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 Lewis then explains why the present breathing equipment is obsolete, an explanation which is even more complicated than the financial breakdown, so I won’t reproduce it here.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

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

Front Street: One for the Road

Motorcyclists on Front Street before it was resurfaced

In  April 2012, in River Vices, in the post “Front Street: Unsafe at Any Speed,” I warned  about the hazardous situation on Front Street. I argued that it was a potential fatality waiting to happen. One of the groups making it hazardous are the motorcyclists, like those in the photo above.

 Most of the bikers I’ve met on Front Street have been polite and considerate. Most bikers certainly  don’t want to cause trouble. They simply want to see and have their photo taken in  front of the Motorcycle Mural, which is  the most popular by far of all the murals. That mural has become mecca for thousands of bikers from Ohio and surrounding states, but not all those bikers are considerate and careful. Some of them are wannabe Brandos burning rubber.  Just last Saturday, about 6 PM, I saw two bikers take advantage of a lull in traffic to speed west on Front Street, roaring past the Motorcycle Mural at breakneck speeds. I also recently saw a show-off biker do wheelies with his rear passenger holding on to him for dear life.

Joggers passing staging used to wash and retouch murals

I don't know whether  the changes that are being proposed for Front Street, including making it one way, with a bicycle path, are feasible,  but  I do know that something should be done about the incompatible and hazardous multiple uses to which Front Street is now being put. What follows is a list of the principal users of Front Street:

• Tourists, in automobiles, on motorcycles, in wheelchairs, and on foot.
• Motorists who avoid the traffic lights on Second Street by using Front Street, which has no traffic lights and stop signs,  to get in and out of downtown Portsmouth as fast as possible, especially in the morning, as if they are late for work. 
• Joggers, both individually or as part of a group, usually running in the middle of the street because of the planters obstructing the eleven foot lane next to the murals.  
• Classes of grade school and middle school students on foot and sometimes on school buses.
• The Portsmouth Garden Club. God bless the dedicated ladies of the Garden Club, who dutifully tend to the planters,  but the ugly, obtrusive planters are a plague that detract from the beauty of the murals and add to the hazards of Front Street. In 2012, I counted twelve planters. A few days ago I counted twenty-five. 
• Portsmouth police officers in cruisers who use Front Street to travel to and from the Police Station and their clubhouse, which are  located at opposite ends of the Floodwall Murals. Since these cruisers sometimes go over the speed limit, especially in heading west, to the clubhouse, it is not surprising they do not issue traffic tickets to speeding motorists. In the all the years the murals have been there, I have walked Front Street for exercise at least once a day and in the thousands of times I've taken that walk I have never seen a motorist stopped for speeding, though I have seen many going over, sometimes well over,  the speed limit. 

Tourists in wheelchairs and a toddler in stroller amid  ugly obtrusive planters  

(For an earlier post,  "Front Street: Unsafe at Any Speed,"  in which the above photo appeared, click here.)

Third Street: Thick as Thieves

Third Street: Hatcherville

Third Street

      Shawnee State University doesn’t have a master plan as much as a master plot. By plot I mean not “a measured area of land,” but rather “a secret plan, a scheme.” The plot was to enrich a local lawyer, Clayton Johnson, and his partner in crime, a local developer, Neal Hatcher, by giving them sweetheart deals: for example,  taking  the worthless Marting Building off Johnson’s hands, for almost two million dollars, and allowing Hatcher  to build SSU student dormitories in a can’t-lose arrangement. Hatcher  built dormitories on the  northern side of Third Street, a major thoroughfare running through the heart of the university. The dormitories were on one side of Third Street, the classrooms, the administration buildings, the athletic center, the student center, etc., on the other. A hazardous arrangement. 

       Every student who lives in Hatcher’s dormitories plays Jeopardy. They have to to cross heavily trafficked Third Street day and  night, much of the traffic coming from or going to the Grant Bridge. Just the other day a young man from Portsmouth, on a moped,  was killed on the Kentucky side of the bridge, apparently by a driver who reportedly ran a red light. Like most streets in Portsmouth, Third Street speed limits are frequently violated, putting the lives and limbs of students in jeopardy. Now, the university wants to close Third Street and put grade school, middle school, and high school students, just north of Third Street, in jeopardy, making a bad situation even worse.

