At a meeting of the City Building Committee (20 Nov 2006), Portsmouth Police Chief Charles Horner told committee
chairman Mike Mearan that when Dr. Singer signed
the Adelphia building over to city
it was infested with black mold. In speaking to Mearan, Horner might as well
have been speaking to a stone(d) wall. In chairing the City Building Committee, Mearan was in a flagrant conflict of interest because
he was Dr. Singer’s shyster lawyer. (To read “Mearan's Conflict of Interest,” click here.) As an absentee landlord living in Los
Angeles, Dr. Singer had long neglected keeping up the Adelphia
building, or so a longtime Adelphia employee
told me. The city never should have accepted Singer’s “gift,” which came not only with strings but with toxic mold spores attached, or so Horner
claimed. Horner also claimed mold in the Municipal Building had made him ill. Naturally, he didn’t want the police
department relocated to another moldy old building, especially if it was black mold. “Depending on the length of
exposure and volume of spores inhaled or ingested,” the entry on black mold in Wikipedia states,
“symptoms [of toxic black mold] can manifest as chronic fatigue or headaches,
fever, irritation to the eyes, mucous membranes of the mouth, nose and throat,
sneezing, rashes, and chronic coughing. In severe cases of exposure or cases
exacerbated by allergic reaction, symptoms can be extreme including nausea,
vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding in the lungs, and nose.”
At that same City Building Committee meeting (20 Nov 2006), another
committee member said that if the Adelphia Street building had black mold, “that
building’s no good anymore,” adding that it “had to go.” The committee member who
said it had to go was current duplicitous First Ward council member Kevin W.
Johnson. Contrast Johnson’s negative statement
above about the Adelphia building back in 2006 with the positive one he made at
a recent city council meeting (9 Nov 13) where the council voted to authorize
legislation to fund the rehabilitation of that controversial building. “We have
all been wondering what the heck to do with that building,” Johnson is quoted by
Frank Lewis in the online Portsmouth Daily Times (10 Oct 13). Speaking
at that council meeting to the City Waterworks Director Sam Sutherland, Johnson
said, “This solves the need you have had for a long time since you lost your
property (pipeyard) to King’s Daughters.” Sutherland is one of three incompetent city employees Jane Murray fired
not long after she took office. (To read more about those firings, click here.) King’s Daughters is the
Ashland based hospital that had been
portrayed as an outsider corporation that took local jobs and property away in the process of
opening a Portsmouth branch clinic. That is what Johnson implies when he says
Sutherland “lost” his property to King’s Daughters.
There is $700,000 in the Capital Improvements budget (CIP) that
Sutherland wants used to rehabilitate the Adelphia building. It was Mayor Jane
Murray who opposed the city illegally using CIP money to provide salary increases for city
employees, but I think she would have opposed
putting one nickel of CIP funds to rehabilitate the Adelphia building. The final
cost for its ill-conceived rehabilitation
will be closer to a million dollars before it is done, and that may not be all the city will pay if Waterworks
employees eventually claim they developed health problems as a result of
working in the rehabilitated building.
Kevin W. Johnson said he had wondered what the heck to do
about Adelphia building. I’m wondering what the heck we’re going to do about Kevin
W. Johnson. Since he arrived in
Portsmouth. Johnson has never failed to
suck-up to the politicians, developers, lawyers, and bankers who control the city economically and
politically. He is yet another Portsmouth failure who turned to politics when his own mismanaged business failed.
Johnson, of all people, is chair of the city council’s Economic Development
Committee. His idea for the city’s economic development is to go
upscale and spend money the city doesn’t have. Why he even wants to upscale the
city seal! Look at how he mishandled the city manager search. The public was
not told the candidate the search committee had selected had trouble with the
law until after the candidate was offered the job at a salary of $105,000 plus
generous benefits and a nice severance package should he not work out, which (count on it) he will not work out. If Johnson is allowed to mishandle the finances of the city the way he mishandled
the finances of his upscale antique shop, the state is going to have to take
over Portsmouth’s finances.
Whether or not there is black mold in the Adelphia building,
there is financial black mold in Portsmouth city government, and Johnson is
the one who is spreading it, like the plague. If the other members of council
continue to go along with the crazy proposal
to spend nearly a million dollars
rehabilitating a worthless building that its owner unloaded on the city, Portsmouth
citizens should unite as they did against rehabilitating the Marting building, a leaking, moldy, asbestos
death trap that should have been torn down a decade ago.
Upscale City Seal
