To the Editor:

Our municipal officials must feel very secure in their positions. Their increasing comfort with dictatorial rule has been evidenced this year by a growing lack of regulatory restraint, a tendency towards selective construction and enforcement of the law, and a proclivity for willful deceit.

One of our mayor’s first acts was to renegotiate the PILOT paid by her husband’s employer — notwithstanding rules that prior officials have construed to require recusal in similar situations. I might be more forgiving had there not been so many recent examples of “recusal” being used to muzzle critics — notably when Jenny Crumiller was advised by Borough attorneys to recuse herself prior to the Planning Board vote on the University’s “arts less transit” neighborhood.

More recently, our mayor has boasted of $3 million in alleged consolidation savings. Her brazen lie was echoed by our town’s administrator and permitted by a compliant Council to go unchallenged. Krystal Knapp, alone among our local reporters, had the courage to reveal that $2.3 million of the alleged “savings” were pure fiction — the result of counting prior expenses but ignoring related offsetting receipts.

The catalogue of meddlesome rules and ex cathedra proclamations now includes a decree that leaves must henceforth be bagged (at a cost to Borough residents that has yet to be tabulated), and that twigs and branches must be neither longer than three feet, nor wider than specified diameters, nor stacked in more than three piles. Forgive me for reminding our mayor that we in the Borough were promised that consolidation would not diminish anybody’s level of service. Forgive me also for observing that the cost of bagging our leaves will greatly exceed whatever paltry tax relief property owners will receive as compensation for dismantling the Borough’s zoning protections.

And let’s not forget the needless assault on our police chief (for indulging in “locker room language”). We will all share in the likely cost of a future settlement. Our Council turned suddenly thrifty, however, when asked to defend their Planning Board against AvalonBay’s charge of bigotry. The interests of the hospital and the growers evidently trumped those of neighborhood residents — just as do the wishes of the University president who has resolved to kill the Dinky before her resignation takes effect.

The authoritarian trend recalls the scene in Dr. Zhivago in which Yuri returns home to find his Moscow house a shambles, inhabited by dozens of squatters, one of whom berates him for having failed previously to throw open to Moscow’s population what some might today call his McMansion. Is that really what we want for Princeton?

Peter Marks

Moore Street