The Black Mold of Portsmouth

“The black mold Adelphia building still stands, or rather rots, on Washington Street, a monument to the hanky-panky our politicians play by taking worthless property off the hands of the well-heeled.”

 Five years ago, on July 24, 2006, articles about the Adelphia Building appeared in the Portsmouth Daily Times and the Community Common. Written by Jeff Barron, the opening line of the PDT report was, “Several members of the city building committee gave good reviews to the former Adelphia Communications building Wednesday for use as a police station.”

The Building Committee members were Mayor Jim Kalb and his sidekick Terry Ockerman; First Ward councilman Mike Mearan, who was the chairman; antique dealer Kevin Johnson; and pawnbroker Jim Robinson. The committee  was  accompanied on its visit to the Adelphia building by Police Chief Charles Horner and Captain David Thoroughman.

The committee didn’t just give good reviews to the building; it fell in  love with it. Robinson was quoted as saying, “[I]t seems to be perfect for what they’re wanting. There’s no reason to look anywhere else. My vote would go for it.” He wasn’t talking about the Taj Mahal; he was talking about the ugly, leaking Adelphia building. And what did antiques dealer Kevin Johnson say? He said he was happy with the building because it solved a lot of problems.  The Adelphia building didn’t solve any problems, as far as I can see. Instead,  it created a lot more. For one thing,  the black mold in  the Adelphia building was worse than in the Municipal Building, so how would moving the police department from the Municipal Building to the Adelphia building solve any problems? But Chief Horner was in favor of the move. Why? I believe he was in cahoots with  Neal Hatcher and Mike Mearan, two big backers of the move.

All the News Unfit to Print

Jeff Barron wrote a sentence in his article that makes it easy to see now why he would later be canned. “The building has a musty smell in it and some parts of the ceiling have fallen down.” Barron didn’t realize that there is always news that the PDT does not consider fit to print, news that might upset advertisers or somebody with influence, such as Andy Glockner who didn’t like it when Barron reported that a man who had been arrested for dealing drugs was a mechanic at Glockner Motors. As a PDT reporter Barron  had no business smelling anything or noticing anything falling down, even if it was the ceiling. The musty smell may have been the black mold, which nobody noticed, not even Chief Horner, who is now claiming to have been made ill by black mold in the basement of the Municipal Building.   

With twenty-twenty hindsight, we now know the Adelphia building was a swindle, as the Marting building had been before it. The absentee Adelphia landlord’s lawyer, Mike Mearan, the chairman of the Building Committee, had engineered the crooked deal  by foisting the building  off on the city, which still has it on its hands, like a dead dog  run over by a truck five years ago. The Adelphia building still stands, or rather rots, on Washington Street, a monument to the hanky-panky our politicians play by taking worthless property off the hands of the well-heeled. The city  doesn’t have the money to tear the unsightly building  down, so it remains a monumental eyesore, as it was back in 2006, when the committee and Horner made goo-goo eyes at it. Horner since then has made goo-goo eyes at least several other buildings he’d like to move the police force to.

Kalb The Count

“. . . ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine for the Adelphia building and one against.”

Not only the Building Committee, but everybody in Portsmouth was for moving the police force from the Municipal Building to the Adelphia building, according to Mayor Kalb who will probably be back snoozing on the city council after the November election. Kalb told the Community Common  on that same day, five years ago, July 24, 2006, “When we had the Martings’ forum at Portsmouth High School, 99 out of 100 people that turned in a ballot believed the Police Department should be in the former Adelphia Building.” Can you believe that? Who counted those ballots? Was it Kalb? Was he The Count? Who cast that one dissenting vote? Probably one of those  uncooperative CAVE people.

The city accepted the Adelphia building on the condition, stated  in ordinance 20-2005, that “said real estate . . . is free from all environmental hazards.” If ever the city came into possession of a building that was not free of environmental hazards, it was the Adelphia building, which was about as free of environmental hazards as the Gulf of Mexico was of oil pollution during the oil spill of 2010.  The absentee landlord, who had allowed the building to deteriorate for years, unloaded the building on the city so he could  get a tax write-off, but he could get it only if the building was free of environmental hazards and only if it was subsequently used for some public purpose, which it hasn’t been. It sits there useless five years later, as contaminated as ever. Did the landlord  illegally claim his tax write off to the IRS? Only the absentee landlord knows.

