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?

.

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.)

,

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.

.

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.








.

PDT: Bankrupt!

On December 21, 2009, Heartland Publications, the parent company of the Portsmouth Daily Times, filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. As of October 2009, Heartland had debts of $166.2 million but assets of only $134.3 million, which is a deficit of some $32 million. Heartland announced that it hoped to restructure itself, emerge from bankruptcy, and eventually return to profitability. Given the precarious financial condition of newspapers generally in the United States, and of Heartland Publications in particular, the prospects of Heartland ever returning to profitability seems like a pipe dream and its announcement just a hollow public relations pronouncement. When, pray tell, was Heartland, founded by James M. McGinnis, Jr., in 2004, ever profitable?

The federal government used stimulus packages to bail out Citigroup and other financial institutions as well as General Motors, which are showing signs of recovery. But the government is not about to bail out the newspaper industry. No one can seriously make the case that newspapers are too important to the economy to be allowed to fail. On the contrary, print newspapers are an increasingly obsolete if not irrelevant industry. As many residents in Portsmouth have learned, the incredibly shrinking Portsmouth Daily Times is something they can easily live without. For those of us who feel that it is editorially bankrupt and believe that it is the house organ of the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership, the financial bankruptcy of its parent company comes as no surprise. Like the system of canals that were built in Ohio and elsewhere in the United States in the early nineteenth century, canals that were subsequently rendered obsolete by railroads, the newspaper industry is being rendered obsolete by the Internet. Perpetuating newspapers makes about as much sense, financially, as perpetuating canals.

In addition to suffering from the same economic problems that other newspaper companies are plagued with, Heartland Publications has problems peculiar to itself. McGinnis, the founder and CEO of Heartland, turned out to be not only incompetent but a crook. He made his home and headquartered his business, incidentally, not in the heartland of America, but in Florida, and he drove a car produced not in the American heartland, but in England, a gold Jaguar. In a plea bargain, McGinnis later admitted having stolen $1.7 million from his own company after which he forged bank account statements to cover his theft. (I wrote about McGinnis in River Vices back in 2005 in “Prostitute Times.”) McGinnis reportedly had named his company Heartland because his weekly and small daily newspapers were located in what used to be called America’s heartland but what is now more often referred to as America’s Rust Belt. It is too often the case that con artists use patriotic names and sacred symbols in which to wrap their greedy and ill-conceived schemes, as McGinnis did Heartland, which now, not surprisingly, has gone belly up.

The Portsmouth Daily Times’s parent Heartland Publications filing for bankruptcy came fast on the heels of an announcement by the newspaper that it had appointed Deborah Daniels, previously a features reporter, as managing editor. Whether she is “acting” (i.e., temporary) or permanent managing editor is not clear, but at this point what’s the difference? Isn’t everyone at the PDT now effectively temporary? Daniels may have been the reporter who some years back wrote a series of investigative articles on prostitution in Portsmouth. It is the only investigative reporting that I can recall the PDT doing in the last twenty years. If I recall, she or whoever wrote the series concluded prostitution was a result of drugs, to which most of the prostitutes were addicted, but she apparently did not investigate the notorious local lawyer who was and still is widely rumored to be involved in both the drug and prostitution rackets in Portsmouth. PDT reporters would not do that kind of investigation because certain local lawyers like certain local businessmen enjoy an immunity from investigation and prosecution

Au Revoir River Vices

I will be taking a sabbatical from River Vices for the first half of 2010 to prepare a publication for the 300th anniversary of a church in my hometown, in Massachusetts, which I mentioned in a previous posting. I know that the results of the recent municipal elections in Portsmouth, while encouraging, do not signal the end of the problems plaguing our community, including drugs and prostitution, but rather just the first tentative steps toward addressing them. I wish I could continue to investigate and comment on those problems in the months ahead. But I know from the past four and a half years of writing River Vices that it takes up more time than most people might imagine. It is not the writing—it is the research and the editing (the editing above all) that demands so much time. I envy those who can knock off a piece of writing with no sweat in no time. I agonize over each word and sentence and I revise constantly, and still end up dissatisfied with the results.

I even envy those emotionally and mentally disturbed individuals who post frequently and anonymously in chatrooms and blogs, without regard for spelling, syntax, or sense. For several years, in the 1950s, as an undergraduate, I worked as a psychiatric aide in a mental hospital, on the graveyard shift, usually on the ward for the criminally insane. Every day, I see people walking the streets of Portsmouth or posting on the Internet who probably would have been institutionalized in the 1950s, when there was very little tolerance for non-conformity. But today with the development of antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers, people who would previously be walking in circles in a mental ward can today not only walk the streets but also can exercise their First Amendment rights on the Internet, even if they are somewhat mentally disturbed or have personality disorders. Why do they post anonymously? Why don’t they sign their names and identify themselves? They’re mentally disturbed, some of them clinically so, but they are not so crazy as to use their real names and identify themselves. And for good reason. Their anonymity encourages them to write things that they would not be so brave or foolish enough to write if their identity were known.

