The WayneWho staff whole-heartedly agrees with an editorial published by the Osceola News Gazette this past Thursday on campaign finance reform. The campaign finance rules that are in place right now allow special interests to either hand-pick candidates or control issues by insuring a free-flow of money into campaign accounts. Their article pointed out two incumbent candidates that we have discussed in this blog many times. Paul "TicketGate" Owen and Bill "My Bid Wins" Lane have proven to be experienced at channeling financial support from developers with their eye on Osceola County. We are glad to see the News Gazette cover this topic fairly because many have called for free and democratic elections in Osceola County for several years.While campaign finance reform is critical, we firmly believe that this does not address the whole problem. Some type of ethics reform package needs to be brought forward to ensure true transparency in our local government. Slapping a few of your developer, construction, engineering, paving, and marketing buddies together on a board that rubber stamps every idea that helps developers win over the backs of residents is not "listening" to the people. The "Community Vision" survey clearly showed the distrust residents have in elected officials to help fix the problems that elected officials created. The number of people looking to leave this community because of the uncontrolled growth was staggering. Ethics reform might be the only bridge that leads us back to trusting our elected officials.
The real question that is being raised by the editorial in the News Gazette is, do the voters care about ethics and campaign contributions? Do the voters care enough to vote for "honesty" over "experience" or do they really not care? The News Gazette itself endorsed both Paul Owen and Bill Lane during their campaigns, so we have to ask ourselves why question them now? They were taking the same money during the last election, it just came from different sources as your editorial indicated, so why now? We are glad to see you bring this issue to light, but if your own editorial staff was so easily able to ignore this in the past, will the voters do anything about it now?
Again we applaud the editorial on campaign finance reform by the Osceola News Gazette and we hope they continue to fairly investigate the depth of influence peddling in our community. We just hope the voters enjoy the same "fairness" epiphany and use the information to make their voting decisions accordingly.
4 comments:
The voters are almost always impressed by special interest candidates. The will vote against themselves every time.
The voters do not care. They vote to lower taxes, but vote for projects that cost us money. Then they yell when the service they like gets cut. The voters of the community are stupid.
I am glad you brought up information on Lane's company getting several contracts with the county. It just looks bad when a sitting commissioner has his company vehicles all over road project being paid for with tax dollars. Something does not add up.
Campaign reform is easy. No corporate money period. And any county commissioner who accepts money from an individual would automatically have to recuse himself from any vote on any project that the donor was involved with. The only people who will complain about this type of system will be the people that are exploiting the current system. Let's take our county back from the special interests.
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