Cheer

In a welcome bit of news, the Butler Transit Authority announced this week that a compressed natural gas fueling station formerly expected to be up and running in 2019 will be operational a year earlier.

The station, one of 29 natural gas fueling stations statewide, is a major step forward for the transit authority, which is moving toward CNG-fueled buses and expects to have three operational sometime in late 2017.

With natural gas prices at historic lows and the nation’s largest reserve of shale gas beneath Pennsylvania, this is an opportunity too big to ignore.

How big? PennDOT estimates that transit authorities will realize a total of $10 million in annual savings to their operating budgets. That money could be used to improve service or lower fares for riders. Though the latter is unlikely to occur, CNG could keep rates from rising because of the difference — about $1 — between its cost and the cost of gasoline or diesel fuel.

An opportunity to improve service and keep consumer costs low is always a good thing.

Jeer

Judicial partisanship at the federal level has been in the news all week after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s ill-advised comments on Donald Trump.

But more concerning are the results of a decade-long study on judicial partisanship at the state level, by researchers at the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta.

The study, which tracked election disputes between 2005 and 2014, found a cause-and-effect relationship between the exponential rise of money in state-level judicial elections and the propensity of judges to rule in favor of members of their own political party.

Predictably, when judges no longer have to run for office — say, in their final term before mandatory retirement — the study found that the relationship between campaign contributions and partisan judicial decisions “disappears.”

The rise of money in judicial elections has been a concern for some time. In the 1990s, $83.3 million was spent on state Supreme Court campaigns. That number rose to $207 million from 2000 to 2010, along with a dramatic rise in election dispute cases.

This is not an easy problem to address, but this study is a reminder that judges are not infallible. They are political beings with opinions and ideas that impact the way they do their jobs. Blithely ignoring that fact and allowing political contributions to influence our state courts is a recipe for corruption.

Cheer

Members of Congress took a good step this week, when they sent legislation to President Barack Obama requiring most food packages to carry a label, symbol or electronic code indicating whether the product inside contains genetically modified ingredients (GMOs).

Critics of the package say it doesn’t go far enough to require labeling, but any system is preferable to the one we have now — which is a patchwork of state laws that make it difficult for companies to know and follow the law.

It’s valid to wonder whether consumers will actually take advantage of electronic labels, which could be scanned with a smart phone to learn about any GMOs in a product, and also whether penalties for non-compliance are tough enough to ensure companies actually follow the rules.

But the fact is that 75 to 80 percent of foods produced these days contain GMOs, most of which are corn and soy-based. The Food and Drug Administration says they are safe to eat, but consumers deserve the chance to decide for themselves whether they want to put these substances in their bodies.

These national standards are a step toward ensuring that people have the chance to make that choice.