Rolling Mill Hill Residents’ Association President Linda Joseph, left, and Wilkes-Barre City Councilman Tony Brooks talk outside the South Pennsylvania Avenue office of state Rep. Eddie Day Pashinski on Friday, where they had come to present petitions seeking the repeal of a state law allowing the sale of consumer fireworks.
Roger DuPuis | Times Leader
Stats show number of 4th of July nuisance calls spiked since Act 43 was passed
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WILKES-BARRE — It may be quieter now that the Fourth of July is past us, but residents concerned about fireworks in the hands of their neighbors have not forgotten the booms and blasts that echoed throughout the region this summer.
Their push to repeal a state law putting consumer fireworks on the hands of the public took a key step forward last week, with the presentation of petitions to area lawmakers who represent the region in Harrisburg.
Rolling Mill Hill Residents’ Association President Linda Joseph and Wilkes-Barre City Councilman Tony Brooks on Friday presented copies of petitions with over 750 signatures to the offices of state Reps. Eddie Day Pashinski, D-Wilkes-Barre, and Aaron Kaufer, R-Kingston; as well as state Sens. Lisa Baker, R-Lehman Township and John Yudichak, I-Swoyersville.
The representatives were understood to be in session in Harrisburg when Joseph and Brooks visited their local offices.
At issue, Joseph explained, is Pennsylvania Act 43 of 2017, which loosened decades-old restrictions on what types of of aerial fireworks Pennsylvania consumers could legally purchase within the state, subject to a 12% tax on top of the state’s existing 6% sales tax and any applicable local taxes.
Highly taxed or not, anyone who was around the Wyoming Valley this summer, particularly on Independence Day, experienced ample evidence that fireworks were selling well and being exploded at an unprecedented rate.
“From Memorial Day to the Fourth of July it was terrible, it was horrendous,” Joseph said. “And the Fourth of July was just beyond. People just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Joseph pointed to statistics provided by Wilkes-Barre Police Chief Joseph Coffay showing how complaint calls to his department from July 3-5 have ballooned in recent years since Act 43 was passed: There were 24 complaint calls for those three days in 2016. That rose to 30 in 2017, 37 in 2018, 69 in 2019 and 217 this year.
Days after this year’s boisterous holiday weekend, The Rolling Mill Hill Residents’ Association and the Wilkes-Barre Crime Watch Coalition came together for a community meeting, attended by Coffay as well as other members of his department, Fire Chief Jay Delaney and Mayor George Brown and members of council, at which officials encouraged residents to petition for the repeal of Act 43.
The act is, officials said then, the main thing blocking cities from issuing harsher penalties for those violating local ordinances about fireworks — the fine for violating ordinances, capped by the state at $100, isn’t much of a deterrent for someone who has already spent $1,000 on explosives, they noted.
Brown has said he would like to see much steeper fines, perhaps as much as $1,000.
The petitions now potentially put the matter back into the hands of Pennsylvania lawmakers, who will have to balance community concerns against the tens of millions of dollars the law has already generated for the chronically cash-strapped state.
Joseph said Friday the petitions to Harrisburg included comments from those who signed online, as well as the statistics cited by Coffay.
“Residents are complaining. Veterans, people with PTSD are being affected. People’s pets are being affected. It’s a problem, and it needs to be stopped — or at least give municipalities more tools to deal with this,” Joseph said.
As she and Brooks pointed out, widespread use of fireworks frequently violates the law in many places, since the act states that aerial fireworks cannot be set off within 150 feet of any structure — a stipulation that was clearly being ignored in and around Wilkes-Barre’s densely built neighborhoods this summer.
“There is no neighborhood in Wilkes-Barre or pretty much any municipality, where this would be allowed under the law,” she said. “And this is a problem in all of the neighborhoods.”
For now, things have quieted down, but Joseph and others know it is only a matter of time before the explosions begin anew.
“Labor Day was not bad,” she said. “We’ll see what happens New Year’s Eve.”