State briefs
Audit approved PITTSBURGH (AP) – Pittsburgh’s controller has agreed to audit the city’s parking authority amid complaints the agency is trying to profit from a recently passed tax hike affecting parking lots, garages and parking meters.
After a unanimous vote by Pittsburgh City Council members on Tuesday, Controller Tom Flaherty agreed to audit the Pittsburgh Parking Authority, which said it would hike rates as much as three and a half times in some locations.
The agency announced the rate hikes after city council approved raising the city’s parking tax from 31 percent to 50 percent, a move anticipated to make as much as $3 million for the city, stave off layoffs and keep city facilities open.
“I expected some profiteering on this. I just didn’t expect it from our own parking authority,” said councilman Bill Peduto.
Parking Authority head Ralph Horgan defended the rate hike, saying most of the money the agency earns goes toward paying off its debts.
Plea withdrawn
PITTSBURGH (AP) – A former council president in suburban Pittsburgh withdrew his guilty plea to charges of receiving more than $8,000 in illegal pay and stealing $500 from a borough safe, hoping to preserve his state pension.
Attorneys for James Schlanger, a former head of the council in Swissvale, said he mistakenly thought he would be able to keep the state portion of his pension when he pleaded guilty in September 2002.
Even if Schlanger is convicted of the charges during his April trial, he will now be able to keep the pension he earned as a state field auditor for 17 years, said John Contino, head of the State Ethics Commission. He was suspended from his $45,000-a-year job in February 2002, three days after being charged.
The charges stemmed from an investigation into the embezzlement of more than $800,000 by former borough manager Thomas Esposito, who was sentenced to three to six years in jail and 20 years probation after pleading guilty.
Esposito told Schlanger to take an advance on his annual council pay of $3,000 and Esposito also gave Schlanger funds from petty cash, according to court documents. Schlanger also didn’t report $3,000 he earned as a part-time parking attendant, prosecutors allege.
Ordinance challenged
HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa. (AP) – Two secondhand stores have challenged an ordinance in Altoona that requires them to store items sold to them for a week and submit a list to police, claiming it is unconstitutional because antique stores are excluded.
Michael Hazenstab, owner of Crazy Hazy’s II, and John Franks, the owner of VJ’s Secondhand Store, claim the three-year-old ordinance is unfair because antique stores are exempt even though they deal in many items that people steal, such as crystal, candlesticks, jewelry and silverware.
The men also claim the law is an unfair financial burden because they’ve had to add storage for the items and can’t sell them as quickly.
Altoona officials passed the ordinance hoping to curtail criminals looking for quick money in the city, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh.
Altoona attorney Eva Stanger countered that city police aren’t concerned about the items typically sold at antique stores and dismissed the store’s financial arguments, saying the law was not an undue burden.
Blair County Judge Hiram Carpenter gave city officials until Feb. 10 to file a brief explaining why the ordinance is constitutional.
Policy revised
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) – Penn State administrators have revised a new policy requiring background checks for all new faculty hires following protests from departments in the College of Liberal Arts.
Robert Secor, vice provost for academic affairs, said the revised policy will require self-disclosure forms only from the final candidates rather than from all finalists. Also, the background check will no longer cover misdemeanor convictions but only felonies, sex offenses, or instances of misappropriation of funds, he said.
Opponents said the original policy posed privacy problems and would interfere with the university’s ability to hire and retain top faculty, according to resolutions from the departments of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures, economics, labor studies and industrial relations, and history and religious studies.
“We are deeply concerned about the ability to attract and retain people,” said Gregg Roeber, department head of history and religious studies. “These are people not only in the country, but foreigners.”
Penn State, learning that a tenure-track professor had been convicted of a triple murder in the 1960s, said in November that it planned background checks on all job applicants. Indiana University had been the only Big Ten school to take such action.
Monument to be moved
HANOVER, Pa. (AP) – Council members plan to move a 6-foot-high Ten Commandments monument from Hanover’s Wirt Park to a private site following objections from a Washington group that called its display in the public park unconstitutional.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote the borough council in November to object to the pink granite monument, council vice president Gary Brown said Tuesday.
“They told us we had to move it or they would take us to court,” Brown said. “It cannot be displayed on government property.”
The monument will be moved in the spring after the ground thaws.
The group’s legal director, Ayesha Khan, said people of all faiths should feel welcome in a public park. “It needs to be on private property in a way that does not discriminate,” she said.
