Local Politics

Since 1800

Dirty politics has been around for a long time.  Last week, I pointed out “dirty” campaigning of the early 1800’s (Monticellian Sally), as the nation dealt with its first major ideological split.  The differences between the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republicans were deeply held and often ugly.  They also sometimes became tragic.  Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr, a Democratic-Republican, and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, a leading Federalist, had long standing personal issues.  But the political differences made the personal animus even worse, leading to the spectacle of the next in line to the Presidency killing a leader of the opposition party in a dual in New Jersey (“everything’s legal in Jersey”). 

Mike Pence didn’t shoot Nancy Pelosi, and Kamala Harris isn’t counting off against Steve Mnuchin:  so I guess things could be worse.  But we certainly are in another era where all’s fair in love, war, and politics.  And it’s not only on the national level.

Etna

The current political ugliness, where truth is often a casualty of potential political profit, extends to local politics here.  Etna Township, a division of Licking County in Central Ohio just east of Columbus, is in the middle of as ugly a campaign as I’ve seen for a very long time.  What used to be insults and innuendo in the newspapers is now full blown attacks – and it’s all on Facebook for the world to see.  

Etna faces some very real issues.  What was a rural community a half-century ago, farms divided by I-70 and US 40 with soybeans on one side and corn on the other, is long gone.  Now Etna, adjacent to Franklin County and “next up” in the ever-expanding Columbus metro area, is dealing with competing visions of growth. 

Powers

The “old power” of Etna are the remaining farmers.  There are still great tracts of land in the township planted in crops.  And, as one of those farmers put it to me, the land is their retirement plan.  They don’t have 401-K’s chock full of investments.  They have their acres, and those acres are worth so much more as suburban housing or giant Amazon-style warehouses than as fields of corn. So they want to sell, and head to Florida, or farther out in the countryside where they can buy five acres for every one acre here.

The “new power” are those suburban voters, “newcomers” to Etna, but in our one-person, one-vote system, able to out-vote the “older” residents.  The “newcomers” wanted to move “out in the country”, though the “country” has long passed by most of this community.  A half-century ago there was a “tractor day” at the local high school: everyone brought their own. Now only a very few kids can tell the difference between a Massey-Ferguson and a John Deere.  

And in the center of the dual interest are the three Township Trustees, who hold the power to determine what zoning is allowed, and what can be built.   The current trustees are committed to industrializing large portions of the former fields.  Like the outskirts of many large cities in the United States in our era, industrialization means warehouses.

Visions

The suburban “newcomers” had a “vision” of what their community should be. And that vision didn’t include dozens of semi-trucks lined up on the local highways, waiting for their turn at the loading dock of a mile’s long warehouse structure. But that’s what they got. Etna Township now has multiple “giant” warehouses: Amazon (two), Kohls, the Ascena Group, FedEx (almost completed) and some giant project called “the Cubes”. Oh, and a new truck stop on the interchange (Loves) as well as soon to open Starbucks and Chipotle. The state is rebuilding US 40, the National Road, but the rest of the county roads are groaning under the weight of fully loaded semis delivering their goods. We even have a local “gas price bubble”. Our prices are hiked by a line of little Amazon vans lining up to refill: supply and demand in microcosm.

And it’s not just the warehouses.  What kind of suburban growth should there be in Etna?  When the farmer sells his one-hundred acres, does that equal one-hundred homes with acre lots, or four-hundred homes on quarter-acres? Or, “heaven forbid”, apartments –  almost everyone opposed to that – with all the racial undertones involved.  It’s up to the three township trustees to decide.  

As you might expect, this much growth creates financial questions as well, and it’s not just for the remaining farmers.  So much money is flooding into “little Etna”, that it raises concerns about who is benefitting or pocketing.  

Trustees

So we have the two current trustees up for re-election, one with decades in the township and the other a life-long Etna resident.  And we have “suburban insurgents” running against them.  For the current trustees, it’s been business as usual – a small government that nobody used to care about, doing their best to take care of the “voices” they listen to – mostly the old power structure.  And for the “insurgent” candidates, it’s claims of corruption and “selling out” what Etna was supposed to be.

How ugly is it?  Campaigns used to be waged in the local paper, The Pataskala Standard.  The Standard moderated the debate; if things got too far out of control Tom Caw, the editor, would simply not print it.   But Mr. Caw and the Standard are in the past. Now the campaigns are waged in social media, specifically in this community, on Facebook.  There is no moderation, no filter.  Sitting at the keyboard folks feel that they can say anything they want, without regard.  I call it the “punch in the nose” rule.  If you said some of those things twenty years ago, you would get punched in the nose.  But the keyboard and screen protects you from that kind of personal responsibility.  

So folks say everything.  We know about bankruptcies and how marriages broke up.  We even have fake entities “weighing in”.  One side created a new Facebook page claiming to be a “free online news publication” about Licking County politics.  The page then solemnly intones “endorsements”, as if they were The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  But they have only existed since yesterday (literally), and no actual names are associated with it.

Impact

It isn’t just the “fate” of Etna Township at stake.  Etna is part of a greater Western Licking County, all countryside being subsumed by metro Columbus.  How many kids will be in the schools, how many Sheriff Department cruisers will be on the roads, how many more sewer pipes will be laid:  it impacts all of us nearby, not just those in the Etna boundaries.  So while I don’t have a “vote” in Etna; what happens there will affect me as well.  Whoever ends up as Township Trustee, a part-time job that pays $22,000 a year, will also inherit the ugliness of this campaign.  That, the competing power interests and the real problems of growth, won’t be going away anytime soon.  

The “winners” will earn every dollar.