Mayor Jane Murray: The Lady’s Not for Burning

Recently, I realized how far the hysteria about Portsmouth mayor Jane Murray had gone when I overheard an educated,  usually  mild-mannered Portsmouth gentleman who lives on the Hill blurt out angrily, “She’s a witch!” I thought, “Has it come to this, when not just the peasants on the floodplain  but the patricians  up on the Hill are out for blood?” 

Historically, those  who were accused of witchcraft  were almost always women, who  were believed to be  the accomplices and  sexual partners of  the devil, who gave them the supernatural  power to cause pain, injury, and distress by casting spells, performing rituals or simply giving somebody the evil eye. The belief in witches and the evil eye was carried by the Scotch Irish to America where it persisted in the hollows and hills of Appalachia. Vestiges of it can be found in Appalachian  Ohio and even, apparently, in cities such as Portsmouth, and not only among the uneducated. A woman with a history of mental illness, a  protégée of the ex-mayor’s mentally disturbed wife,  went around accusing another woman, a   critic of Kalb, of  being a witch. A friend of mine recalls seeing someone on on of the chat rooms call for the mayor to get her broom and fly out of town.

Puritan Massachusetts

Witch hysteria doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It doesn’t arise when things are going well. Things were not going well early on in the Massachusetts  Bay Colony, in the 1630s, when the conservative and radical Puritans struggled for control of the colony. The leader of the radical Puritans was a woman, Anne Hutchinson,  who challenged the Puritan patriarchy by questioning  the authority of the ministers, all of whom were males. Hutchinson was not accused of being a witch, but she was suspected  of a terrible sin characteristic of witches:  she was believed to be having a sexual relationship with the devil.  When she had a miscarriage that  resulted in a deformed fetus, that was all the evidence the  Puritan patriarchy  needed, for  “monstrous” miscarriages were believed to be common among witches.  A follower of Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, also had a miscarriage that resulted in a “monstrous” miscarriage, or devil's spawn, that was seen as  further proof  the two troublesome women were the devil’s disciples.

Banished from Massachusetts after being found guilty of heresy, Hutchinson  went to Rhode Island where she helped establish a new settlement, which they named Portsmouth. The  “Portsmouth Compact,” which called  for the separation of church and state and greater freedom of conscience, was a milestone in the evolution of American democracy. Hutchinson later moved to Long Island, in what is now New York, where she and her family were  murdered  by Indians. When he heard of her bloody death, the  Massachusetts  governor  saw it as God’s punishment of a wicked woman.  Mary Dyer, who had gone her separate way, converting to Quakerism, was  later hanged by the Puritan patriarchy  for her persistent heresy. In expiation, the Massachusetts government subsequently  placed statues of Hutchinson and Dyer outside the statehouse in Boston, where they were seen as martyrs to freedom of conscience.

Statue of Anne Hutchinson outside the statehouse in Boston

The radical spirit  of Anne Hutchinson lived on in the Puritan  colony. Historians speculate that the witchcraft hysteria that arose in Salem and other towns in Massachusetts early in the 1690s was a panic reaction by the  Puritans, who felt they were losing control of the hearts and minds  of the younger generation, who were espousing radical notions, such as rationalism and democracy.  New ideas were infecting New England, ideas of the European Enlightenment, which  challenged the blind faith of the first generation of Puritans in  everything in  the Bible, including the belief in witches. The  so-called  Salem witch hysteria was centered not in what we know as the seaport of Salem, but inland, in a rural conservative farming community, then called Salem Village,  now called Danvers, which was the Appalachia of  Essex County. Danvers was later  chosen as the site of the State Lunatic Hospital, which  had the  dubious distinction of being  the place where the frontal lobotomy operation originated.

Appalachian Ohio

Witches tend to pop up  when things are going badly, and things have been going badly  in Portsmouth for at least a half century. Mayor Murray is now accused of being a witch, but she was viewed as a witch even before she was elected, when  she was characterized  as a threat to “our town,”  as the  political sign on Kinney’s Lane (shown below) warned, even before she allegedly went on to  do such terrible things as ask for a renegotiation of public employees contracts. Most recently, Murray is  being accused of dissing  one of the most influential and tightly knit groups in Portsmouth, the bikers. The motorcycle panel  on the Flood Wall, from my observation,  attracts more tourists, on  motorcycles naturally, than any other single panel, so slighting bikers is akin to a Catholic spitting on the image of the statue of the Virgin or a Muslim hawking hotdogs on the Hajj.  

