Covington Township repeated a controversial hearing over the $800,000 loan it took out to fund a proposed pavilion at the Moffat Estate.
The Covington Twp. Board of Supervisors held a meeting on March 5 to reauthorize the loan following concerns over the legality of the first meeting, which was held on Feb. 16, because it did not give enough notice to the public under the Local Government Unit Debt Act as well as the Pennsylvania Township Code.
“The reason that we’re holding this hearing was that there was some indication that there wasn’t enough time for the citizens of the township to be able to review the ordinance,” Covington Township Solicitor Brian Yeager said at the meeting.
Speaking for the first time about the hearing during an April 8 interview, Chairman of the Covington Twp. Board of Supervisors Thomas Yerke said, “We did it all over again so there were no doubts. Brian Yeager thought it would be best if we readvertised it and did the whole thing over again.”
At the Feb. 16 meeting, Supvervisor Bill Willson cited the Second Class Township Code of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, saying that the public was not given enough notice to fully inspect the loan ordinance before the actual hearing and that the hearing’s date was not decided on at a public meeting.
“The meeting was in violation of the law,” Willson was quoted as saying in the Feb. 25 edition of The Villager. “It was a rush job to get the pavilion approved.”
According to the Pennsylvania Township Code, the Feb. 11 publication date of the original hearing meant that the ordinance could not be passed any earlier than Feb. 18.
Yeager disagreed with Willson and claimed that the original hearing was legal under the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development’s (DCED) Local Government Unit Debt Act, which states that an ordinance should be advertised no less than three nor more than 30 days before its enactment.
For the Feb. 16 meeting to fall under the parameters of the Local Government Unit Debt Act, the ordinance would have had to have been on display from Wednesday, Feb. 11 through Monday, Feb. 16. However, as reported in the Feb. 18 edition of The Villager, the Covington Twp. Municipal Building was closed on Thursday, Feb. 12 and Friday, Feb. 13. Because of this, the ordinance was not available for public view even though those days were advertised as regular township business days and several township residents went to the municipal building to view the ordinance and were turned away.
“Things like that happen,” Yerke said. “If Kate [Tierney, Covington Twp. Secretary] realized that thing was to be made available and she wasn’t in the office, she should have told me to be there but you don’t think about these things.”
The parameters of both the Township Code and the Local Government Unit Debt act provide for a repeat of a hearing if the municipality feels that it made an error.
The meeting notice for the March 5 hearing was published in the Scranton Times on March 1, which fell within the guidelines set forth by both the Township Code and the Local Government Unit Debt Act.
“What the naysayers of this project are trying to say is that we’re trying to push this in illegally— we’re not,” Yerke said. “Nothing we do in Covington Twp. is illegal. There may be problems, there may be mistakes but I don’t have a doctorate degree in anthropology or anything. I was a garbage man and that’s what I did. I didn’t come into this role saying, ‘I’m gonna be the chairman of the board of supervisors’. I did it because I want to keep my kids in the area and improve the area.”