 Each of the last four  mayors wanted to fire Horner. They  understood he was not to be trusted. They understood he is incompetent, disloyal to the bone, and insubordinate to boot. He works hard as police chief, but what he works hard at is  trying  to undermine whomever the mayor might be before the mayor can fire him. He currently has the well-intentioned but naïve Solace group in his pocket. Nine women from Solace reportedly sat in the front row of the  city council meeting last Monday night to complain about the mold in the Municipal Building and to say that  the police force should have a new police station. If the Solace-inspired levy to support drug rehabilitation programs goes down to defeat next November, it will in part be because Horner has infiltrated that group like black mold does the interior of old, leaking buildings. Horner is the black mold of Portsmouth politics, and the air will continue to be contaminated  until some mayor succeeds in firing him.

McGruff the Crime Dog 

In an article in the PDT (19 August 2011),  “SOLACE Vows to Find PPD New HDQ,” Horner is quoted as saying, in compliance with the mayor's restraining order against him shooting off his mouth, that he has not had any direct discussions with SOLACE members about finding a new home for the police station. But there Horner was (in the photo below) at the emergency meeting of SOLACE, hours before the Monday night council meeting at which members of SOLACE showed up to support Horner and his campaign for a new police station. The distrustful dog in the photo apparently hilariously, like McGruff the Crime Dog, tried to take a bite out of Horner.  SOLACE may find next November  that there are a lot of voters in Portsmouth who feel like McGruff and don’t trust Horner.  It is  a shame the good people of SOLACE have allowed their organization to become so politicized and exploited by Horner.

Police Chief Horner (on left) at the emergency kitchen cabinet meeting of SOLACE on Monday, August 22, just after "McGruff" tried to take a bite out of him, not long before the city council meeting that evening. Is this what Horner meant by having no discussions with SOLACE members?

Gerlach Says No to City Manager

Frank Gerlach, former city manager and mayor of Portsmouth

I don't think  there's anything wrong with the city manager-council form of city government for some cities, but Portsmouth never has been and is not likely ever to be one of those cities. Nobody knows that better than Frank Gerlach who has served as both city manager and mayor. As Mark Shaffer wrote in the Scioto Voice (18 July 2001), Gerlach believes reverting to a city manager would be a step backward. "I would say the city needs a mayor rather than a city manager," Gerlach concluded. 

That is not to say, and Gerlach is not saying, that the current mayor-council system is satisfactory. Far from it. That system needs to change, but reverting to the city manager system would only make things worse. 

In case you have not read Mark Shaffer's Scioto Voice story, I am reproducing it here. Like Jeff Barron and Mike Deaterla, Shaffer used to report for the Portsmouth Daily Times before that newspaper stopped making even a pretense at providing balanced news coverage about the city. 

Portsmouth Murals Cover Up

Mural of Muse of Art on Portsmouth Floodwall

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Portsmouth Murals. But if the Portsmouth murals can be said to have an Achilles’ heel, then it’s the way they don’t depict unpleasant truths about the city, past and present.

A little known incident is a good place to begin a discussion of the “cover up.”  Among the very last of the fifty-two panels on the main flood wall are panels  #49 and #51, the Muses of History and  Art. Muses are figures from what we call Greek mythology or what  more accurately should be called Greek religion, for who is to say which religions are mythological?  The Greeks believed that the Muses, or goddesses, were spirits who inspired artists to create. The Greeks and Romans did not hesitate to  depict the muses sculpturally as topless, or  bare breasted, and that is the way they have often been depicted in sculpture and painting in the Christian era.

Bare-breasted  is the way Robert Dafford intended to paint the muses in murals #49 and #51. “However,” according to a footnote at the very end of A Thirst for Land (2004), “the Portsmouth Murals trustees  thought that this might cause a bit of controversy and asked that the paintings be ‘covered up.’” Dafford apparently complied with the trustees’ wishes and covered up the muses. Muses may have inspired Dafford to paint the murals, but the Trustees of Portsmouth Murals, Inc., who were paying him, largely with public money, called the tune. At all costs, even the cost of the truth, controversy must be avoided. The last thing the  Trustees of Portsmouth Murals, Inc., and the Chamber of Commerce wanted depicted in the murals is the naked truth.

