Kazan Fingerprint Debacle is Indicative of a Bigger Problem, Resident Says

A firestorm has broken out over the delay to seat Cathy Kazan, who was elected to the Board of Education of the Wayne Public School District over yet another background check by another contractor retained by the state's security apparatus.

According to news reports and Ms. Kazan, the problem seems to rest in a failed fingerprint identification that is reported to occur only one percent of the time. This mind you in the age of six points of identification for a driver’s license and passports now being used as identification to prove an individual is in fact who they say they are during the age of 'no fly lists' and the Snowden NSA meta data revelations and a push for ever more voter id by the right wing of the republican party?

The problem as I see it now how ever is something like an episode out of “The Twilight Zone” where a community questions itself as to the real identity and motives of its long standing members after some unusual event? That event in this example is that during a past election cycle some one ran for office who was clearly making long range plans to leave Wayne anyway sell their home and then move to Texas. This person having won the seat, and then announcing their intent to vacate it, left the board to appoint a relative unknown individual who had not bothered to have run for the seat like Ms. Kazan and few others had done.

Where I can lay honest criticism on the board for causing this latest dust up was that they did not appoint Ms. Kazan to the vacated seat that was the next runner up during the election for the open seat. In this most recent election Cathy Kazan made the second effort and carried the day, and that should have settled the matter but as we read it did not.

Now, while a recent national poll reveals that an overwhelming majority of people simply have no faith in government or its ability to solve problems, here at home there is also a similar and critical crisis of trust. 

In the era of the George Washington Bridge scandal that has engulfed the governor and his cronies is it really too far fetched to be suspicious of how the Kazan affair came about when we know that the council has done what it has in these three examples and to my knowledge has never publicly apologized to the aggrieved individuals and entities, nor has the school board publicly spoken of their acquiescence to the voice of the People and, is too far beyond the pale of credulity to ask if some one within the township may have done something to scuttle Ms. Kazan's election? Say, someone who in the past may have opened an investigation on Ms Kazan that remained open and stopped the background check dead in its tracks that now has become unwieldy since there is no there, there, in her background?

As the freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz said about the combat wounded decorated Vietnam Veteran Chuck Hagel during his appointment hearings as Secretary of Defense and a bank deposit Mr. Hagel made? 'We just don't know' [where the money came from]. 

As it goes here in Wayne when it came to some one every body knew, Cathy Kazan, we just don't know who may have attempted to interfere with an election and we never know what with the penchant this country now has with secrecy and security, even when it comes to a school board election it would appear and that is not good for democracy at all much less rebuild the trust and confidence the People have in Wayne's local government.

Stewart Resmer

Wayne, NJ