Meeting Room

When the Montgomery County commissioners last week were forced to reveal their plan to build themselves a new meeting room, they gave disgruntled department heads a long-desired chance to label them hypocrites. "What a joke!" Maryanne Rickenbach, the recorder of deeds, said of the plan. "We can't give people raises, but we can spend a million dollars on a new commissioners' room?" "They're setting a very bad example," said Prothonotary William E. Donnelly, "by asking (other)

Bob Pierson's office is not a pretty sight. He sweats in the summer and freezes in the winter - and that's the good part. The walls had started to cave in and he had to prop them up with a backhoe - until the landlord took action. No, his office is not in one of those run-down inner-city buildings that the government sells for $1 each to virtually anyone willing to fix them up. Pierson's tiny office is in Lower Gwynedd, and it's the headquarters of the township's Department of Public Works.

As he vacuumed new carpeting in a soon-to-be-unveiled meeting room inside the greatly expanded Convention Center, Pat Taylor felt a sense of accomplishment. "It looks really nice," Taylor, 18, of Downingtown, said as he paused in his work, looked up, and surveyed a room that just three months ago was still taking shape. "It feels great that we can make a room like this beautiful," said Taylor, a member of Laborers Union Local 57. The $786 million expansion of the center - described as the city's "dream house" when it was being developed two decades ago - is 87 percent complete, on track, and on budget for its highly anticipated March debut, said Joe Resta, project executive for the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority, which is overseeing the expansion.

TRENTON — William Scott Jr. was concerned about a housing development being built near his Montclair home by a politically connected nonprofit. He filed an open records request to try to figure out how the nonprofit secured a big government construction grant from Essex County, even though it applied past the deadline. His request was rejected by the county. So he appealed to the New Jersey Government Records Council (GRC), which hears such cases. Twenty-one months later, he watched as the GRC voted on his case in a meeting room in Trenton.

You could say Pat Montgomery has put her love for Chester County's Highland Township on the wall - of the township building on Gum Tree Road, that is. Montgomery, the township's secretary and a 30-year resident, is painting "the four seasons of Highland" in Grandma Moses style on the supervisors' meeting room wall. The township's offices are in the converted Highland School, which was built in 1937 and is in the process of being refurbished. "I have no artistic talent at all," Montgomery said with a big smile as she pointed to her version of autumn for this 25-square-mile municipality in the county's western reaches.

The green doors to the Eagles' meeting room closed at 6 p.m. and did not reopen until 7:56, when cornerback Ben Smith pushed them ajar and met a wall of cameras and TV lights. He was followed out the door of the team's much-publicized slate-cleaning by a burst of hot air and 50 other Eagles, none of them scraped, bruised or bleeding. Inside, beneath the leather jackets and flashy warmup suits, it might have been a different story for some of them last night in the basement of Veterans Stadium.

Marple Township's political whirlwind was upgraded to hurricane status this week. A stormy commissioners' meeting ended abruptly Monday evening when the fire marshal declared that the meeting room in the township building was overcrowded. After the meeting, a Democratic candidate for Congress, who was prevented by board President Patricia Keates from addressing the commissioners, said he would seek a court order that would allow him to speak at the board's next meeting. Meanwhile, a group of dissident Republicans has announced that it is starting a new GOP organization in Marple to compete with the Republican Party of Marple (RPM)

More than a month has passed since 13 developers submitted land-use proposals for the Haverford State Hospital site to the Haverford Authority, an appointed township board that will eventually recommend uses for the land. Tonight, the authority will meet to discuss the plans for the first time. Residents hoping to discover details of the proposals will have to wait at least a little longer, though. Authority Chairman Fred Moran, who announced the meeting only Friday afternoon, said the discussion would likely focus on procedures for evaluating the proposals, not the proposals themselves.

A hearing on a proposed 37-house development in Uwchlan Township has left residents and officials with more questions than answers. Landowners Ethel Otter and Marshall Learn have proposed building single- family houses on 26 wooded acres off Balderston Drive, near Lionville Elementary and Junior High Schools. Their plan shows a circular, 3,000-foot- long extension of Balderston Drive into the property. Eight acres around the edge of the site would be left undeveloped as open space.

During the two years that Gina has lived near 21st and Pine streets, her car has been broken into twice, her boyfriend's truck has been stolen and three units in her apartment building have been burglarized. Last month, her apartment was broken into by someone who threw a brick through the back door. Gina, who would not give her last name, was among more than 100 Center City residents who packed a meeting room at the Unity Church on 21st Street near South last night to do something about the recent surge in burglaries and muggings in the area.