Meeting Room

A district justice here has found that the husband of Mary Swick, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for East Fallowfield supervisor last year, was guilty of harassing the sister of Sharon Scott, the woman who beat out Swick for the supervisor's seat. Senior District Justice Donald Brown ruled that Ronald Swick had harassed Paula Davis, Scott's sister, during a Feb. 15 supervisors' meeting at the East Fallowfield township building. Brown said he was basing his decision on East Fallowfield Police Chief Pete Mango's testimony.

It is considered one of the FBI's longest and most expensive eavesdropping operations. For 435 days over a two-year period and at a cost of $517,673, federal agents tapped into the conversations of dozens of organized crime figures and their associates meeting in the Camden law offices of defense attorney Salvatore J. Avena. The result was a sweeping racketeering indictment handed up in March charging reputed Philadelphia-South Jersey mob boss John Stanfa and 23 others, including Avena, with various acts of racketeering.

It was as if an alien had landed. There, sitting in the middle of the East Marlborough Township meeting room, was a complete, three-dimensional model of Russell Richardson's latest vision for the future of his Towns End Farm, in the heart of this village. This was not the charming E.T. Rather, to a handful of vocal opponents who attended last week's meeting of the township Planning Commission, the model was more like Darth Vader. "I hear some of these will be rental units," said one woman.

Less than 20 minutes after it began, the Chester Upland school board meeting came to an abrupt end last night with one sweeping bang of President Robert Sellers' gavel. "Motion to pass the agenda?" Sellers yelled to the board members over the jeers of a standing-room-only crowd in the public meeting room. The members' response was drowned out by the jeers of the crowd, but Sellers managed to raise his voice just loud enough to say, "Meeting adjourned. " In the angry moments that followed, residents accused Sellers of violating their right to speak, while he countercharged that the meeting had turned political.

The Chester County Consumer Fair '93 will be held at the Exton Square Mall on Sept. 10 and 11. The show, sponsored by the Chester County Chamber of Business and Industry, promotes Chester County businesses with displays of everything from Christmas trees to financial planning services. "Last year, about 50,000 people saw the 60 exhibits in the fair," said Tim King of KingsLine Marketing Communications of Berwyn, fair coordinator. He expects more companies to participate this year.

It has been an oncoming car for weeks now, and, finally, Eagles coach Rich Kotite met it head-on. The unavoidable subject - the massive reshaping of a conference semifinalist - has popped up in postpractice media sessions and Kotite has dealt with it. Last night, addressing his returning veterans for the first time at training camp, was different. There must have been a lot of glum faces. Jim McMahon's Honda scooter was not parked outside West Chester University's Schmidt Hall and his presence was notably absent.

When Mayor Pamela Hammer used to take her seat at the front of the municipal meeting room, something seemed missing from the wall to her right. Prior to last week, when a visitor's gaze wandered to a portrait called "Mayors of Voorhees," they would see that the picture conspicuously lacked her and her immediate predecessor, John Geaney. Although Hammer has been mayor since January 1992, she had not been immortalized like seven of the eight men in somber suits who preceded her since the 1950s, and whose picture hung on the wall.

If you need to do business in the area of Deposit, N.Y., you could always stay in one of the chain hotels along Route 17 toward Binghamton, 30 miles to the west. But a growing number of business travelers, bored to tears with staying in the same type of hotel room night after night, are choosing instead to stay in the White Pillar Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Deposit with all of four rooms. Innkeeper Najia Aswald, who opened the White Pillar in 1987 in a Greek Revival-style mansion built in 1820, offers important services that business travelers need, including a phone and a television in every room and a photocopier.

They'll cut the ribbon at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on June 26, and with great fanfare, they will announce that the building is open for business. But in fact, the building has been gradually drifting into use for several months now, quietly hosting a handful of public events. So far, these events have resulted in only negligible income for the building, and probably little direct effect on the local economy. It's what follows the ribbon-cutting that will begin to show what the Convention Center can do. The very first public meeting in the building was the Convention Center Authority's monthly board of directors meeting in October.

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)