The Carpetbagger: from Piqua to Portsmouth

     

WANTED

       The opening sentence of a report in the Portsmouth Daily Times (PDT) by Frank Lewis posted online on 6 November 2015 states, “Portsmouth City Council will take action to authorize Portsmouth City Manager Derek K. Allen to begin to advertise for bids and to enter into contracts with the lowest and/or best bidder for required supplies, materials and services for 2016.” According to the report by Lewis, “Yearly requirements include such items as manhole rings and covers, asphaltic concrete, uniforms for police and fire departments, chemicals for water filtration, police department radio maintenance and other equipment and services.” Lewis then details the costs of the new breathing apparatus the Fire Department needs. “The estimate from Breathing Air Systems lists the original price of $11,842, showing a 16 percent discount, bringing the cost to $9,947.28, less $1,000 for the trade-in of their existing unit, the new price is $8,947.28. Allen said there is an additional cost for shipping and installation of $819 and he is requesting an additional $1,000 for contingency.” Lewis then explains why the present breathing equipment is obsolete, an explanation which is even more complicated than the financial breakdown, so I won’t reproduce it here. 

       What I will emphasize here is that  one of the important details Lewis failed to mention, even in passing in his report, is that our carpetbagging city manager  who will put out for  bidding all services and materials that cost $50,000 or more, as required by state law, was himself guilty of violating state law regulating the purchase of materials when he was the assistant city manager in Piqua, Ohio, where he continues to  make his home, though his high paying job is in Portsmouth, which is why I call him a carpetbagger. Not only did Allen ten years ago break the law in purchasing $160,000 worth of gravel for a bike path without putting it out for bid, but he compounded his crime by lying under oath when testified about the gravel purchase. (See the Celina Daily Standard report at the end of this post.) On the basis of his testimony, Allen was convicted of perjury and received a fine and a suspended jail sentence. Shouldn’t Lewis in his story on contract bidding at least have alluded, if only in passing, to Allen’s failure to follow state law about the bidding process in Piqua, where they probably would not hire him now as dogcatcher.  Because of the PDT's soft pedaling  of Allen's controversial career, as many as nine out of ten Portsmouth residents may have no knowledge of his criminal record, nor of his  inability to hold on to a job. Unlike honest investigative PDT reporters who lost their jobs when they reported something they shouldn’t have, Frank Lewis is a master not only of omission but also of innuendo. He knows not only whose toes should not be stepped on but also whose toes should be on behalf of the crooked clique. 

       For example, on November 4, in reporting on the results of the Portsmouth elections the day before, Lewis did not limit himself to reporting on Tom Lowe’s decisive victory in the Sixth Ward city council race; Lewis also alluded, as he had in the past,  to the alleged ganging up by Lowe and Shawn Stratton on the Sixth Ward incumbent Jeff Kleha in the primary election. “Stratton and Lowe were at the center of a controversy in the May Primary,” Lewis wrote, “when they seemingly teamed up to defeat incumbent councilman Portsmouth attorney Jeff Kleha, leaving him as the odd man out. It was that election in which the Scioto County Board of Elections allowed Sixth Ward voters to vote for two instead of one as had always been the practice of the city in previous elections.” The so-called “controversy” arose primarily not because of past election practices but because Kleha had been a political rubber stamp for  city manager Allen, who hated to lose him. Because Allen has a history of not being able to hold a job, he needs every city council member in his corner. It was not Stratton and Lowe but the voters in the Sixth Ward who made Kleha “the odd man out,” but Lewis does not see it that way. In reaction to Kleha being voted off city council, there will be an amendment on the March 2016 ballot to outlaw elections in which electors  can vote for more than one candidate. That amendment has Allen’s fingerprints all over it. The amendment serves  the purpose of further calling into question the legitimacy of Lowe sitting on the city council. The politics of Portsmouth are even dirtier under the city manager form of government than they were under the mayoral form of government. If only there was a Breathing Air System for readers of the Portsmouth Daily Times whose use of smoke and mirrors to mislead Portsmouth residents about the political corruption in one of the dirtiest drug-addicted cities in America.

