(Thu, May/08/2003  by The  Bucks County Courier Times)

Our view: What with the shopping center mess on their hands, the last thing Tullytown Council members should be doing is canceling meetings. Yet, that's what they did - so they could campaign for re-election.

This week's Tullytown Council meeting was canceled, according to the council president, because too many council members would be out knocking on doors trying to get re-elected.

And that, folks, tells you all you need to know about Tullytown government. The people running it are more interested in keeping their jobs than in doing their jobs. And even when they show up for work, it's questionable whether they know what they're doing.

Take the Levittown Shopping Center project. Thirteen months ago the owner/developer of the site was given the OK to start demolishing the place. Ever so slowly buildings started coming down. In their place giant piles of debris rose; in between, water-filled pits formed.

It took several citations before the piles began to be carted away. Still, the place looks like a cross between a town dump and a war zone. Nearby citizens are losing their patience. If only council members were as sick of the mess.

But instead of doing something about it - something meaningful - council members are begging off, claiming a citizen's legal effort to save just one of the shopping center's 60 original buildings has rendered them powerless.

We don't buy it.

By that we don't mean to assert that council has unquestionable authority to force the builder's hands. We're not lawyers, we don't know for sure what they can and can't do. That said, they ought to be doing more.

The building in question, the old LPRA building, takes up a half-acre at the edge of the 52-acre site. Seems to us that the developer could - if he had a mind to – build a few more of the 13 stores he agreed to build. He did that in the case of a Home Depot, which has been up and running since February.

Why is it that the LPRA legal flap didn't keep Home Depot from going up?

According to Dave Sowerbutts, attorney for New York developer Stephen Ifshin, Home Depot's distance from the LPRA made its construction feasible. Other retailers aren't as willing to locate near a blighted building, he said. Plus, the whole development plan would have to be redesigned, he said. And that would slow things
down more than waiting for the LPRA matter to be resolved.

Thanks, Dave, but let's hear it from your boss. That's what Tullytown Council attorney Jim Downey wants to do - invite Ifshin to a council meeting and ask him to outline his construction schedule and to name his prospective clients. "So citizens can be assured that he is a man of his word."

We like that idea, though we're not sure it would help. What would help is an escrow that would give officials some sort of real leverage. Instead, according to Downey, council settled for $25,000.

That's the right number. It's not missing any zeros, though Sowerbutts says more escrow money will be put up as the project moves into different phases.

Minus any documentation to that effect, let's assume that Downey is right. If so, $25,000 hardly provides assurance or insurance that a multi-million dollar project will be completed, or that little problems like stubborn piles of demolition debris will be cleaned up in a timely manner.

The reason council accepted such a paltry escrow, Downey said, was to make doing the project more financially feasible for the developer. There's some logic to that thinking. But as another attorney familiar with development deals pointed out, when you try to make a project work for a developer, "you lose your leverage." That's because those funds become your "only recourse" when a developer can't or won't complete a project or abide by terms of the development agreement.

Which brings us back to this week's canceled meeting. We're just curious, with the shopping center mess and all, what reasons council members are giving voters to re-elect them.

The people running Tullytown government are more interested in keeping their jobs
than in doing their jobs. And even when they show up for work, it's questionable
whether they know what they're doing.

May 8, 2003 8:23 AM

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