Since what they say and how they say it indicates they are disturbed, they don’t want to reveal who they are. And why should they? They have a right not to. We live in a free and increasingly insane country, and they have a right to remain anonymous and disturbed, and a right to not be exposed as part of the madding crowd. It is only when they act out their Internet gun-nut assassination fantasies that they become dangerous; it is only when they show that they are crazier than they are cowardly that they need to be feared. That is why gun nuttiness on the Internet should not be ignored.

Skunks

The crazies are one thing, skunks another. The skunks don’t reveal their identity because . . . Well, because they’re skunks and like the scorpion in the fable of the frog and the scorpion, can’t help doing what comes naturally. Which is make money. Skunks are foxy and know how to make a buck while faking being philanthropists. But we need them all, and we will especially need them when the Portsmouth Daily Times is no more. Let a hundred bloggers blog; let a hundred schools of thought contend. This a rule that should be followed in America and especially in the so-called American heartland. Let the presses of the bankrupt PDT rust in peace but let the bloggers blog. Long live the blogosphere!

"The nice thing about the Internet is nobody knows you're a skunk."







.

The Swearing-in of Jane Murray

Portsmouth Mayor-elect Jane Murray

Thursday morning, December 17, at a historic ceremony in the rotunda of the County Courthouse, Jane Murray was sworn in as Portsmouth’s first female mayor. The South Webster High School choir sang Christmas carols after the ceremony, and the words of one carol echoed in my head as I left the Courthouse: “The hopes and fears of all the years . . .”

I: The Hopes

For Mayor-elect Murray, our hopes are high. The city now has as mayor someone with the education, experience, diligence, and intelligence commensurate with the responsibilities and challenges of the highest office in city government. As she had promised throughout the campaign, she has assembled an advisory team, or what was called back in the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a kitchen cabinet, which includes none of the usual suspects. Rather, it includes accomplished and respected individuals, both male and female, both black and white, of various ages, from our community.

The Mayor-elect emphasized in her remarks to the several hundred well-wishers who attended the swearing in that she was just beginning what would be a team effort in which transparency and responsiveness would prevail. To underscore that point, she introduced her team of advisors, who were seated in the front row, providing a thumbnail biography of each. She went on to explain how she had become involved in the political life of Portsmouth after she became one of the flooded homeowners in the Grandview Avenue neighborhood. She had become one more victim of the incompetence and corruption of the Kalb administration. She promised a government that will help raise the city from the political and financial shambles that it is now in. Judging from the substantial margin she won the primary by and the margin of victory she achieved in the general election over two male rivals, the incumbent Kalb and the write-in candidate Skiver, she obviously has considerable support among the electorate. Hers was not a narrow victory: she has a clear mandate from the voters to make significant changes in the way city business is conducted. Unfortunately the city charter may not give her the constitutional authority she needs to make those significant changes, but judging by the way she campaigned, there is reason to think she will be as effective and determined in running the office of mayor as she was in the way she ran for it.

Instead of putting in lots of time raising money to advertise in the Portsmouth Daily Times and on local radio stations, she chose to focus on the more economical path of creating a website, communicating with supporters face to face and through email, and ringing door bells, all of which cost her very little. The old way of running for office, through the traditional media (the newspapers, radio stations, and billboards) no longer pays off. In spite of the big bucks they spent on traditional advertising, Kalb and First Ward councilman Mike Mearan—the one the embodiment of incompetence, the other of corruption—were defeated decisively, removing the two biggest obstacles to progress in city government. Murray is a mayor for the digital, not the analogical age. “We’ve waited a long time for this,” somebody said to me as Murray took the oath of office. Let’s hope she will prove worth the wait, and there is good reason to think she will.

Murray on May 1, 2009, campaigning for primary, which she won by wide margin

II: The Fears

But if the hopes are high, the fears are deep. Murray is boarding a listing if not a sinking ship, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited a nation in the throes of the Great Depression, in 1932, and just as Barack Obama did at the beginning of 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession. It took a decade before Roosevelt helped the country out of the economic doldrums. Whether Obama is going to succeed at turning things around is far from certain, especially with the Republicans saying no to anything that might redound to the credit of Democrats and the president, even if it would be good for the country.