       Tim Loper was elected to city council as a candidate who was strongly opposed to the city’s costly plan to renovate the decrepit Marting building into the new city hall, but once elected  as reformer, Loper became a tool of the corrupt clique that controls Portsmouth. The corrupt clique valued Loper so much that they provided him with a sham address in Ward One to allow him to continue on council even after he and his wife moved to another ward. Allen is a far more valuable tool to the corrupt clique than Loper ever was, and the PDT and Frank Lewis in particular will be careful not to step on Allen’s toes at the same time that they will be reminding residents that Lowe, should he continue to act  like a trouble-making reformer, had "seemingly" resorted to electoral chicanery to get on city council. If Lowe for any reason does not finish his four-year term, Kleha will be waiting in the wings to be appointed to the city council by the city council, which is how he got on council in the first place. Those foolish four-year terms  for city council are what enable the game of musical chairs to be played over and over again. Will we ever have a city council that will allow for the return of two-year terms, which will make recalls and musical chairs a thing of the past? Not when we have the likes of Jim Kalb and Jo Anne Aeh and the convicted perjurer like Derek Allen as city manager. I will end this post by reproducing a story from an Ohio newspaper that, unlike the PDT, does not use smoke and mirrors to protect convicted carpetbaggers.

From the Celina Daily Standard

The Latest Portsmouth Daily Times Coverup

The masthead of Celina's The Daily Standard, which, unlike the Portsmouth Daily Times, did not cover up the truth about Derek Allen's career.

      Under the byline of that pious fraud Frank Lewis, a  front page report in the  Portsmouth Daily Times (29 Sept. 2015) has the headline, "City Says Multiple Public Records Have Been Costly to Taxpayers.” How costly? According to the  carpetbagging perjurer Derek Allen, who is Portsmouth’s city manager, the cost of the public records requests has been  over  $42,000. Because Allen is a compulsive liar, I doubt the veracity of everything  he says. That $42,000 figure is more inflated than a Macy's Parade balloon. In a report on public records that Allen concocted, which was handed out at the City Council meeting (28 Sept. 2015)—a meeting Allen did not attend—he claims that $24,592.50, or over half of the alleged total cost of the public records requests,  was what the city paid to the firm of Squire Patton Boggs (SPB) for legal advice on public records requests, beginning in January 2014.  

      What is Squire Patton Boggs? It is one of the largest and judging by the fee they charged Portsmouth probably one of the most expensive law firms in the country. Just who in our  city government is responsible for enlisting the services of SPB? Could it be anybody other than our wheeling and dealing, politically scheming  city manager? And who might he have been trying to curry favor with in engaging the services of SPB? Senator Rob Portman has close ties to SPB, according to Wikipedia. One of the partners of SPB, Patton Boggs, is an unsavory character who has represented some of the worst dictators and most polluting companies in the world. In advising Portsmouth legally, SPB is representing one of the sleaziest city governments in the United States, so maybe they are the right law firm, however high-priced they maybe. Perhaps because City Solicitor Haas has the reputation of being a nincompoop lawyer, maybe SPB was necessary. But if SPB  was the price the city had to pay for having a nincompoop  as  city solicitor, is that Murray’s fault? 

Deja Vu All Over Again

      Maybe the reason Allen is doing everything he can to stop Murray from making public records requests about the flooding in Portsmouth is because it was a public records request somebody made in Piqua that led to the exposure of Allen’s  illegal purchasing activities when he was the Assistant City Manager in that city. It was when he  testified under oath about those activities that Allen committed perjury. Allen was fired as soon as he perjured himself, but that was not the first time he had been fired from a job in the public sector.  As reported in The Daily Standard (2, Oct. 2004), Allen had previously been fired from public service jobs in Van Wert, Ohio,  after he was named as a defendant in two civil lawsuits and then subsequently in Celina, Ohio, by the mayor because Allen had become such a controversial figure, as he has also become in Portsmouth. When will he be fired as city manager in Portsmouth? For Portsmouth’s sake and for the sake of the flooded residents who live near the Hill and the Southern Ohio Medical Center, of whom Jane Murray is one, that day cannot come too soon.

