WILKES – BARRE, LUZERNE CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Insider trading has become a hot topic in NEPA, and a petition has been making the rounds the last couple months to ban Luzerne and Lackawanna County officials from doing it. They needed a combined 20,000 signatures across both counties. They got over 40,000.<\/p>\n
Their pitch is simple: elected officials shouldn\u2019t be using the knowledge they learn from their office for personal profit.<\/p>\n
While national Pennsylvania representatives have received scrutiny over stock trading, these petitions are aimed at the counties.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe groundswell of support shows that people want this type of change, and the first step to that is doing it at the local level,” said Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, executive director of Action Together NEPA and the head organizer behind the effort.<\/p>\n
Action Together NEPA and the Pennsylvania Accountability fund worked on the petition for months and have been canvassing for the last few weeks.<\/p>\n
Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties have a home rule charter which allows voters to locally draft ordinances \u2013 the insider trading ban being one of them. To move forward, they needed over 11,000 signatures in Luzerne County and over 8.900 in Lackawanna County. By today, they had over 23,000 and over 17,000 respectively.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt shows what people want to change, and it shows that people in NEPA are just tired of corruption,” continued Hoffman-Mirilovich. “We\u2019re tired of it. We want it to go away, and we want elected officials to do their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
If approved, it would ban Luzerne and Lackawanna County officials from using any inside information they have when trading stocks \u2013 and would also have the Ethics commission of the county publish a report on what stocks representatives \u2013 local or national \u2013 are trading.<\/p>\n
The drafters say the petition received broad bipartisan support.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis shows us that there are issues that regardless of political affiliation, we are in agreements on, and the big thing we\u2019re agreeing on right now is anti-corruption,” explained Hoffman-Mirilovich. “It is time. Enough is enough. People can\u2019t pay their bills, and we want to make sure that Congress isn\u2019t taking advantage of us, that our elected officials, regardless of level, is not taking advantage of us. That they care about us and they\u2019re putting constituents first.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voters in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties will now vote on whether to adopt the ban or not on the November ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WILKES – BARRE, LUZERNE CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Insider trading has become a hot topic in NEPA, and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-260641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}