Murray has an even steeper hill to climb than Roosevelt or Obama because Portsmouth has been going downhill not just for a couple of years, not just for a decade, but for about a half century; and it has been going downhill not just economically but also socially and morally, becoming a haven for drug dealers, prostitutes, and lawyers and developers who have gotten rich on government pork and preferential treatment. Competition, supposedly the lifeblood of the American economy, has all but disappeared in Portsmouth, where collusion and incestuous politics prevail. In America during the Depression, it was the New Deal; in Portsmouth for the last half century, it's been, except for the privileged few, the Raw Deal.

There are those who want to see Jane Murray fail; there are those who will do everything they can to see that she doesn’t succeed. I’m not going to say Police Chief Horner is one of those who will conspire against her, but the last two mayors wanted to remove him from office, yet he is still sitting in his corner, with his thumb in everything, while Bauer and Kalb are history. Horner will be involved in politics; you can count on that, and Murray should watch her back when the going gets tough. as it no doubt will. As somebody said to me after the swearing-in, if Murray really goes after the drug dealers, she’s going to stir up a “Horner’s nest.” Horner as a drug-buster has been a bust. That the notorious Journeys were able to chop up automobiles and sell Oxycontin for as long as they did at their garage, only a half mile from the police station, is one for the books. And she should watch out for the Portsmouth Daily Times, which will wait for its chance to pounce. Don't expect that shrinking but still slinking leopard to change its spots

As previously mentioned, the Portsmouth city charter does not give the mayor much executive authority. Since so much needs to be done, and she is so determined to do it, the limitations of her office could prove a serious impediment to progress. When I interviewed him for my video documentary, Recall of Mayor Bauer (1994), Frank Gerlach told me how frustrating it was as mayor to have so little authority under the charter. And as long as four years remains the term for city council members, the crooks will remain in control of that body by seeing to it that new lapdogs are appointed to replace those old ones who don’t complete their full terms for one reason or another. Howard Baughman's resignation to escape recall is the latest example of the way in which the council continues to be stacked with lapdogs; in this instance John Haas was appointed Baughman's replacement. Albrecht, Mearan, and Haas are just the latest examples of lapdogs who were first appointed, not elected, to city council. A charter change to two-year terms will help stop the appointment shenanigans and make frequent recalls unnecessary, since citizens would be able to vote out the rascals on council every two years instead of being stuck with them for four. But it takes time and a lot of effort to get the charter amended, and meanwhile Murray will have to work with a council that has historically been a rubber stamp for the SOGP.

Marting Building

The Marting building we will always have with us. Or so it seems. It would be unfortunate if any of the new members of city council become a stalking horse for the SOGP-Marting Foundation. My suspicion is that the renewal of the campaign to tear down the Municipal Building is only the opening gambit in a political game that has as its ultimate goal the renovation of Marting’s and the turning over of the land where the Municipal Building is located to developers with visions of gambling dollars dancing in their head.

In the last eight years the Municipal Building has become a graveyard for the political corpses of those public officials, like Kalb, who made the stupid argument that the 75-year-old Municipal Building was decrepit and should not be renovated but the 125-year-old, leaky, moldy, cavernous, empty Marting building would be ideal for city offices. The truth is that renovating the Marting Building would represent not a step forward but a step backward. The voters didn’t decisively reject the Marting building several times and send Kalb packing in the last election only to have someone new try to promote Marting’s and Kalb’s other foolish policies, which have brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy, both financial and moral. If the county is in the toilet, financially, can the city be far behind? The election of Murray is an opportunity to put all the Marting malarkey behind us and to move forward.

Let’s have faith, during this holiday season, that the well-organized, stirring, and historic swearing-in ceremony at the County Courthouse was a harbinger of better things to come, a sign of joy triumphing over tears, hopes over fears. “Fast away the old year passes,” say the words of another carol, “Hail the new, ye lads and lasses.”

.

Trent Williams, CPFA

Trent Williams, CPFA, who has a degree in music education, strums while city's finances go up in smoke

What is the meaning of the acronym CPFA that City Auditor Trent Williams attaches after his name when he signs official documents? Since CPFA has in it the letters CPA, which is an acronym for Certified Public Accountant, CPFA seems to imply that it stands for some kind of a Certified Public Accountant. But a CPA is an accountant who has been certified by and met the standards set for the profession by the state. But Trent Williams, CPFA, is not to my way of thinking the kind of accountant that the state of Ohio or any other public accrediting body would certify.

So who or what precisely is Trent Williams, CPFA? He is a Certified Public Finance Administrator, but he is NOT any kind of Certified Public Accountant, though there is an implicit attempt to suggest he is by including the letters CPA in his CPFA title.

