The City of Morgantown

A blog about home, as written and photographed by townies here and away.

[cityofmorgantown]

Tom Bloom Is The Most Delicate Snowflake

Last week, news broke that the ACLU had officially warned various state politicians about their social media behavior. One of those politicians was Monongalia County’s Tom Bloom. The County Commissioner has made a habit of blocking critical constituents on Facebook. The ACLU is balking at his doing precisely that because, while it is acceptable to ban people for obscenity and threats and other misbehavior, doing so simply because one of your constituents disagrees with you is a no go. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has referred to social media as a “modern public square.” When a government official cuts off access to a public square because of a constituent’s viewpoint, they are depriving that person of their rights under both the federal and state constitutions, said ACLU-WV Legal Director Loree Stark, who issued the notices.

“It’s unacceptable for public officials to deny their constituents access because of a differing viewpoint,” Stark said. “And it is just as unconstitutional to bar a constituent from engaging on an official social media account because they disagree with you as it is to ban someone from a town hall event.”

The more specific issue is that Bloom is using his personal Facebook page to engage in local political activity. He has a campaign page that he could use instead, but he prefers not to for whatever reason. But Bloom chooses to use his personal Facebook account to advocate politically, which in turn makes his personal page fair game for his critics. 

But Bloom, being Bloom, and having been caught redhanded, has persistently refused to acknowledge what he was doing, repeatedly insisting that the only people he banned were trolls operating under fake names, political activists who did not live in Monongalia County, and people who threatened both him and his family. He has now posted twice on the subject, once here when the complaint was first made public, and a second time today (although, oddly, he deleted that one after he got pushback from constituents who noted he was not actually allowed to simply ban people who had disagreed with him, because doing so was a First Amendment issue). 

Bloom used the pages of the Dominion Post to insist that he only posts about issues of local relevant interest on his personal page:

Bloom is active on Facebook, regularly posting to his own page as well as community forums.

“Today I posted about a five-car accident because I heard about it on the radio. Those are the kinds of things that I post. I try to put out information to help the community,” Bloom said. “If there are two goals that I have worked hard to achieve in my years of public service, they are accessibility and transparency, and I intend to keep my commitment to these goals.”

Bloom said he finds the timing of the claims interesting and speculated that he may have been included as a result of his recent public comments questioning how funds were used by the Appalachian Stewardship Foundation — a group formed when the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited and the National Parks Conservation Association brought a legal challenge to the air quality permit being sought by Longview Power.

Of course, Bloom knows damned well that the ACLU’s rebuke had nothing to do with his critical comments about the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited, or the National Parks Conservation Association. That is because Bloom knows who it was that he banned on Facebook*. Yes, he banned some of the same cowardly trolls anybody who has been on local Facebook groups have endured; he also banned folks who do not live in Monongalia County (although this was not a universal rule, but rather one he chose to create whenever particular critics got under his skin). But he also banned his critics. 

How do I know? Because I am one of the people he banned. Not because I have a fake account (I don’t), not because I don’t live in the county (I absolutely do), and not because I threatened or harrassed him (I most certainly never did either). 

He specifically banned me because I regularly asked him to explain why it was that he was always trying to mislead people via his Facebook feed. Bloom came up in local politics when he only had to make sure that good old boy outlets (like the Dominion Post and WAJR) were pleased with him. As long as he fed them stories they liked, they returned the favor by keeping their attention elsewhere. But Bloom’s addiction to social media has opened him up to mountains of criticism given his ongoing commitment to flying completely off the handle whenever anything happens anywhere in the county. 

And he has never evolved to the point where he was willing to accept the idea that other people might be interested not only in what he said but in the wild inconsistencies buried within his claims. Bloom has never found a topic he is willing to honestly engage on, and has always gone out of his way to bury the truth in a maze of misdirection, misinformation, and misleading public statements. So this website teed off on him. 

This page has relentlessly criticized Bloom’s dishonest behavior, whether than meant discussing his angry dissembling about who his friends are, his ongoing attempts to mislead people about Morgantown’s User Fee, his absurd desire to waste hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on a website, his ridiculous demand that he be allowed to skip work whenever he felt like it without using his allotted vacation days, and all manner of other egregious misbehavior. 

Bloom hates that. 

He always will. He believes he is owed worshipful coverage. He is a good old boy (although not local) politician who believes that his only responsibility is to take care of entrenched political interests throughout the county. He is too old now to change and has shown no interest in more honestly engaging in political discourse about local issues. His loyalties are where they are and nothing is going to change that. He is what he is. 

But nobody has to accept that.

