Until his open-heart surgery three years ago, Donald Gaster acknowledges, he was a tough SOB. A self-employed builder since the age of 16, he had developed dozens of properties around Delaware County, fought township commissioners and been in legal scrapes galore.
"I guess that's why they call me a fighter," he said.
But all that changed when one day at age 53, despite the physical conditioning of four decades in construction, he suddenly found himself facing eternity from an operating table.
"My heart was literally out of my body. . . . I felt like I was in a giant tunnel . . . and I was at the dark end, and I could see a light at the end. I was dead at one time."
Three years later, after a six-way bypass operation, Gaster still occasionally struggles for breath but says he feels lucky to be alive. But more than that, the self-made millionaire says he has been born again - as an enlightened developer.
After years of building expensive subdivisions of one-acre lots, Gaster, 56, says he's ready to help the little guy. To be precise, he wants to build two mobile-home parks, in Concord and Nether Providence Townships.
Making money isn't a goal anymore, he said - "I have enough of that." His main concern, he said, was to create a place to live for decent, hard-working, low-income people.
"It puts me in tears," he said, "seeing these poor people stranded, with no place to go. Their apartments are being turned into condos. . . . I think maybe after being a tough guy in construction for so long, I stumbled on this little (project) in Concord. People told me they need me, and it just makes me feel good."
Or so goes the Donald Gaster version of Donald Gaster.
But these days there's another picture of Donald Gaster developing. In this one, Gaster is not a social do-gooder, but a stubborn, wily developer who treats permits as annoyances.
In this version - the state's - Donald Gaster is in a lot of trouble.
This month, the state Department of Environmental Resources (DER) told Gaster he had committed numerous environmental violations in Concord Township, and sent him a letter saying the violations warranted a fine of $41,000.
The proposed fine stems from excavation work Gaster has been doing on the 70-acre Concord site that he hopes to turn into a mobile-home park, said Michael Sherman of the DER's Bureau of Soil and Water Conservation.
Sherman toured the parcel last month, and called it "one of the worst sites I've seen."