      Those who might be opposed to the project are dismissed, in a recent PDT editorial, (9 March 2013) as “people who are opposed to anything that brings progress.” Sound familiar? Steve Hayes has been peddling that line at WNXT for years. Where is Steve’s buddy, WSAZ’s Randy Yohe, now that the ruling clique could use Yohe’s support for closing Third Street? But the Can-Can Man was canned after being arrested for drunken driving. Of course, Yohe or no Yohe, the collection of bankrupts and political pawns who make up the Portsmouth City Council will pass the measure to close Third and probably quickly, as the PDT urges in the same editorial, as the council previously acted quickly to unload the Marting building on the taxpayers of Portsmouth. 
      If the most recent editor at the PDT did not support the closing of  Third Street,  it would not be long before he would join the long line of editors and reporters who have  quit or been fired when they failed to please the rich crooks who control the no-longer daily Daily Times  and the city. Now,  the politics are even thicker than they used to be. The Felix of the Odd Couple, Clayton Johnson, has retired, leaving Oscar, Neal Hatcher, holding the money bags alone, prompting Jeff Albrecht, Portsmouth’s preeminent snake oil salesman, to make his move for the Municipal Building, backed by the American Savings Bank in the person of Michael Gampp. Thick as thieves, they are all for closing Third Street, as quickly as possible, whatever the consequences. 

Click below for previous posts related to above post:

Portsmouth's First Commandment

Student Housing Shenanigans at SSU

Municipal Building

Dr. Albrecht’s Snake Oil Fifth-Third Elixer 

Three Bankrupt Mayors

The Odd Couple Johnson and Hatcher

PDT:Little Shop of Horrors Portsmouth Daily Times

Canning the Can-Can Man

Sh*t Heel Jim Kalb

Depicted above in a Portsmouth sewer is the then redneck  mayor Kalb who in a 2AM  email to me in 2009 wrote that, “I think you're a worthless  piece of s**t and I wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire.” 

As Eskimos have many words for snow,

River rats have even more for sh*t.

In sewers, rats prefer to go with the flow

Like the politician Kalb, the nitwit, 

Who leads excrementally, from behind,

Which puts him, linguistically, in a bind.
Whenever  he’s at a loss  for words,
The dope has to resort to p*ss and t*rds.
To piss or not to piss, what in tarnation!
Verbal diarrhea or constipation?
Among the rats  he’s a really big deal
But excrementally only a shit heel.

                               Robert Forrey, 2012

Waste Water Dunces

This is a paragraph from an unsigned notice sent out by the city falsely claiming that the U.S. EPA has ordered 63 residents of the Grandview area to disconnect their downspouts. Neither unelected mayor Malone, Wastewater Dunce Duncan, nor City Solicitor Jones was apparently willing to sign the notice. For more on this issue, see former elected mayor Jane Murray's website (click here).

"With all due respect, Mr. Duncan, in your Power Point presentation, you say 'downsprouts' are causing Grandview's flooding problems, but I don't think you know a downspout from a horses's ass."

Charge-off Chicanery

“The Madame Gu of Portsmouth Politics.” 

Charge-off Chicanery

In a letter dated 16 July, 2012, Charles Barga of the state auditor’s regional office, in  Athens,  notified Portsmouth city auditor Trent Williams that the city’s latest state  audit, for 2011, revealed that the city had  continued to violate statutes  regulating accounting practices.  Barga reminded Williams that “Ohio Revised Code Section 5705.10H states that “monies paid into a fund must be used only for the purposes for which such a fund has been established.” He also pointed  out that in Portsmouth  “monies [are] being paid into funds and subsequently used contrary to their restricted purposes.” Williams has not been obeying those restrictions  for some  time.  Through a procedure that he puzzlingly  calls “charge-offs,” Williams has been making  what Barga calls “unallowable allocations,” that is he has been taking money from one fund illegally to pay the expenses of another.  Why? Apparently  in order to help pay the salaries and raises for  the mayor, the city auditor, the city solicitor,  and other city employees, including the fire and police department employees.   As a result, even during Portsmouth’s chronic periods  of financial shortfalls, the Portsmouth city auditor has used unallowable allocations to  help  pay salaries and provide raises, using funds, that is, “contrary to their restricted purposes.”

Williams calls the transfers he makes “charge-offs.” He considers them  allowable but the state auditor considers at least some of them unallowable. I have looked in vain in many dictionaries to find a definition of charge-off in the sense that  Williams uses that term. What hard copy and online dictionaries do say is that a  charge-off is an uncollectable or bad debt. For example, Wikipedia defines charge-off as “the declaration by a creditor (usually a credit card account) that an amount of debt is unlikely to be collected.”  Merriam-Webster traces this sense of the word as far back as 1892. Why does Williams misuse the word? Instead of calling an unaccountable allocation an unaccountable allocation, he calls it a “charge-off,” perhaps to fool taxpayers. He appears to be  misusing the word to try to cover up his  shady accounting practices. He may have fooled the public, but he has not fooled the state auditor. In the city’s 23 July response to Barga’s 16 July  letter, which has Williams name at the bottom, the word “charge-off”  is used thirteen times, but Barga had not used it even once in his letter to the city. I am assured by a Certified Public Accountant  that “charge-off,” in the sense that Williams uses it, is not a word that is part of the accounting lexicon, except when it refers  to an uncollectable debt. Williams should stop using the word “charge-off”  and say what he apparently means—namely “indirect costs” or what Barga calls  “allocation adjustments.” Indirect costs or allocation adjustments are legal, provided those who resort to them  prove they are warranted, which too often, according to Barga, is not the case in Williams’ bookkeeping. In  Williams’ bookkeeping,  “charge-offs” are the means by which he attempts to get  around the restrictions placed upon the city’s spending practices  by Ohio Revised Code Section 5705.10H.