Black Friday

It  is not just breasts that got covered up or omitted in the Portsmouth murals. The mistreatment of blacks is among the great crimes of American history.  One shameful example from  Portsmouth’s past  was the so-called Black Friday. In “Relics of Barbarism,” which is Chapter VII of his History of Scioto County (1903), Nelson Evans wrote about Black Friday:  “On January 21 [sic], 1830, all the colored people of Portsmouth were forcibly deported from the town. They were not only warned out, but they were driven out. They were forced to leave their homes and belongings.” A Thirst for the Land  repeats Evans’ account of Black Friday, and the historian C.G. Woodson mentioned Portsmouth’s Black Friday in The Education of the Negro (1919), providing the correct date of Black Friday—January 1, 1830. (The date of the proclamation and of the expulsion were probably not the same.) Of the fifty-two panels on the main flood wall, couldn’t one have depicted this tragic event in the city’s history?  The point is not to have a Murals of Shame. There is much to be proud of in Portsmouth’s past, but to exclude an episode as important as Black Friday distorts history. Doesn’t the bible say the truth can make us free? Whether it’s Portsmouth’s racism, unemployment, poverty, drugs, prostitution, or political  corruption,  covering  up or ignoring the truth helps perpetuate rather than remedy the wrongs.

Missing Memorial Mural

   Until such time as Robert Dafford paints a Black Friday mural, Theodor Kaufmann’s painting of fugitive slaves (below), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, could serve as a substitute for the yet-to-be-painted, probably never-to-be-painted, missing memorial mural, “Black Friday: Expulsion from Portsmouth.” 

City Manager for Portsmouth: Deja Vu All Over Again?

City Manager Barry Feldman after being suspended by City Council

Portsmouth’s unhappy experience in the early 1980s  with the city manager-council form of government helps explain why the voters decided to return to  the mayor-council form of government in 1988. Now  some misguided folks as well as the usual crooks want to switch back to the city manager-council form of government. When will they ever learn? It’s as if Barry Feldman never existed. Feldman was the city manager of Portsmouth  during the early 1980s,  a period of political upheaval that he was primarily responsible for. I don’t see Feldman’s name on Portsmouth’s Wall of Fame, which occupies the river side of the floodwall. If it was a Hall of Shame, Feldman’s name should be right up there with all the other crooks. (For more on Feldman, click here.)

Under the council-manager form of government the city manager is supposed to follow the direction  of the city council, but in 1980 Feldman followed the orders not of the city council but of the plutocrats who control Portsmouth. A plutocracy is government in which the wealthy hold political power, and Portsmouth has been a plutocracy since at least as far back as 1980.  In 1980, a  majority of three council members wanted to fire Feldman,  which they had the right to do under the  city charter, but the plutocrats helped organize a  successful campaign to recall the three councilmen.  Their recall was an example of plutocracy, not democracy, at work.

The basic problem with the council-manager form of government is that instead of checks and balances,  it concentrates  the  legislative and executive powers in one branch of municipal government—the city council. Under the city manager-council form of government, the city council exercises both executive and legislative functions and the  city manager is merely the administrative servant of the council. Under the city manager-council form of government, the city manager is  the servant of  the city council, a housekeeper: at worst, which is what Feldman was, the city manager is the  eunuch in the harem of prostitutes financed by the plutocracy.

Bottom of the Barrel

Under the present city charter, anyone can run for city council provided he or she is a registered voter, and therefore at least eighteen years of age; anyone can run for city council who has lived in the city for at least five years (that’s the Portsmouth Boy provision) and have been a resident for at least six months in  the ward they are seeking to represent. They don’t need to be high school graduates; they don’t  need to have finished  grade school. They don’t need to pass a mental competency or drug test. They can be a fool, a crook, and a crony, and too often are. They are the failures and the losers, they are the bottom of the barrel of bad apples. And these are the ones who are going to tell the city manager what to do?

If the the majority of city council members were honest, intelligent, and competent,  the manager-council form of government would make sense. But when was the last time the majority of the Portsmouth City Council were honest, intelligent, and competent? In 1980, that’s when, but that majority was recalled from office precisely because they were, intelligent and competent and above all honest. While there have been notable exceptions, of course, like Bob Mollette, the majority of the Portsmouth city council is usually dishonest, dumb, and  incompetent, and they serve the interests not of the public but of the plutocrats—the wealthy lawyers, developers, and beneficiaries of the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership. A city manager would be at the mercy of the failures and political hacks—the Bauers, the Kalbs, the Malones—who gravitate to city council with the hope of becoming mayor by default—by recalls, by resignations by those facing recall, and by indictments.

