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
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.
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