Teusday, October 16 at 2:00 p.m.
McCoart Building
1 County Complex Court
Prince William, VA 22192
(Located at Prince William Parkway and Asdee Lane)
Please plan to attend this very important meeting to ensure your voice is heard on this critial issue.
If you cannot attend the meeting, please be sure to call your district supervisor or email the Board at BOCS@pwcgov.org to give them your input on Prince William Counties illegal immigration policy. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact my office at 703-792-4640 or cstewart@pwcgov.org
Thank you
Corey A. Stewart, Chairman
1 comment:
Postcards from the edge
Alfred Biddlecomb
Potomac News
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The next time county supervisors schedule a meeting to vote themselves a pay raise, I want Chairman Corey Stewart to mail out postcards advertising the vote. Since he's building a reputation of keeping all non-illegal residents of Prince William County informed of his actions, he should be consistent.
While he's at it, why not spend another $30,937 in taxpayer money to inform the public on an important vote to raise impact fees on developers? The same goes for funding the Park Authority and raising the real estate tax rate next year.
Stewart has been successful in recent months grabbing headlines and the attention of his constituents with a stand against illegal immigration.
It gets him free air time on television newscasts, we hear him on local talk radio and read about his resolve to drive illegal immigrants from the county almost daily in the newspapers.
He recently sent a mailer to 128,000 local residents reminding them that the board was scheduled to vote on the resolution designed to bar illegal immigrants from some county tax-supported services.
So why would the chairman need to dip into his taxpayer-supported discretionary spending account to mail post cards advertising Tuesday's vote? He did it for the same reason every other county supervisor dips into these funds -- to get reelected.
Discretionary funds have been the board's dirty secret for years.
Each supervisor gets $47,500 annually (the chairman only gets $27,500) to spend on unforeseen expenses required of the office. Money not used is rolled over to the next year. Boy does it add up.
Supervisors call it discretionary funds. I call it a taxpayer supported slush fund. But that's just me.
While some of the cash does go toward fixing street lights and making sudden purchases to cover administrative costs, a lot of it gets spread out to local charities and non-profits -- usually around election time.
There's nothing wrong with giving to the local youth sports league or middle school booster club. It's just that the supervisors tend makes these "donations" in their own name rather than on behalf of the taxpayers.
Which brings us to Corey Stewart. His $30,937 venture wasn't for charity and it didn't go toward fixing some broken street lights. What it did do was link his name with his biggest campaign issue using a mass mailing paid for by county taxpayers. He says it was to inform the public and that just might hold in court.
But it doesn't take a lawyer to see what's going on here.
The post card begins with: "NOTICE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION VOTE" in large, bold type. It ends with "Sincerely, Corey A. Stewart, Chairman" also in large type.
As an elected official, Corey Stewart has every right to pursue a crackdown on taxpayer-funded services to illegal immigrants until his last day in office. The problem I have is with the taxpayer-funded services designed to get Stewart reelected chairman of the board of supervisors.
Here's a simple question. If this was only a means of informing the public, as the chairman contends, why didn't he bring the matter before the board of supervisors and ask that the mailer be sent on behalf of the county? I'm confident the county staff could have drafted something much more descriptive than the post card nailing home Stewart's stand on illegal immigration.
If Stewart was determined to spend more than $30,000 in taxpayer money on a mailer, then why couldn't he have kept the money in the county? Instead he went with a bid from Executive Press in Fairfax County. Executive Press has shown it is capable of producing and mailing political fliers -- as long as they're not from Democrats. Oh, and by the way, Executive Press is run by Becky Stoeckel who also serves as chairman of the Republican Party's 11th Congressional District. What a coincidence!
Alfred Biddlecomb is the former Opinion Page editor for the Potomac News and Manassas Journal Messenger.
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