Council members will seek a prominent private site for the monument, although Brown said most people want it to remain where it is. Hanover Manager Bruce Rebert said a handful of churches and a retirement home have offered the monument a home.
Three charged
YORK, Pa. (AP) – Three men charged for the second time in the murder of a city bartender were ordered to stand trial Tuesday.
County prosecutors, in a motion that drew laughter among the trio, were forced 15 months ago to drop homicide and attempted murder charges due to lack of evidence. Charges were reinstated after prosecutors went to a grand jury in November.
“Nobody’s laughing now,” Chief Deputy Prosecutor Bill Graff said after Gregory Lee, Daymond Swartz and Antoine Williams were ordered to stand trial in the June 7, 2002, murder of Deena Faye Cunningham and the wounding of her boss, Patrick Hatzinikolas. The three are all serving state prison sentences for unrelated crimes.
Cunningham, 26, was shot to death June 7, 2002 in an alley behind The End Zone Sports Bar on West Market Street. Police initially arrested five men in what they believed to be a contract killing targeting Hatzinikolas.
Co-defendant Antonio Stauffer was to testify against a fourth man alleged to be behind the contract, but Stauffer stopped cooperating and those charges were dropped. Stauffer’s capital murder and assault trial ended in a hung jury, and he remains in county prison without bail pending a retrial.
Beating death recounted
BETHLEHEM, Pa. (AP) – A woman accused of beating her live-in boyfriend to death with a metal baseball bat argued with the man over her missing purse with $10 inside, which she suspected he had taken to gamble, witnesses said.
The testimony came at a hearing Tuesday at which District Justice James Stocklas ordered Richele Abraham, 50, to stand trial in the death of Dennis Wampole Sr., 56, who was killed shortly after he returned home at about 2 a.m. on Dec. 21.
The man denied taking the purse, but Abraham thought he was lying and became enraged, said her sister, Luann Black. Officers who recovered the bloodstained bat in the basement also found the purse with the money inside, police said.
Police said Abraham told them she crawled into bed with Wampole Sr., thinking he was merely unconscious, and later dressed and left the house to attend a baby shower and go Christmas shopping. His son, Dennis Wampole Jr., 23, who found his father’s body that night, said Abraham appeared surprised that her boyfriend was dead.
Abraham, who was quiet throughout the hearing, is being held without bail in Northampton County Prison. She could face the death penalty if District Attorney John Morganelli pursues a first-degree murder conviction.
Restoration advances
OLEY, Pa. (AP) – The restoration of the Pleasantville Bridge in Oley Township is almost finished, and the 152-year-old covered span should be open in May, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
“The whole structure is done,” project engineer Scott H. Juenger said. “Now the rest is to button it up and make everything look nice.”
The wooden bridge was closed in 1993 after a wall on the northern end collapsed during a storm. In summer 2002, PennDOT started a $2.2 million effort to reconstruct the bridge, which spans the Manatawny Creek.
Oley Township supervisors passed an ordinance Jan. 12 to reduce the speed limit to 25 mph from 40 mph near the bridge and will put stop signs at either end, chairman David R. Kessler said. Clearance devices will also be installed at the approaches to stop vehicles taller than 11 feet, 3 inches that could damage the structure.
The sides will be painted red and the entrances will be coated white.
County faces suit
SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) – The family of a former minister who hanged himself in Carbon County Prison in February 2002 after an arrest in a domestic dispute is suing the county.
Suits filed by the second wife of Stephen Puza Jr., Helena Barker Puza, and his daughter, Leah, in U.S. District Court in Scranton each seek more than $100,000, naming the county, prison officials, and others.
Stephen Puza Jr., a Coaldale native, founded small churches in Wind Gap and Shenandoah but retired from preaching in 1997. Puza, 49, was arrested Feb. 20, 2002, and jailed on charges of aggravated assault, public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. He used a shoelace to hang himself from a heating vent in a cell.
Nesquehoning police reported that corrections officers said Puza appeared to be in a good mood, and told one that “he was a minister and did not believe in suicide and had a lot to live for.”
The lawsuit filed by Puza’s wife, however, said previous domestic cases made police aware that Puza had emotional and mental-health problems, and prison officials should have known that he was drunk and a danger to himself.
County attorney Gerard J. Geiger, who has asked that one of the suits be dismissed or the two consolidated, said he expects the county to prevail.