That, of course, is a bummer, but if he is really so annoyed about having to endure constituents who disagree with him, nobody is forcing him to be a County Commissioner. That is work he chose to do voluntarily. And if he wants to remain a County Commissioner? Well, nobody is forcing him to use his personal page for political activity. He has a political page that he could use instead. But he lacks the discipline and wherewithal to do so. Which is how he ended up here, on the wrong side of a First Amendment that he very clearly despises, all while insisting that his goals are “accessibility” and “transparency,” two laughably ridiculous claims. 

So it goes though in our local politics. Bloom is following in the footsteps of other local politicos who have done the same thing, all insisting that they are owed our performed ignorance of their dishonest shenanigans, all insisting that to hold them responsible for the things they voluntarily say and claim is a bridge too far.  

(*Incidentally, Tom Bloom could have figured out this mystery immediately if he had done literally ten seconds of Facebook research. I’m right here replying to an open call for elected officials who ban their constituents.)

[cityofmorgantown]

Dominion Post Gonna Dominion Post

Somehow, the author of this piece managed to fall for a ghost scam before the article's headline was even over.

[cityofmorgantown]

Sabraton Elementary is now gone. Time marches ever onward. The building could not be saved or rehabilitated after years and years and years (and years) of neglect. Such is the way these things go.

It has literally been decades since any students went to school there.  Thanks, as always, to West Virginia History On View.

[cityofmorgantown]

A doorway in Morgantown. And, more specifically, a doorway in lower Woodburn near campus.

[cityofmorgantown]

Richwood Avenue’s Richwood Mini Mart - formerly Dairy Mart - is simultaneously a neighborhood institution and perhaps not the first place you would stop get a tank of gas, a cup of coffee, or a bottle of soda. This is about the former. And more specifically, about the fact that what we now think of as a weirdo quick stop was once a functioning Sinclair Garage.  

If you look carefully - and unfortunately I couldn’t align the photos quite right - you can see that the three-windowed house over the top of the Sinclair Station is still there, although trees have grown between it and the gas station and the neighborhood is significantly more developed. The construction of the awning over the pumps, unfortunately, means that the photo cannot be perfectly recreated, but the pumps themselves are still roughly where they have always been. 

Thanks, as always, to the fantastic WV History On View for the historic image and for Google Street View for the newer image. 

[cityofmorgantown]

Morgantown’s City Council Elections Were A Blowout

Tonight's Morgantown City Council election is in the books, and after all of the rage, all of the fury, and all of the criticism, it turns out that the city's participating voters really seem to like the representatives that they have.

Ron Dulaney and Jenny Selin each run unopposed and won easily. Barry Wendell ran against Todd Stainbrook, a write-in candidate, and won easily. Bill Kawecki ran against Barbara Parsons and won 878-702, the night's closest election. Rachel Fetty ran against former councilor Ron Bane and won very easily, 1000-583.

Newcomer Dave Harshbarger ran against former councilor Jay Redmond - a candidate whose campaign was controversial from its outset, what with him being caught knowingly submitting forged signatures on his candidate petition - and won very easily 1034-536.

In the night's weirdest election, write-in candidate Zack Cruze - a local political newcomer - beat the combined vote totals of Ryan Wallace (the Ward's current representative, who announced he was running for re-election and then announced he was moving to Canada instead), former councilor Wes Nugent, and Richard Dumas. Cruze, Nugent, and Dumas were running as write-in candidates. Cruze got 734 votes to Nugent's 372, Wallace's 199, and Dumas's 131. That is an astonishingly good performance for a write-in candidate, particularly an unknown one.

The seven winning candidates had huge leads after early voting that expanded further after the day-of totals started being calculated.

Two years after one of the city's most shock elections - very few people predicted 2017's absolute blowout of sitting incumbents - this year's campaign was quieter by comparison. Part of this had to do with who was running where. Only five the council's seven seats were competitive and only three of those featured straight-up head-to-head matchups. That was an oddity given how angry 2017's losing side was about having its candidates turfed. They tried to turn every imaginable thing into a full-blown controversy, a strategy that they apparently believed would pay huge dividends for them during this year's election.