  

Crux of the Matter

The crux of the matter, the point in dispute between the state auditor and Williams, is the city’s abuse of “charge-offs.” The city has used funds designated for sewers, water, street maintenance, etc. to pay salaries and benefits of other departmental employees. The result is that now many of those funds are in deficit positions and the infrastructure, for which the funds were supposed to be used,  are falling into disrepair. City water, sewer, and sanitation fees have increased steadily over the years to cover ever increasing salaries and benefits. In 2010,  over $1,000,000  was transferred from the water fund to cover salaries, overtime, and benefits of fire department personnel. Only the salaries and benefits of the water and sewer departments should be paid from the Water and Sewer Funds with a reasonable charge by the General Fund for administrative expenses. The city has used the charge-off methodology to justify the increase in water and sewer fees for years by charging fire department salaries and benefits  to the Water Fund and then passing the cost to the residents in the form of higher water and sewer fees. 

The amount of the charge-offs could not be justified by Williams, other than to say he has always done it that way. The first sentence of the city’s  letter (23 July 2012)  in response to Barga states, “The City of Portsmouth has used a system of payroll ‘charge-offs’  historically for as far back as at least 1993,” or about the time Williams became auditor, although it may be that cooking the books actually began when the notorious Tom Bihl was city  auditor. Regardless of when the illegal practice actually began, precedent is the main argument the city uses to justify these “charge-offs.” Not only in the first sentence, but on  page two of the city’s reply, the claim is made that “The City [in 2011] continued to use the same method [charge-offs] consistent with the past many years . . .” In the third and final page of the city’s letter, the claim is again made that “. . . the City has used a consistent methodology over many years” [emphases added]. In other words, the city has been doing it this way for so long (and getting away with it!) so Williams should be granted  some slack and not be required to change his methods immediately. But doing something wrong, unethical, or illegal for twenty or more  years doesn’t make it right or mean we have to put up with it any longer, does it?

Poisoning the Money Supply

In the New York Times (8 Aug. 2012) there was a report on  the  trial of Madame Gu Kailaithe, the wife of a prominent Chinese Communist official. She was convicted of poisoning a British businessman associate. Because she told the court there were extenuating circumstances—she claimed the British businessman had made threats against her son—she is expected to be spared the death penalty. The son is a student at Harvard’s  John F. Kennedy School of Government, so her claim seems specious. To my way of  thinking,  Trent Williams is the Madame Gu of Portsmouth politics. He is the poisonous auditor of  Portsmouth’s finances. He feels he should be granted a pardon and given more time to rectify any mistakes and balance the books.  Will the state auditor buy his argument? 

   First Ward councilman Kevin Johnson recently circulated an email reminding voters  that the City ended Fiscal Year 2011 with a deficit of $1.4 million, which the state auditor responded to by putting the city on Fiscal Watch. The deficit  projection for FY2012 is even more, $1,418,719. This is just the General Fund and does not include deficits in other funds such as Water and Sewer. At the beginning of 2012, the sewer fund had a $600,000 deficit, so, as usual, crooked politicians  in the Municipal Building city raised our sewer fees 10% to help cover the deficit.

The state auditor can place financially troubled municipalities in three  fiscal categories: Caution, Watch, and Emergency. Portsmouth was in Fiscal Caution last year, and now, even  after the city’s income taxes were increased it has moved on to the next most serious condition—Fiscal Watch. If the state auditor does not buy the convoluted excuses and veiled threat  of financial catastrophe in the city’s letter of 23 July,  Portsmouth may  be declared in Fiscal Emergency. But there could be a silver lining if that happens. If the city is placed in Fiscal Emergency, the State will take  over the finances of the city as it took over the finances of Scioto County, where there reportedly has been financial improvement. If what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, then what’s good for the county should be good for the county seat, Portsmouth.

Confucius Says 

 I have compared Williams to Madame Gu. A saying attributed to Confucius is, “Never seek illicit wealth.” Another could be, “Never resort to charge-off chicanery to hoodwink  taxpayers.” 

