You blew your whole damn career to play in the Metaverse?
Honestly, this foolishness with former Saucon Valley school board director Mark Sivak—and fellow Democrat—just gets more depressing.
If all these allegations are true, what we have here is a promising public finance career absolutely shitcanned for embarrassingly stupid reasons.
Here’s a product of one of Eastern Pennsylvania’s many pricey-but-not-overly-rigorous Catholic institutions of higher learning throwing away his reputation over thievery that amounts to $15K or so.
Mark Sivak (Photo/LinkedIn)
I could make $15K working part-time at McDonald’s these days in a matter of a few months. What ever happened to the concept of a (legal) part-time job? I mean, my own machinist dad was almost ashamed if he didn’t have a couple side hustles going—but all legal side hustles.
Sara Cassi on LehighValleyLive.com reports:
In another interview May 24 with his defense attorney present, Sivak admitted selling 31 city cellphones between November 2019 and April 2022, and that he made $12,630 from the sales, court records say.
One of the phones sold was an iPhone forfeited to Bethlehem police as part of a child pornography case in Lehigh County, police said.
Sivak also admitted using the city’s Verizon account to pay for electronics for his personal use, including two Oculus VR headsets, a JBL sound bar and subwoofer, a Sony speaker, an iPhone12 Pro Max, and phone battery packs, police said.
Sivak gave the items, which cost about $2,500, to police.
The abject petty stupidity and arrogance of the alleged crimes described here are what gall me. It’s so perfectly Lehigh Valley, it actually makes me feel physically ill.
In one claim, police say Sivak used public money to buy Oculus VR headsets for personal use, presumably to fuck around in the Metaverse.
You got time to deliver virtual pizzas, you got time to deliver real pizzas. I have a colleague—a wonderful full professor at state-owned ESU—who worked part-time at Bob Evans well after receiving tenure. That’s called work, but doing it for the public, too, entitled her to nothing but what was in our faculty union CBA, and I admire her to death for her humble joy in her Bob Evans “side hustle.”
Government officials are supposed to live by a higher standard. We depend on it. We too often don’t get it.
And I don’t know if you’re keeping score, but when I tally up the registered Dems versus GQP/Trump Party officials getting in trouble for corruption in Lehigh Valley lately, well, we Dems aren’t looking so great. And yes, that will inevitably hurt us at the polls, and maybe it should.
This is why government corruption around here bothers me so much.
It’s hurting our community, folks. It’s damaging. In the end, ordinary folks suffer.
But the Ed Pawlowskis of the world are the just the sordid tip of the iceberg.
There’s an official culture of profound self-entitlement among way too many public officials around here. They think they know better than you. They are arrogant, ignorant, and feel they deserve a “little extra” without putting in the sweat ordinary citizens must.
That arrogance is the problem, and thank you, Terry Houck, for taking it to task this week. I’m just sorry you had to.