Modifications

For rowing aficionados planning to partake in the 75th annual Dad Vail Regatta, president Jim Hanna wants you to know that the race is still on - with just a few minor alterations. Yesterday, practices were canceled due to a mixture of inclement weather and river conditions, leaving questions about today's proceedings. Officials decided to push the start time from 7 to 8 a.m. to accommodate the hundreds of teams and onlookers expected along Kelly Drive today. In addition, teams will race in a head-to-head format as opposed to the traditional side-by-side style that, according to Hanna, allows for a "safer way to row given the current conditions.

One question kept nagging 12-year-old Scott Dorfman as he began preparing for his bar mitzvah. Looking up at the bimah, where he would one day be called to read from the Torah, he wondered, "How am I going to get up there?" Scott has cerebral palsy and must use a motorized wheelchair. Doors and steps, while providing building access to most, represent barriers to him. Luckily for Scott, the congregation at Shir Ami was not insensitive to his problem. During a special Shabbat service Friday, members celebrated their commitment to making the synagogue more accessible to handicapped people.

The roar of racing cars may finally be coming to Fairmount Park. After many false starts in the past 20 years, the Fairmount Park Commission has given preliminary approval to a Vintage Grand Prix, to be held around Memorial Hall either late next spring or in August. The commission has given preliminary approval to several racing proposals in the past two decades, but each was eventually rejected because of safety modifications necessary to accommodate speeds in excess of 150 mph. The modifications were seen as too costly and detrimental to the park environment, according to commission spokesman Richard Nicolai.

Practicality and aesthetics in property subdivision prompted members of the Wrightstown Planning Commission to make final modifications to the township's subdivision and land development ordinance. The major change involved restricting flag lots, properties that have limited road access and usually feature an extended right of way that runs past neighboring road-front property. "They're impractical, they're expensive, and they're not good for planning," said Planning Commission member William Perry.

After more than a year of debate on whether to install two-way radios on school buses, the Rose Tree Media School Board is scheduled to vote on the issue tonight. Recommendations made at Tuesday's meeting raised a question, however, about what type of system should be installed. Consultant Thomas Crowley told board members that a system that allowed buses to be identified individually should be installed in the district's 66 buses. Crowley said "IDer" systems allow individual drivers to maintain an open line to the main switchboard, a capability that simpler two-way systems do not have.

With fresh evidence that voluntary mortgage modifications aren't working, a national lawyers' group is urging the government to let the courts fix bad loans. "Court supervision of loan modification is needed, and unlike so many of the responses to the foreclosure crisis so far, there will be no cost to the taxpayer," Henry Sommer of Philadelphia, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, said Thursday. A study last month of mortgage-servicer reports to investors by Alan White, Valparaiso University School of Law professor, showed that of 3.5 million subprime and slightly less-risky Alt-A mortgages examined, 10 percent were in foreclosure, and another 10 percent were delinquent.

Read their lips. Higher taxes may be a distinct possibility for the residents of Easttown Township. According to the township Board of Supervisors, a gap of approximately $250,000 is expected in the budget for late 1990. Unless sufficient cuts can be made in township expenditures between now and when the budget is completed in mid-October, residents in Easttown can expect a tax increase, it was announced at a meeting Monday night. Supervisor Anson Taylor said, "First you look at the taxes now on the books and estimate what they will provide next year.

Most older adults opt to remain in their homes as long as possible, but sometimes failing health or disability jeopardize that independence. Government-funded home-care programs can help the needy stay at home, but often the home itself needs help, or at least modifications, to remain livable. That's where Tracy Beck enters the picture. Beck is executive director of Residential Living Options in Downingtown, a nonprofit agency that administers housing modifications for Chester County's elderly and disabled living in low- to moderate-income households.

When Olympic gold medalist Laura Schwanger arrives at the public library on Main Street these days, she has a hard time even opening the front door. It's not because she doesn't have the strength. The wheelchair athlete, who won medals at Seoul in 1988 and at Barcelona in 1992, is blocked because the entrance is not wheelchair-accessible. "I have to have someone hold both doors open. . . . Usually somebody who is coming in at the same time will hold them for me," Schwanger said.

A local Girl Scout troop watched Yardley government in action Tuesday night, and appropriately enough, a new child-care center won unanimous approval from Borough Council members. Scheduled to be opened by early summer, the facility will occupy about half of the American Legion Post 317 building, at 215 S. Main St. The building is owned by the Oak Grove Home Association, and licensed day-care providers Katrina and Michael Brunner of Lower Makefield Township will operate the center.

