Lehigh County Board of Commissioners voted Oct. 11 to appeal U.S. District Judge Edward Smith’s ruling in favor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in its suit against Lehigh County’s continued use of a Christian cross in the county seal.

The 6-3 vote came after an executive session when commissioners discussed the case.

In the public session, three commissioners voted against appealing the decision: David Jones, Geoff Brace and Dan Hartzell.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit in August 2016 on behalf of several local residents who objected to the Latin-style cross featured in the center of the county seal and flag.

In an interview, Hartzell, who identified himself as a Christian, said, “The cross in the seal never bothered me.”

However, he said he does not think the case is winnable but would instead be a waste of “several hundred thousand dollars” of taxpayers’ money.

In an interview, Patrick Elliot, senior counsel with the Wisconsin-based FFRF, estimated similar cases have cost defendants between $140,000 and $200,000. He said that, at some point, the winning side will be reimbursed their fees by the losing side.

Lehigh County Assistant Solicitor Thomas M. Caffrey, who is currently representing the county in the case, declined to estimate what the cost might be. He said he is on salary with the county, so he will not bill the county.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of Freedom From Religion Foundation, said, “We’ve won; we are confident we will win the appeal.”

However, she was not happy to see the judge qualified his decision by claiming to be unhappy about it.

“[Judge Smith] sent signals of his displeasure” in favor of the defendants, Gaylor said in an interview.

The website Christianpost.com quoted Smith’s statement as saying, “While the court must defer to the government’s articulation of a secular purpose, the court cannot hold that the county’s articulated purpose is secular. Honoring the settlers by retaining a cross on the seal is the equivalent of honoring the fact that the settlers were Christian.”

Smith based his decision on a legal precedent called the Lemon Test, which allows for state-supported religious entities provided they serve a nonreligious or secular purpose.

Smith disagrees with the Lemon Test, according to Christianpost.com, “calling Lehigh County’s seal a ‘passive symbol’ which ‘does not violate the plain text of the Establishment Clause.’

“While the court does not believe the current state of the law applicable to this case comports with the text of the Establishment Clause, the court is not in a position to reject it,” Smith said, according to Christianpost.com.

Regardless of Smith’s opinion, the matter is now out of his jurisdiction; the appeal will be heard by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, according to Caffrey.

In other business, the commissioners reviewed proposed amendments for next year’s county budget.

Some Lehigh County organizations with a stake in next year’s budget came forward at the meeting to make their pitch for the budget line item affecting them. Commissioners reviewed proposed amendments to the planned budget for next year and moved money from some line items and placed the money back into various county funds.

The commissioners considered 18 separate line items in the budget, which will be voted on at a special meeting Oct. 30, the day before the deadline for passing a budget.

A delegation of officers and board members from the Valley Mountain Bikers Club, led by its president, Louis Mazzante, acquainted the commissioners with the work the club has been doing on a milelong stretch of trail in Trexler Nature Preserve. Lehigh County owns and maintains the 1,108-acre preserve.

The preserve is in North Whitehall Township and Lowhill Township.

Local industrialist General Harry Trexler bought the land between 1901 and 1911 and, after his death, bequeathed the land to Lehigh County.

While the $100,000 line item for a mountain bike trail was reduced to $1, with the balance transferred to the Green Future Fund, Mazzante said he believes getting the trail funded is the key to getting it built. He plans to try to get the commissioners to agree to fund a professional design, a first step to getting funding for a final project.