A couple weeks ago, Delaware County filed a lawsuit against the FAA challenging the FAA’s flight path redesign plan. In Swarthmore, the Republican mayor and a Democratic borough councilman joined as plaintiffs to the suit. The Swarthmorean carried an item on the topic that should be useful for anybody who would like more of an insider’s view of the suit. Unfortunately, the Swarthmorean  doesn’t produce an on-line edition, so I’m reprinting the article here with the permission of the author:

Last Friday Swarthmore Mayor Eck Gerner and Swarthmore Council member Geoff Semenuk became plaintiffs in the Delaware County lawsuit seeking to halt the FAA air-space redesign plan that seeks to redirect an open-ended number of departing flights over the center of the county. The suit, which Semenuk says is “currently the best chance to stop the FAA” seeks to show that the FAA failed to fully comply with the legal requirements of the plan’s Environmental Impact Study.

Among other points, the suit contends that the FAA failed to properly study noise levels by looking at averaged noise of a 24-hour period rather than the specific noise associated with an actual plane flying overhead or nearby. Another target of the suit is that the FAA failed to properly factor in the positive airline traffic effects of its own approved and under-contruction 17-35 runway extension. “The FAA predicated their plan on conditions they knew they were improving with this other project ,” Semenuk added.

Although Gerner and Semenuk were happy to lend support to the hard work of County Council Chair Andrew Reilly, who has spear-headed this bi-partisan effort and was kind enough to speak to Borough Council on this matter last year, they admit that the issue is bigger than just this particular lawsuit. “No one wants the airport to fall on hard times, most of us use it and depend on it in varying degrees,” said Gerner. “The shame of this is that delays could be ended tomorrow if the FAA forced the airlines to spread their schedules more evenly during the day instead of over-booking those popular rush hours.”

“So when the FAA says that because of flight delays it has to fly fully-fueled and sold-out passenger planes at full throttle and only a few hundred feet above the center of the second most densely populated county in Pennsylvania, they are clearly being disingenuous,” said Semenuk.

Last week in one of her final public speeches before leaving her post as head of the FAA in order to become the president and CEO of a company that lobbies the FAA to adopt automated air traffic control technology of the sort she has been publically promoting for a number of years, Marion Blakey made this admission: “To be clear, the airlines need to take a step back on the scheduling practices that are at times out of line with reality. Passengers are growing weary . . . And if the airlines don’t address this voluntarily, don’t be surprised when the government steps in. Drawing down the schedule at Chicago was not my happiest hour, but it could come to that on the East Coast as well.”

In Chicago in 2004, the FAA stepped in and forced the airline industry to reduce the number of takeoffs and landings between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. to 88 per hour, down from over 130 or more, reducing delays by 24.5 percent in 2005.

Why the FAA doesn’t simply make airlines comply with common sense isn’t a mystery though, the FAA charter is to promote the airline industry as well as ensure its safe operation. Semenuk adds, “It is a shame that our federal government can only seem to respond to a crisis instead of guiding an industry to adopt safe and reasonable practices. The airlines wouldn’t lose any money, people would still buy tickets to get from point A to point B. If I was forced to fly at 10 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. I’m not going to cancel the trip. I’d much rather have a reliable off-peak travel time than risk turning my trip into some delay-ridden day long saga.”

When asked what the public could do, Gerner and Semenuk agreed that citizens should contact both the FAA and even individual airlines with comments. “The airlines want to make profits, and the FAA want to help them do that. If they think that real people in real numbers are noticing that their industry is undertaking poor practices, perhaps then they will voluntarily make more sensible schedules,” said Semenuk.

Gerner and Semenuk also noted that Swarthmore’s elected representatives Congressman Sestak, State Senator Erickson, and State Representative Lentz were also standing shoulder to shoulder with the County Council and the citizen plaintiffs in support of Council’s efforts. Reilly, Sestak, Erickson, and Lentz acknowledged gratitude for everyone in our area that has already written letters and attended local forums addressing this issue.

Gil Spencer’s started doing his usual hit jobs on area Dems in his column, taking aim at David Landau last week. (And on a high holiday–REALLY classy, Gil!)

David can politic for himself, and nobody but the local wingnuts listen to Gil anyway. (He was so very infuential in Sestak vs. Weldon, wasn’t he?)

But I’m calling this bum out on his blatant chauvinism. Look at how he talks about Magisterial District Judge Stephanie Klein:

Landau says county government needs to be “cleaned up” and the “system” is “disgraceful.”

I guess by that he means some of the nepotism and cronyism that can easily be found around the county.

