Food Bank Loses DRPA Funding For Now

Should you keep a promise you've made, to help a good cause, even though many believe you should never have made the commitment in the first place?

Think about that when you're paying $5 to cross bridges run by the Delaware River Port Authority.

The DRPA just raised tolls to raise money for repairs to its four spans. That extra money was needed because so much has been squandered over the years, on so-called "economic development such as stadiums, historic sites and projects that had nothing to do with its core mission: getting people across the Delaware River.

The Food Bank Of South Jersey is a supermarket of sorts. Volunteers from more than two hundred food pantries in Camden, Gloucester, Burlington and Salem Counties come here to stock their shelves.

The food bank expects to distribute 12 million pounds of food in 2011, triple what it doled out just three years ago.

Dennis Williams is stocking up for the pantry at Saint Vincent DePaul in Burlington City. They serve 55 families a week, including lots of seniors and newly unemployed.

"Without this facility, we wouldn't be able to operate. Because what we get from the state and federal government, it's really been cut back lately- we're not getting hardly any meat this month at all," he says.

In December 2009, the board of the DRPA voted to donate $2 million to area food banks.

But the public outcry over DRPA's spending made even louder by the recent toll hike caused the agency to rethink its donation.

A DRPA spokesman told Fox 29 that all pending economic development projects are on hold, pending a review by the agency's finance committee.

The folks whose pantries benefit from this food bank know the DRPA donation came with a side dish of controversy.

But they hope the agency will decide to keep its promise to them.

We do not know how long the DRPA review will last and until it's complete, the food bank waits.