inadequate guidelines<\/a> have turned many voters against him, Maura believes Shapiro is on Archbald\u2019s side. Ed Staback and Shapiro were close friends, she said, and the bond didn\u2019t break with the older man\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\u201cThey sat next to each other on the House floor for years, and he mentored Josh because he was younger, much younger than my father-in-law,\u201d she said. After Shapiro visited Staback Park and issued his executive order, Maura said she was moved to send the governor a handwritten letter. Shapiro was so moved by her letter, he arranged to speak with Maura by telephone.<\/p>\n
She said the governor thanked her for reminding him of the lessons he learned from his late mentor and expressed regret for his early support of invasive data center development. He promised to take a strong stand against the annihilation of Archbald. Maura said Shapiro told her he left Staback Park asking himself, \u201cWhat would Eddie do?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout saying, \u2018I made a mistake,\u2019 he was like, \u2018I painted with too broad of a brush, and I assure you that these permits will never, ever get past my desk,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018They\u2019re not happening. They\u2019re not.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Maura took the governor at his word. I\u2019ll wait for the receipts, but if Shapiro is genuinely asking himself what \u201cEddie\u201d would do, we can be thankful that Staback provided such an honorable example.<\/p>\n
Staback Park was built on reclaimed strip mine land, a lush, green, public jewel that replaced a wasteland wrought by greed and exploitation. Surrounding it with toxic data centers and power plants would be an unforgivable sin against Archbald and an indelible stain on Shapiro\u2019s record.<\/p>\n
What would Eddie do? He\u2019d stand strong at Staback Park on Saturday and fire the starting gun.<\/p>\n
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, will see you there. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over an astonishing 14 terms as state representative for the former 115th District, Ed Staback took strong stands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2117,1590,2116,201,182,3052,139,1559,1560,28,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-296951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-archbald","tag-chris-kelly","tag-data-centers","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-midvalley","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296951","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=296951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}