N.I.Z. Is Law Of Land – What Lies Ahead For AHL’s Assisted-Living Phantoms
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Like it or not on principled grounds with respect to the role of Big Government in building expensive sports facilities, the notorious NEIGHBORHOOD IMPROVEMENT ZONE is now the law of the land in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The NIZ Cheerleaders happily shake their booties and shoot their mouths off about their hard-won right to blow the lid completely off the existing record for a minor league hockey arena with the impending construction of Chairman Pawlowski’s transformative $ 158.0 million dollar PALACE OF SPORT. Meanwhile, the “dour and misguided” Comrade Molovinsky moans that the People’s Democratic City With No Spending Limits now has only three pools open to service an entire metropolis in the midst of a record heat wave.
A City of Allentown spokesperson has already publically stated quite some time ago that the reason Fountain Pool remains closed is as a result of the lack of / unwillingness to spend an estimated $ 160,000 required to make needed repairs, bear in mind.
The important breaking news that actually matters to anybody who is somebody in Pawlowski’s Paradise this week, though, is the announcement that “Allentown’s cash-poor arena project will soon get a $ 10.0 million infusion that city officials hope will carry the project until the big money arrives in August”, writes MATT ASSAD in THE MORNING CALL on July 6, 2012.
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Using more imagery than any Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film worth its salt, the Honorable Pennsylvania State Representative JENNIFER MANN (D-Lehigh) asserts, “The biggest downside of the litigation is it put a dark cloud over something that is really positive for everybody.”
“I’m just glad that cloud is gone.”
The article by Assad quoting Mann did not state whether or not the Honorable State Representative, who also happens to sit on the board of the Allentown Neighborhood Improvement Zone Development Authority, was aware of all the (unnecessary?) struggles that the unfortunate City of Chester’s Mayor JOHN LINDER has experienced in getting the (deadbeat?) Philadelphia Union of Major League Soccer, the occupants of $ 122.0 million dollar PPL Park, to pay its long-overdue tax bills.
The softball-tossing reporter from The Morning Call also never did ask the Honorable State Representative exactly why the Allentown Arena must be built for a seemingly obnoxious amount of money that thoroughly shatters all previous record construction costs for any minor league ice hockey arena that has ever come before Pawlowski’s oppulent Palace of Sport.
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On the other hand, one does not need to be a rocket scientist to concur that, nowadays, it’s all about the season ticket sales for the American Hockey League’s soon-to-be Assisted-Living outfit. The club’s woeful on-ice record during their stay in upstate New York already makes the job of the Phantoms’ people currently hawking season tickets to the record-smashing Allentown Arena hard enough to begin with, of course. And, it could be quite some time before the public is prepared to forget headlines proclaiming the fact that “one of the first major beneficiaries of the Allentown Neighborhood Improvement Zone legislation championed by Senator PAT BROWNE have hired Browne’s wife, Heather, as a lobbyist.” (The Morning Call, January 30, 2012)