Since local elections *are* my problem, I've started looking into the county commissioners' race. Not done yet, but I came across this over-the-top libertarian site, which was greatly wroth over a member of a State College planning commission's characterization of a church on College Heights as a cancer upon the neighborhood. An examination of the provided CDT article shows that said planning commission member is a member of that congregation, and had been complaining that the church's expansion of its parking lots was doing damage to his neighborhood's character. So, take Nittany News with a fairly massive grain of salt.

As for the commissioners, Dersham is some sort of distant neighbor of mine, being the owner of Dersham's Sport Center over towards Bishop Street, across from the Catholic church, sort of. I've never actually caught that place open, so I can't report to you how good of a shopowner he is (or isn't, as the case may be). He seems to think that the "barn" his shop is in is "historic", so take off points for goofiness.

Exarchos, on the other hand, is a rock-ribbed fiscal conservative. So much so, in fact, that he seems to think that any increase in local spending or debt is verboten. Given that Centre County is in the midst of a decades-long demographic upswing, and that the perpetual motion machine that is the University is continually pumping new people into the county, this sort of blinkered objection to proper local financing strikes me as ill-advised, at best.

Goreham has an ugly, amateurish site. She seems to be selling herself as the farmers' candidate; this strikes me as a losing bet in a county that's quickly sliding into University-oriented suburbia.

Conklin is the only surviving incumbent in the race. As such, he gets the credit and the bile that the last term has earned. So, he gets credit for the successful push to get rid of the deeply regressive occupation assessment tax; he also gets a lot of brickbats over a continuing tussle over the county prison that I haven't been following particularly closely, nor caring much about, either. He doesn't seem to have his own campaign site - that's a subpage on the local Democratic Party's site, not his own.

I'm currently inclined towards Conklin and Dersham, but that's a pretty "soft" inclination as of now.