To the editor:

Seemingly, the forthcoming municipal elections have stirred up strong feelings, grim warnings, high anxiety. Questions are raised and charges are made about the ideas and the intentions of certain candidates: What if “they” should bring a new look to the City Commission or the Lawrence school board? How, then, can the citizenry be guaranteed that “the right people” will control local affairs for the next two years or so?

A few possibilities have already been suggested: dredging up the term papers of all candidates for traces of distasteful ideas, or deferring to the preferences of a self-appointed committee of former mayors. But I feel that more effective stratagems have been overlooked.

Why not just hire consultants to guide our voting? Better still, we might just engage the consultants to become the commission and the school board. Then we’d be sure we were getting the “right” ideas and people. After all, consultants are professionals who, because they usually come from afar, presumably would be unbiased and we would not have to read their old term papers. To be sure, there is a fly in the ointment. Consultants expect and cost a lot of money, which sadly no longer is in plentiful supply.

John R. Willingham,

Lawrence