The Illustrated Ballad of Dr. Lundeen

The office of Dr. James E. Lundeen in Portsmouth

This is the door of the controversial doctor

Who was accused of dispensing pain pills like candy

To “patients” who came from near and far

To a location that was handy—

The fourth floor of the Masonic Building

On Chillicothe Street in P’town.

Masonic Building, c. 1900

Was he practicing medicine or a swindle;

Was he high-minded or low-down;

Was he Hippocratic or hypocritical;

Was he hard working or just lazy;

Was he the sufferer’s best friend,

An angel of mercy—or just crazy?

He operated in God’s country, the Buckeye state,

Thirteen crowded so-called clinics

Where milling “patients” faced a long wait

That drove some of them to hysterics.

On entering, what his patients would see

Was a smooth shaven, bow-tied gent

Who was not only a bona fide M.D.

But had also been candidate for president.

For more on candidate Lundeen, click here

He proposed a foreign policy called SMITE—

A biblical assault on evil—

A reminder to enemies of God’s might,

Which could eradicate them like boll weevil.

In addition to providing a fix to those in pain,

The doctor also would ask for a donation

For his presidential campaign

To help relieve the pain of the nation.

He literally threw his hat in the ring,

A hat made by Cynthia, his millinery wife.

She was his one, his only, his everything—

His faithful companion for life,

His support hose, his holy staff.

She was the first to ask, “Jim, what’s the matter?”

The only one who could make him laugh—

She was both his dream of genie and mad hatter.

The Lundeens at Kentucky Derby in hats designed by Cynthia

The Lundeens in campaign hats designed by Cynthia

Having gone bankrupt in 2007,
Did Lundeen, when he came to P’town
Feel like he’d arrived in loser’s heaven?
Mayor Malone, President Haas, Kalb the clown,

Desimone, of Fork and Finger—

And a very close call for Kevin—

All had given creditors the finger,  

All were deadbeats, all Chapter 7.

Lundeen’s office was just down the hall

From the studios of WNXT,

Where Stephanie Haze, the SOGP’s moll,
Was always denouncing the CCG—

The fourth floor hall of Masonic Building where as many as forty patients sometimes waited to see Lundeen

The Concerned Citizens Group—

For criticizing the SOGP’s dirty tricks,

While, milling in the hall, dozens of cooped

Up addicts waited impatiently for their fix,

Waited like cars to get gassed on dope.

The shorn losing candidate in one of his cramped thirteen offices

Notice the box marked “Free Trial,” a sample,

As if it contained some evil dope

From the satanic Procter and Gamble,  

Which was into much more than soap. 

The former P&G “satanic” logo

 

The Southern Ohio Growth Partnership

Controls P’town like Tammany did Manhattan

And the military now does Egypt.

While the poor of Portsmouth repine, the SOGP fatten.

Only after the homeboy was not reelected

Did the state revoke Lundeen’s license;

Only after one in eight babies were born addicted

Did authorities finally stop the pretense.

Lundeen had been dispensing for five long years,

While Stephanie Haze ranted on the station

Against C.A.V.E. People and  the CCG’ers

For besmirching  P’town’s reputation!

The doctor has fled to Indiana or Pennsylvania.

On the fourth floor, WNXT has found the solution:

Thirty second plugs for Mohr’s Automania—

Instead of pain pills, it’s noise pollution.

Mohr noise

Mr. Albrecht Goes to Washington

Jeffrey Albrecht speaking to WSAZ prior to his flight to Washington, D.C.

  

Do  Republicans really believe what Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience,” namely, “That government is best which governs least”? Tea Partiers seem to believe it in spades. Their motto could be, “That government is best which governs not at all.” But if Republicans believe this, do they practice it? Are Alaskan Republicans, for example, or at least the Palinistas,  rugged individualists or are they hooked on government aid as much as addicts in Scioto County are on Oxycontin? Are they hypocrites who denounce government aid except when it can help them build a bridge to nowhere? Because the Bachman family farm took government  subsidies, is Michelle Bachman any  less a hypocrite than Sarah Palin?