"After extensive deliberations with the board, I recommended to them that I was no longer the right person to lead Sunoco as it progresses to the next phase of its future. " - Lynn L. Elsenhans, announcing she will step down as chief executive officer of Sunoco Inc. after leading the Philadelphia company in winding down its oil-refining businesses. "She was brought here to do something, she did it, and now she's going. I know a couple thousand people who wouldn't mind helping her pack.

One recurring theme in reader questions, especially from creationists, is that Darwinian evolution can't explain big changes - the invention of fur or feathers, kidneys or brains. These readers don't see how such innovation could possibly come about through random spelling errors in DNA, no matter how many millions of years they had to accumulate. ". . . the concept of 'descent with modification' cannot generate more complex systems . . . the old adage that if you give 1,000 monkeys 1,000 years to randomly type we could get the works of Shakespeare is false.

The Obama administration said Thursday that it was withholding financial incentives from three home-loan servicers needing to substantially improve their performances in the government's mortgage-modification program. The three are Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, according to the Treasury Department, which oversees the Home Affordable Modification Program. Treasury's review of first-quarter performance by lenders that participate in the voluntary program also cited Ocwen Financial as needing substantial improvement.

Dear Harry: Our family has hit on very hard times. Both my brother and my husband have lost their jobs in the last year. To make matters worse, my brother got scammed in an attempt to get his mortgage payments spread out over a longer period than the eight years remaining on the original schedule. He gave someone $500 up front to get a promised deal for 15 years with a lower interest rate as icing on the cake. The guy cashed my brother's check and disappeared. The TV station that carried this guy's ad was never paid, either.

Newton Conover, behind on his bills after a series of illnesses, thought he found the help he desperately needed when Hope Now Modifications of Cherry Hill promised to secure lower mortgage payments. Instead, Conover, 65, of Galloway, was among 514 customers in New Jersey and other states who fell victim to a company that preyed upon those looking to avoid foreclosure on their homes and who paid large fees for services never provided, state officials said. On Wednesday, the New Jersey Attorney General's Office announced the company, which also uses the name Hope Now Financial Services Corp.

The state of the U.S. housing market, and its immediate future, came into sharper focus Wednesday through economic reports pivoting around the now-expired federal tax credits for buyers. April 30's deadline for the credits helped boost pending home sales for the third consecutive month, the National Association of Realtors said, citing data reflecting signed sales agreements rather than closings, which lag one or two months behind. The index the Realtors' group uses to measure pending sales rose 6 percent in April, to 110.9.

During the height of the real estate bubble in the early 2000s, it was remarkably easy to get a loan: Go online, fill out an application, and you were well on your way to homeownership. But as some of those homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, the same technology wasn't applied to loan-modification, or "workout," efforts that could help keep them in their homes, advocates for the borrowers complained. That could change. An industry group with an executive at the Philadelphia mortgage insurer Radian Group Inc. in a leading role has developed an online system to streamline the loan-modification process by using a method that gives servicers, investors, mortgage insurers, and housing counselors a common platform and repository for documents.

Jim Townsend is a retired Philadelphia sanitation worker with a decent pension and a love of the Jersey Shore, where he bought a home for his retirement. Miles away is Talina Johnson, who bought a rowhouse in Clementon. Both planned their moves with care. Townsend bought his North Cape May home, just two blocks from the Delaware Bay, four years before he retired. Johnson took an eye-opening class in homeownership that prepared her to become the first person in her family to own a house.

Relatively few troubled borrowers are having their mortgage payments permanently reduced under the Obama administration's year-old Home Affordable Modification Program, data for January released yesterday by the Treasury Department show. Of the 1.3 million "trial" modifications started under the program since February 2009, just 116,000 have been made permanent. Still, the number of permanent modifications has increased substantially since December, when just 65,000 were reported.

An old axiom among city planning professionals says transportation is the glue that holds cities together. This is especially true of the Philadelphia waterfront, which is now lacking glue. To make the area the economic engine that waterfronts have become in other cities, three kinds of transportation are required: Simple, direct links to Center City and adjacent neighborhoods. Seamless connections among existing and potential waterfront attractions. Convenient links between the Philadelphia and Camden waterfronts, because Camden has attractions of interest to the Philadelphia population, and vice versa.