It took Lackawanna County lengthy sufficient to ultimately comply with do the precise factor.
Now, if it could get different political leaders to step apart and let the folks care for the enterprise it ought to have dealt with months in the past, a strong precedent for democracy across the area and the commonwealth simply would possibly wind up being set in spite of everything.
On Friday, the Lackawanna County Board of Elections voted, 2-0, to hold a special election Nov. 4 to fill the seat of former Democratic County Commissioner Matt McGloin on the three-person board. We assist the choice to let Lackawanna County voters, and never leaders of a former commissioner’s political occasion, make the decision on who finest represents them shifting ahead. We additionally urge state lawmakers to contemplate passage of a invoice mandating particular elections as the popular technique of changing county officers who go away their elected positions earlier than phrases expire all through Pennsylvania.
The McGloin saga has confirmed the need for a uniform coverage on changing county leaders because it began in late February. That’s when the Scranton native and Penn State soccer legend resigned to simply accept a soccer teaching place at Boston School. (He resigned from that put up, too, after simply hours on the job.)
The hassle to interchange McGloin on the Board of Commissioners has been an unnecessarily convoluted one ever since, centering round authorized battles over the county’s House Rule Constitution and the method it supplies for filling such vacancies.
Whereas the Lackawanna County Democratic Committee underwent an at-first secretive course of to pick out three candidates from which the county Courtroom of Widespread Pleas would select — a course of prescribed within the county’s House Rule Constitution — Majority Commissioner Invoice Gaughan challenged the availability in court docket. Gaughan endorsed Dunmore Mayor Max Conway to assert the open spot; the Democratic Committee as a substitute superior former county Financial Improvement Director Branda Sacco, Olyphant Borough Council President James Baldan and Scranton College Director Robert J. Casey to the bench.
A sequence of court docket choices and appeals adopted, with one facet questioning the opposite’s authorized proper to make the selection, resulting in a monthslong political battle which has seen no person named to the board on even a brief foundation. All of the whereas, county enterprise that may’t be agreed upon between the 2 remaining commissioners, Gaughan and Republican Minority Commissioner Chris Chermak, isn’t getting performed in any respect.
It’s honest to marvel precisely how a lot may have been completed by the county authorities, and hasn’t been, simply over the half yr it has taken to interchange McGloin, thus far.
As a substitute, the Friday vote doubtless kicks a complete new sequence of lawsuits and appeals into movement, with the Democratic Committee objecting to the particular election, insisting the regulation doesn’t permit them for commissioner vacancies. Contemplating the county’s preliminary settlement with that stance, the objections are predictable.
Given all of it, it appears attainable Lackawanna County will be unable to fill a vacant seat on its most necessary governmental board till the calendar flips to 2026. That might imply nearly a full yr misplaced on potential progress for a county that wants it.
However one thing Gaughan stated throughout the election board assembly simply made sufficient good, sensible sense, it stands to cause it ought to have been the rule all alongside.
“I feel we must always have a particular election it doesn’t matter what anyone does,” he stated. “Depart it as much as the folks. … Why anybody can be towards that’s past me.”
That’s democracy.
A authorities place voted on by the folks, representing the folks, ought to all the time be crammed by the folks. Since McGloin’s resignation, there’s no sensible cause a particular election couldn’t have been held throughout the Could primaries. Neither is there a cause one couldn’t be put collectively by November.
To argue {that a} board or another kind of entity, particularly a political occasion, ought to have the only real energy to decide on who governs the folks runs counter to American beliefs. Free and honest elections are, and ought to be, the one means by which these jobs ought to be crammed.
The political and authorized wrangling over filling the open commissioner’s seat in Lackawanna County ought to be show a cautionary story for different such boards throughout the state, and one for the state itself to resolve with clear and direct guidelines giving that energy to those that deserve it most: The people who find themselves being ruled.
