Our Opinion: W-B train station salvation becomes travesty

Letter to the Editor: U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey fails to protect human trafficking victims

So, a guy responsible for maintaining a boarded-up, 157-year-old train station bought with millions of taxpayer dollars and listed on the national Register of Historic Places walks into said building and finds two squatters sleeping.&#8220;We&#8217;re napping!&#8221; squatter one says with annoyance.&#8220;Oh,&#8221; the guy replies, &#8220;Well, maybe you could do that somewhere less illegal.&#8221;And the squatter says &#8230;If you want, fill in your punchline here. Some quick ideas to prime your mental pump:&#8220;And disrupt my friend&#8217;s dreams of living in this station before it became a dump? What kind of monster are you?&#8221;&#8220;No prob, I hear the Irem Temple down the street has way more room, and class!&#8221;&#8220;I&#8217;m not some homeless bum! We&#8217;re just protecting this historic jewel until the ninnies who own it figure out how to save it, which is more than you can say!&#8221;Sadly, almost anything you can come up with would be funnier, and less absurd, than the truth.As staffer Jen Learn Andes reported in Wednesday&#8217;s Times Leader, the napping squatters were quite real when Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority workers prepared to offer a tour of Wilkes-Barre&#8217;s historic and remarkable former New Jersey Central train station.The &#8220;we&#8217;re napping&#8221; expression of annoyance was also true. As was the decision to let the law-breakers off with a warning because, you know, they were homeless and swore this was their first time breaking, entering and sleeping illegally in government-owned property.Golly, who would&#8217;t let them go?The rest is fiction. Would that it all were.Alas, it got more surreal. Luzerne County Councilwoman Eileen Sorokas stepped into the room where the squatters had been sleeping, saw what appeared to be excrement, and opined &#8220;My chicken coop is cleaner than this.&#8221;Here&#8217;s hoping Sorokas lives on a poultry farm, not a city side street.Finding more sleeping bags as well as toiletries and medications neatly arrayed on built-in shelves, visiting county resident Brian Shiner asked &#8220;what the heck, is this someone&#8217;s living room?&#8221;The answer apparently is literally &#8220;yes.&#8221;Here&#8217;s the nub.Go to Rome, Italy. You can walk through the Pantheon, completely intact despite an oculus deliberately left in its domed ceiling when it was built two millennia ago. You can see the tombs of epic artist Raphael, the first king of unified Italy Victor Emmanuel II, and the tomb of his successor Umberto I.That&#8217;s in a 2,000 year-old building with a hole in its ceiling that lets in any weather.Go to Wilkes-Barre&#8217;s lone remnant of the iron horse&#8217;s golden age, built less than 200 years ago, and you will see excrement, personal toiletries and homeless squatters.What&#8217;s wrong with this picture?Absolutely everything.