One would think a past trustee and one time candidate for village president would retire from small town public life to become an elder statesman of local politics. A sort of present day Benjamin Franklin whose political time had passed but whose institutional memory, universal respect and gravitas could unite warring factions and bring peace and clarity to difficult issues. If one was thinking about former Trustee Stan Zegel as this elder statesman, one would be deeply mistaken.
During the most recent town hall meeting we heard about the Winfield Road referendum which is coming to a ballot box near you this November. In the meeting we discussed the sorry state of Winfield’s roads, our options available to fix the roads and our options to create sustainable revenue sources so our budget and our town is never caught with it’s proverbial pants down again. Of the many ideas bandied about, one was leveled by Stan Zegel who suggested we balkanize our town into neighborhoods and make each neighborhood responsible for their own streets. Taken at face value, it’s a horrible idea. The costs for implementation and the logistics of yearly polling of neighborhood residents to see if they are finally ready to pay for the roads outside their home should be daunting enough. It would have the added benefit of both letting the current trustees off the hook for a complete lack of budgetary foresight while pitting neighbor against neighbor in deciding exactly when they collectively need to fork over the requisite dollars to fix the roads.
If you actually knew Stan Zegel and knew where he lives you would be able to see his suggestion in a whole new, self-serving light. Stan lives on a road that is maintained by the county and was re-surfaced last year. So if the Zegel plan was adopted, he would conveniently be excluded from any tax increase. So much for statesmanlike magnanimity.
Benjamin Franklin was a publisher among other things. Stan Zegel shares this profession with Franklin but I find him to be more like the lead character in the 1941 classic movie “Citizen Kane.” In a loose depiction of the life of William Randolph Hurst, the newspaper man Charles Foster Kane is shown to be an abandoned, lonely boy who grows up to be an isolated, needy man. The story line reveals Kane to be arrogant, thoughtless, morally bankrupt, desperate for attention, and to be incapable of giving love.
In a recent conversation with Barry Dredze, editor of the “Winfield Post”, Barry suggested the purpose of his paper was to rebuild “Good Will between the citizens of Winfield” that was left lacking in the wake of Stan Zegel’s publication.
Good Will in Winfield?
Good ol’ William Goode of Winfield. Yes, I believe the last time I saw the lifeless carcass of his body politic it was crushed and crumpled, feted and festering in the bottom of a smoking crater of a pothole on Winfield Road. It had been scorched by vitriol, tormented by vindictive and injected with venom from Stan’s poisoned pen to ultimately be run over by the “Winfield Register” and left to die right next to a leaky water main in a hole too deep to fill with a whole dump truck load of hyperbole and alliteration.
Stan’s publication “The Winfield Register” went bankrupt shortly after the elections in 2009 but one could easily say it was bankrupt from the first day it was printed. Stan Zegel is Winfield’s own Charles Foster Kane, our Citizen Pain.
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