Strong D&C editorial on Wayne Zyra
This is very good writing from the D&C editorial board:
Nearly two weeks ago, Zyra presided over the mangling of First Amendment guarantees to public assembly and petitioning. But his mishandling of the process leading up to the Republican-controlled legislature’s selection of Tim Donaher as Monroe’s new public defender is just one of Zyra’s offenses to open government.
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He allowed County Executive Maggie Brooks’ F.A.I.R. plan to be ramrodded through the legislature last fall. The plan, which resulted in suburban school districts losing significant sales tax revenue, was introduced and adopted by the legislature, all in a few hours.
More recently, Zyra refused to use a community-based merit selection process to choose the new public defender. Never mind that the process worked well in the past without the kind of unnecessary political intervention that Zyra insisted on.
But perhaps the most egregious offense was Zyra’s heavy-handed approach in limiting public access to the legislature meeting at which the new public defender was approved. Citizens were treated like suspected criminals based on alleged security threats that neither Zyra nor any other county official has satisfactorily explained.
Zyra has repeatedly refused to return calls from this page over the past few months.
We’ll be revisiting this later. It’s good to see the D&C taking a strong stand against Zyra’s outrageous misbehavior.
Yes a good editorial. Where it misses the boat is that it pins it all on Zyra as if when Zyra goes we will experience a kinder gentler GOP becasue of his replacement.
No - it is the GOP philosophy. Zyra is simply an enabler of this philosophy.
I’ll discuss more later.
Great point!
The rubber really meets the road on this one during the next two legislative election cycles. Every one of the GOP majority had to go along with Zyra’s misdeeds, or their majority of one would have been lost. The actions of Zyra must be attributed to every GOP legislator, from Quatro on down, especially the ones that the D&C endorsed with the naive hope that they would exercise their own independent thinking. Clearly independence is a quality sorely lacking from the GOP back benchers…must be in the same hiding place as their spines. If the D&C means what they said this morning, their actions, in other words, their endorsements, must be consistent with their words, and when they take their endorsement away from Zyra they must take it away from every other County Leg GOPper that has stood by while civil liberties have been trampled and Morin Ryan decimated in the dark of night on the backs of Monroe County school children.
We keep correctly emphasizing that Minarik, and no other local Republican, calls the shots. If you watch Zyra, he hardly appears to have the intelligence, cunning, whatever it takes, to craft a strategy that makes it look like the Republicans were creating a fair process for PD selection. I don’t think he’d get the math on the FAIR issue. And I’m sure he has no clue what a community college is really all about even though he sits on the MCC Board of Trustees. And the Republicans know it - that’s why Quatro is out there spinning the stories. Quatro’s snake-oil salesman approach may not be as smooth as Bill Smith’s, but for Republican PR, he’s way better than twitchy Zyra. Although Zyra will surely be a player to watch in the upcoming MCC fiasco.
I think you’ve nailed it.
Insiders I’ve talked to all predicted that without Bill Smith’s smooth charm, things would start to fall apart. And Quatro is probably a poor man’s Bill Smith. While Zyra is…I don’t even know who to compare him to.
…a turtle.
Suppose we could get a picture of that ? : )
Of course! But like most things GOP - it’s a bit of a freak of nature!
http://img801.mytextgraphics.com/photolava/2008/03/01/waynesworld-49oy586yx.jpeg
[...] but don’t spend a lot of time - it isn’t there. What’s there instead was the County GOP bypassing the community, without considering their voice , to install a political [...]