In summary, the council-manager form of city government would make Portsmouth a worse, not a  better place,  and God and now the rest of the country knows our notorious, corrupt, pill-popping  river city is bad enough as it is. 

Cartoon from early 1980s showing city manager Feldman mauling Portsmouth taxpayers

City Solicitor Mike Jones: Gotcha or Botcha?

Did Mike Jones play “gotcha” or “botcha” in the charter amendment case?

     The case of  Patricia Smith, et al. vs. the Board of Elections of Scioto County, et al., involves the challenge to the results of the special election of Feb. 3, 2009. In that election the voters approved an amendment to the Portsmouth City Charter to limit the taxing power of the City of Portsmouth. That amendment  read, in part, “No taxes may be levied on the property owners of the City of Portsmouth for the retirement of any bonded indebtedness without the approval of such levy by a majority of electors [emphasis added] of the city of Portsmouth. Bonded indebtedness for the construction, acquisition and/or improvement of city property costing more than $100,000 in total may be incurred only by approval of  a majority of the electors [emphasis added] of the city at the next general election or a special election called by the Council. . . .” If instead of “electors” that proposed amendment had said “voters,” there would have been no court case and I would not be writing this piece, but the law, like life, is not an exact science, and mistakes are often made.

Too often life is a  matter of trying to minimize or, conversely,  to take advantage  of the consequences of mistakes. Smith, Evens, et al., represented by Rodeheffer and George L. Davis, the III and IV, is trying  to take advantage of the mistake the authors of the proposed charter amendment made when they used “electors” instead of “voters.” Electors are those citizens eligible to vote. Voters are those electors who actually vote. All voters are electors, but not all electors are voters. There were approximately 6000 electors who could have voted in the Feb. 3, 2009 special election. If a majority of electors was required to pass the proposed amendment, then it didn’t pass, because only 584 of those who voted were for it, and 584 is clearly not a majority of 6000+ electors. Smith, Evans et al. challenged the results of the special election in the Scioto County Common Pleas Court, which agreed with them and invalidated the results of the election.
   However, the Ohio Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling, pointing out that Smith, Evans, and other residents of Portsmouth, including city officials, such as the city solicitor, should have challenged the language prior to the special election. The Supreme Court stated, “Appellees could have raised their claims in a timely pre-election protest to the petition,” and, “Election contests may not be used as a vehicle for asserting an untimely protest.” It was common knowledge in Portsmouth prior to the special election that City Solicitor Mike Jones was telling others with relish that  the language of the charter amendment was faulty and that if it did pass it would be challenged in court. Instead of objecting to the wording of the amendment prior to the election, Jones played the game of gotcha! That is how he, like the  city solicitor before him, saw his job: betraying the people on behalf  of Portsmouth’s puppet masters.  But we now know, from things like the “misfiring” of Mayor Kalb and the “mistrial” of  Harald Daub, that Jones plays the game of botcha! much better than he plays gotcha!

Will Democracy Triumph?

The case is now under consideration in the Scioto County Court of Common Pleas, with visiting Judge William J. Corzine presiding. After showing the persistence of a bulldog, Essman is no longer involved in the case, but four citizens, Jerry Conkle, Austin Leedom, Harald Duab, and Ray Mitchell,  have become defendants in intervention, petitioning the court to dismiss the motion of Smith, Evans, et al., to invalidate the results of the Feb. 3, 2009, election. Only time and Judge Corzine will tell whether democracy will triumph. In the meanwhile the results of the special election remain in effect, and the city government cannot pull the financial shenanigans it has in the past, such as it did when it unloaded the decrepit Marting building  onto the taxpayers of Portsmouth. The taxpayers owe a vote of thanks to Essman and the others who have worked so hard and long on their behalf.

