Letter: No Known Data To Support Ryan's Claims

To The Editor:

Today's Patch announcement by mayoral candidate Lonnie Miller Ryan, a longtime Republican apparatchik whose is now running for mayor makes the claim that Democrats are now switching party affiliation en masse to assure her election win is about as disingenuous as her Photoshopped campaign head shot.

At this juncture there is no known verifiable empirical data available to support her contention that the great political conversion actually exists, and it will be some time before the town clerk and the county registrar will be able to reveal the data one way or the other.

The dark, ominous picture Mrs. Ryan paints about affordable housing here in Wayne... "higher-density, new residents, higher taxes, lower property values, larger class sizes, and increased traffic," speaks volumes about not just her personal version of class warfare exclusivity but that of the republican party in general, but her mindset and that of the parties protectionist not-in-my-backyard mentality is an affront to progress, to say nothing about the New Jersey Supreme Court's repeated rulings that affordable housing is in fact a matter of settled law.

When it comes to what it is exactly that Wayne Township really is all about I am of the mind as California Governor Jerry Brown said recently when he went to Washington to make his case on behalf of California, the seventh largest economy in the world, "politics is a matter about inclusion and not exclusion," and judging by Mrs Ryan's remarks, she simply does not adopt that view except of course when she is trying to get herself elected to higher office, in which case she turns to democrats who she somehow thinks share her political vision and that of the party of Trump.

To Mrs. Ryan's credit, as a long time ally of the local Republican Party operatives and aide to the Honorable Scott Rumana, the former mayor, assemblyman and now judge, she has served all the people of Wayne with distinction, and she is able and qualified to continue to serve in any capacity she might want to, and which capacity the governed allow her to, but on issues facing the township when it comes to the inevitability of change, both she and the rest of the leaders here would do well to manage the changes in a progressive manner that embraces those changes and economic forces that the free market presents, and she should not attempt to vainly stand in the way of progress.

And that obstruction includes not comporting Wayne's affordable housing responsibility that is contrary to the law as Wayne Township has done for ten years now, and campaigning on that exclusionary mentality as though it were a winning strategy, as cynical a strategy as that may actually be.

What a real mayor and council should be setting about to do is finding the way to find that elusive and hard fought for balance where all the partners at the table are served as the great document admonishes, to form a more perfect union.

Stewart Resmer
Wayne, NJ