The  hysteria surrounding Murray is a reaction to the changes that  are  taking place not just  in southern Ohio, but throughout our  financially imperiled nation.  Many Americans  fear that outsiders will or already have taken over the country and destroying what  they believe God intended to be a white, Christian nation. The Tea Party movement is fueled by some of the same  distrust that is fuelling the Murray hysteria. SAVE OUR TOWN is the local version of SAVE OUR COUNTRY.  The distrust of outsiders in Appalachia is legendary, and the   incestuous character of Appalachian  politics only intensifies this distrust. The anti-Murray lawn sign that appeared during the last mayoral campaign nailed the  nativist  sentiment exactly:  “Don’t Be Screwed by a Stranger.” Though Murray is a native of the area, she is viewed as a stranger, as an outsider, having spent part of her career elsewhere, where she acquired strange attitudes and ideas, such as balancing a   budget instead of  robbing Peter to pay Paul.

 To put the  the current  controversy  about Mayor Murray in perspective, we need to go back to 1980, when Portsmouth was in the throes of a similar political hysteria.  The culprits back in the 80s  were three male council members who were accused of standing in the way of a new mall and the prosperity it was supposed to bring.  The precursor of the SOGP, with lawyer Clayton Johnson in the picture, had used the media to mobilize most of the town, even school children and ministers,  against the three councilmen, who were called many names, but because they weren’t females, nobody called them witches.

If  Murray is recalled, next in line to become mayor, in the  corrupt line of succession  the SOGP has arranged, is an evangelical serial adulterer who is a wizard with  figures. But, unfortunately for the fiscal future of the city,  they are figures of  the wrong kind. With his notion that Portsmouth can pray its way to prosperity, the next-in-line is more like the Wizard of Ooze than Moses. Last year, twenty  local governments in Ohio, and one county, Scioto, of which Portsmouth is the county seat, were on Ohio's fiscal emergency list and were being supervised by state-run commissions. Will Portsmouth become the twenty-first? What the media and the Portsmouth Daily Times  in particular is performing, with the assistance of a couple of public school teachers, is the  frontal lobotomy of the public so they won’t be conscious of the city’s severe financial crisis.  Alcohol, the anesthesia for the operation,  is being supplied by the teachers at a bar—oh, excuse me—a pub on Portsmouth’s blighted East Side. Once the lobotomy is completed, they will try to burn, i.e.,  recall,  the mayor. Where else but in Portsmouth could this happen? The hysteria that has been whipped up against Murray  may result in her recall, but the fiscal crisis  she insists on calling the public’s attention to  won’t go away, even if she does.

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The Problem of Portsmouth's Public Employees Unions

The flyer (shown above) that our heavily leveraged Portsmouth City Solicitor Mike Jones circulated during his campaign for that office shows him standing tall with representatives of the fire, police, and sheriff department. Jones stood  tall and proud for the public employees unions during the campaign, but he has stood shamefully small for the public, showing himself, in my view, a tool of the SOGP,  and a tool of the public employees unions,  as well as  a thorn in the side  of Mayor Murray, whose resignation he has called for. Jones is one of those city officials who it is not clear whether  it is his incompetence or his dishonesty that best explains his behavior in office.

It is unfair but  public employees everywhere, and not just in Portsmouth,  are stereotyped as  being overpaid and underworked. But with the likes of Jim Kalb toddling off on long weekends  when he was mayor to  motorcycle races in the Carolinas for senior citizens, leaving the city and its financial problems untended until he returned with another trophy of a third place finish to put in the display case in the mayor’s office (I am not making up the display case), what were the  residents to think of Portsmouth public employees if not that they were shortchanging the taxpayers  who were  paying their salaries? It did not help the public’s perception of Bauer and Kalb that their limited acumen—in Kalb’s case terminally limited acumen—was rumored to be further impaired by cocaine and weed: “Cough! Cough!”

There is no  denying that in the current economic crises there is a serious problem across the country with public employees and public employees unions. In Portsmouth, the  problem is even worse  because of the  relationship between our  public employees and our  corrupt politicians. To get reelected,  Portsmouth politicians have catered to public employees. They want to stay in public office and out of the private sector, where too many of them had proved to be failures, such as  the two previous mayors, Kalb, the  goof-off   grocery clerk, and Bauer, the out-to-lunch graphic designer. As mayors, both Bauer and Kalb had  been in  a  mutually beneficial, you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll- vote-for-you-relationship with public employees.  Instead of serving as a serious negotiator, the city government, at least under Bauer and Kalb, had  rolled over  for  the public employees unions, making concessions that have now come home to roost. Because the city government is  restricted by law from how much it  can tax property owners, it has steadily raised water and sewer rates to help pay the generous  wages and benefits  it has provided public employees. Portsmouth  politicians have  been robbing the public to pay for  public employees. Because the  city does not have to get voter approval to raise water and sewer rates, those rates have served as a cash cow, or  ATM, to help pay for salaries and benefits  of city employees, even though state law mandates that that income should not be used to pay general operating expenses.

