PA political stuff coming up (consider yourself warned)…
Boy, did I see red when I read about this (haven’t gotten to the Inquirer yet today, and I don’t know if I will).
So Andy Warren of PennDOT is going to give up his $110,000-a-year job to run for the Democratic nomination to oppose Repug Mike Fitzpatrick in the general election next year for the 8th-district seat in the U.S. Congress, huh? No two-week notice either, I gather (how professional, even for those life forms in Harrisburg).
Warren is an opportunistic turncoat who bailed on the Republican Party to join the Dems. I don’t have a problem with someone leaving the Repugs, but please spare us this phony baloney excuse that you would have “reformed the party from within” if you had risen higher in the Repug ranks. You’re trying to pad your resume by taking a very-ill-advised shot at the U.S. Congress with the only party that will let you do that, and in the process, you’re diluting an already-crowded field of good, decent, and marginal candidates.
All of that being said, Warren is undeserving of holding public office (as opposed to the appointed patronage gig he just stupidly walked out on) because he has one of the worst temperaments for an official that is supposedly representing the public that I have ever seen. Like many major metropolitan communities, major road construction projects have been a fact of life in this area for as long as I can remember, and whenever a story appeared in a newspaper about it (usually documenting driver frustrations along with other information), you could bet that Andy Warren would be quoted representing PennDOT with some incendiary words to get people even more aggravated than they already were (witness the Schuylkill and Route 202 construction projects, anything related to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, etc.).
As proof of what I just said, I offer Exhibit A.
Since I live in Bucks County, it may seem strange for me to side against Warren and support residents in Huntington Valley, PA just outside of Philadelphia in Montgomery County. But I do (and yes, partly because I’m one of those baaad people from Philadelphia who moved out into the pristine hinterlands of Repug dominance).
As background, I should add further that the Woodhaven Road construction project (of which I am personally familiar, because it affects family members and friends of mine), the subject of Warren’s idiotic remarks, has a long a dubious history in this area. It is a consequence of poor-to-nonexistent regional planning and development. Basically, the road is a three-to-four-lane highway in each direction that is forced to abruptly end at Roosevelt Boulevard (part of Route 1).
Two main options have been pursued to improve the road access: 1) building an interchange between Woodhaven and Route 1 and 2) expanding Woodhaven into Montgomery County (the most popular option, with PennDOT anyway). Both of these options have very painful consequences for area businesses and residential communities alike. Every few years, PennDOT announces that they’re going to resurrect this project (in all honesty, something needs to be done to improve traffic flow, but it’s easy for me to say that because I live elsewhere), and every few years, residents and businesses go nuts over it and it gets shelved again (Joe Hoeffel honestly tried to get it moving again and got his nose bloodied over it, and I don’t think Allyson Schwartz is even going to go near it).
So maybe the fact that the Woodhaven Road project could possibly turn the lives of the affected people upside down would tend to make them “less civil,” wouldn’t it? And by the way, with all due respect to the good people in Newtown, Pa., I’ve read of plenty of incidents where they haven’t been very “congenial” (specifically when it comes to development of office complexes near their plush, vernal surroundings).
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