Spinoffs staying in Delaware after Dow-DuPont merger

The state and New Castle County
offered tax relief and pledged $17 million to keep DuPont strong
in Delaware, and it paid off on Friday.
The News Journal‘s reporting team of Jeff Mordock, Scott Goss, Adam Duvernay and Matthew Albright writes:

The
state beat out Iowa and Indianapolis to land the corporate headquarters
for what will be the largest agriculture company in the nation, a spinoff that
will be created after the merger of DuPont and Dow Chemical later this year.

The
First State will become home to two of three spinoff companies that will be
created from the$130 billion
merger.
A
yet-unnamed specialty products company, which includes DuPont’s nutrition and
health unit, will also be headquartered in Delaware. The third spinoff, a
material sciences company, will be based in Dow’s hometown of Midland,
Michigan.
“One
of the key things that is nice for us is that we’ve got this great talent
here,” DuPont Chief Executive Officer Ed Breen told The News Journal
Friday. “We’ve been pleased with all of the hard work by the people at the
corporate headquarters.”
Combined,
the two spinoffs are expected to generate more revenue than the
existing DuPont, according to documents filed with the Securities and
Exchange Commission. Agriculture will have about $20 billion in revenue
and specialty products is expected to produce $13 billion in revenue. DuPont
generated $25 billion in revenue in 2014.
The new agriculture company will surpass St.
Louis-based Monsanto Co.
How
DE out-hustled other states to win DuPont ag unit
[News-Journal reporters Scott Goss, Matthew Albright, Jeff Mordock and Xerxes Wilson]

After two centuries of shared
history between DuPont and
Delaware, local officials had just 10 weeks to pull together a
deal that would secure the company’s future in the state it helped to
build.
DE Gov. Jack Markell Photo: Kyle Grantham – The News Journal
That
meant putting together an incentive deal with enough tax breaks, subsidies
and capital improvement assistance to keep thousands of jobs in New Castle
County.
It also
required working together to present an unrelenting sales pitch that
would beat out much larger states Iowa and Indiana, a feat many analysts
and other outsiders considered unlikely, if not downright impossible.
Seventy
days later, Delaware emerged victorious with two out of the three businesses
that will eventually be spun off from DuPont’s impending merger with The Dow
Chemical Co.
“It
certainly wasn’t out of the question that we could lose all of it,” Gov. Jack
Markell said Friday.
“That
would have been devastating,” he said. “So we put together a team of
collaborators and got to work immediately after DuPont and Dow announced their
planned merger in December.”
That
effort paid off Friday when the companies announced plans to locate the
agriculture company’s corporate headquarters in Delaware.

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Neither snow, nor rain, nor Wild New Jersey Turkeys…

The mail must go through. And surely it did on February 16 in the placid borough of Hillsdale in Bergen County, NJ. But only after two policemen were dispatched to rescue a mailman trapped inside his truck by a posse of wild turkeys who didn’t give a good gobble gobble about his appointed rounds.





Lisa W. Foderaro writes in the New York Times:


“It was just one of the latest skirmishes in suburbia’s wildlife wars. Turkeys have now joined the ranks of raccoons, foxes, coyotes, bears and deer, all of which have both fans and detractors and seem to make headlines with growing frequency.

“While New Jersey environmental officials say they are unaware of anyone’s being physically harmed by a turkey, the large birds are intimidating. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which reintroduced turkeys to the state in the 1970s, says that there are now about 25,000 statewide.

Foderaro provides details of the Hillsdale standoff and other wild turkey encounters across the state and speculates that it all might be attributable to a sort of turkey testosterone rush.

You have to read this for yourself.  Full story here.

