This is something I’ve been arguing for years. Benjamin Wachs, Messenger Post columnist, makes a case for this in a recent MP column, with some really funny and insightful commentary.

[County Republicans tell us ] this election…is about controlling discretionary spending. Which is a silly idea because, frankly, the county doesn’t have very much discretionary spending, and it hasn’t had a large discretionary spending increase in years. Nor, come to think of it, has anyone proposed one lately.

And he’s just warming up.

Still, Republicans are so determined to define discretionary spending increases as the enemy that they’ve turned their “Taxpayer Protection Act,” which would cap discretionary spending increases at the rate of inflation, into a voter referendum.

Which is meaningless because, of course, they’ve already passed the thing.

Embarassingly, I missed this little fact. Here’s hoping the voters and D&C ed board won’t. This is basically the equivalent of Karl Rove putting gay marriage bans on the ballot to pull the fundamentalist Christian vote, even in states where it was already banned.

Ben goes on to make the very good suggestion that the election “be about” having a regional plan. But if a GOP insider’s right, that will never happen while the GOP is in charge of the county:

A few weeks after I wrote my most recent column about the need to prepare a regional response to the current wave of Big Box retailers, I was talking to a local official. “Of course we need a regional master plan,” he said, “but that’ll never happen while the Republicans are in charge.”

What do you mean? I asked. He was, after all, a Republican.

“Who gives the most campaign contributions?” he asked. “The developers, who get paid to build these things.”

Holy crap! It’s the kind of thing you *feel* is the case, based on everything you see and hear, but to have someone in the know actually *say* it? Someday I’ll be jaded enough to not be shocked and disappointed by that.

This election should be about doing what everybody knows we need to do: Come up with a regional master plan that identifies the kind of growth we want to have, where we want to have it and how we want to get it done.

This election should be about passing zoning laws to support that plan, and not giving any incentives or tax breaks to development that doesn’t fall under the plan.

Um, any local Dems want to grab that flag and wave it for real before the GOP comes up with a fake, window-dressing version of it like they’ve done with this “Taxpayer Protection Act”?