I am sympathetic to public employees. I was a union president for state employees when I taught at Shawnee State University, and I don’t agree with the view, especially among conservatives,  that only people in the private sector earn their keep because the private sector is competitive and depends on the profit motive. The view that employees in the public sector have little incentive to work hard because they  are not competing with anybody and are not making profits,  is not a view I share. I believe  public employees do the often  hard, sometimes dirty, and sometimes dangerous work that keeps our towns and cities functioning. (The military, incidentally, are also public employees who do dirty and dangerous non-profit work for relatively low pay.)  Public employees are the ones who have to deal with the the trash and  crime, as well as the  occasional calamities, such as forest fires and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, and  they do it for wages that will never make them rich, in sharp contrast to  the denizens of  Wall Street who are paid very generous and sometimes exorbitant  salaries and bonuses without necessarily doing anything useful and sometimes doing things that are very harmful to the public employees whose  pension dollars they gamble with as if it were Monopoly money. The police and fire departments are to cities what the army and navy are to the nation: we could not live without them. But given the current economic crisis, which may continue for another five and possibly even ten years, can we afford to live with them?

The Reckoning

Because Mayor Murray has dared to put the contracts with public employees unions on the negotiating table and taken the position that there may have to be a reduction or at least a freeze of wages and benefits for public employees, she has been vilified in local chatrooms and insulted at City Council meetings. But other cities have already gone  much farther than she has.  A  recent survey by the National League of Cities found that  51 percent of the cities reported  they had cut or frozen salaries of city employees; 22 percent said they had revised union contracts and  reduced wages  and benefits; and 19 percent said they had resorted to  furloughs. Local and state government contribute to these grim statistics. As a state, Ohio  has a projected gap of $577 million in its 2011 budget. Cities in Ohio towns and cities are making or have already made drastic cuts in even the most essential of public services, such as the police and fire departments. Early in July 2010,  the mayor of Chillicothe announced five day furloughs as a measure to help with the budget crisis. Six years ago, even before the current recession,  five Chillicothe firefighters lost their jobs in an economy move. In 2009,  Columbus firefighters agreed to a wage freeze  and so did firefighters and police officers in Lancaster. “Every city of size, even if you're a city of 10,000, you're facing budget problems. The problems are pretty universal,” John Mahoney, deputy director of the Ohio Municipal League, told the Columbus Dispatch in December 2009. Last year, twenty  local governments in Ohio, and one county, Scioto, of which Portsmouth is the county seat, were on Ohio's fiscal emergency list and were being supervised by state-run commissions. Unless Portsmouth   takes corrective action, unless it takes its head out of the fiscal quicksand, it too  may join the other twenty towns and cities whose finances are being supervised by state-run commissions. In March 2010, an official at the Ohio Office of Budget and Management told  the Columbus Dispatch  that in spite of  isolated instances of theft in public office, the financial problems in Ohio communities are  more often the result of the financial incompetence rather the dishonesty of  public officials. We only wish that were the case in Portsmouth—that we only had to worry about   the incompetence and not also the dishonesty of our public officials.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has called the current economic crisis, and accompanying grim unemployment picture, “The Horror Show,” but Portsmouth public employees and their relatives party at the Dickens Pub, owned by Portsmouth city councilman Nicholas Basham,  like drunken passengers on the  Titanic, or like those partying  characters in Poe’s macabre story “Masque of the Red Death” who think they can escape the plague, the “red death,”   as  long as they don’t stop dancing. That’s like the public employees at the Dickens Pub thinking  they  can escape the unemployment line as long as they don’t stop drinking.

Guerilla Warfare

Because she has taken  on the public employees unions, Murray  has become the target of disgruntled  city employees. Encouraged by their  political allies in city government—council members John Haas and Nicholas Basham; City Solicitor Michael Jones; and City Clerk Joanne Aeh—disgruntled city employees are waging a kind of guerilla warfare against her.  They are sniping at her on local websites and spreading  lies and attempting to sabotage municipal services and functions. Just try to get a response for a public records request from City Solicitor Jones. I wrote in an earlier blog about  SLAPPING,    an acronym standing for  Strategic  Litigation Against Public Participation, or “How to Silence Your Critics by Using the Threat of Lawsuits.” Mike Mearan  attempted to silence me by initiating legal action he never intended to follow through on. Murray’s disgruntled public employees are engaged in a form of SLAPPing, bringing as many lawsuits as they can  to overwhelm he r with legal problems and prevent her from making the personnel cuts she thinks are necessary for the city to avoid bankruptcy. If all else fails, they hope to drive her crazy. 