I thought about Republican hypocrisy when I heard that  Jeff Albrecht and three other Portsmouth businessmen, along with Portsmouth’s unelected Uncle Tom mayor David Malone, had flown to Washington, D.C., on 12 July 2011 in a corporate jet to lobby politicians  on behalf of a private corporation, the United States Enrichment  Corporation (USEC). The four businessmen flew to Washington to pressure elected officials and especially the president to co-sign  a $2 billion dollar loan to USEC so that it can proceed with its plans for a centrifuge project in Piketon, a small community located about 15 miles up Route 23  from Portsmouth. “Locals Lobby D.C. for USEC Approval,” was the headline of the story Frank Lewis wrote for the Portsmouth Daily Times. But they’re not lobbying for “approval.” They’re lobbying for a $2 billion dollar guaranteed loan. “Ohioans Go to D.C. to Push for Uranium-Plant Guarantee” was the more accurate headline of Jessica Wehrman’s report in the Columbus Dispatch (click here). In  a New York Times story (20 July 2007), “Cost Cutters, Except When Spending is Back Home,” the lede reads, “House Republicans who rode a wave of voter discontent into office last year may be pushing for spending cuts, but they’re also quietly funneling millions of federal dollars back home.” That’s what Republicans  Rob Portman and Jean Schmidt may be doing on behalf of USEC, risking not millions but billions of taxpayers’ money. 

Should the government be involved in co-signing a $2 billion dollar loan for  any private corporation, let alone one that critics say is badly mismanaged? According to principles Republicans swear by, shouldn’t it be the so-called free market, not the federal government, that decides whether USEC completes the centrifuge project in Piketon or whether it goes bankrupt, which it may if the government guaranteed loan doesn’t come through? What were these Republican businessmen from Portsmouth doing in Washington lobbying in favor of what may turn out to be Ohio’s version of Alaska’s bridge to nowhere?  Do Albrecht, Lute, Schmidt, and Glockner, the four Portsmouth businessmen, really believe in competition for everybody except themselves? Are they opposed to government intervention in business except when the business is in their backyard? Aren’t Republicans supposed to stand for free enterprise, not free lunches? Aren’t Republicans supposed to believe in “hands off government,” not “government handouts”? Aren’t Tea Party Republicans going so far as to threaten to shut down the government if it doesn’t stop spending and lending, if it doesn’t stop borrowing and “tomorrowing”? Don’t they understand that if  the centrifuge in Piketon goes kaput, the government as co-signer will have to  fork over  $2 billion of tax payer money to some bank?

It is ironic that the Portsmouth contingent seeking government financial support  was led by Jeff Albrecht, because he was the owner of the Ramada Inn, in Portsmouth. Over the years, the  Ramada scraped by with the assistance of public dollars: Shawnee State University lodged job interviewees and unhoused students in its spare rooms, of which there were usually plenty, and, in addition, government agencies  lodged non-violent offenders  waiting to appear in court to face various charges. If things were any worse, Albrecht might have reserved a floor for Section 8 tenants. Among seasoned travelers Albrecht’s Ramada gained notoriety as “The Queen of the Rust Belt.” (Click here.)  

Golden Opportunity for Government Assistance

Albrecht’s golden opportunity for government assistance came in October 2008, when presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, campaigning in southern Ohio, had breakfast  at Albrecht’s Ramada Inn. Albrecht implied to Wehrman of the Columbus Dispatch that he  personally served the future president breakfast. In any case, Obama’s presence provided  Albrecht with an opportunity to ask for government help. According to Albrecht’s own account in the Dispatch, he asked Obama if he would support a loan for the United States Enrichment Corporation if he was elected president. Albrecht told the Dispatch reporter that Obama had promised him he would. This was good news for Albrecht because the USEC’s centrifuge project would be good for business in Portsmouth and therefore good for Albrecht’s  Ramada Inn.

On the basis of Obama’s alleged promise, Albrecht made an important business decision. He decided to transform his Ramada Inn, “The Queen of the Rust Belt,” into a completely renovated Holiday Inn. He made this important decision in spite of the fact that a Holiday Express Inn had not too long ago failed to make a go of it in Portsmouth, just a couple of traffic lights up Route 23. In fact, not only had Albrecht in his words “invested significantly” in transforming the Ramada into a  Holiday Inn, he had borrowed money to do it. He decided to borrow money at least in part because of the promise Obama had allegedly made to him to support a government guaranteed loan to USEC. Who in their right financial mind would have loaned Albrecht  anything based on a promise a campaigning politician, a Democrat,  had allegedly made to him during a campaign stop in Portsmouth?

