Enjoy the Right to Guess, I Mean Vote

Election Day is tomorrow and I feel a need to get out and be counted and cast my votes.

There are some local issues that I feel pretty strongly about. I feel it's important to do my part to try to change some current local directions.

First of all, in the Spring of 2006 our current local school board raised real estate taxes 19-percent. Nineteen-percent?!?!?!? What goes up 19-percent? Did your income go up 19-percent?

The school board justified the tax increase by saying that years of former boards being afraid to raise taxes made this huge tax increase now painfully necessary.

I considered it horribly irresponsible. That large of a tax increase is impossible for local property owners to budget or plan for. I know it led to at least one local business closing. I'm sure it had a great negative impact locally. Locals were up in arms.

And I have a tough time understanding such a lack of funds when new developments with $250,000 homes are going up everywhere locally and generating more and more property taxes.

To me, it sounds like some school board members need to be replaced. Voting is really the only method of checks and balances we hold over government.

Also we have a renegade mayor here in the borough of Marietta. He fashions himself as a bit of a puppet master who pulls the strings, and makes things happen the way he sees fit. After a snowfall borough personnel and vehicles magically appear at his fortress of a home and clear all of his snow meticulously. Then they start to work on the public roads.

When our borough council decided that the mayor was abusing his oversight privileges over the local police force they voted to remove the mayor as the borough's representative to the police force and voted a council member to assume the position instead.

The mayor reacted as expected. What? You dare challenge the authority of the puppet master?

The mayor tapped thousands and thousands of dollars from our small borough budget to sue borough council. He cited some ancient and obscure state law that provides mayors with the right to oversee local police.

The mayor is not up for election this year (He is running for a school board position though.) But being the puppet master the mayor has convinced a handful of local cronies to run for borough council seats. He's working hard to load council full of folks who will vote as he sees fit.

When you see officials abuse their power at the smallest level, it makes you wonder what's going on at the highest level.

We're a small borough. We're landlocked and we have a pretty fixed tax base and a pretty meager budget. We have a very tough time just trying to keep up with the costs of upgrading our infrastructure. Does the mayor spending thousands of taxpayers' dollars to sue borough council sound like a responsible decision? All so he can have power over the police? Why does he crave such power?

Sounds like I have more reasons to vote tomorrow. It's the only power I have.

But there's a small problem. I don't know anyone on the ballot. I don't know why they're running for office, who they are, what they stand for. And I'm struggling to try to find out anything about any of the candidates.

The Lancaster paper published a voter's guide last week. But all that was published for Marietta Borough and Donegal School District was a list of names. We've only lived here for three and a half years. We do not recognize one name on either list.

More importantly we do not know anything about any of these people, what they stand for, what their goals are. We don't know anything.

I've been searching for information, scouring old news archives online, talking to locals that we know, trying to find out everything I can. I've managed to identify one candidate for borough council that has been hand-picked by the mayor. That's it.

I don't know if I've ever had more personal interest in voting. And I don't know if I've ever been more ill-equipped to vote responsibly. I just can't go into the voting booth and vote for someone based on party affiliation, or a nice face, or a name I like. I have an overwhelming fear that tomorrow I will accidentally vote for people that are supporting all of the things that I'm against.

All of the local papers in the county, who we used to be able to count on for this important local information, have been bought out by large news corporations. Our local Donegal Ledger recently sold to a media group in Philadelphia, and gone is all our local news. The Lancaster papers cover the city news and fighting amongst county commissioners. But when it comes to local municipal news they opt to run stories on Britney Spears instead.

When watching news on TV or reading it in the paper, I always ask myself "How does this story affect my life?" If news doesn't affect my life, I don't bother with it. How does a woman in Texas murdering her five children affect my life? It doesn't. It's like slowing down to get a better look at a car accident.

I'm going to become a news reporter again today, back to my original profession. I'll have to make my own phone calls, collect my own information, to see if I can piece together the local election puzzle.

I'm sure my dilemna is a common one for many. If people are provided the information they need about candidates I believe that they will be interested and they will vote. But to many it just doesn't seem worth the time if it all boils down to "eenie, meenie, miinie, moe."