The health benefits and retirement packages for public employees can be an even bigger financial burden for city governments than wages. The  costs associated with police and fire departments are among the biggest drain on city budgets nationwide. Fast-rising pension and health costs are making benefit costs grow more rapidly than wages. Some cities are taking drastic steps where fire and police departments are concerned. Oakland, California,  one of the most dangerous cities in the country, laid off eighty police officers as recently as  April 2010; and in San Jose California, on July 29, 2010, fifty-one firefighters  turned  in their badges and gear after negotiations with the city failed and they lost their jobs. The city had asked for a ten percent reduction in their pay as well as increased health care co-pays and premiums and other health care coverage reductions,  but the firefighters union  would agree to no more than a five percent reduction in their wages, but the San Jose  mayor said these concessions were not nearly enough to balance the budget. In Maywood, California, a densely populated, blue-collar suburb of Los Angeles, almost all city employees, including  the police department, were terminated. Maywood city services have nearly all been outsourced. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has a contract to provide law enforcement for the community,  at a big  saving to Maywood, which no longer has to pay wages, health insurance, and other benefits to local police. Chaos was predicted when Maywood let go about sixty public employees, taking the axe to everybody, including the police department, but the chaos and crime wave did not materialize. The headline of the story on Maywood in the New York Times was, “A City Outsources Everything. Sky Doesn’t Fall.” Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, doing away with almost all public employees?

As recently as August 3, 2010, the New York Times reported that more and more public employees  are being pressured to accept pay cuts rather than furloughs, which is a euphemism for  mandatory unpaid vacations. The mayor of Albuquerque  said, “When you’re trying to lower the cost of government while maintaining services, furloughs don’t do the trick.” The Times also reported that pay cuts are appearing most frequently among state and local governments, which are under extraordinary budget pressures and have often already tried furloughs, but have found, like the mayor of Albuquerque, that they are not enough to solve the financial dilemma. Mayors and governors across the country are pressuring public employees to accept a cut in pay and benefits, but nobody is calling their sanity into question as public employees and their allies are calling the Portsmouth  mayor’s  into question.  All of the financial crises in Ohio and the nation seem to have little effect on the public employees of Portsmouth. They want to help drive her out of office and replace her with someone who will continue to deny financial reality, and with the assistance of City Solicitor Jones, who is acting like the public employees’ puppet, those unions just might succeed. Who is the crazy one in  this situation, the mayor or the public employees unions?

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Bad Boy Basham

RECALL NICHOLAS BASHAM

Whereas Bad Boy Nicholas Basham, previous to becoming a member of the Portsmouth City Council, was best known, in my opinion, for throwing temper tantrums in the Northwest School District, where he is no longer employed but which he sued before he left; 

           

·       ·     whereas Basham, as a public school teacher, in my opinion, has set a bad example for young people by operating the Dicken's Pub, which deserves the nickname the Pernicious Pub, on  Portsmouth’s impoverished  East Side, where he glorifies and glamorizes the  consumption of alcohol as if we were back in the Roaring Twenties;

·         ·    whereas the first group Basham tried to lure to  the Pernicious Pub were the students of Shawnee State, offering them special deals that could lead  some of them, in my opinion, down the road to alcoholism;

·        ·    whereas Basham, in my opinion, went on to target as potential customers the public employees of the city of Portsmouth, who fear that their jobs are in jeopardy as a result of Mayor Murray’s determination to reduce the operating costs of city government;

·         ·    whereas Basham has established “Happy Hours” for public employees at the Pernicious Pub, offering them drinks at reduced prices, trying, in my opinion,  to get them hooked not only on the alcoholic “Happy Hours” that sometimes lead  to “Years of Misery,” but also to enlist them in  the Hate Jane Murray Movement  that he and Ward Five councilman John Haas are waging as part of their effort to recall her from office;

·         ·    whereas Basham, in my opinion, following the lead of Haas, has engaged publicly  in the campaign to recall Murray, in violation of the City Charter, which states (Sect. 82) that “No person receiving remuneration from the City and holding an appointive office or place in the City government shall act as an officer of a political organization, take part in a political campaign, serve as a member of a committee of any such organization, or circulate, or seek signatures to any petition provided for by primary or election laws, or act as a worker in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office”;

·         ·    whereas Nicholas Basham, for these and sundry other reasons, is unfit, in my opinion, for public office, he should be recalled forthwith from such office by the residents of Ward Three as is allowed for in the Portsmouth City Charter.