From what I know of Albrecht’s ability as the operator of the Ramada Inn,  I think anybody who loans money to him  is engaging in unsafe financing. The Ramada had been mismanaged for a long time and did not improve in its dying days. Elijah on Yelp.com said in 2009, “Guests beware, your money is better spent by staying at a quality bed and breakfast rather than this dump.” Things weren’t any better in 2010, when  Nicole wrote, “The Ramada Inn in Portsmouth Ohio was one of the most unsanitary, gross hotel rooms I’ve ever stayed in!” Location! Location! Location! Albrecht's Holiday Inn is in downtown Portsmouth in the same location the Ramada was, with the same security problems, even though the Portsmouth Police Station is directly across the street. That fact had not stopped the police chief's son from dealing drugs at the restaurant in the Ramada, I was told. “During my stay,” one disgruntled guest complained online, “five vehicles including mine was broken into while parked in the Ramada parking lot. My car in particular was right in front of the lobby. When I told the front desk what had happened, they said that this happens all the time.” Critics are saying the same thing about USEC, whose reputation for mismanagement is not quite as bad as Albrecht’s, but USEC’s stock has plummeted like a lead sinker in a fishless pond.  Moody’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded USEC,  somewhat the way TripAdvisor, an online website, downgraded Albrecht’s new Holiday Inn. Although it is the newest of Portsmouth’s  four major motels, Albrecht’s Holiday Inn has been  rated last by TripAdvisor.

The Obama administration will probably back the loan to USEC, even though Fuel Cycle Week (click) a nuclear energy newsletter, says such a move would mean the federal government has formally adopted USEC “as a ward of the state.”  Guaranteeing the loan may be unwise but it is not hypocritical. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are not infected by the virus of free market fundamentalism, although the liberal Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman is not so sure about Obama.  Ohio’s Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, once a critic of the centrifuge  project, is now a strong proponent. In the current depressed economy, Brown, Obama, and other Democrats cannot afford politically to oppose the project, even if its prospects for success are not very good, anymore than are the prospects of Albrecht’s Holiday Inn. The loan made to Albrecht, like the loan that will likely be made to USEC, may have to be written off. Let's keep our fingers crossed on the centrifuge project for the sake of USEC’s employees.

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

If USEC doesn’t get the  $2 billion dollar loan guarantee from the government, and if Albrecht’s Holiday Inn is no more profitable than his Ramada Inn, then he will no doubt blame President Obama not only for the jobs that aren’t created in Piketon but also for the guests who choose not stay in his Holiday Inn. It is much easier, to my way of thinking,  to tilt the playing field to favor Portsmouth Boys  or rig the bidding at an auction in Athens, Ohio, which Albrecht was suspected of doing (click here), than it is  to control what happens in  Washington, D.C. The four Republican businessmen who visited Washington, and Albrecht in particular, may learn that it is much easier to have  the mayor of Portsmouth in their pocket, and on their corporate jet, than it is to have the Democratic president of the United States keep his campaign promises, even if Albrecht once fed him bacon and eggs at the Ramada. Mr. Albrecht and his Republican cohorts may have flown to Washington for government assistance, but the chickens, which must make do with chicken feed,  will still come home to roost in Portsmouth.

Chickens coming home to roost at the Holiday Inn

We Got Trouble in River City: Ameresco, The Music Man, and the Portsmouth Boys

George P. Sakellaris, Founder and CEO of Ameresco

Established in 2000, Ameresco is an energy conservation company that grew rapidly  in its first  six years or so by aggressively marketing  its energy saving services to customers in both the private and public sector, to schools and hospitals, to businesses and municipalities both large and small, to everyone, that is, who could profit from the more efficient use of whatever kinds of energy they were consuming. Ameresco arrived on the corporate scene just as the Enron Corporation,  much of whose business was in gas and electricity, was about to implode ignominiously. Profiting from  massive fraud and deception, Enron had grown steadily in the second half of the twentieth century when most Americans  consumed much more than they conserved. Ameresco’s growth, by contrast, occurred at the beginning of the new millennium, by which time the conservation rather than the consumption  of energy was  becoming a big business. Energy conservation became a crusade not just for  those in the private sector, such as Ameresco, but for government as well, at the local, state, and national levels. Wearing its green hat, like the Jolly Green Giant, Ameresco cooperated with  public bodies and agencies  on behalf of conservation.  Instead “Keep America green, bring money,”  Ameresco’s slogan, referring to energy, is “Green, Clean, and Sustainable.” But for some brands, such as Salem Cigarettes, green has become a racket. “Think Clean Keep it Green” is the slogan on the green colored package of  Salems, a leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States.

The founder and CEO of Ameresco is the sixtyish Greek immigrant George P. Sakellaris, who  said of  himself, on Linked In,  “I am a hands on leader, and I bring the same professionalism and enthusiasm to every project.” His biography, or what we know of it, reads like the typical Horatio Alger American success story. “I have won many prestigious awards,” Sakellaris wrote. Among those prestigious awards was his  1999 Horatio Alger Award for Distinguished Americans. In the lexicon of American mythology, the name Horatio Alger is synonymous with success. But the prospects for Ameresco and for  the field of  energy conservation in general are not nearly as promising as they were before the Great Recession that began in late 2007.  Ameresco’s Initial Public Offering, in 2010, which had the aim of raising money for its expansion and for servicing its debt, was lackluster.  The disappointing response to  Ameresco’s  IPO could be a harbinger of hard times ahead, not just for Ameresco but for the whole energy conservation industry.  The  bloom may be off the green rose. When Ameresco’s first quarter earnings were released a few months ago, resulting in a stock market dip, Mr. Sakellaris ignored his company’s policy of not commenting publicy on fluctuations in its stock and hastened  to CNBC to  nervously explain that first quarter returns were normally the lowest of the four quarters for his company. So the 3.5% profit the quarter was nothing to worry about. He told CNBC, “Market Trends are very, very good.” His underlying message appeared to be, “Don’t Panic!” But if he doesn’t look panicked on that interview, he does look nervous, and maybe he has reason to be.

