Your Award-Winning News Source for the Upper Delaware River Valley Region Since 1975
Vol. 41 No. 13
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MARCH 26 - APRIL 1, 2015
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www.riverreporter.com
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$1.50
Protest explodes at Berlin ordinance hearing By LINDA DROLLINGER
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EACH LAKE, PA — Almost 200 Berlin Township residents crowded into the basement great room of the Beach Lake Community Center to attend a March 17 public hearing on three proposed ordinance changes. The first proposed change was to adopt language revision to the township’s existing Subdivision and Land Development Ordinance (SALDO), as suggested by the Wayne County Planning Commission. When board of supervisors chair Paul Henry asked for public comment on that change as advertised, he received no response. That change was later passed in the board meeting that followed the hearing. The second proposed change was adoption of a signage ordinance, the first of its kind in the township. Again Henry called for public comment. The only response was one request that it be read aloud. When Henry told the crowd that it was 18 pages long, it was waved off as insignificant and adopted later that night at the board meeting. The third proposed change was adoption of a nuisance abatement ordinance (NAO) that would also be the first of its kind in the township, although a similar ordinance had been floated 12 years earlier and was eventually scrapped in the face of strong public opposition. If the language of the second NAO was not quite the same as that of the first, public response was the same, only this time more vehement. When Henry called for public comment on the NAO, he and fellow supervisors Cathy Hunt and Charlie Gries heard themselves called everything from “the three stooges” to “communists” to “politicians on the take” and worse. One angry accusation that the ordinance was “un-American” escalated into a vitriolic profanity-laced diatribe that ended only when the speaker was escorted out of the room still shouting obscenities. That was not the only instance of profane commentary, causing Henry to say, “Watch your language. There are ladies here.” Continued on page 5
INSERT: FISH
TRR photo by Amanda Reed
In most years, the ice is mostly gone by the first week of spring, but 2015 has been an unusual year in the Upper Delaware Valley and beyond.
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Locally frigid, globally toasty
EGION — The global weather data for the month of February is in, and according to the National Climatic Data Center, February was an extraordinarily cold month in the northeast section of the United States. The region’s average temperature of 13.5° F was 12.7° F below normal. This made it the second-coldest February on record behind 1934, which had an average temperature of 12° F. All 35 Northeast airport climate sites ranked the month among their top 20 coldest Februarys, with 15 of those sites having their coldest February on record. Twentysix sites ranked this winter among their top 20 coldest winters. Globally, the temperature was an entirely different story. The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for February 2015 was the second
SPANNING 2 STATES, 4 COUNTIES, AND A RIVER THAT UNITES US
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highest for February in the 136-year period of record, at 1.48°F above the 20th century average of 53.9°F. The warmest February occurred in 1998, which was 1.55°F above average. Nine of the past 12 months have been either warmest or second-warmest on record for their respective months. Looking at the entire winter, which includes December through February, the temperatures in the Northeast, which includes New York and Pennsylvania, were below average. Globally, however, during the three-month period, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.42°F above the 20th century average. This was the highest for December–February in the 1880–2015 record, surpassing the previous record of 2007 by 0.05°F.
The River Reporter