Tom Bihl: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

“I would suggest you leave a lot of that stuff to the Auditor and his department.” 

     Soon-to-be-recalled Mayor Bauer's bad  advice to city council regarding soon-to-be-indicted city auditor Tom Bihl (9 Feb. 1998).

     Frank Lewis of the Portsmouth Daily Times (PDT) reported in the Sunday edition (25 July 2010) that a  former police chief who is also a former city auditor, Thomas Bihl, has appointed himself the leader of the campaign to recall Portsmouth mayor Jane Murray because nobody else had stepped forward. Not one of  those people who have clamored for a recall of Murray on various websites and chatrooms had  the courage to come forward because that would have required them,  instead of hiding behind the mask of anonymity on the internet, to reveal who they are.

     Both  as police chief and city auditor Bihl  was and is becoming again, judging from the reaction of the public, a notoriously controversial figure. For somebody who has delegated himself  the  leader of the campaign to recall  Portsmouth mayor Jane Murray, he couldn’t have picked a worse person than  himself. Bihl  has too much baggage and dirty laundry to lead any kind of a crusade. Did Frank Lewis expose  any of  Bihl’s dirty laundry when he reported that “the former police chief” was leading the effort to recall Murray?  No, not one dirty  bit  of it.  Lewis’s job at the Portsmouth Daily Times, when he is not slanting the news, is to launder it. Nevertheless,  I don’t think Bihl's crusade  is likely to get farther than the three hundred block  of  Offnere St., the scene of one of the strangest ever automobile accidents in Portsmouth's  history.

Tom “Evel Knievel or Hell on Wheels” Bihl

     In  explaining why he is leading the recall campaign, Bihl told Lewis, “I like this city. I’ve been here all my life, and it really upsets me as to what has happened.”  By “as to what has happened,” he means  apparently what has happened  in the six months or so  Murray has been mayor. Bihl is in his early sixties. My question is why isn’t he  upset about what happened in Portsmouth in the last sixty years, including the twelve years he was chief of police?  A good part of the surge in  crime and drugs took place when   he was chief. And what about his  own shenanigans when he was  chief?  Let’s start  with the   Evel Knievel one-man demolition derby he performed   back in December 1992 on  Offnere.  That accident  was reported by Jeff Henson, in the Portsmouth Daily Times, back when there were still a few honest reporters at that newspaper, before they all left or were fired and replaced with the  likes of a Frank Lewis. According to  Henson’s  report, “Portsmouth Police Department Chief Thomas Bihl hit three parked  vehicles Tuesday night and totaled two of them.”  I can imagine how two cars coming from opposite directions and traveling above the speed limit on Offnere  might  be totaled, but how could two parked  vehicles on a street be totaled and by the chief law enforcement official in the city who couldn’t remember how it happened?  If he wasn’t drunk,  how did the accident happen? He told Henson he couldn’t remember how it happened but did insist he wasn’t intoxicated, even though a woman who was driving northbound on Offnere said she was nearly hit head-on by his van.

     Bihl was the boss of the  two  police officers, patrolman Brad Evans and Sergeant Steven Diamond, the first to arrive on the scene. They  did not give Bihl a breathalyzer test or issue him  a citation even though his failure to control his van was listed in the police report as the cause of the accident.  A mechanical failure was not the cause. Bihl was.  Patrolman Evans and Sergeant Diamond said they did not test Bihl for alcohol because they did not smell  alcohol on his breath. Maybe officers Evans and Diamond themselves should have been tested for olfactory dysfunction. Even the PDT, in a rare display of editorial moral outrage, found Bihl impossible to stomach. They checked with a police chief from another city who said his department would have insisted somebody outside the department do an investigation. A PDT   editorial, “Police Chief Should be Accountable, ” said of the apparent cover up of Bihl's culpability,  “For too long there has existed an image that two ‘classes’ exist, ‘the haves who can get away with anything’ and ‘everybody else’ ” (9 Dec. 1992).

Totally Smashed

     Bihl didn’t see anything wrong with totaling two vehicles and smashing another and not being tested or cited, but now he thinks Portsmouth with Murray as mayor is going to hell. He doesn’t specify in what ways it is going to hell. Could it be the high priority she has put on fighting drugs or the efforts she has made to make driving in the city less hazardous by getting  the traffic lights turned on again? Are those some of the ways she is  ruining the city?

