By Bill Keisling
“Eighty percent of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen once remarked.
By this simple measure, the board of directors of the Lancaster County Solid Waste (LCSWMA) failed this week, as they didn’t even bother to show up for this month’s board meeting scheduled for Friday, May 17.
To be fair, LCSWMA makes plain on its webpage that board meetings can be cancelled.
In this respect, this year’s LCSWMA board meeting cancellations have been on par with previous years.
But, in previous years, LCSWMA and its board never had so much at stake. They never needed, in the past, to communicate with the public of Lancaster County, as they do now.
As discussed by the local press and NewsLanc, LCSWMA is on the cusp of consummating a deal to buy the Harrisburg incinerator.
Controversies now faced by LCSWMA board members include:
• The economics behind the $150 million bond deal to buy Harrisburg’s long-troubled incinerator has raised lots of challenge .
• Moody’s has threatened to substantially downgrade LCSWMA’s sterling credit rating if the deal goes through.
• As NewsLanc recently reported, the longstanding environmental problems at the Harrisburg incinerator are among the worst in the nation, and LCSWMA and someday its customers may be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs, if not a hundred million.
LCSWMA says its private consultants have prepared reports on these big subjects. But then conveniently says it won’t share the reports with the public due a to non-disclosure agreement with the Harrisburg Authority.
We can only hope that LCSWMA’s chair, Karen Weibel, will insist on a board meeting as scheduled for June 22, if not earlier, to discuss some of these issues with members of the public, representatives of the media, and among themselves.
The time has come for Weibel, Co-chair Scott Ulrich, the board and the public to insist on hard information from CEO Jim Warner to justify the extraordinary risk to which he is exposing the authority and every member of the Lancaster public.