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

Smokers' Lungs

A non-smoker's and a smoker's lungs

To deter smoking, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed putting five gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. Some experts believe this will not be an effective deterrent. When asked his opinion on the FDA proposal by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David J. Linden, author of Compass of Pleasure, said studies have shown the effectiveness of anti-smoking warnings wear off fairly rapidly. This is at least partly because the circuitry  of the brain of an addicted person is permanently rewired. There is no such thing as ex-alcoholics, for example; rather, there are alcoholics who no longer drink, just as there are nicotine addicts who no longer smoke. Perhaps addicts need to understand that they are always going to be addicts; the goal is not to be somebody you are not. It is hard enough to be an addict who successfully successively says no; to be an addict who is not an addict is impossible because your brain knows better. You and your brain have to be on the same page or the book is not going to make sense.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr, a Canadian environmental psychologist works with communities to instill lasting behavioral change. The Boston Globe reported McKenzie-Mohr believes such information campaigns, like the FDA's,  “have virtually no likelihood of changing behavior.” He apparently knows other ways to help the addicted.

All in the Family

I am the ninth child in a family of sixteen (counting my Irish- and Norwegian-American parents), all of whom survived into adulthood except the second child who died in the diphtheria epidemic following the First World War. Everyone in the family, except me, became smokers. How I escaped has always puzzled me. One possible explanation is that in grade school our class visited the Boston Museum of Science, where I saw a smoker’s and a non-smoker's lungs suspended in formaldehyde in a glass display case. I think the display was not far from the museum entrance, so it was hard to miss. Children are very impressionable and highly educable. I’m not certain I learned my lesson about the evils of smoking from that ghastly smoker’s lung I saw as a child, but I think having a smoker’s lung at the entrance of every grade school in America might  be a far more effective way of deterring smoking than putting gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. By the time a kid  takes a cigarette out of a package, somewhere between the ages of eleven and say fifteen, it is already too late. Peer pressure and the billions of dollars the cigarette industry have spent, directly or indirectly, to addict kids, will have their effect, and as for adults who have been smoking for years, forget it, because that's what most of them will do, forget it, as studies of anti-smoking warnings have shown. The chances are a smoker’s palpable lung near the entrance of grade schools will do more to deter kids from smoking than a hundred gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. If the lung I witnessed once when I was about nine or ten made such a difference, what would it do witnessed over and over again, K through 12?

In addition to being heavy smokers, my family were also heavy drinkers of both alcohol and coffee—strong black espresso-like coffee the morning after. Following my father’s and older brothers’ examples, I began drinking coffee in the morning at about the age of eight and was so strung out on caffeine  by the time I was fifteen that I knew I had to break the habit and I did, but I continued getting an occasional fix on coffee ice cream, which habit I did not break until I was in my early twenties. I might not have been able to break the caffeine addiction if I had been addicted to nicotine. Since addiction to caffeine lays the groundwork for all the other addictions, reducing its occurrence could have far reaching benefits. As the twig is bent, so shall the tree grow. In Portsmouth, Ohio, now notorious as the Oxycontin capital of America, how many have graduated from caffeine to nicotine to oxycodone? Instead of using the purloined Indian Head rock to teach kids in south-central Ohio about their cultural heritage, as state representative Todd Book preposterously proposed, how about having a smoker’s lung at the entrance not just of each grade school, but of the middle school and high school too? Maybe if some of our addicted politicians—addicted to dishonesty as  well as to drugs—and their puppet masters would will their lungs to the public schools, they would be doing more in death for future generations than they ever did in life. 

5: Oxy & Contin: From Zanesville to Zanzibar

“ 'You’ll  probably find it hard to believe and you might even think I’m crazy,’ the doctor said, spreading his arms wide apart to indicate how wide of the truth what he was about to say might seem.”

Chapter 5

“It’s only Heck,” the embarrassed doctor said when the rat hopped out of the drawer up on to the  desk.

“Who?” the man with the shaved head said.

Now that she was over the shock of seeing the rat in the drawer,  Barbie felt sorry for the confined creature. “The poor thing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” the man with the shaved head said to Barbie, seeing an opportunity  to display his wit. “He’s top drawer, ain’t he?”

“I wish I hadn’t screamed,” Barbie said. “I mean rats have feelings too, don’t they?”

 “It probably couldn’t breathe in there,” the hollow-eyed woman sympathized.

“I know rats aren’t as clean as  cats, and baby rats aren’t as  cuddly as kittens,” Barbie said,  “but that’s no reason for people to treat rats like, well, like . . .”

“Like rats,” the man with the shaved head quipped.

“Exactly,” Barbie said.

“But why was the rat in the desk in the first place?” Madelyn asked. 