     Bihl figured out  a public relations move to placate the public.  He ordered  Sergeant Diamond to cite him, after the fact,  which Diamond, following his boss’s orders,  did. Bihl was fined $61.00 in Municipal Court. Perhaps he  thought that would be  the end of it. But it wasn’t. Bihl had not only totaled two vehicles, he had badly damaged the image of the city  and the police department. As the PDT editorialized, “The manner in which this whole episode was handled  seriously jeopardizes the integrity of this entire [police] department.” Bihl’s boss, Mayor Frank Gerlach,  was  not impressed by Bihl’s performance as police chief. With Gerlach as mayor, Bihl did not have much job security. If Bihl  felt his days as chief were numbered, so did some other people. So what did Bihl do? He eventually  came up with the kind of solution that he could have gotten away with only in Portsmouth. The city auditor’s position was open because the previous auditor, who herself had been appointed to the office,  had resigned. Although he had neither the education or experience to be auditor, any more than the current auditor Trent Williams has,  Bihl  had supporters on the city council, including Jim Kalb and Ann Sydnor. Over the strong objections of  Mayor Gerlach, who claimed the city council was  violating the city charter,  the council appointed Bihl auditor, passing over a half dozen other candidates, one of whom was a Certified Public Accountant.  A PDT editorial (29 May 1997) criticized the city council  for allowing Bihl to “double-dip,” to retire from one city position and take another. The editorial pointed out that the council in appointing Bihl was going against a 1995 city ordinance that was intended to prevent double-dipping. “Appointing someone to a new city job before they’ve even left their current city position seems to contradict the stand they previously took.”

     Once appointed, one of  Bihl’s first acts as auditor, the PDT reported,  was to pay himself   some $15,370 in  unused sick days, which he  claimed he was entitled to since he had  retired as police chief. Gerlach argued that Bihl, as auditor,  was still employed by the city and would have to wait until he was retired before he could collect that money. The PDT quoted Gerlach as saying Bihl paid himself the money “with no oversight and no checks and balances” (8 June 1997).  Bihl claimed Gerlach had it in for him and was conducting a vendetta. Futhermore, Bihl claimed, adding insult to injury,  the city still owed him an additional $9,000 for unused vacation and holiday pay.  Only in Portsmouth!

     As auditor, Bihl conducted business in a way that has had far reaching, harmful  financial consequences for the city. At a meeting ( 9 February 1998),  the city council passed a budget that included a line-item budget provision that required the auditor  to have money in hand for any expenditure he approved. If the money was not there, he could not approve that  budget item. The intention was to stop the abuse  of having an auditor use money that had been appropriated for  one item being used for something else.  As Council member Ray Pyles pointed out at the same  council meeting, he had heard horror stories where a department was given $10,000 to pay phone bills but spent only $500 for calls and  the rest went to pay for something else, with no accountability. Bihl complained that not allowing him to move money around from  account to account tied his hands. Did he want more freedom  to finagle? Bihl was backed up by Greg Bauer, who had just been elected mayor, and who was about to help cook up the Marting Scam  in which almost 2 million dollars was allegedly illegally moved around. Bauer defended Bihl's moving money around, saying at the  same meeting (9 Feb. 1998),   “I would suggest you leave a lot of that stuff to the Auditor and his department.” The council followed Bauer's suggestion and repealed the provision that had prohibited Bihl from moving money around without the council's permission.

A Shady Bauer

Mayor Bauer, of course, adopted  the same “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Policy.” The city government has been following that policy ever since, taking money from one account or department to pay the expenses of another. This kind of finagling is in violation of state law, according to Murray, and is one of the reasons the city is in a critical budget shortfall. The water and sewer accounts in particular have been used as piggy banks to pay other operating expenses of city government, including salaries of public employees. Because the city council does not have to go to the voters for approval of rate hikes for water and sewers, it keeps  on raising those rates in part to pay for the generous health and retirement packages it pays city employees. Of  course the council and mayors Bauer and Kalb didn’t  dare end this “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Policy”  because the public employees unions would be up in arms with any official  who dared to tamper with this arrangement. That she has dared to tamper with the arrangement is one of the reasons  Murray is in such political hot water with public employees.  But she argues that the current economic crisis in the state, county, and city  allows her no alternative. The Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Policy will no longer work. At a political forum in the Welcome Center  late last fall, as the mayoral campaign neared its  end, Murray said Paul could no longer be paid  because Peter was broke. The piper must be paid, and the piper’s name is not Peter or Paul, and it is not Tom Bihl. It is John Q. Public who wants an end to the Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Policy that Bihl practiced as auditor.