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A program to protect fish may be saving fishermen, too

The captain and crew of the Moriah Lee pose with sablefish caught off the coast of Half Moon Bay, Calif. A new study found that fishermen in the West Coast sablefishery were much less likely to engage in risky behavior — like sailing out in stormy weather — after catch share quotas were implemented.
The captain and crew of the Moriah Lee pose with sablefish caught off the coast of Half Moon Bay, Calif.
A new study found that fishermen in the West Coast sablefishery were much less likely to engage in risky
behavior — like sailing out in stormy weather — after catch share quotas were implemented. (Ethan Righter)
A program used in many U.S. fisheries to protect the marine environment and maintain healthy fish populations may have an immensely important added benefit: preserving the lives of American fishermen.
Clare Leschin-Hoar writes in NPR‘s food blog, the Salt:  
That’s according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that catch share programs (where fishermen are allotted a set quota of the catch) reduce some of the notoriously risky behavior fishermen are known for, such as fishing in stormy weather, delaying vessel maintenance, or heading out to sea in a boat laden with too much heavy fishing gear.
Traditional fishery-management programs open and close fishing seasons on specific days. By contrast, catch shares work on a quota system, under which fishermen have a longer window to harvest their predetermined share. That gives fishermen the luxury (and perhaps the life-saving option) of time.
The findings don’t surprise Scott Campbell Sr., who spent most of his 35-year career fishing the Bering Sea for king crab the way it used to be done: derby-style. Crab season would open, and regardless of weather, Campbell and his crew would be on the water, hoping to nab enough crab during the season’s brief window to keep his business afloat.
“If you can picture a four-day season for crab — and that’s the only four days you’re going to get — and a 50-knot storm blows in for 24 to 48 hours of that four days, well, a lot of boats didn’t stop fishing, because that was their only revenue stream for the whole year,” says Campbell. “It forced us to take unnecessary risks for financial survival.” (His son, Scott Campbell Jr., is a former star of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, about the hazards of the fishing industry.)
That kind of risk-taking has historically made fishing one of the nation’s most dangerous professions, with a fatality rate more than 30 times the U.S. average, according to the new report.
Today there are approximately two dozen state and federal catch share programs in the U.S. Most launched in the last decade. However, derby-style fishing still exists in many U.S. regions, including the Pacific and Atlantic swordfish fisheries, the Northeast’s monkfish and herring fisheries, and the West Coast dungeness crab fishery.


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John Hanger resigning as PA Gov. Wolf’s top policy adviser

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s office announced this morning that his secretary of policy and planning, John Hanger, is leaving the administration.
John Hanger
Karen Langley reports in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Mr. Hanger said in a statement that it had become impossible to both do his job and commute regularly to Massachusetts, where his wife and daughter live.

The governor’s office said that Sarah Galbally, who has been deputy secretary for policy and planning, will take Mr. Hanger’s job.
Mr. Hanger, a former secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, ran against Mr. Wolf for the Democratic nomination for governor but dropped out before the primary.
He joined the administration and became an advocate for Mr. Wolf’s agenda, encouraging the Penn State University board by email last week to lobby for the governor’s proposed tax increases.
“John’s service to my administration has been invaluable, and it is difficult to see John leave his current position,” Mr. Wolf said in a statement. “I have known John for many years and I am glad that John will continue to provide me the benefit of his counsel and expertise in the years ahead.”
Sarah Galbally
The governor said that Ms. Galbally has been a key adviser for more than two-and-a-half years, and that she has served ably as Mr. Hanger’s deputy.
“It has been an honor to serve an extraordinary governor and his administration who work tirelessly to make better Pennsylvania,” Mr. Hanger said in a statement. “It is difficult to leave, but I cannot be in two places at once.”
Mr. Wolf also said that Will Danowski, until now the acting secretary of legislative affairs, will serve in that role permanently. 
Patriot-News columnist John L. Micek writes today:
Hanger’s departure, which comes more than eight months after the resignation of ex-Chief of Staff Katie McGinty, spells the official end of Wolf’s “Team of Rivals” era.
Both Hanger and McGinty challenged Wolf for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2014. And both were viewed as far more ideological than Wolf, who had run as an outsider vowing to change the tone in Harrisburg.
But for much of Wolf’s first year in office that new tone sounded an awful lot like the old one. McGinty, for instance, was seen as the force behind controversial firing of Office of Open Records boss Erik Arneson. 
Hanger was a forceful advocate of a severance tax on natural gas drillers, arguing it was long past due, since the Republican Corbett administration was widely seen as “in bed with the Marcellus Shale industry.”
So with the two gone, it’s tempting to ask whether that new tone Wolf pledged to set back in those faraway days of January 2015 might now finally get its day.