“Because he’s  my pet,” the doctor said.

 “Pet rat?” Barbie said, looking at her mother. “And I can’t have a pet kitten?”

“You can’t have a pet kitten, and you can’t stay here another minute. Please go home now, Barbie,” her mother insisted.

“But why was the rat in the desk?” Barbie asked, repeating her mother’s question.

 “I’m done answering questions,” the doctor said.  “I would like  everybody out of my office.” When no  one appeared willing to be the first to exit, as is sometimes the case with guests at a party, he said, firmly, “Now!”

Clutching her prescription as if it was a winning lottery ticket, the  hollow-eyed woman left. The  doctor scribbled an Oxycontin prescription for the man with the shaved head.

“Here's yours, Theodore,” the doctor said. 

 “Call me, Ted, doc,”  the man said  as he put his copy of The Road to Serfdom under his arm. He stopped in the doorway, and said, the tattooed inscription on his brow looking like an epitaph on tombstone, “Oh, by the way. In case anyone's interested, I'm a lay preacher.”  Before she left,  Barbie wanted to give Oxy and Contin a hug, but they were still in her mother’s  arms, so she didn’t dare. Not that they noticed. They were still staring bug-eyed  at the rat on the desk.

 “What’s going to happen to the kittens?” Barbie asked.

 “Never mind what’s going to happen to the  kittens,” her mother said. “It’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t  get your little behind  home as fast as you can.”  

 Barbie replied petulantly, “Oh, why did we ever leave Zanesville!” Sulking,  she turned on the heels of her Keds and left.

Except for the rat and the kittens, Madelyn and the doctor were alone in the office. The doctor looked at Madelyn, waiting for her to leave. Instead,  she  deposited  the kittens on top of the tall, three-drawer  metal file cabinet. Being higher than they had ever been before, at least physically, the  kittens crouched together anxiously.  

“Why are you putting them up there?” the doctor asked.

“Because I’d like to I have a word with you, doctor,” she said. “I think you owe me an explanation.”  

 “Isn’t it you who owe me an explanation?” the doctor replied, walking over and closing the door, causing  Oxy and Contin to look  at each other in alarm, because they understood in the way cats have of understanding things, that even if they could get down from the file cabinet, there was no escape from the office.

 “I owe you an explanation? For what?” she asked.

“For them,” the doctor said, nodding  toward  the kittens.  He moved closer to them. Because he was only five foot four,  he stood about eye to eye with the elevated kittens.  Intimidated by his piercing eyes, which were enlarged by his thick glasses, they edged as far back on top of the cabinet as they dared.

“I’ll apologize for Barbie,” Madelyn said, “but those are not my kittens.” 

“Then whose are they?”

“I don’t know that they’re anybody’s,” she said. “But I know whose rat that is. What I  don’t know is why it was in your desk.”

“Why was Heck  in my desk? That’s what you want to know?” He stopped staring at the kittens and stared at her.

“Yes,” she said, wilting a bit under his gaze.

As he stared at her, she wished, instead of confronting him,  that she had left his  office when he asked her to. Realizing there was nothing to stop him from firing her, she  was suddenly very anxious. She recalled what Barbie had said about wishing they had never left  Zanesville. She craved an Oxycontin,  but they were in her pocketbook, which was locked in her desk in the outer office. “It’s probably none of my business,” she muttered, taking a step back, giving ground, both literally and figuratively.

 “You’ll  probably find it hard to believe and you might even think I’m crazy,” the doctor said, spreading his arms wide apart to indicate how wide of the truth what he had to say might seem. But I’ll tell you anyway,”  he continued, as  he began kneading  the  back of the rat’s neck with the knuckle of the middle  finger of his right hand. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, noticing her startled look.

“Wrong?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen anybody pet a rat.”

“Oh,” he said shrugging, “it’s just a habit.  I wasn’t even conscious I  was doing it. But petting a rat is really no different from  petting a kitten, is it?” To prove his point, the  doctor stopped kneading Heck’s neck and reached up and took Contin in his arms. “See,” he said as he began rubbing the back of Contin’s neck. Taking advantage of being in the doctor’s arms, Contin  licked his fingers eagerly, finding traces of Oxycontin on them.  

“But why was the rat—”

“Call him Heck, please,” the doctor interrupted her.

“Why was it—why was Heck—in the drawer?” she asked.