The Perjurer from Piqua

      So we have the perjurer Allen,  from Piqua,  where his home is located but where he would not be hired as dog catcher, becoming with the complicity of the Portsmouth Daily Times and the  connivance of city council member Kevin W. Johnson and the skullduggery of the International City/County Management Association, the carpetbagging high-paid city manager of Portsmouth, where he is trying to sweep the  flooding under the rug and accusing Murray  of bankrupting the city with public records requests about that flooding. Allen reminds me of Patton Boggs, the big cheese in the Squire Patton Boggs law firm. Boggs served in the 1990s as the lawyer for the bloody Guatemalan dictatorship. When a Guatemalan nun, Sister Dianna Ortiz, was tortured and raped by members of a death squad, Boggs, according to Wikipedia, defended the dictatorship by claiming that Sister Ortiz was murdered not by a death squad but by her "out-of-control, sadomasochistic lover." With Allen we are bogged down with a city manager who blames the victims of the flooding for the flooding, but all we get in Lewis's report in the Portsmouth Daily Times on public records requests is Allen's side of the story. Why didn't Lewis call Murray, who says her telephone number is in the phonebook, for her side of the story? Lewis knows on what side his bread is buttered, so he never stops buttering up our local dictators, nor does Allen, who is fortunate he does not have a controversial city manager in Piqua who has been fired as may times as he has.

"That $42,000 figure is more inflated than a Macy's Parade balloon."

For Jane Murray's views on this subject, check out her blog: 

http://wegottroublerighthereinrivercity.blogspot.com/

Update on a Cover-up

October 2014: And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

      I published a post on River Vices (29 October 2014) on the  wall that fell on Washington Street, as shown in the photo above (click here for the link to that post). The fallen wall was part of the property belonging to Dr. Alain Asher at 633 4th Street. Today I am posting a follow-up to that post, arguing that a cover-up is taking place of what was revealed when the wall fell, which is shown in the photo above. What was revealed when the wall fell was that the roots on the ground to the east of the towering tree at the corner of 4th and Washington Street were and still are largely above ground. Tree roots are supposed to be below ground, anchoring the tree,  but the roots of this tree, on the wall side of the tree, were not, and still are not,  anchoring the tree. In order to anchor a tree, roots must be in the ground below and must be able to spread laterally in order for the tree to live and grow.

      The roots on the eastern side of the tree are not anchoring the tree because they are above ground. What the roots are trying to do is find ground to grow deeper and farther into the ground, but the wall and the concrete sidewalk prevented the roots from extending in an easterly direction. There was  a conflict between the roots and the wall. A very slow motion sumo wrestling match between the tree and the wall had been going on for many years.  Compared to the humungous towering tree, the brick wall was a 97-pound  weakling, so there was no question about who was going to win this wrestling match.

      The towering tree and its nearby companion tree should have been cut down  some time ago by the previous owner. But that would have been  a considerable expense, and also that would make the property  look somewhat naked. It would certainly look a lot less sylvan and marketable  without those trees.  Perhaps one of the reasons Dr. Asher bought the property is he was captivated by those majestic trees, as anyone who appreciates nature would. But when nature poses a threat to people, as those trees do to pedestrians on the sidewalk and the drivers of vehicles passing along Washington Street, people should come first. But now, in not cutting  down those trees,  Asher in my opinion is not only bricking over, he is  covering up the problem.  The tree with the roots exposed could be toppled by high winds or it might because of gravity fall on Washington Street without warning. The city was lucky when the tree that fell at Tracy Park didn't injure or kill a child or parent (click here for a relevant post). The city had been warned publicly by me and others of the danger of trees in Tracy Park falling because some of their roots had been cut in the construction of the playground. If there  had been deaths or injuries, for ignoring those warnings the city could have been sued for millions.