The next important question is who certifies people to be CPFAs? It is not the state of Ohio or any public agency. It is a private group, APTUSC, or the Association of Public Treasurers of the Unites States and Canada. Founded in 1965 and having about 1,300 members, the APTUSC or APT, for short, offers the CPFA certification, but only to those who first join APT. The current individual membership fee is $409. Once the fee is paid, a member can then apply for CPFA certification, which presumably means paying another fee. This whole private certification business appears fee driven. As an additional expense, APT requires those getting a CPFA to attend the annual APT conference—$$$$.

The 2009 APT conference was held this past July in Spokane. The theme of the conference was “Effectively Managing the Peaks and Valleys of Your Financial Resources,” which is APT’s way of helping its members “to effectively manage their public operations and funds during the tumultuous times we are facing.” During his terms as auditor, Williams and the city of Portsmouth have had no financial peaks but quite a few financial valleys, the most recent of which looks more like the Grand Canyon than a valley. If Williams was able to attend the Spokane conference, let’s hope he got some ideas about dealing with the large city deficit he helped Mayor Kalb create and cover up.

You can go online and get any diploma or certification with a minimum of effort, sometimes no more effort than writing out a check to the private organization that is awarding you the diploma or certification. APT is not a diploma mill, but it does seem to operate within an ethical gray area. It offers “services” to its members, but the services seem to have as one of their goals the wringing of more money from members. The services APT offers include newsletters in which members can place a full page ad for a year at a cost of $3,000. Or members can publish an article in one of the APT’s magazine, at a cost of $500.That’s right, members pay APT for articles they write for APT magazines. APT has other money making services. It conducts six different workshops and seminars for which it charges participants $45 apiece. APT requires a 50 participant minimum to conduct these workshops and seminars, which comes out to a minimum of $2500 a seminar, plus travel and lodging expenses for the seminar leader.

The seminars cover six different subjects: Cash Flow Forecasting, Cash Handling, Debt Policy Development, Disaster Preparedness, Revenue Preparedness, and a workshop called “Stop that Fraud!” By attending these seminars, APT members get yet another certificate. It could be said APT is in the certification business. But isn’t there a disincentive to setting higher standards for certification? The lower the standards the more certificates they can issue and the more money they can make. It sounds like a conflict of interest. I suspect at least some CPFAs might be under-qualified for the positions they hold. I suspect at least some CPFAs are politicians who lack the appropriate education and relevant experience to qualify them for the offices they are elected or appointed to.

GFOA

Trent Williams, CPFA, is a member not only of APT but also of GFOA, which is an older, national organization, founded in 1906. GFOA stands for Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada. The GFOA has been awarding a Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting (CAFR) since 1945, and, wouldn’t you know it, Trent Williams, CPFA, is a recipient of a CAFR, to which, naturally, there is a fee attached. $$$$ GFOA awarded Williams a CAFR for the city’s financial report for 2006, the same report which received low marks from the CPA firm that the city hired to do an audit of city finances. Williams had the chutzpa to pass along a copy of this CAFR for the 2006 financial report to the Ohio State Auditor’s office with the city’s 2007 financial report. The outside 2007 audit, in turn, reported a number of shortcomings in the way the city and Williams conducted financial business, including that old standby “significant deficiency in internal control over financial reporting.” In other words, Trent Williams, CPFA, got a certificate of excellence for a financial report that an outside CPA criticized for faulty financial reporting and Williams sends that certificate of excellence along with his next financial report, which contains more or the same faulty financial reporting. In addition, a separate letter dated June 30, 2008, was sent by the outside CPA to the city regarding its noncompliance with accepted standards of financial reporting.

GOOFOFFS

I am considering creating an organization called GOOFOFFS, which would provide, for a fee of course, SNUFF Certificates for politicians trying to pass as auditors and financial officers, with SNUFF standing for, let's see . . . . How about: Sleazy, Negligent, Unscrupulous Financial Fuckoffs? The practice of awarding phony titles, certificates, and awards is par for the Tiger Woods PGA (Promiscuous Golfers Association) course in the public relations alternate reality that is America today. I recall an incompetent past president of Shawnee State University who, not long before he was pressured to resign, in 1998, got an award from some organization as an Outstanding Ohio Academic Administrator of the Year. It would not surprise me to hear that Trent Williams, CPFA, got a similar award for auditors, provided he or the city paid whatever fees are associated with such an award, and it would not surprise me either if there is public pressure for him to resign.

Trent Williams, CPFA, in front of Municipal Building

.