Unedited video of Ward 11’s Candidates’ Forum at Ludington Library, October 17, 2023
On Tuesday night (October 17), despite competing with Game Two of the Phillies-Diamondbacks National League Championship Series, several dozen residents of Lower Merion’s Ward 11 came to the Ludington Library to hear Democrat Maggie Harper Epstein and Republican Mark Klotzbach make their cases as to why the voters should elect one of them as their Township Commissioner.
Although she was in the audience at the candidates’ forum on Tuesday, Tiffany O’Neill who currently represents the ward, is not running for re-election. O’Neill is among only two Republicans currently serving on the 14-member Lower Merion Board of Commissioners.
Ward 11 has voted heavily Democratic in every election since O’neill ran unopposed for Commissioner in 2019. On the other hand, Klotzbach seems undaunted by the recent voting trend. He claims to have already knocked on more than 600 doors. Epstein said she has also been actively going door-to-door but wasn’t specific about the number of homes she has approached.
The one issue that drew a clear divide between the two candidates was whether or not the majority of the ward’s residents wanted more sidewalks. Epstein expressed that most of them did want more sidewalks. On the other hand, Klotzbach claimed that among all of the homes he had visited, not one of the neighbors had expressed an interest in having more sidewalks.
The majority of Republicans in the U.S. (if not in Lower Merion), including their presumed presidential candidate, would consider Klotzbach a RINO (Republican In Name Only). At the forum he demonstrated his RINOness by not only espousing a “Pro-Choice” position on abortion, but far more egregiously, he said that “Joe Biden is our president, 100%.”