      Not surprisingly, in  view of the wildly inflated price Asher had paid for 633 4th Street,  he failed to find a buyer when he put it on the market. When the wall fell, a sale became virtually impossible. Asher paid the Johnsons $440, 500 for the property, which was almost twice the $244, 150  the County Auditor's Office valued the property at. So Asher paid the Johnsons almost $200,000 more than  the county auditor's valuation. If the property had been on the Hill, that would have been one thing, but 633 4th is in the heart of the Boneyfiddle district, where the value of property, already low because of the chronically poor Portsmouth housing market,  dropped further because of the presence of the Counseling Center, which has been attracting drug addicts to Boneyfiddle from the tri-state area for decades. Petty crime is rife in the city,  but much of it goes unreported because the victims feel reporting it is pointless.

      I asked the bricklayers who are building the wall if they had a building permit, and one of them said replacing the wall was restoration, and restoration projects do not need building permits. But this is not just a restoration, it is a cover-up that hides a potentially dangerous problem. The city will be liable because it is allowing the cover-up to continue when what it should require is the removal of the two trees because they are a danger to the public. The City Engineering Department reportedly recently sent someone to inspect the project. If the inspector  didn't see the roots, which are the root of the problem,  then just what did he see?

     The  problem  is even worse than I have suggested because the section of the wall that still stands, the section on 4th Street, appears to be unstable because of the pressure from the roots of the companion tree. The sidewalk of 4th Street side of the property was in such bad condition some years back  that I posted an article on River Vices warning that it was hazardous for pedestrians (click here). It was not long afterwards that the sidewalk was repaired by the developer Neal Hatcher's construction company. The infamous photo of Hatcher giving me the finger was taken while his workmen were completing the sidewalk repairs. One of Hatcher's redeeming features is that he is not a hypocrite. Our city government, on the other hand, reeks of hypocrisy. I think it is worse now that we have a carpet-bagging, convicted liar as  city manager. When we had the doofus Jim Kalb as mayor, at least he lived in his own home, in Portsmouth. Allen's home is in Piqua, so he rents an apartment from Neal Hatcher. If one of the trees falls on you, you will be no less crippled or dead whether we have a city manager or a mayor. If you are killed by a falling tree,  at least you will find a place in earth even if those roots don't.

Towering tree with new yet-to-be-painted red brick wall (lower right)

Other Relevant Posts:

"Kiwanis Playground: Deathtrap for Tots?" Click here

                                      "The Hole Truth": click here

http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2013/03/kiwanis-playground-deathtrap-for-tots.html
http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2009/09/test-playground.html

Schlepping Online Around Ohio

Ohio: 88 counties, 251 cities, 35 city managers

      I have been schlepping around Ohio for the last couple of days via the internet. What I was trying to find out was how many of Ohio’s 251 cities had a city manager. Wikipedia facilitated my search because it has a "List of Cities in Ohio" which includes a category called Government. Because some cities didn't state what kind of government they had, I schlepped over to their official on-line websites for the answer. But that information was  sometimes hard to find on official websites, and a couple of cities, smaller ones,  did not have an official website. So I had to do Google searches, which did not always lead me to an answer. As a result I am not a hundred percent sure the final figure for the number of cities with city managers, 35, is exact, but it is very close. Since there are 251 cities in Ohio, that means that about 14 percent of Ohio’s cities have a city manager.

     In  schlepping around Ohio online, I learned more than which cities had city managers. For example I noticed with two exceptions, Hudson and Springboro,  that city managers were invariably males whereas mayors were in a surprising number of instances females. Assistant city managers or their equivalents were occasionally female, but her boss was usually a male, except in Springboro where both the city manager and the assistant were females.

      The populations of manager-council cities tend to be smaller than cities with mayor-council form of government. The half dozen most populous cities in the state are mayor-council.  They may have experimented with the city manager form, but that didn’t last long. The manager-council city with the largest population is Hamilton, which is located in the greater metropolitan Cincinnati area. Hamilton’s population is over 62,000, but most city manager cities are much less populous. Perhaps politics have as much to do with large cities choosing mayor-council as do economics, but I will leave that issue to the experts.