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NJ engineer Birdsall pleads guilty, faces multi-year jail term

Howard Birdsall in center – APP Photo by Thomas B. Costello


The onetime head of a prestigious Monmouth
County, NJ engineering firm that met its demise during a state pay-to-play
probe pleaded guilty today to corporate misconduct in a plea bargain that calls
for a 4-year prison term, Kathleen Hopkins reports in the Asbury
Park Press.

Howard Birdsall, 72, of Brielle, the former chief executive
officer of Eatontown-based Birdsall Services Group, entered a
guilty plea to misconduct by a corporate official in a brief proceeding before
Superior Court Judge James Den Uyl.

Birdsall admitted concealing or
misrepresenting political contributions, in violation of state law, and also
reimbursing Birdsall employees for political contributions they had made.

He acknowledged the scheme netted a benefit in
excess of $75,000 to himself and others.

Birdsall, also the former longtime
chairman of Brookdale Community College’s board of trustees, admitted that he
operated Birdsall Services Group for the furtherance of a commission of a crime
from Jan. 1, 2006 through May 31, 2012.

He made the admissions by replying with
simple, affirmative answers to questions posed to him by his attorney, John P.
McDonald.
MORE: Former Birdsall
execs agree to hand over $3.95M in insurance money to bankruptcy estate 

Firm’s downfall 
Birdsall was indicted March 26, 2013 along
with his firm and six other of its key executives, in a case that swiftly led
to the demise of one of New Jersey’s oldest and most prestigious engineering
companies.

The state Attorney General’s Office alleged
then that the firm and its executives deployed a scheme to skirt the state’s
pay-to-play law by masking corporate political contributions as individual
campaign donations and then reimbursing employees who made the donations in the
form of company bonuses.

The state alleged the firm and its executives
made more than $1 million dollars in illegal campaign contributions that,
had they been reported as corporate political donations, would have
disqualified it from public contracts.

Authorities at the time of the indictment
alleged that Howard Birdsall made at least $49,808 in illegal campaign
contributions.

MORE: Belmar plans to
weaken pay-to-play law

Punishment
Birdsall, in entering his guilty plea, agreed
to forfeit that amount and turned over a check to the state in court to cover
the forfeiture.

Deputy Attorney General Anthony Piccione said
the plea agreement also calls for Birdsall to be banned for 10 years from
bidding on public contracts or doing any public work, and that eight other
criminal charges against the defendant will be dismissed.

He said he will recommend a four-year prison
term for Birdsall with no period of parole ineligibility. The sentencing date
is April 22.

Read the entire
story here 

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NJDEP and Dems grapple in a rematch over flooding rules

Flooded streets early Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016, in Sea Isle City, N.J. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

A second showdown between
Democrats in the state Legislature and the Department of Environmental
Protection is brewing in the ongoing battle over proposed changes to flood
hazard control rules, David Giambusso reports in Politico
New Jersey. 

During the last session, the Senate
and Assembly approved a “legislative veto” that marked the first step
in preventing the DEP from relaxing certain restrictions for development near
certain waterways. The DEP had 30 days to either address the Legislature’s
concerns or ignore them. They chose the latter and now the Legislature must
vote again to prevent the agency’s new rules from being enacted.

The DEP proposed the rules change as a much-needed streamlining of regulations
it maintains eliminates red tape while still providing for the protection of
the waterways. Democrats in Trenton and environmental advocates say the rules
change is a giveaway to developers that will compromise the streams and
exacerbate an already chronic flooding problem in New Jersey.

The legislative veto requires only a simple majority so it should be an easy
sell for state Sen. Ray Lesniak and Assemblyman John McKeon who sponsored the
first resolutions in their respective chambers. But in an interview, Lesniak
said he expected the DEP to ignore even the second vote, and anticipates a
court battle over the regulations.

“Since they totally ignored the first one, when we do the second one, I
expect them to totally avoid it again,” said Lesniak, a Democrat from
Union County. “I will monitor any permits that may be issued … and go to
court to stop each and every one of them.


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