But the other part of this year's (relative) calm was a bizarre strategy undertaken by the election's competitors. Whereas the incumbents routinely appeared at community events, including neighborhood meetings, their competition appeared to do very little of anything at all. Jay Redmond, of all people, smugly claimed he would be doing no campaigning at all, apparently believing that simply finagling his way onto the ballot (despite having blatantly violated the city's charter to do so) would be sufficient to earn him a victory. Ron Bane and Barbara Parsons did not appear to do much more. Each of them had campaign signs that appeared mostly on the rental properties of the landlords who (allegedly) stayed out of this year's campaign but neither seemed to do much more beyond that. Wes Nugent stood on his lawn all day today, imploring people to vote - at least that's something - but he was down by hundreds of votes in the early going, and having his name plastered all over Biafora properties apparently was not enough for voters to be interested at all in his last-second campaign. And Stainbrook and Dumas? Well...uhh...they were there too.

In the end, the same old things worked. The winners went to meetings, knocked on doors, reached out to voters, and did the fundamental work of winning an election. The losers...well, they did not. They believed that their echo chamber represented the city's mood. But it did nothing of the sort, and only goes to show how unbelievably out of touch they remain with a changing city. If tonight's absolute shellacking does not prove to be sufficient motivation to significantly re-evaluate their thinking, nothing is ever going to be.

[cityofmorgantown]

It’s ramps season! 

RAMPS SEASON!!!

Okay, as you were. 

[cityofmorgantown]

Redmond Acknowledges Having Committed Fraud, Metz Withdraws

Late last week, we started hearing rumors that several candidates had been caught with various types of forged signatures on their campaign petitions. Then yesterday, we found documentation showing that something was certainly amiss. Then today, the Dominion Post reported on the issue. One of the two candidates has already withdrawn his candidacy. But the other one has chosen a different route: he has acknowledged that his petition contains forged signatures but is claiming that he was right to do so.

That is par for the course for Jay Redmond.

Redmond has been caught submitting an election petition which features ten signatures but only five handwritings. Those signatures are below:

There is no denying what is plainly visible here, but Redmond decided that instead of acknowledging what he had done - which is plainly a violation of Morgantown’s Charter 7.02(a) - he went on the offensive in the Dominion Post article documenting the ongoing investigation into both petitions. 

As for the question of spouses signing for one another, Redmond said he’s personally collected every signature in each of the four council elections he’s been a part of and feels he’s done nothing wrong.

“Almost every signature I gathered was from a close neighbor or a long-time friend or acquaintance. With an exception or two, I know every single person who signed my petition,” Redmond said. “Everything I did in gathering signatures was within the spirit and intention of the process. Only those with ulterior motives would see it otherwise.”

It is worth noting here, without question, that Redmond is lying when he says that what he did was “within the spirit and the intention of the process.” The process states very clearly that signatures have to be unique.

Redmond gathered his own signatures. He seems to be claiming that he witnessed five spouses sign for their partners, then knowingly submitted a petition with signatures that were not genuine. The idea that this is within either the spirit or the intention of the process, given the charter’s very specific language, is absolutely bonkers.

But Redmond went further that excusing his own fraud and impugning those who objected to it. Redmond insisted that his fraud was tolerable because Morgantown has such difficulty in getting candidates to run for office.

“With so few residents willing to run for city council in the first place, why would anyone take a course of action that does nothing but discourage participation,” he said, later adding, “This is one of the most dangerous and troubling times in the history of city politics. I hope the voters put an end to it on April 30th.”

Redmond’s first claim - that Morgantown is struggling for candidates - is absolutely ludicrous nonsense for two reasons. 

The first is that Morgantown’s elections have featured plenty of candidates for office: 2017′s election featured 14 candidates, two in each ward; 2015′s election featured 12 candidates, with two uncontested wards; 2013′s election featured 12 candidates; 2011′s election featured 12 candidates. Yes, uncontested wards are, perhaps, not ideal, but the idea that there are “so few residents willing to run” withstands absolutely no historical scrutiny, at least for the last decade. 

But, the second reason is much starker. Let’s suppose that Redmond is right when he claims that “so few citizens are willing to run for city council” and then wonder why. There are all kinds of possible answers, but one of the most obvious is that elected officials come in for incredible levels of harassment from an entrenched old guard in the city represented by, among others, Jay Redmond. 

Redmond has long been a part of a group that has called itself, at times, Victory For Morgantown. It has routinely engaged in all manner of abuse of elected officials that it could not beat in elections. This included suing to remove four city councilors that it accused of...drumroll please...violating the charter. Jay Redmond was a signatory to the petition that began the lawsuit. That signature is below:

The upshot of this lawsuit - which was filed after the City Council refused to implement a gerrymandered Wards and Boundaries map designed by Guy Panrell, another longtime member of Victory For Morgantown - was that it got laughed out of the courtroom by the three-judge panel assigned to hear it. The State Supreme Court then refused to hear the group’s appeal of its earlier loss. 

