Thoughts on the May 2007 Primary:
Maidencreek Voters Alliance (MVA) founding members Joe Rudderow and Barry Higo both ran for township supervisor against Bob Kofer. The MVA is perhaps best known for its “Drive for Five” campaign to increase the board to five supervisors from the current three. The “Drive for Five” campaign started just after MVA founder Joe Rudderow lost his bid to become supervisor in the 2005 primary and general election. Since we only had three candidates in this primary, I suppose it's possible (had the drive for five succeeded) we would have had only have one candidate for each seat. Barry ran directly against Bob on the Democratic side, and Joe ran unopposed on the Republican side. Bob Kopfer won with 231 votes to Barry's 156 (I believe these totals are correct) I received reports from believable sources, that both Joe and Barry claimed I am a liar while they were at the polls. Right now I will not comment on anything Joe said, but I had a first hand conversation with Barry Higo. Barry claimed I lied during the public hearing about the teamsters union letter. Barry claimed that I said “I have a letter.” which he claims is lie since the letter is not addressed to me. I recall saying, “We have a letter.” However, in any event, the letter is addresses to the Maidencreek Board of Supervisors, so any one of the supervisors could say “We have a letter” or “I have a letter.” without telling a lie. Barry went on to complain that I lied during their drive for five effort. I do not understand how Barry can make this claim. My chief point in the drive for five was that townships with 5 members on average have a higher tax rate that townships with three. To substantiate this I listed all the townships I could find from the Reading Eagle web site and their respective municipal tax rates. The average for the three member townships was 1.09 mils while the five member townships was 1.99 mils. I intentionally included the listing of the tax rates used to compute the averages so people could see that the spread on the three member townships was greater than the five, and they could see that only about 25% of the townships have 5 member boards. Barry claimed I lied by omitting townships. As far as I can tell, my list contains all the second class townships in the Berks County. I did exclude boroughs, since their form of government is totally different from the second class township. If you wish, click here look at the data and scroll up to the “Some thoughts on the Ballot Question” section to see what I wrote about Mr. Higo & Rudderow's 2006 ballot question.
I still have copies of the Fredrick Bastiat book “The Law” available to Maidencreek residents. Email me if you want one.
Paid for by Roy Timpe