Ohio Bi-political

      As a result of schlepping around Ohio on the internet, I have a better sense of why Ohio is a swing state in national elections, why it might be called bi-political, and why it might go Republican in one presidential election and Democratic in another. Historically, the two major cultural and political influences on Ohio were the Northeast (New England and Connecticut specifically) and Appalachia, and seldom if ever do  the twain meet. What state would not be at least a  little schizophrenic with such a conflicting regional heritage? Midwesterners in general and Ohioans especially have a repressed sense of cultural inferiority that they deal with in part by trying to be number one athletically, especially in that manliest of all sports, football. Most babies are born in Ohio with Buckeye fever. The Notable Persons listed on most city websites  are dominated by athletes, entertainers, and politicians in that order. Does any other state have more Notable People who have played in the National Football League? The best that  one deprived city could come up with for an athletic Notable Person was some guy who had played in the Canadian Football League. How pathetic! Portsmouth, which is proud to be the granddad of the Detroit Lions, has a plethora of baseball players but not much to show culturally except for Kathleen Battle.
      But it could be worse. At least Portsmouth did not suffer the ignominy of Springfield, Ohio, which as recently as 2011 was found in a Gallup Poll to be the “unhappiest city in America.”  Just yesterday a rather sad looking fellow stopped to ask me directions. He looked like he might have hitch-hiked into town. I asked him where he was from. He said Springfield. Springfield may be trying to make up for its unhappiness by having an unusually long list of Notable People, including David Ward King, the inventor of the King Road Drag, which has nothing to do with drag racing. It was a horse drawn implement that smoothed out rough roads but could only be used after a  road had been softened by rain. Imagine a road crew that works only when it rains. What a drag! What we have in Portsmouth is not King Road Drag, but drag racing legends such as the bankrupt perennial  politician Jim Kalb.

      One Ohio city reaffirmed its commitment to culture by naming itself Trotwood,  after a female character in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.  Trotwood was way ahead of other Ohio cities in countering sexism and racism. Not only is Trotwood not a manager-council city, it has a mayor who is not only female but black. The first female mayor of Portsmouth, who happened to be white,  proved so uppity to the Portsmouth Boys, as they are known,  that she was promptly recalled from office. Portsmouth has since, with the assistance of the devious International City/County Management Association (ICMA), switched to the manager-council form of government and hired Derek Allen, an ICMA member,  as city manager, even though Allen had been convicted of lying under oath when he was a government official in Piqua, Ohio, which happens to have a mayor-council form of city government. What can you expect from ICMA,  an organization that has been dominated historically and apparently still is by white American males? Though Mr. Allen probably would not be hired as dog-catcher in the mayor-council city of Piqua, he still makes his home there while serving as the perjured, carpet-bagging city manager of Portsmouth. In Portsmouth, to qualify for public office it seems you have to have either been a pimp, a drug dealer, a bankrupt, or a perjurer.
      If there was a Gallup Poll for the most addicted manager-council city in America, Portsmouth would probably  win in a landslide, as would Derek Allen for the slipperiest city manager.  Do Portsmouth residents sleep more soundly knowing that Allen is city manager and that they are one of the 14 percent of Ohio cities that have a manager-council form of government? Gallup should do a poll on that question. There are some rough roads ahead for Portsmouth under a city manager. The problem in Portsmouth may be that we no longer have dirt roads. Every inch of surface of the Hill section of the city is paved so that when it rains Grandview Avenue, at the foot of the Hill,  resembles at best a tributary of the Ohio River and at worst a makeshi(f)t sewer. Where is David Ward King's Split Log Drag when we really need it?

Ballad of Derek Allen

The official results of the Ward Six primary where Stratton and Lowe were

the finalists, as indicated by their names in bold type,  and Allen's man Kleha 

finished out of the money, results which Allen is desperately challenging.