As he considered whether to answer her question, the doctor  put Contin back on top of the file cabinet. Relieved to have his sister back, Oxy welcomed her by wagging his little tail, but when he nuzzled with her he picked up the scent of fresh Oxycontin and began licking her mouth ravenously.

 “Some people might  say instead of bats in the belfry,  I’ve got rats in the drawer,” the doctor told Madelyn, with a humorless grin, as he resumed Heck’s backrub.

The phrase Madelyn was thinking of, as the doctor resumed his massage of the rat, was not that he had bats in the belfry but that he didn’t have all his marbles. But all she said was,  “I wouldn’t say that. I’m just a hick  from Ohio. What do I know? If people at Harvard keep rats in drawers, they must have a reason.”

 With a condescending smile, the doctor said, “You think people keep rats in drawers at Harvard?”  Picking up the rat up by his hind quarters and looking  him straight in the eye, the doctor said, “Well, I suppose we should explain,  shouldn’t  we, Heck? There’s no point in keeping her in the dark, is there?”

Heck made vigorous motions with his paws, as if he were a mute  lifeguard giving swimming instructions to a passenger on the deck of the Titanic.  Like children watching from the balcony of the theater of the absurd,  Oxy and Contin looked down on the scene in complete perplexity.

  Looking at his wrist watch, the doctor told her, “We’re wasting time. Why don’t you go out and tell our impatient patients there'll be a  delay.”  

When Madelyn stepped outside, she saw the line had thinned out. Because of the cold and delay, some of the less desperate—deserters from the army of addicts— had drifted away.  Without saying what it was, Madelyn announced that the doctor had to deal with an emergency inside. 

“It don’t have somethin’ to do with those kittens, does it?” asked a wiry fellow in a Caterpillar Tractor cap. “I think they got the rabies myself,” he said, only he pronounced it “rabbis,” and he  spat a mouthful of chaw as an exclamation point. When she went back inside, Madelyn  was shaking with tremors, craving an Oxycontin, but when she discovered that her drawer was unlocked  and her pocketbook not in it, she hurried to the bathroom to see if she had left it there, which she sometimes did, but it wasn’t there either. If only she could remember what she had done with her pocketbook. Had she even taken it out of her car that morning? She took a moment to brace herself before going back in the doctor’s office, but she stopped before reentering when she heard his voice. Assuming he  was on his cell phone, she decided to wait before entering.

“I know, I know,” she heard the doctor say. “She probably isn’t  going to believe me, but I’ve got to tell her something.  What?” There was a pause. Madelyn assumed the person at the other end of the call was telling the doctor something. “Oh, it’s reassuring that you think so,” he said with a tinge of sarcasm,  “but what you and I think is one thing, but what  she thinks is another. What was that?” Another pause. “Yes, yes, I agree. I should have kept my mouth shut at Harvard.  But we’re not at Harvard anymore, are we?” Pause. “All right! All right! Let’s not get into that again. Yes, yes, I know. I couldn't have trusted Summers. I know, I know. He’s a snake. I should have listened to you.” There was another pause after which the doctor said in a lowered voice. “What? She’s standing outside my door?” There was a pause. “Madelyn,” the doctor called. “Are you out there?”

“Yes, doctor,” she said entering guiltily, embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping. The doctor, was  seated behind the desk facing the rat. But how could whoever the doctor had been talking to know she was outside the door?

“How long were you out there?” he asked.

“Just a few seconds” she fibbed. “I thought you were on your cell phone.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said.

“You weren’t?” She looked around the office. Except for the kittens  on the file cabinet  and the rat on the desk, there was no one else in the office.  “Who were you talking to?”

“I was talking to Heck,” he said.

 “What?” she asked incredulously.

“Well, not exactly talking,” he said.

“But how . . . ?”

“I’ll try to explain,” he said.

“Yes, doctor, why don’t you explain what this is all about,” Madelyn  said finally, sinking emotionally drained into the chair that had been previously occupied by the hollow-eyed woman. 

What Madelyn had on her mind at that moment, however, was not the hollow-eyed woman or the man with the tattooed inscription on his shaved head, or Barbie, or the kittens on the file cabinet, or the rat on the desk, but her missing pocketbook with the Oxycontin. 

“Oh, by the way. In case anyone's interested, I'm a lay preacher.”