And yet, Landau himself is not the best person to criticize that sort of thing.

As head of the Democratic Party in Nether Providence, Landau helped engineer his wife’s nomination and election to a plum district judge position.

Let’s get this point straight. Judge Klein is an elected official. No matter how ambitious Landau may be, you cannot confuse an elected official with a nepotistic appointment in the courthouse. Stephanie Klein represents the people who elected her to the bench.

But it’s the underlying assumption behind Spencer’s potshot that deserves a wag of the finger. He completely discounts the role that Klein herself played in her election. Did she want to be a district judge? Sure, her politically savvy husband helped with fund raising and campaign logistics. But who went door-to-door?

I’ll tell you. It was Stephanie Klein. Stephanie has her own constituency. Long before I knew David Landau, I knew Judge Klein. It was she who came to my door and asked for my support. And my son doesn’t know who David Landau is, but he knows Stephanie Klein from her doorstep and polling site visits.

To hear Spencer tell it, you’d think that Landau could just snap his fingers and some magical Democratic machine would simply install his wife on the bench. Maybe that’s the way it works for Republicans around here, but Dems have always had to earn their successes.

And let’s not forget that she’s been re-elected twice, and will be elected one more time in November. Why am I so certain of Klein’s re-election to the bench?

In May, she beat a well-known local Republican official (and president-elect of the County Bar Association) in the Republican Primary.  I worked the polls at her opponent’s home precinct that day, one of the few places she didn’t carry. But in all my years of election day poll-working, I’ve never had so many people approach me to say something nice about one of the candidates whose ballots I carried.

So my advice, Gil, is to leave Stephanie–Judge Klein to you–alone and stick to people on your own level.

No, the subject title isn’t referring to a future presidential election. No, it’s not about the London Olympics either.

2,012 is the staggering number of consecutive unanimous votes conducted by the all-Republican Delaware County Council since 2003, according to The Evening Bulletin.  This gang is to be congratulated for what must be one of the longest winning streaks in elected officialdom. In four years, with over $1 billion of tax revenue spent, not a single dissenting vote of conscience.

To steal a (rare) good one-liner from Senator Bob Casey, when five people agree 2012 consecutive times, four or them are clearly unnecessary.  Unfortunately, only three seats are open this fall, but I’ll take what I can get.

The three Democrats running for Delaware County Council held a press conference on the steps of the Media courthouse to advance their list of proposed reforms to county government. In the course of Alex Rose’s reporting of the event in the Delco Times, it sounds to me as if County Director all but admitted that the Delaware County Council routinely and deliberately violates the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act.

County Director Marianne Grace later explained everything on the agenda has already been discussed and examined throughout the week leading up to the council meeting.

By the time council votes publicly on the items, everyone understands what they’re voting on and why, so there is no need for council to discuss, she said. Some agenda items are routinely summarized during the meeting for the audience anyway.

The point of the PA Sunshine Act is not only to have public meetings at which official votes are recorded. No, the point of the Act is to allow citizens to witness and respond to the entire decision making process of our elected governments.

65 Pa.C.S.A. § 702. Legislative findings and declaration

(a) Findings. — The General Assembly finds that the right of the public to be present at all meetings of agencies and to witness the deliberation, policy formulation and decisionmaking of agencies is vital to the enhancement and proper functioning of the democratic process and that secrecy in public affairs undermines the faith of the public in government and the public’s effectiveness in fulfilling its role in a democratic society.

[Later…]

65 Pa.C.S.A. § 704. Open meetings

Official action and deliberations by a quorum of the members of an agency shall take place at a meeting open to the public unless closed under section 707 (relating to exceptions to open meetings), 708 (relating to executive sessions) or 712 (relating to General Assembly meetings covered).

Council meetings aren’t televised, and they’re held at 10:00 AM Tuesday mornings, when most of us are at work. If you want to see your one-party Council perform a rigged show of governance, you can spend a half day of your vacation time to fund out what they’re up to. [Meeting Schedule].

As reported in the Delco Times, Rep. Mike Carroll (PA-118) is sponsoring a bill to outlaw all non-wood bats for youth baseball and softball in the Commonwealth.

