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ournal-herald THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2021 • Volume 41 – No. 15 ©2021, THE JOURNAL-HERALD. All Rights Reserved
CONTINUING: THE WHITE HAVEN JOURNAL ESTABLISHED 1879–143rd YEAR, NO. 2
SINGLE COPY– 75¢ (USPS 277440)
CONTINUING: THE WEATHERLY HERALD ESTABLISHED 1880–142nd YEAR, NO. 28
WH council asks for bridge tolling input EDITOR’S NOTE: An e-mail glitch kept this letter from being published last week. Because we feel the topic is vital to the wellbeing of our area, we are opting to give it front page coverage.
Dear Editor and all White Haven Residents: White Haven Borough Council, along with East Side Borough Council and the Luzerne County Council have been working diligently to make clear to PennDOT our concerns about the proposed tolling of I80 by our borough and how it will impact the quality of life for our residents and business owners. PennDOT has advised us that 27,400 vehicles travel the interstate across the Lehigh bridge every day. They believe from their traffic study that 44% of those vehicles are trucks. They also believe that 8% of that traffic will use a “diversion route” to avoid the toll. This route will be 940 thru White Haven and East Side Boroughs. This is 2,192 more vehicles traveling thru the borough and of those 964 of them will be trucks. PennDOT then advised us that they would only toll East bound traffic so the diversion route would have less impact. Even if that were to cut the traffic in half, it will still have a major impact to our communities. In a recent meeting, we again expressed our concerns about the intersections, school bus safety, railroad crossing and the trail users. PennDOT stated they were all existing conditions and other than some new paving, curbing and new handicap sidewalks at 940/437 intersection they were not going to do anything further to assist the residents. It was not a concern to them that they were adding all this additional traffic with no solutions on how to mitigate the issues. See LETTER, page 1
THE WEATHERLY AREA MUSEUM joined forces with Weatherly Area Community Library on Sunday to tour the town with Santa in the Christmas train, then a meet and greet with Santa in the libray. Shown above from left are museum board members Greta Yoka, Dan Dargay, Alicia Quinn, Shane Moran, Ryan Schertrumpf, and Santa. Below, Santa with one of the littlest visitors in the library. Photo by Greta Yoka.
Penn Lake project gets boost from county planners At Penn Lake Park Borough’s November 11 council meeting, the borough received an endorsement for the dam replacement project from the Luzerne County Department of Planning and Zoning. The borough is eligible to receive hazard mitigation grant funds. The meeting was held in person and also via Gotomeeting. Council member Shaun
Kuter reported that the Borough received an official depredation permit. He’s looking for more volunteers to control the geese. Council member Dave Longmore said that patching for the water-main replacement project will begin shortly with milling and patching of saw cuts, followed by paving. See PENN LAKE, page 3