That petition’s signatories never apologized for their nonsense lawsuit, nor have ever acknowledged that they were wrong. Redmond, meanwhile, has his own history of violating campaign rules, something he did in his 2017 election, as well as a long history of being an enormous hypocrite about coordinated campaigning. So, who knows, maybe it is those kinds of things that make candidates leery to run for office? (Although, once again, and just to verify: candidates are not leery to run for office.)

Which brings us neatly to Redmond’s final point:

“This is one of the most dangerous and troubling times in the history of city politics. I hope the voters put an end to it on April 30th.”

Redmond is correct about this and deserves credit for saying so. There is at least one candidate still running for office who has knowingly committed election fraud, and rather than acknowledge any regret for having done so, has instead belligerently derided those who caught him doing so. Hopefully, city voters put an end to his campaign on April 30th, assuming of course that his campaign makes it that far. If his five forged signatures get tossed from his petition, the document he submitted will be several signatures short of the 75 required to run for office. 

***

T. Aaron Metz has withdrawn as a candidate for Morgantown’s City Council, confirming earlier reports that he had, in fact, forged several signatures on his election petition.

[cityofmorgantown]

(At Least) Two Council Candidates Actually Violate The City’s Charter

UPDATE: After additional research, the two petitions in question came from Jay Redmond (a former city councilor who has previously run afoul of slightly less serious election rules) and T. Aaron Metz.

Morgantown’s City Council elections are less than two months away, which means two delightfully fun months of campaigning between spirited people who care deeply about the city and the direction that it is headed and oh my god we already have a controversy? 

Cmon. 

Candidates for office are required to circulate petitions showing that they have the support of 75 voters from their home ward. Those petitions have to be turned in before the creation of the city’s ballots. Morgantown’s City Charter is very, very, very clear about candidate petitions and how they can be signed:

To sum up that legalese:

Each petition has to be signed by 75 different people. 

Petitions cannot share signatories. 

In cases where petitions do share signatories, only the first submitted petition’s signature will be counted. 

And that is where the problems begin. Two candidates challenging for office each submitted petitions that each, in their own unique ways, run afoul of these standards.

Here are ten questionable signatures from one of the two petitions:

These are examples of somebody signing for somebody else (in each case, one spouse signed for another). There is simply no other conclusion that can be drawn from any of these pictures, which clearly show the same handwriting being used for two separate names. Per the charter, it does not (or should not) matter that these are spouses who signed for one another. The charter clearly states the following:

Such nominations shall be by separate petition each signed by seventy-five (75) or more qualified voters residing in such ward

that each signature on it was affixed in his presence and that he believes each signature to be the genuine signature of the person whose name it purports to be.

These ten signatures plainly run afoul of those two rules, but especially the second rule, which makes it clear that the signature has to be “genuine”; these plainly are not that. 

The second petition has far more significant problems, although before getting into those, it too features a spouse signing for another spouse.

Spouses signing for other spouses is clearly a problem and is not allowable. Perhaps it is an honest mistake but it remains disqualifying. Candidates are expected to know the rules and to adhere to them. However, this second set of examples goes well beyond what might have been honest (although consequential) mistakes. 

Those are examples of petitions which share signatures. Although it is a bit difficult to tell, the photos block together same names, different signatures. That first one is from a Patrick Cyphert. The second one is from a Paul Zepp and a Frances Zepp. The third one is from a Bruce Brubaker. 

As a reminder, if those were the same signatures, the candidate who submitted his or her petition first would have the signature counted; the candidate who submitted second would that signature tossed. But those are not, to put it politely, the same signatures. They are not even close, quite frankly. Which means that there is a very real possibility - although it remains currently unconfirmed - that signatures were being manipulated to meet petition requirements, with the expectation being that the issue would not get caught. (The issue was caught by city resident Patrick Hathaway, who presented the issue to City Council earlier this week.)

Lest anybody doubt the seriousness of the issue, or the possibility of signature manipulation, the image above has one glaring error that cannot be ignored:

Look carefully at the spellings of Francis/Frances. They are not the same. One of the two signatures uses an “e”; the other uses an “i.” There is no way somebody spelled their own name wrong on a petition. 

The question remains as to what happens next. It seems obvious that these particular candidates, if they are found to be responsible, should be barred from running for office. There are rules in place - the Charter is a sacred document after all, one which should always be respected - which have plainly been violated. 

There is currently at least one investigation ongoing into the issue. 

(We will update this post as additional information becomes available.) 

[cityofmorgantown]

I’ve never seen the river this frozen and still.

