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Wednesday, November 03, 1999 Page: 8A
Luzerne County voters injected new life into the two-party system, threw
sand into a once-invincible political machine and drove a stake through the
heart of business as usual at the polls Tuesday.
Spurning single-party voting, the voters sent the message that a Democratic
nomination is no longer a first-class, express ticket to county office.
Republican Barry Stankus’ stunning defeat of incumbent sheriff Carl
Zawatski and Stephen Urban’s victory in the commissioners’ race over the
Democrats’ favorite Republican, Joseph “Red” Jones, proves that voters are
tired of the old, exhausted politics of nepotism, cronyism and arrogance in
high places.
Republican Mary Dysleski’s close second-place finish in the Recorder of
Deeds race establishes that the voters’ new mood transcends the particular
circumstances that contributed to the defeat of Zawatski and Jones – the
former’s suspicious car crash and the latter’s utter failure to act as a
taxpayers’ watchdog.
The message in the unofficial returns is unmistakable:
Open things up. Make some noise. Blow the whistle.
That’s what we expect from Urban, who is the apparent new minority
commissioner, and Stankus, who will double the number of Republican row
officers to two.
Urban promised in his astonishingly successful low-tech campaign to be a
taxpayers’ watchdog – to target wasteful spending, expose political hirings
and demand open debate.
Stankus pledged to pursue enhanced security at the courthouse without
breaking the budget and to reform the operations of Zawatski’s secretive posse
– a group of volunteers who hold deputy’s badges, but have been anonymous and
unaccountable to the public on Zawatski’s watch.
Both newly elected officials now have a duty to question the old ways of
doing things, to pursue new initiatives, to open the workings of a secretive
courthouse to public scrutiny.
That does not mean that Stankus must treat every issue as a showdown or
that Urban must be a spoiler who votes “no” on every issue and tries to
thwart majority commissioners Tom Makowski and Tom Pizano at every turn.
Certainly there have been majority initiatives in the past four years that
deserved minority support, such as the 911 emergency program, the
levee-raising project and the county arena. But each of those programs might
have been done sooner or cheaper or better had someone with a more critical
eye been crunching the numbers, poring over the payroll and asking the hard
questions.
We expect Urban and Stankus to foster a new atmosphere of courteous debate,
healthy skepticism and responsible partisanship in the courthouse. A
government with many voices and many points of view best serves the people’s
interest.
We would like to believe that Tuesday’s vote is the precursor to a more
competent, competitive, responsive and responsible political culture in
Luzerne County.
To all of Tuesday’s victors, and especially to voters, we give our hearty
congratulations.