Focus local government on local issues

Dear Editor,

Bravo to Don Scott in his well-written and well-reasoned opinion piece in the May 7 edition ("The danger of one-party towns" Page 22).

He eloquently describes the problems that arise when national issues are pushed down to the local level. There seems to increasingly be a tendency for governments at all levels to want to take on issues that are the prime responsibility of a government at a different level.

Perhaps focusing on areas where you have little or no influence or responsibility is one way of avoiding real accountability, but it most certainly robs time and focus from what is clearly in your wheelhouse. Whether it is federal, state, county or local, every level of government has its core areas of responsibility, and each should stay primarily in their own lane. In particular, we should all resist the growing tendency to push down national issues to the local level where the focus should be on roads, zoning, parks and policing.

A fundamental reason political parties were formed was to inform voters broadly where someone stood before there was much timely communication. That fundamental reason has largely disappeared in our digital age today, which is why each year more switch to independent status. President George Washington had a prescient warning about political parties when he said "However political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

As we approach the 250th anniversary of our country's founding, we should pay attention to his advice.

-John McCown, Pound Ridge