Joe Crabb Clerk Quits, Disillusioned
By Byron LaMasters
The El Paso Times reports:
An assistant clerk for the House Redistricting Committee recently wrote an interesting letter to Chairman Joe Crabb, R-Atascocita, and members after she quit.
Lauren Kasprzak had a front-row seat as assistant clerk of Crabb's redistricting committee in addition to a perspective from the backroom where much of the real politics plays out.
Kasprzak's letter drips with disillusionment.
"The process that we went through during the regular session was a joke," she said in the letter. "The public was excluded in any real decision calculus of the committee. Sure, we held public hearings... on a plan that we never intended to go to the floor.
"And then we introduced the new plan... while someone was writing the other map that we actually intended to be voted out of the committee in a back room," she wrote.
She and her parents are Crabb's constituents. Lauren says her parents are Republican. She now calls herself an independent.
Earlier this summer, hundreds of people lined up to testify on a redistricting plan that Crabb knew was a sham, she says. The hearing lasted all night. People hung around to 4 a.m. ... 5 a.m. .. 6 a.m. to testify on a phony plan, unaware that backroom architects were drawing the real plan.
"They wasted the people's time. ... You have to honest with the public," she says. "You are changing their lives as well as other politicians' lives. There should be openness and honesty."
It would be appropriate at this point to share Crabb's perspective and his response.
But a meeting this week in his Capitol office didn't go very well. Crabb interrupted before any question about the letter and other observations by his former employee.
"What you are doing is evil. Leave my office," Crabb, an ordained minister, said while booting this reporter into the Capitol corridor.
And this from the ever-so-liberal *screaming sarcasm* El Paso Times.
Posted by Byron LaMasters at September 4, 2003 02:41 PM
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