of wells, which inspired the researchers from Stanford, Princeton and other institutions to dig deeper to define attributes of the biggest leakers.
“There are hundreds of thousands of wells in Pennsylvania. That’s a lot of wells to fix,” Ms. Kang said. “But if we only have to fix 10 percent of those, that’s a huge cost benefit.”

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Trump fills two more posts; What’s left for Christie?



Governor Christie may still be in contention for a job in Donald Trump’s White House, though he will not become chief of staff, one of several positions he has been rumored to be in contention for as the Republican president-elect fills leadership positions in his administration ahead of Inauguration Day.


The Record‘s Dustin Racioppi reports:


Trump announced that Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, would be his chief of staff on Sunday and made Stephen K. Bannon, chairman of the alt-right media outlet Breit­bart News, his chief strategist and senior counselor. 

Bannon, the chief executive of Trump’s campaign, and Priebus will work as “equal partners,” Trump said, “to transform the federal government, making it much more efficient, effective and productive.”

The announcement fills in two players in the parlor game that began in earnest after Trump’s stunning defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But it is likely to fuel further speculation about the future of Christie, who became one of Trump’s most vocal supporters 16 days after dropping out of the race for the GOP nomination for president in February. In recent weeks, though, Christie has had a diminished role with the campaign.

Christie and two top allies from New Jersey, Bill Palatucci and former chief of staff Rich Bagger, were demoted Friday in Trump’s White House transition effort. Christie had served as transition chairman since May but was named a vice chairman. Palatucci, who had been the transition’s general counsel, and Bagger, the executive director, were named advisers.

Christie’s name had been floated as a possible choice for chief of staff or attorney general, but he has said as recently as last week that he hadn’t discussed a future with Trump in his administration and hadn’t committed to anything. 

He has a little more than a year left on his second term as governor and cannot run for a third consecutive term. He has said he intends to finish his term as governor and retreat to private life but has also left open the possibility of accepting a position should he be offered one by Trump.
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Want to impeach Chris Christie? Don’t hold your breath

Since two of his top aides were found guilty in the Bridgegate trial and a third pleaded guilty before the trial launched, the Internet chat has been clamoring for the impeachment of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. At least two prominent state Senate Democrats-Loretta Weinberg and Ray Lesniak-have joined in but there is little apparent support for impeachment among their colleagues.

NJTV NEWS Correspondent David Cruz has the story above.

Related: 
WaPo columnist Richard Cohen sees grounds for impeachment  
It’s not the first time Christie has been counted out

 
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Traps too cruel to raccoons? NJ top court may decide

They are a ubiquitous and often an irksome part of suburban life in New Jersey, known for carrying rabies and tearing through garbage. 


Now raccoons are at the center of a legal battle between animal rights activists and state regulators, one that may soon head to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Scott Fallon reports for The Record:

At issue is a Christie administration policy that allows the use of a controversial trap that led to the capture and killing of thousands of raccoons by fur trappers earlier this year.

Enclosed foothold trap
The new traps will be used again when raccoon season begins on Tuesday after an appellate panel sided with Fish and Game last month, saying there was a enough of a difference in the two traps to uphold the policy. 

A coalition of animal rights and environmental groups will appeal the decision to the state high court this month, their lawyer said.

The traps are very effective. Used for the first time during the previous raccoon trapping season from last November through this past March, the traps helped catch 12,600 raccoons — a 77 percent increase from the year before and the most in 25 years, according to state trapping data.

Enclosed foothold traps act similar to a mouse trap with a steel bar in a baited, two-inch-wide cylinder snapping down on a raccoon or opossums’ paw.

Opponents say they are essentially the same as the illegal jaw traps because they are excruciatingly painful to the animals that are caught in them.

“These traps snap on the animal just like the old ones did, and they suffer for days until the trapper comes around,” said Dante DiPirro, a lawyer representing the coalition.

“It causes the same exact kind of cruelty that the legislation intended to prohibit.”


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Could he become the environment’s public enemy #1?

Myron Ebell

In looking for someone to follow
through on his campaign vow to dismantle one of the Obama administration’s
signature climate
change policies,
President-elect Donald
J. Trump probably
could not have found a better candidate for the job than Myron Ebell.

Henry Fountain writes for The New York Times:
Mr.
Ebell, who revels in taking on the scientific consensus on global warming, will
be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of
the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy more
broadly.
Mr.
Ebell, whose organization is financed in part by the coal industry, has been
one of the most vocal opponents of the linchpin of that policy, the Clean Power
Plan. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the plan is
a far-reaching set of regulations that, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions
from electricity generation, could result in the closing of many coal-burning
power plants, among other effects.
Mr.
Ebell has said that the plan, which has been tied up in the courts since it was
finalized in 2015, is illegal. In the interview in Paris last year, he said he
hoped whoever was elected president would “undo the E.P.A. power plant regs and
some of the other regs that are very harmful to our economy.”
Read the full story here
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