Even though I’m a loving and protective father with a son who participates in youth baseball, I’m still skeptical about this bill on several grounds:

1. Although there are catastrophic injuries from batted balls, they hardly seem frequent enough to demand a governmental response. The number of annual injuries from batted balls has been going down dramatically over time. And injuries still occur in places that use wood bats. This is one of those cases where the fear of shark attack seems inversely proportional to the risk of shark attacks. Resorting to legislation seems like governmental overreaching, even to a confirmed liberal weenie such as myself. Perhaps we should investigate a ban on swimming pools before we ban metal bats. Or cars, guns, and junk food.
2. Even if one agrees that some coordinated response is required, an outright ban of aluminum seems unnecessary. The biggest factor in generating ball speed is bat speed. An aluminum bat can, and often is, manufactured to increase bat speed by manipulating its weight. But the performance characteristics of aluminum bats can be regulated within the sport. The National Federation of State High School Associations seems to have come up with a perfectly reasonable solution of mandating limits on length-to-weight ratio. (In high school competition, bats cannot be more than three ounces lighter than their length in inches.) If you simply stop the arms race in bat engineering, you’ll probably accomplish just as much good. The length-to-weight ratio is a nice solution, because it is easily managed by umpires and coaches on the field of play.
3. The durability of aluminum bats is a boon to youth baseball.

It doesn’t sound like this legislation is going anywhere. (The Delco Times article leads me to believe that our legislator, Bryan Lentz, is dubious too.) Still, this issue pops up in states and municipalities all the time. I don’t understand why this pet issue has so much staying power.

Of course, we grow a lot of the Northern white ash used in wooden baseball bats here in PA. Maybe some industry lobbyists are behind the scheme.

I did my roundup of Delco council election news on Wednesday night, only to discover that the Inquirer ran an article the next day about how David Landau’s aggressive campaign for Delaware County Council is pressuring the GOP. A couple key passages stand out.

The only thing missing from the Delco2007.com site seems to be the word Republican.

Unlike Landau and O’Keefe, whose sites prominently identify them as Democrats, the three Republicans do not use their party affiliation. They are described as “independent and experienced.”

Strange for endorsed candidates who control all five council seats and every row office to conceal their party affiliation.

Like my piece did, the Inky picked up on the attempt to increase Landau’s negatives by tagging him as an “ACLU lawyer”:

“He is an ACLU lawyer,” McGarrigle said in an interview. “Lawyers like that tend to care more about criminals and cop killers than residents of Delaware County.”

When asked, McGarrigle could not cite anything specific in Landau’s background to support the accusation.

Sensing the barbarians at the gate, the GOP ticket announced today that they’re setting a combined goal of 10,000 door knocks.

Most of the serious jousting in municipal elections happens after all the kiddies have returned to school, but the Delco County Council race has been unusually hot this Summer. In case you’ve missed anything, here a a bunch of links to help you catch up.

Above Average Jane posted an interview with David Landau. Jane’s long-format interviews with notable PA candidates are among the best original, informational contributions from any area blogger. Her interview with David was her first (and hopefully not her last) for the 2007 elections.

David’s Democratic running mate, Ann O’Keefe launched her new campaign site.

Congressman Joe Sestak (PA-07) held a roundtable along with all three Democratic County Council candidates to support their push for a new county health department. Both the Delco Times and the Evening Bulletin covered.

Up in Montgomery County, the Republican candidates for County Council are trying to distance themselves from the national Republican party by calling for the dismissal of Alberto Gonzales. (Hilariously, though, their press release called him “Roberto.”) In the meantime, their Delco counterparts are trying to say that the 2007 election is a local election; they claim the disarray of Republicans nationally will not be a factor in local races. (Keep telling yourselves that, Andrew Reilly!)

David Landau’s making the case that County Council is pandering to the wealthier Western sections of Delco, at the expense of the inner ring communities like Lansdowne and Yeadon. Landau held a press conference with Lansdowne Mayor Jayne Young, who agrees with him.

The Delco GOP is claiming that they’re the environmental party. (No, seriously!)

Landau met with local union members at Steelworkers local 10-1 in Linwood. Take special note later in the article at how the Republicans laughably try to label Landau as an ACLU lawyer. They’ve used the tag repeatedly in recent public statements. It’s true that David worked for the ACLU decades ago. The problem for them is that the ACLU has strong credibility among David’s core Democratic supporters, who are sick of encroachments on civil liberties by the Bush administration. The association will simply not damage him at all among independents and any non-dittohead Republicans, either. Those machine guys have been drinking the one-party water for too long, that they’re still stuck on 1988 talking points. (And by the way, isn’t that nationalizing the debate?)

David Landau’s campaign office held it’s grand opening. Joe Sestak and State Rep. Greg Vitali (PA-166), were in attendence at the celebration in Clifton Heights.

Here concludes our roundup. And that’s just covering the news in the last 10 days, here in the dog days of August.