Letter: Councilman Jasterzbski Recall Is Not A Partisan Issue

To the editor:

Several years ago now, after our home was ransacked by burglars and two other homes on the block were knocked over in the same afternoon, two other neighbors reported their burglar alarms were tripped. Three days later when we got home we found the sliding back door shattered on the floor unreported by our neighbors and not discovered by the police.

I soon learned there was a crime wave going on and the mayor was disinclined to hold a town hall.

In a short while, Concerned Citizens of Wayne organized a town hall meeting with the Passaic County sheriff and his staff took the time to attend, no sitting council member or the mayor would attend. Even though they said that it was a Democratic Party event, it was not. It was just that no elected republican would attend.

This week at a council meeting, a lady took the podium to announce that the petition to recall councilman Jasterzbski would be publicly available for signing later that week. I decided to go to sign the petition and, sitting in the room alone when I arrived was a co-author of the petition: Former Councilman Alan Purcell, who was also one of the very partisan council members who flatly refused to attend the town hall meeting I mentioned above.

Mr. Jasterzbski was appointed to Purcell's vacated seat. Although Jasterzbski is a "favorite-son" creation of the local Republican Party, the petition to remove him is not an exclusive partisan matter, like the crime wave this household and the others who fell victim to the crime wave, was not an exclusive partisan issue. The time and place of the public signing venue was a highly partisan Republican Party meeting and as such the republicans utterly failed to make the signing a non-partisan opportunity because, in my opinion, the local republicans, are demagoguing again.

The Jasterzbski affair reflects on the entire township regardless of ward or party affiliation or non-affiliation for that matter, and the republicans just don't get that nuance as they continue to attempt to run Wayne as though it were a private club.

And as turnaround is fair play, now as then, as a registered unaffiliated voter I refuse to sign a partisan-generated petition because it is a Republican Party stunt to give their party political cover.

Stewart Resmer
Wayne, NJ

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