Portsmouth's Carpetbagging City Manager

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Mr. Allen. You say you are the city manager of Portsmouth, Ohio, but your home is in Piqua, Ohio, a couple of hours away, where you were once assistant city manager but where you were convicted of illegally buying $160,000 dollars worth of stones for a bicycle path from a company that the  mayor of Piqua was a salesman for, which offense was called “dereliction of duty,” and that you lied under oath about this illegal transaction,  making you a perjurer, which the mayor of Piqua himself said was what really got you in trouble, and then the city manager of Piqua, who also said you lied to him about the illegal transaction,  fired you, but you managed to get a job as Village Administrator in Delta, Ohio, where they didn’t need any stones for bicycle paths because they were in the boondocks, so to speak, so you were not guilty of anything, so the search committee from Portsmouth, Ohio, which was looking for a city manager and was chaired by the  same-sex councilman and vice mayor, Kevin W. Johnson, who offered you the city managership, which you probably wouldn’t have gotten if  your trouble with the law was publicized but it was not until after you were hired, and then  you rented an apartment from the controversial developer named Hatcher who has a sweetheart deal with Shawnee State University which guarantees him students for his dormitories in Hatcherville and if occupancy in Hatcherville ever goes below 90 percent the university must make up the difference. So now nobody knows you are the hatchet man for this Hatcher and as long as he is your landlord you feel you have taken a new lease on life and with the passage of the income tax hike by less than ten percent of the registered voters the city will not have to be put under fiscal emergency watch as the county was, which some people think was the best thing that ever happened to county government, but you don’t and you are opposed to a skate park, as you are opposed to  freshmen  being allowed to opt out of Hatcherville dorms, and now that Kevin W. Johnson may soon be saying Sayonara and out of your hair, you are looking forward to building a bicycle path from Portsmouth to Piqua.  Have I got all this straight, Mr. Allen?”

If the recent vote on the increased income tax does nothing else it should open the eyes of at least some of those residents who think of City Manager Derek Allen as the Mr. Clean of Portsmouth politics, as somebody who is always trying to do the right thing for the residents of the city. I believe that who he is trying to do the right thing for, as his career makes fairly clear, is  Derek Allen. It is not the residents of Portsmouth he is serving but the  clique that controls the city economically and politically.  Allen is  a carpetbagger who serves the fat cats, like the real estate kingpin Neal Hatcher, from whom he rents an apartment on North Hill Road. If Hatcher has a duplicity suite in that North Hill complex, Allen should occupy it. Allen is  a carpetbagger because his home is in Piqua, Ohio, to which he commutes as his flexible schedule allows.

     He has a  well-paying job in Portsmouth, but he does not appear willing to commit himself to making Portsmouth his primary residence. Nor should he if he knows what’s good for him. He does not have much job security because the City Council can fire him at any time. He is in his early fifties, so he might hold on to his high paying job until it is time for him to retire. He has good political skills. He is a master at telling  people just what they want to hear and playing off one boob on the city council against another. He might be able to hold his job for another ten years or so, until retirement age.  But in the unlikely event that he does that, he will have worked longer than he has at other jobs he’s held.

     Prior to becoming the city manager of Portsmouth, Allen was the Delta Village Administrator from February 2008 to December 2013. Delta is village of just over 3000 inhabitants located in the Northeast corner of Ohio. What was an ambitious administrator with a master’s degree in public administration doing in a rustic, small-potatoes hamlet like Delta? You could say he was doing penance.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone

     On August 13, 2004, when he was serving as the assistant city manager of Piqua, Allen was convicted of dereliction of duty for having bought $160,000 worth of stone for a bike path without putting the purchase out for bid as was required by law. It so happened that the Mayor of Piqua was a salesman for the company that Allen purchased the stone from. Was he helping himself by helping well-placed politicians to public monies? Is that how he operates politically? It sure appears that way. Allen badmouths those entrepreneurs who dare to compete with Hatcher by providing housing to accommodate students.