Ameresco’s Poor Report Card in Portsmouth

In regard to  promises made and not kept, Ameresco has a poor report card  in Portsmouth. Cynics might see a passing resemblance between Ameresco’s CEO and Harold Hill the traveling  salesman in The Music Man, who came to the fictional River City, Iowa,  shortly before July 4th, in 1912, to take advantage of its unsophisticated citizenry. (Watch “Ya Got Trouble Right Here In River City” by clicking here.) Though he prides himself on being a “hands-on” CEO,  Sakellaris did not himself come to Portsmouth. Ameresco grew too fast for him, headquartered in Massachusetts, to have his feet everywhere and his hands on everything.  But  his  Midwestern representative, Jeff Metcalf, out of Indianapolis,  was very much “hands-on” in Portsmouth. It was standard operating procedure for Harold Hill in his sales pitch to promise more than he could deliver. That’s what Mefcalf has been accused of having done  in the Ohio river city of Portsmouth: promised more than he delivered.

At the 13 November 2006 meeting of the Portsmouth City Council, Metcalf promised, according to the minutes, that “every meter in the City will be installed  within a year.” Four years later, in a 24 March 2010 memo to Mayor Jane Murray, Patricia Williams, the city’s Public Utilities Computer Programmer,  listed eight ways in which Ameresco had not lived up to its promises to Portsmouth, including Metcalf’s that the  meters would be installed within a year. Williams wrote in the memo,  (1)“We have changed over 500 meters that were supposed to have already been changed by Ameresco and were not.” She explained that the city had to pay city workers overtime to change the five hundred meters that Ameresco workers, four years later, had failed to install. Not only that, city workers found new uninstalled meters lying in pits next to the unremoved  old meters.  (2)Ameresco workers sometimes mixed up which meters went with which address, resulting in confusion and loss of revenue.  (3)“Meters were put into pits at vacant lots and inactive accounts. We have brand new meters sitting in pits of  vacated homes that will never be used unless we come upon them and pulled them to be used somewhere else.” (4)“We have lids that have not been drilled and meter transceiver units mounted [im]properly (too numerous to mention). ” (5)The workers who were hired by Ameresco were supposed to be certified plumbers and apprentices, but “[t]he people they hired were heating and air conditioning  people  who had no experience in this field.” (6)“Multiple repairs had to be made to various customers’ lines and property due to the fact of inexperienced people changing meters.” (7)“Inaccuracies in paperwork caused many billing nightmares. It took considerable time to correct inaccurate meter numbers and reads to make sure the customers were charged accurately.” (8)“We have changed 139 meters to date and many more need to be changed because they have already become non-registering. This causes loss of revenue not to mention the cost of ordering new registering.” Williams ended  her  damning memorandum with the comment, “In closing, I would not give Ameresco any good references.” (Williams’ memo can be found on Teresa Mollette’s Portsmouthcitizens website by clicking here.)

     I don’t think Jane Murray will be giving any good references for Ameresco either.  In an email to me (2 July 2011), she wrote, “[T]he Ameresco deal is about as preposterous as the financial instrument used for repayment. This called for a nearly $1 Million debt payment per year for 10 years. This decision was made at the same time that more than 60 homes were inundated with sewage thanks to the lack of public policy and code enforcement from the city, resulting in major storm water runoff problems from development at SOMC, Hillview, and others.” Murray  went on to explain, “The Ameresco deal essentially was to pay nearly $9.5 Million to have a company replace water meters, light bulbs, street lights, traffic lights, and windows. Director of the Water Department, Sam Sutherland told me that the whole thing was a disaster and that he pleaded with Jim Kalb over and over to not do the deal.” But the deal was done and Murray inherited a looming  financial disaster. She is not the only one in Portsmouth who thinks the Ameresco deal was a disaster.