     It is ironic  that Bihl, who helped put the city in the financial mess it’s in,  should be the one to lead the Recall Murray Campaign. Those who know Bihl have told me  he may be angling  for  yet a third  job with the city, maybe this time as mayor, or auditor again, which would be a case of triple dipping.  In the unlikely event that Bihl ever triple dips, the city could  have a financial crash that will make the demolition derby he was involved in on Offnere St. in 1992 look like a wheel coming off a soap box derby racer.

Robbing Peter to Pay Tom 

     The  low point of Bihl’s career as auditor came when his Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Policy finally caught up with him and he was indicted by a Scioto Grand Jury in May 1999 for theft in office. He was accused of having used the public treasury  to pay for repairs on his personal vehicle when he was police chief. He protested he was innocent and had simply made a bookkeeping error. But if  the personal vehicle in need of repairs was the  same van in which Bihl had  totaled two parked vehicles in 1992, then instead of stealing Indian Head Rock from Kentucky to teach local school children about  their Appalachian heritage, maybe the  city should have impounded Bihl’s  van  and  put it on display in the Welcome Center to show  visitors a genuine artifact of Portsmouth’s river vices culture. Or even better, maybe the van could have been placed in the display window of Marting’s Department store, itself a three-floor leaking monument to everything that is rotten in Portsmouth’s politics. The historic van could be accompanied in the display window with wax figures of the corrupt mayors,  police chiefs, and auditors, including Bihl, who have given city government such a bad name. And now that bad name may become even worse because Bihl (of all people!) has appointed himself the leader of the crusade to recall Mayor Murray. Do the other people who are serving on the recall committee (Grant Stephan, Ronald Meyers, Amy Kayser, and Tim Arms) really know who Bihl is and what his role has been in this city?  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I suspect they do not. 

(I want to thank the always vigilant Austin Leedom for important leads on this story.)

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Sewers of Portsmouth

"You're a numb-skull, Norton!"

I’m back. But I feel like Ed Norton of  The Honeymooners returning to work  after a six-month sabbatical  from the sewers of Brooklyn, only in my case it’s the sewers of Portsmouth, the political as well as the backed up physical ones. It’s like nothing has changed except for some of the rats. Before,  we had a drug dealing pimp on the city council, and now we have an alcohol-pushing public school teacher, and maybe that qualifies as an improvement. And the one lawyer we had on council has been replaced by another, which may not be much improvement. Think how much better this country would be if there was a constitutional amendment prohibiting lawyers from holding public office at every level of government, local, state, and national? In Portsmouth, each of the lawyers in question  got on council by first being appointed by the crooked majority of the city council, the preferred way by which most of the crooks  start their political careers. 

The current four-year term for council members well serves the few multimillionaires  that run Portsmouth, because it cuts down on elections, where there is at least the remote chance that an honest person might be elected. Traditionally, when a crooked council member is about to be recalled, as Howard Baughman was not long ago,  he  resigns, enabling the crooked majority on the city council to appoint another crook to replace him. That’s the way it works. When one turd  is flushed down the political toilet, another  one takes his place.

Baughman had been president of city council, and therefore next in line to be mayor if  the then-mayor, Jim "Sleepy Kalb," were recalled or for other reasons did not  finish his term. Oh, and how had Kalb become mayor?  Because he had been president of city council when Mayor Bauer had been recalled for his role in the city’s purchase of the worthless Marting building, a scam that smelled so bad that nauseated voters not only recalled Bauer but also booted several other council members out of office.

Effluvia Avenue

What did Baughman in, what led to his resignation from council, were sewers, specifically the sewers of  Grandview Avenue, where  occasional heavy rains cause sewage to back up into the basements of beleaguered homeowners. Baughman's failure to deal with that problem led to a recall movement that would very likely have resulted in his being removed from office. His recall would have given the voters of his ward the  opportunity not only to remove him but to choose  who his replacement would be. To frustrate that exercise in democracy and to insure that the council would have somebody as compliant and complicit as himself, Baughman resigned, ever loyal to the high and mighty low-lifes whose interests he served. The lawyer John Haas was appointed to take his place.

If sewers ended Baughman’s chances of being mayor, they improved those of Jane Murray, a resident  of the Grandview area who became the spokesperson and the champion of the angry homeowners, who felt they were being ignored by both the city government and by the neighboring Southern Ohio Medical Center, whose careless over-expansion they and Murray believed was the cause of their sewer problems. Maybe a  more appropriate name than Grandview  for the street they live and suffer  on would be Effluvia Avenue.