     Allen compounded his problems in Piqua by lying under oath about his role in the purchase of that $160,000 load of stone. The Piqua mayor, who was a salesman for the stone company, said that where Allen really got in  trouble was “when he lied and tried to cover it up.” It was like a mini-Watergate in which the coverup was worse than the crime. Allen was fined and given a ninety-day jail sentence, but that was suspended after he agreed to cooperate with the on-going investigation of the stone purchase. 

     As soon as he was convicted, Allen was fired as  assistant manager of Piqua by the city manager Mark Rohr, who said that Allen, in addition to lying under oath, had lied to him about the purchase. But dereliction of duty and perjury weren’t the only legal problems Allen has had. He  had worked as the safety director at Van Wert, Ohio, a town of about ten thousand in northwest Ohio,  but he left that position after  he was named as a defendant in two civil lawsuits.

Following in Feldman’s Footsteps

     Supporters of Allen claim that he indicated at council meetings and indicated to  them personally that he was not in favor of the tax hike. That may have been what he was saying, or implying, but I believe Allen knew from the start that he would be in favor of the hike. Was he lying to those he told he was not in favor of the hike? Is lying one of the political skills he has resorted in his career? If he does lie he is following in the footsteps of former Portsmouth city manager Barry Feldman who concluded that city managers have to be politicians if they hope to survive and if there’s one thing politicians do more than anything else it  is not tell the truth. Not telling the truth goes with the territory. When it comes to not telling the truth Allen is carpetbagging trooper.

     Allen may be a carpetbagger but that has not stopped him from becoming the most important  politician in city government. He was instrumental in getting the tax increased passed. He let it be known there would have to be layoffs of city employees if the tax hike was not passed. That was like guaranteeing city employees would quietly campaign for the tax hike—quietly because campaigning is illegal for city employees.  Allen went along with  the tradition of having the most  controversial issues, like the tax hike,  on the ballot in the primary off-year elections when voter turnout is always low. In fact, the amendment to return to the city manager form of government, the passage of which eventually led to Allen’s hiring, was also, if I am recalling correctly,  passed in a primary election. There are currently 11,613 registered voters in the city. It took less than ten percent of those registered voters to pass the tax hike. That isn’t democracy—it’s hypocrisy!

     Somebody reliable told me that our officious, conniving First Ward councilman Kevin W. Johnson, who helped Allen get hired by keeping Allen’s  conviction for dereliction of duty and predilection for lying unpublicized, until after Allen was hired, is writing on Facebook, or wherever, about riding off into the sunset, to Florida and California, once he sells his antique laden house. What a legacy Kevin W. will have left us: a lying, carpetbagging city manager whose landlord, if not feudal lord,  is Neal Hatcher. Is the current city government with  Allen as the de facto mayor and the cretin Jim Kalb as the vice mayor—is this an improvement over the past? I don’t think so.

Bikers in Piqua where Allen was sentenced to 90 

days for dereliction and perjury.

Derek Allen's Cock-and-Bull Open Letter

Cock and Bull, Matt Sesow

We have  come full circle. As a result of the familiar fraud of musical chairs made possible by four-year terms, one of the most incompetent and dishonest mayors in Portsmouth history,  Jim Kalb, is mayor again, at least in name. Because of the current crisis in Portsmouth’s city government, concerned citizens should read City Manager Derek Allen’s “Open Letter to the City Council,”  which is bundled with  his July 14, 2014 city manager’s report, located on the city’s website. (See link in Appendix A, below or click here  for the report and then scroll down seventeen pages.) Allen’s Open Letter confirms  the suspicion that instead of being part of the solution, Allen, as city manager, is part of the problem. He is very ambitious, but as city manager he has, statutorily, virtually no power.  As city manager, Allen has  lots of responsibilities but very little authority. His primary responsibility, as city manager,  is to carry out the policies and directives of the city council. If Allen is worn to a frazzle after only six months, it may in part be because in addition to his many responsibilities he is also a commuting city manager who still makes his home in Piqua, Ohio, some two and half hour drive  from Portsmouth. He doesn't commute every day of course, but even weekend commuting would be tiring.

