As Tuesday\u2019s primary election looms, the candidate generating the most buzz with swarms of angry Lackawanna County voters isn\u2019t on the ballot.<\/p>\n
A year ago, Democratic and Republican prognosticators near-unanimously agreed that Commissioner Bill Gaughan had no hope of winning a second term in 2027. The bipartisan consensus held that Gaughan\u2019s support for an urgently necessary 33% property tax increase and a decades-delayed reassessment rendered him terminally unelectable.<\/p>\n
Gaughan\u2019s response? Hold my toe tag.<\/p>\n
The commissioner\u2019s out-front leadership in the resistance to invasive data center development has resurrected his political career and put pressure on the rivals who tried to bury him alive. Gaughan is more popular now than any candidate on Tuesday\u2019s ticket.<\/p>\n
Call it a \u201cmiracle,\u201d but all Gaughan had to do was draw a line and stand on it. While other incumbents embody the antiquated \u201ccommitted bystander\u201d model that created the tax and reassessment messes, he made himself the elected standard-bearer of grassroots resistance to the annihilation of communities in service to Wall Street thieves and their greedy local accomplices.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not too late to join the fight,\u201d Gaughan says in a TV and online ad campaign he paid for with his own campaign money.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey (developers) want us to think it\u2019s too late, but not if we show up together. Go online, go to meetings, join me and say, \u2018No.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The campaign includes ShowUpLackawanna.com<\/a>, a website that links to more than a dozen community groups and resources aimed at understanding and resisting invasive data center development. Gaughan also pushed for a review of the county\u2019s legal options as a landowner. He is using the position voters put him in to proactively protect the public interest. It\u2019s really that simple, and in widespread demand.<\/p>\n Voters across the country are ousting officials who openly defy overwhelming public opposition to data centers or passively accept their \u201cinevitability.\u201d Democrats, Republicans and independents are swarming like angry hornets in united defiance of a common threat to our lives, livelihoods, and our constitutional rights as Americans.<\/p>\n