Governor’s emergency powers to get ballot box test

HARRISBURG — Republican lawmakers across the country have tried to roll back the emergency powers that governors wielded during the COVID-19 pandemic, as they ordered businesses shut, mask-wearing in public and students home for distance learning.

Pennsylvania’s Legislature is now taking its case to the ballot.

In the first vote of its kind since the coronavirus outbreak, voters statewide will decide twin constitutional amendments that would give lawmakers much more power over disaster declarations, to apply whether the emergency is another pandemic or natural disaster.

The questions were placed on Tuesday’s primary ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature, which has had a long-running feud with the state’s Democratic governor over his emergency actions during the pandemic.

“This is the first opportunity we actually have something

pers to plastic packaging to store flyers — is unlike anything he’s seen as a lifelong Whitehall resident who, as a young man in Hokendauqua, spent time every day looking for bottles on the streets to cash in at the one-pump gas station nearby.

“The problem has become more noteworthy,” he said. “You can see it everywhere at this point.”

“Maybe it was the increase in takeout food during COVID, who knows,” said Deb Rosene, a resident Harakal recruited to join the Environmental Advisory Council. “There was just a lot more litter than we ever remembered seeing in the past.”

She’s leading a committee within the EAC that is trying to wrest control with an initiative to step up enforcement, offer awards to area businesses, organize resident cleanup events, and generally raise the public consciousness around keeping their neighborhood clean.

There isn’t an official name for the campaign yet, she said. Harakal used some newsletter space to brainstorm a few slogans, such as “LOVE WHITEHALL — STOP LITTERING” and “WE ARE ALL PART OF THE SOLUTION — DON’T BE PART OF THE PROBLEM.”

Rosene, meanwhile, is bringing her 37 years of experience in marketing with AT&T to bear on this project. She wants a logo; she’s spreading the word on NextDoor and community Facebook pages. She also wants to create an online litter reporting system on the township’s website, and educational programming for school-aged children.

While much of this is still in the early planning stages, the committee has begun to mobilize the community. The first community cleanup is Saturday morning at the Jordan Creek walkway, which mostly attracts litter in the form of packaging material from nearby Home Depot, Rosene said.

But it’s not just trash from retail centers that is the problem. Whitehall is at the center of the Lehigh Valley and the convergence of two major thoroughfares, Route 22 and MacArthur Road, so litter also comes from people passing through. Even on smaller roads like Mickley, which many use as a shortcut home from the Lehigh Valley Mall, trash has piled up because it’s easier to litter when trash is already there.

“Trying to catch the random stuff that comes out of cars, that’s next to impossible,” Rosene said, apart from posting signage with warnings about the township’s $1,000 fine. “But we can focus on our dirty dozen.”

That’s the committee’s list of about a dozen trouble spots in the township, where they’ll focus community cleanups.

It’s not the first time Whitehall got serious about a green initiative.

The township was early on the recycling front, aggressively implementing a townshipwide curbside program in July 1989, 15 months ahead of a deadline set by state law, according to The Morning Call archives.

The program was voluntary at first, but it achieved a 66% participation rate in the first week. Township officials got pro football star Matt Millen to film an educational video teaching kids the value of recycling.

At the time of its pilot programs the previous year, Whitehall was the largest Lehigh Valley municipality to start curbside recycling.

An official from the state’s then-Department of Environmental Resources told The Morning Call, “They deserve a lot of credit,” and said it perhaps with a twinge of pride — he was himself a Whitehall resident.

Nonetheless, Harakal is appealing to that same feeling today.

“To take pride in our Community is a different kind of pride,” he wrote.