The city manager form of  government is a misleading misnomer; it should be called the city council form of government. But Allen appears to think that as city manager he has quite a bit of power.   As he writes in his Open Letter, "I stated that there was a methodical plan to be installed and that I knew the steps to ensure success. I intended to implement changes to turn Portsmouth around and cease people laughing at this community." One of the steps that would "cease people laughing" at Portsmouth was having a city manager form of government and hiring a leader like himself to be city manager. "The city," he wrote, "had no other choice but to turn the operations over to a professional [himself] in order to reverse the present course or face failure and financial collapse." Instead of being the servant of the city council, he often sounds in his letter like its master. "On February 4, 2014," we read in his letter,  "each council member received a list of my 2014 goals and objectives . . ." They received his goals and objectives?

Allen is sure he knows how to stop people laughing at Portsmouth because he recently was a village administrator in Delta, a small  community of about three thousand people in the northeast corner of Ohio, a community, he claims, people used to laugh at until he turned it around.  What is odd about his claim is that Delta had and still has a mayoral, not a city manager form of government, and what is odder still is that  he was not the mayor of Delta but  only the village administrator, who worked for the mayor.  If there was a dramatic turnaround in Delta, shouldn't  Dan. D. Miller,  who was and still is mayor,  get at least some of the credit? But credit for what? I have made a cursory examination of  the per capita income and population data for Delta and it does not appear that any dramatic turnaround has taken place  in the last five years or so. The most newsworthy thing that's happened in Delta in the last year  was the breakup of a big cockfighting ring that was operating in the area. As many as fifty people were arrested and as many as seventy roosters were confiscated. It was a big story in Fulton County.  Google "Delta and cockfighting" and see for yourself. I suspect that the turnaround that Allen allegedly  single-handedly brought about in Delta may be a cock-and-bull story.

I predicted when the city manager form of government was proposed several years ago that it would not, because it could not, succeed. But I did not think it would implode so fast. I think Allen's days (including as many extemporaneous vacation days he can squeeze in) are numbered, and no matter the circumstances under which he leaves, it is going to cost the city money that it cannot afford, anymore than it could afford to expend the money it did for the costly  job search that led to Allen's hiring, and for that we have our officious, underhanded First Ward councilman Kevin W. Johnson to thank. Johnson is the begetter of the cockamamie idea of returning to the city manager form of government that proved such a failure in the past.

Allen was not very open in his Open Letter about his experience as the Assistant City Manager in Pequa, Ohio, where he was fired, arrested, convicted, fined, and given a suspended 90-day suspended jail sentence for dereliction of duty in public office. Allen had problems in other jobs, but Portsmouth residents were kept in the dark about them by the city council and by the underhanded chair of the search committee, Kevin W. Johnson. My recollection is that we learned only after he was hired that Allen had a criminal record.  Johnson was like the crooked conductor who doesn't announce the true destination of the train until after it has left the station. In reverting to the city manager form of government, as I pointed out in an earlier post (see "The Crooked Conductor" below), we are historically going in the wrong direction. According to a relatively recent scholarly study of the subject, cited in that post, the misnamed city manager system is giving up the ghost. If  Johnson is the crooked conductor in my train metaphor, Allen is the fast and loose engineer who writes five-page cock-and-bull open letters when he should have both hands on the throttle.

Kevin W. Johnson says, "All aboard!"

Appendix A

Previous River Vices posts on the subject of city manager

Barry Feldman (click here)
Gerlach Against City Manager (click here)
City Manager: Repeating the Same Mistake (click here)
Vote No on City Manager (click here)
City Manager Search (click here)
Snuffy Smith on City Manager (click here)
Kevin W. Johnson: The Crooked Conductor (click here)
City Manager Valentine (click here)
Kalb: The Dopiest Councilman of All (click here)

                                                                        
                                                                    Appendix B            

Allen's Open Letter to Portsmouth City Council