A belated Happy New Year from Saucon Shenanigans! 2025 will be a municipal election year! It’s important that we all stay apprised of what will be happening in the Township during the year, so Saucon Shenanigans is back up and running!
There will just be two positions open on the Township Council in November – the ones held by Banonis and Carocci. For those of you who have been eager to know when you can replace them as council people, this is your opportunity. There will be primaries for both parties in May, so put May 20 on your calendar.
There have only been two Council meetings so far this year – January 6 and January 15. There was no Council meeting on February 5 (the usual night for a meeting) because of “scheduling conflicts” so the next one coming up will be this Wednesday, February 19. Let’s get caught up on what happened at those January meetings.
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Charles Dickens
January 6, 2025
January 6 was the annual reorganization meeting coupled with a brief general business meeting. Both Banonis and Carocci couldn’t be bothered to attend. No explanation or excuses given for either of them. Their absence allowed for a very streamlined meeting. 35 agenda items were completed in 2 hours and 15 minutes. Most of the agenda items were appointments by Council or the Acting Manager to township positions as well as reorganization resolutions and fee schedules which are pretty much boilerplate actions each year.
There are a few reorganizational items that resulted in changes. Laura Ray was elected Council President for the coming year and Victoria Opthof-Cordaro was elected Council Vice-President. Expressions of thanks were offered to Priscilla deLeon for her service as President in 2024, especially considering all of the abuse she endured from the two absent council members.
The salaries that were approved for the Manager and the Administrative Assistants are the salaries that will take effect after the hiring of a new manager.
With the resolution of the library issue with the Hellertown Area Library, Jo-Ellen Thomson was appointed to the Library Board. Under the new agreement, Lower Saucon Township and Hellertown Borough each can appoint one Board member. The remaining Board members are appointed by the library Board itself. LST residents can now apply for HAL membership at no cost to the residents.
The other organizational change was the adoption of Resolution 01.A.-2025. The resolution is a revision of the previous Agenda Policy and Code of Conduct for Township Council Meetings #64-2024, which was repealed and replaced.
The revision of the previous resolution is a sad commentary on the behavior of a small group of residents who took advantage of the attempt by last year’s Council to expand the opportunity for public comment. While the Council was under the control of Banonis as president, public comment had been limited to one 3-minute period per resident before each meeting on agenda items only and one 3-minute period per resident after each meeting on non-agenda items. This had severely limited public input because the agendas at that time included very little detail regarding what action might or might not be taken on each item, leaving it difficult for citizens to comment in an informed manner on what was to be decided. You can’t comment if they don’t tell you what they plan to do. Plus, whether you had one item to comment on or five, you still were only allotted 3 minutes. Not enough for any detailed comment.
Beginning in January 2024, the new Council under Mrs. deLeon passed a resolution expanding public comment to 5 minute periods per resident on each agenda item, following the comments made by the Council members. This gave each resident more time to speak on each agenda item if they had comments to make, with the advantage of commenting after learning what the actions were that the Council proposed to take but before the Council voted.
Sadly, a small number of residents regularly abused these comment periods. Certain residents found it necessary to comment on virtually every item on the agenda, usually using up the entire 5 minutes, and often speaking not solely to the topic, but rather using the time to upbraid and criticize the 3 female Council members with dubious complaints about behavior which were distinctly out of order and in violation of the Code of Conduct. As the year wore on, these abuses coupled with Banonis and Carocci’s abuse of their rights of comment as Council members, which were often off-topic, insulting, abusive, and ridiculously long, led to Council meetings that often lasted 4, 5, even 6 hours. This obnoxious and deliberately defiant behavior resulted in many otherwise interested residents no longer attending Council meetings in person.
In an attempt to discourage such behavior, Council in the Fall reduced the permitted comment periods to 3 minutes per resident. Unfortunately, this did little to mitigate the problem and in fact, Council meetings regularly ran to 6 hours.
The adoption of the new resolution #01.A.-2025 was passed on a vote of 3-0 in order to mitigate those ridiculous, wasteful meeting lengths. Public comment is now once again limited to a 3-minute period before each meeting and a 3-minute period after each meeting. The only difference is that comment both before and after the meeting can be on both agenda and non-agenda items and there is somewhat more information provided in the supporting materials to give a better idea of Council’s proposed actions. It is sad that a few self-centered, childish people who think their opinions are the only ones that count have to ruin good public communication for the rest of the community. Ironically, these are the same people who complain – falsely – that Council members are “hiding” things. There used to be more time for public discussion but these people ruined that. This is why we can’t have nice things.
The general business part of the meeting included the good news that the Council and the Hellertown Borough Council have worked out an agreement to return to the joint usage and management of the Compost Center. The Council voted 3-0 to approve the agreement for the period January 1, 2025 – December 31, 2029. This will allow the Township to abandon use of the temporary facility on Polk Valley Road, a facility that required that drop-off items be hauled off-site at a cost to the Township.
January 15, 2025
For one brief shining moment there was hope that either Banonis and Carocci would continue to absent themselves from Council meetings or, that if they did show up, they would have adopted a more polite, civil attitude to the conduct of township business. Alas, that was not to be. They both attended the January 15 meeting with no explanation of why they had missed the organizational meeting on January 6.
For the 5 items on the agenda, it took 2 hours and 11 minutes to complete the work. Were they long or complicated items that needed extensive discussion? No. They included one lot line adjustment request that passed 5-0, the approval of a single tree removal at the Heller Homestead, the appointment of 2 associate members to the EAC, the waiving of annual expenses for groups using municipal properties which also passed 5-0, and the approval of December 2024 financial reports. Tough stuff there.
Of course, it wouldn’t have taken as long if Banonis and Carocci had not spent over 9 minutes carping about the appointees for the EAC. Just to explain, the EAC recommends who they would like to have appointed to the committee as associate members. There were two openings. We had to listen to Banonis call his fellow township residents “like-minded fools” who wanted to ban plastic bags. Carocci complained there were no resumes which Cathy Gorman explained had been in their council packets for the January 6 meeting that neither Carocci nor Banonis bothered to attend. Apparently they not only didn’t attend, but they didn’t read the information in their packets either. As a point of historical fact, in the almost five years that I’ve attended Council meetings where either Banonis or, prior to him, Sandra Yerger was the President, there have never been resumes provided to the public regarding any of the appointees to any of the committees. The Council majority would pick their own “puppets” – to use Carocci’s description of the applicants for these openings – and the residents were given no additional information.
And then we had to have a ridiculous discussion started by Banonis about having co-vice presidents. First of all, there’s no provision for an office like that. Second, the motion was not on the agenda so it can’t be considered. This is the kind of baloney we have to endure because there’s apparently no legal way to either shut these guys up or force them to stick to the agenda. They just blabber on and on.
So it looks like we’re in for another year of wasted time, deflection and distraction before we have an opportunity to vote some productive Council members in. Remember, two seats up for election on November 4. You can make your choices for your party’s candidates on May 20.
Next Council Meeting – Wednesday, February 19, 6:30 PM
Next Municipal Election – Tuesday, November 4, 2025 – 259 days!!