[cityofmorgantown]

Five years ago, the Monongahela River froze over as hard as I ever remember seeing it. It is very possible that, over the next 72 hours, temperatures are going to get cold enough to produce something similar. Remember to check in on your family and friends and neighbors as the temperature plummets to dangerously cold levels. 

[cityofmorgantown]

Dana Holgorsen To...Houston?

Earlier today, the University of Houston fired Major Applewhite. That school is now looking for a new coach, one who can presumably return the school to the brief glory it enjoyed under the leadership of Tom Herman. Herman was so good that the University of Texas came calling.

So UH is now searching for a replacement, which means that all (local) eyes have turned toward Dana Holgorsen, WVU’s current football coach who has long been rumored to be in the hunt for other jobs elsewhere, either because he wanted to leave, or because those jobs wanted him. That last part has never been entirely clear - maybe it has always been a mix of both - but every other time we have played this game, Holgorsen ended up staying here, much to the consternation of fans who are absolutely certain that a different coach would have achieved more. 

Those fans have reached the boiling point after this (truncated) season failed to produce any of the following: an undefeated season, double-digit wins, an appearance in the Big 12 Championship game, a victory over Oklahoma, or a win in a bowl game. And even though there are perfectly good explanations for all of this - like the fact that fans who expect any of those things are always setting themselves for the routine disappointment that is being a WVU fan - those fans will not be soothed until somebody else has the job. 

These fans are not satisfied with Holgorsen’s performance. His 61-41 record since taking over from Bill Stewart is not satisfying. His 2-5 bowl record is not satisfying (he won as many bowl games as Stewart and Rich Rodriguez, and two fewer than Don Nehlen). His signature wins were not satisfying (because there were, allegedly, not enough of them). Everything about Holgorsen has failed to live up to the expectations that these fans had of him, and for that, he must be replaced with the man who will do the job better.

Curiously, these fans - who are absolutely certain that such a man not only exists but will definitely do the job better - refuse to tell us precisely who he is. But for obvious reasons, the fact that they definitely care harder about the Mountaineers than do the rest of us, they insist that we trust their judgment on this. 

Is it worth noting that these are the same fans who were so apoplectic about Stewart’s tenure that they jumped at the chance to get Holgorsen, who then proceeded to deliver less than Stewart did? Nah. That would be wildly unfair. Stewart was coaching against lesser competition with better players. Weirdly, those excuses for why it was right to replace Stewart with Holgorsen are not then acceptable for arguing that Holgorsen has been a perfectly fine coach whose historical performance here closely mirrors what other coaches have here. 

It is almost as though this particular group of fans will never be satisfied, at least until they get absolutely everything they want. Which makes them so much different from fans at other schools who want exactly as much and exactly as hard but have yet to have gotten it, despite playing coaching musical chairs again and again and again. 

Surely though, WVU’s experience will be different than Michigan’s and Colorado’s and Nebraska’s and Miami’s and Arkansas’s and Tennessee’s and UCLA’s and any of the other schools whose fanbases genuinely believed they were just a coach away from salvation. And who have never realized that they were not. 

[cityofmorgantown]

Konate comes up with huge block in transition - ESPN Video

West Virginia's Sagaba Konate continues to dominate on the defensive end as he hustles back for an epic two-handed block.

It isn’t often that we get a play that is literally the all-time greatest version of that type of play. There are plenty of great plays of course. There have always been great plays. But this, beyond any shadow of any doubt, is the single greatest block in WVU Men’s Basketball history. It has no competition either. There is absolutely nothing that comes close. Dude met his guy at the rim, took the ball away from him in the air, came down, and looked bored at having done so. And then there was the subsequent shrug as if to say, “What exactly did he think was going to happen?”

[cityofmorgantown]

If you have the right filter, you can make Morgantown look real weird.

[cityofmorgantown]

The Discount Den was great.

[cityofmorgantown]

Never forget...the time Star City Shoney’s thought this was a good idea. 

[cityofmorgantown]

On the one hand, there are an impressive number of typos in this single classified ad listing. (For those wondering, it’s Hildebrand Lock and Dam.)

But on the other hand, that has got to be the coolest road in the entire damned county. 

[cityofmorgantown]

Guy Gets Super Intense About The Old Mall

I don’t know why YouTube thought to throw this my way - and it is very possible that says a lot about me and my viewing habits - but here is a guy’s extremely intense video about the Old Mall (or, more properly, the Mountaineer Mall). I might have been the last person to have seen this?

Anyway, It is a history and a walkthrough and hell of a hobby for Sal, its publisher.