Apparently, the crooked politicians and the sewer problems we will always have with us. Murray claims that the  back up of sewage is taking place not just when it rains but also when it is dry, and that clogging waste from SOMC caused a back up in homes on Shawnee Road. Although it has agreed to install two grinders to pulverize hospital waste before it enters the  city sewage system, SOMC has denied being responsible for any blockage in that system.  Murray has appealed to the EPA to help resolve the problem.

In taking on the SOMC,  Murray is—how else can I put it—in deep doodoo. And it doesn’t help her that the Portsmouth Daily Times is always there to insinuate and slant, and that two new members of city council are conducting the “Bash ‘em and Haasle ‘em Show,” the purpose of which is, if not to drive her crazy, at least to drive her from office. I don’t know whether Murray is a good mayor or a bad mayor. I don’t know whether she deserves to be recalled or whether she deserves a medal. But I do know from day one, and even before day one, that there were those who were determined to do everything they could to insure that she fail. In Portsmouth, it  may be foolish for any man to challenge the Ole-Boy Network; it may be crazy for any woman to do so. 

Kalb Caught, Not Napping, but Coughing 

There was the last-place finisher Kalb in the front row of one of the first council meetings of Murray's tenure, last January,  acting childishly, according to a  Shawnee State reporter, coughing, coughing, coughing, making  fun of Murray’s claim that she had  replaced the carpet in the mayor’s office because it was making her and others ill as a result of the residue of the chain-smoking Kalb’s  years in that office where, it was rumored, he would, after working hours (if that is not an oxymoron where Kalb is concerned),  not so much  burn the midnight oil as  light up more than cigarettes. And who will ever forget the infamous  2 AM email to me in which he made an international asshole of himself. I know what a failed, incompetent  mayor is like. I am not prepared to conclude that that is what Murray is. Not yet. She must be given a chance to succeed before she can be dismissed as a failure. She whipped Kalb’s ass in the election, and showed him  how to run a campaign. She should be given the chance to show she knows how to run a city, even when that city is in deep financial trouble. 

I don’t like the odds of her succeeding—not with the SOGP and the SOMC; not with the municipal unions; not with the Daily Times; not with Kalb and his hangers-on;  not with the "Bash ‘em and Haasle ‘em Show"; not with all the rats in Portsmouth’s political sewers spewing forth  their effluvia  and causing back-ups in more than the basements of Effluvia Avenue. Without the rats and all, maybe Murray could succeed. Maybe I'm naive for thinking so.  Maybe. “You’re a numbskull, Norton, for thinkin’  any different,” as Ralph Kramden might say to his dim-witted buddy returning from his  six month sabbatical from the sewers.

Sabbatical

As announced in the previous posting, I am taking a sabbatical of about six months to devote more time to several other projects. I am providing, below, links to twenty-five earlier postings from the hundreds I have written about Portsmouth over the past four and a half years.

• "Digital Revolution," July, 2004.
• "Jesse Stuart's Ohio," Dec. 2004.
• "Recall of Mayor Bauer," March 2005.
• "Scioto Cesspool," April 2005.
• "Gutter Politics," June 2005.
• "Prayer" [David Malone], June 2005.
• "Adelphia Building," July 2005.
• "Hatchered" [Neal Hatcher], Aug. 2005.
• "Prostitution Culture," Oct. 2005.
• "Downtown Portsmouth," Oct. 2005.
  
• "Lord, Help Us!" [Timothy Loper], Nov. 2005.
• "Double Cross" [Cornerstone Methodist Church], Dec. 2005.
• "The Blogosphere," Dec. 2005.
• "Estate Planning Scam," Dec. 2005.
• "Police State" [Chief Horner] Feb. 2006.
• "Porksmouth," March 2006.
  
• "Southern Ohio Growth Partnership," April 2006.
• "Shadow Government" [SOGP], May 2006.
• "Political Puppets" [City Council], August 2006.
• "The Finger" [Neal Hatcher], Sept. 2006.
• "Gambling," Nov. 2007.
• "Trial of Harald Daub," March 2009.
• "Kiwanis Playground," Sept. 2009.
• "Kalb: Burning the Midnight Oil," Sept. 2009.

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Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions We Wish Kalb had Made and Kept

1) I will not be lazy.

2) I will not be incompetent.

3) I will not be quarrelsome.

4) I will not whine.

5) I will not be a lapdog.

6) I will not drive to Kentucky in an official car for cigarettes and lottery tickets.

7) I will not blame my terrible reputation on a few “malcontents.”

8) I will not leave my successor a half million dollar deficit.

9) I will not create fraudulent public records to cover my ass.

10) I will not gain international notoriety as an ignorant, foulmouthed redneck.








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