The Ameresco Contract: “A Horrible, Disastrous Investment”

The dim-witted Portsmouth Mayor signs Ameresco Contract

When the traveling salesman of Ameresco began making visits to Portsmouth  around 2005, peddling energy conservation services, he found a number of easily bamboozled Portsmouth Boys in public office, including the aforementioned Jim Kalb, the dim-witted Portsmouth mayor. The Portsmouth Boys  fell for the Ameresco sales pitch hook, line, and meter. Three different witnesses have told me that after the meeting at which the city council had voted in favor of the contract, Ameresco representatives had whooped it up in the parking lot outside the Municipal Building as if they had just bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24 dollars. As a result, Portsmouth city government, which was getting by financially only by juggling accounts and cooking the books,  is now in  precarious  financial straits and is trying to increase the city income tax to bail itself out. Like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,”  First Ward councilman Kevin Johnson has pointed out in an email to his colleagues in city government that Portsmouth is, as a result of Ameresco’s broken promises,  if  not buck naked, down financially to its last fig leaf. (Johnson is not a Portsmouth Boy and he was not on city council when Kalb signed the  Ameresco contract.) The  expensive services and equipment that Ameresco promised—the equivalent of the  musical instruments and the uniforms Hill promised in The Music Man—do not appear to be  paying for themselves over time, as Ameresco had promised. According to Johnson, that promise has not been and is not likely to be fulfilled.  “From a business perspective,” he wrote in his email, “I am most concerned as to how the $647,625 in ‘claimed’ savings for one year compares to the $940,000 payments the City of Portsmouth must make to BankAmerica each of ten years. . . . Even if  these ‘claimed’ savings are real and stay the same for the foreseeable future,” he continued, “it will  take the City 14.5 years to recoup its investment—at which time, if not before, much of this equipment will need [to] be repaired or replaced—therefore ending up as a horrible, disastrous investment by the City of Portsmouth” (emphasis added). On CNBC, Sakellaris said there was no cost to his customers, that Ameresco contracts were “revenue neutral,” because the energy savings the customers would make over the period of the contract would pay for the loans the customers got from third parties. In the case of Portsmouth the third party was the Bank of America. If a contract turned out not to be revenue neutral, Ameresco “guarantees” to make up the difference to the customer. We shall see what we shall see.

The American Dream or the American Nightmare?

George Sakellaris was a Horatio Alger Award winner in 1999,  but so was Enron’s CEO Kenneth Lay the year before—just prior to Enron’s unraveling. Lay was subsequently convicted of securities  fraud. Ameresco is located in Framingham, Massachusetts, not Houston, Texas, and  Portsmouth is a real river city in Ohio, not a fictional one in Iowa, but that did not stop the Portsmouth Boys from buying  $9.4 million dollars worth of trombones, in a manner of speaking. The Music Man ends with a miracle when the boys of River City, Iowa,  learn overnight to play the instruments, and Harold Hill, after falling  in love with a music teacher, sees the light. In real life miracles don’t happen. That’s why we have Hollywood. The workers Ameresco hired never did learn how to install the meters. By the standards of the  Horatio Alger myth, Horatio Alger, the son of a minister, was an abysmal failure for it was finally revealed a hundred years or so after it happened that he was a minister who had fled to New York after it was discovered that he  been  sodomizing  boys in his Cape Cod parish. Instead of being obsessed with the American virtue of making money, Horatio Alger, like the ancient Greeks he admired, was obsessed with boys. In his obsession with boys, which he sublimated  in his fiction, Alger neglected almost everything else. In 1899, when he died, he was practically broke. Are the Portsmouth Boys, after having been seduced by a traveling salesman, leaving the taxpayers of Portsmouth pregnant and barefoot? After she was recalled from office,  Jane Murray started a blog, WeGotTroubleRightHereInRiverCity. I wonder why she named it that?  

What does our current unelected Uncle Tom mayor say about Ameresco? “We still have our yearly payment that we pay to Bank of America,” David Malone  told the Portsmouth Daily Times (10 May 2011).  “But the project is still going,” he reassured the public. “Ameresco is still doing their part in the project contract. As far as I know everything is going along real well.” As far as he knows everything is going along real well? What Malone knows about budgets and spreadsheets, and about finances in general, is so minuscule that even a molecule of H2O would dwarf it. If he had been the mayor who negotiated the Ameresco contract, instead of a mere cheer-leading, mayor-in-waiting councilman, God knows where the city would be now.  I am expressing only my opinion, a right afforded me under the free speech provisions of the Constitution, but I think the lesson to be learned from this Ameresco business, at least where Portsmouth is concerned,  may be to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, even if they are wrapped in recycled green paper. The financial fireworks ahead for the city of Portsmouth, partly the result of Ameresco’s apparently broken promises, may make the fireworks on the Ohio River this Fourth of July look like sparklers.

Fireworks, Portsmouth, July 4th, 2011