Caution: Rita Skeeter at Work

This year Hillsborough’s voters are being asked to choose whether to keep their current form of government (a township committee with five members who choose the mayor from among themselves) or to change to a form with a directly-elected mayor and a separate five-member committee.

For years those in Hillsborough against government change have been fighting a so-far losing campaign to prevent the citizens from making this decision. Now, with elections on Tuesday, the people of Hillsborough are finally getting a chance to decide by voting on Question 5: Do you want to change to a mayor-council form or stay with the current township committee?

An anti-change group, apparently unnerved by the possibility of the question passing, has now activated a final all-out well-funded propaganda crusade against question 5.

They have erected “Vote No” signs from one end of town to the other, posted mailers posing as Charter Study Commission (CSC) news, cut-and-pasted bits of videotape from CSC meetings using quotes out of context and then run the results on the local TV station, funded a web site, and had group members and their families, neighbors, and friends send a steady stream of letters to the editor.

They have tried to instill fear in groups in the township from employees (You’ll lose your jobs!), to taxpayers (Taxes will sky rocket!). Playing with statistics is such a timeworn technique that I won’t even bother to go there.

They have even claimed that the new senior citizen center is in jeopardy if the change goes through. [The reasoning behind that one still eludes me. We’re Senior citizens; ergo, we weren’t born yesterday.]

They have returned over-and-over to the “bigger more expensive government cry”. Okay, we would add one part-time mayor, but there is always the possibility that having someone to oversee the township committee that is not a part of it could produce some savings.

If these crusaders were so sure that they were right, they should have been able to logically and rationally explain their position to the voters and then have confidence in the outcome.

This panic-stricken scramble of disinformation leads me to believe there is more here than meets the eye; that there is some really really big reason that the current politicians don’t want this change - and it doesn’t have anything to do with logic.

If question 5 passes, maybe all those who worked so valiantly against it can apply for a job at The Daily Prophet alongside Rita Skeeter

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Hillsborough’s own township committee decided that a one-page CSC-designed educational flyer about the proposed change should not be mailed out, under the guise that they were heroes saving taxpayers the cost of mailing it. In actuality, the money was already in the CSC budget and had been there for almost a year.