The Truth and Karen Beyer

June 17th, 2005

Karen Beyer, who still is a member of the Saucon Valley School Board, has managed to obtain the Republican nomination for the vacant 131st District Pennsylvania House of Representatives seat.  Clearly this is the fulfillment of a dream for Beyer.  Two years ago, Beyer ran successfully for a seat on the board as part of the TEACH slate.   The campaign was marred by outrageous lies told by  Beyer.  In fact, as Beyer demonstrated then and subsequently, she has always been indifferent to the truth. 

 
When the TEACH candidates were seated as board members in December of 2003, Beyer was elected board president.  For the rest of the year she put on a one woman show that had as its sole purpose the political advancement of Karen Beyer.  Indeed, she was often quite candid about her desire to advance to higher office.  She invariably did and said what she thought would be politically popular without regard to whether it advanced the cause of good education in our district or was even fiscally responsible.

I have detailed some of these charges elsewhere, so I will not do so again here.  (For those interested, please see my column “The Community and Karen Beyer” ) Rather, I would like to illustrate Beyer's utter disregard for the truth by referencing the story in The Morning Call which reported the announcement of her candidacy.

In Warren Kagarise's story on the Beyer campaign launch in the Morning Call on June 1, he reports that Beyer said that “she had never cast a ballot for a tax increase during her time on the board . . .” This makes it sound like Beyer had many opportunities.  In fact, only the 2004-5 budget was passed during  Beyer's service on the board.  While that budget did indeed provide for a tax increase,    Beyer neglects to mention that she voted to include in the draft budget almost every item included in the final budget.  In an obvious case of having your cake and eating it,   Beyer then voted against the budget.    Beyer then had the nerve to lecture her fellow members for their bad judgment in voting for “luxuries,” many of which, while not luxuries, Beyer had supported.  The irony was that three members of Beyer's TEACH slate, who were elected on an anti tax program, voted for the budget.

Kagarise also reports that Beyer proposed “better financial planning for school districts, calling for the creation of five-year financial plans and greater public oversight of boards' budgets."  The fact is that during Beyer's term as president of the board, with her fellow slate members in the majority, she made no such proposal.  Moreover, the notion of great public oversight of board budgets is clearly specious in that board budgets are publicly debated and publicly adopted.  At Saucon, for example, the board holds an all day “budget retreat” to which the public is invited to consider the proposed budget in detail. In addition, this year the Saucon board (Beyer is still a member) will end up having held at least three special public meetings to consider the budget.  If Beyer has a suggestion for greater public oversight, she has yet to make it.
         

Although not stated in the article, Beyer masquerades as a financial conservative.  I say “masquerades” because in fact, when she is out of the public eye, she is happy enough to make proposals that will cost money, often on cosmetics. One of her constant refrains during her year as president was that the high school lobby ought to be refurbished because in Beyer's opinion the decor was not modern enough.
         

One of Beyer's favorite phrases is, “In a budget of millions of dollars I found it incomprehensible that we cannot find . . . ” a relatively small amount for some Beyer purpose.  Band uniforms come to mind. After fighting fiercely to reduce special ed teachers, Beyer objected to an item deleting $23,000 for new band uniforms.   Supporting the band is certainly a popular thing to do at Saucon and fits in easily with Beyer's political purpose.   But as I have reported in a previous column, a mother of a band member arose from the audience and said that while membership in the band was an expensive proposition for students and their parents and band uniforms are certainly needed, she would not have the board vote for band uniforms in place of supporting special education. (When I published the previous column which reported this event, Beyer asked me to correct the column on the grounds that she was misunderstood.  I replied that both the parent who spoke and I did not believe she was misunderstood.)       
         

Let me end with one more quoted from The Morning Call story.  It reports Beyer as saying that during the last two weeks “I've knocked on more than 2,000 doors.”  A friend supplied the following analysis of that statement:
 
“Well, let's say that two weeks is 14 days, and let's say that she [Beyer] was knocking eight hours per day, and we know that there are 60 minutes in an hour, . . . so 14 days times eight hours per day times 60 minutes in an hour yields 6720 minutes.  Now take 6720 minutes of knocking and divide it by 2000 doors. [This yields] 3.36 minutes per door. WOW!  What efficient meetings!”
 

Or, more likely, nothing like this ever happened.
 

Karen Beyer is the perfect example of what is wrong with our political system.  She is not unique in disregarding the truth in her campaign.  Too often candidates, as is the case with Beyer, are motivated by no other objective then to get themselves elected and will do and say anything, without regard to principle, to obtain that end.  Beyer is merely the poster child.