Mountainfest starts tonight. It is supposed to rain. Here’s hoping it pours.
I do this every year. The festival organizers decide, for the however many-th year running, to invite several thousand of their closest friends to town and I rage against their inevitable arrival. I might as well be standing at the edge of the ocean, screaming about the tide.
Rather than use all of that oxygen, let’s just leave it at this: motorcycles aren’t the only way to have a mid-life crisis.
Campaign finance reports released this morning revealed that the North Central West Virginia Business Owners PAC - which remains, at least as far as the Secretary of State’s website is concerned, an unregistered group - appears to have a membership that is actively and aggressively supporting some candidates for Morgantown’s City Council. This support is coming in the form of considerable financial donations to a block of candidates that the NCWVBO-PAC was already supporting in campaign literature.
The NCWVBO-PAC has four board members: Andrew Smith (President), James Guiliani (Secretary), Jim Craig (Treasurer), and Dave Biafora (Vice-President.) Campaign finance reports released this morning show that NCWVBO-PAC Officers Smith and Biafora have donated a total of $2250 to local campaigns. Smith gave $250 apiece to Ron Bane, Al Bonner, Jay Redmond, Bill Graham, and Eldon Callen. Biafora gave $1000 to Kyle McAvoy. Giuliani and Craig do not appear to have donated.
This alone would appear to reek of the kind of coordination that these seven candidates have been vociferously decrying in their public campaigns, and follows the same hypocritical strategy that many of these candidates employed in their coordinated efforts in both 2013 and 2015.
However, Smith and Biafora are not alone in their giving. Significant donations, all from outside of Morgantown, have flowed into the seven campaigns that the NCWVBO-PAC is backing. These include $3500 in donations from Rick Biafora ($1,000 to Bonner and McAvoy) and $1500 from Biafora Inc (to Bonner). Another $2,000 came from Jerry Lorenze (he gave $500 each to Bane, Bonner, McAvoy, and Callen). Another $2500 came from Randy and Rachel Buzzo ($1000 to Bane, $1000 to McAvoy, $500 to Callen). You can see this below, in the following order - Bane, Bonner, Callen, McAvoy, Redmond:
The numbers above total $8,000 in donations from seven donors. All totaled, these seven have poured $10,250 toward the NCWVBO-PAC’s preferred candidates. Of that money, only $1250 has been confirmed to have come from within Morgantown’s borders. Andrew Smith’s home and business share an address. The Biaforas and the Buzzos live in Cheat Lake. Jerry Lorenze is more confusing, as he appears to live at both his bowling alley and in Cheat Lake, depending upon which document is being examined.
What unites them are their business interests within Morgantown. The Biafora’s own and have developed considerable parts of the city, and have repeatedly demanded that the city council protect their interests (by intervening to either prevent or kneecap competitors’ projects). Andrew Smith owns Smith Rentals, a sprawling rental company that is not held in the highest regard by its customers. The Buzzos own Stadium View LLC, an apartment complex competing with newly built (and various car dealerships). Lorenze owns Suburban Lanes, Euro-Suites, Keglers, and Stefanos.
For the record, this website takes no issue with anybody donating to anybody else. This is, after all, their money, and they are free to donate it in whatever direction they see fit, especially if they believe that such donations will materially benefit themselves down the line. In other words, nobody would pay a painter to paint a neighbor’s house (because only the neighbor would benefit) but plenty of people pay a painter to paint their own house (because they would benefit). That is what we are seeing here. Area individuals want to buy themselves a slate of politicians who would then return that financial support in the form of policy specifically designed to benefit their donors. That those individuals would attempt to buy themselves a city council in a city they do not actually live in is, of course, strange, but when you need a government to do your bidding somewhere, you buy the government that is there.
John Raese’s offer to WVU was laughably stupid. IMG, the company that Raese has insisted was treated in a preferential manner, offered WVU a guaranteed $86.5 million dollars in exchange for the school’s broadcast rights. Raese offered WVU, and this is true, nothing.
Morgantown-based West Virginia Radio, which has since launched a lawsuit accusing the university of rigging the bid process in IMG’s favor, had the least-thorough proposal in the first round…
While it did not offer any guaranteed revenue in its proposal, the company projected the university would net roughly $5.7 million in new revenue over the next 10 years by partnering with it.
This is worth keeping in mind when considering Raese’s months-long freak out about the contracting process. Basically, he didn’t receive the preferential treatment he had come to expect. The article says as much:
Once WVU signed a letter of intent with IMG in January, West Virginia Radio owner John Raese began publicly protesting the bid process.
So in other words, IMG made a proposal that included specific proposals. Raese did nothing. And when WVU surprisingly went with the people offering actual money? Raese began his temper-tantrum. This though is my favorite part of Raese’s proposal…:
It touted the advantages and popularity of its award-winning broadcast team, four members of which had accumulated more than 30,000 followers on Twitter, and the statewide network of radio affiliates the company already has in place.
…which leaves me asking this question: if Raese’s such a great businessman, something we’re always told, then is it more likely that he’d go with the business partner offering him cash money or the one offering him Twitter followers? Then why did he expect WVU to do anything different?
By the time WVU took the field for its fourth possession Sunday night, one thing was plainly clear: we had gotten too excited for Will Grier. Far more concerning, Jake Spavital had gotten too excited for Will Grier. On the team’s first three possessions, this happened:
incompletion
completion for -1 yards
incompletion
punt
completion for 12 yards
rush for 2 yards
sack
incompletion
punt
completion for 10 yards
completion for -4 yards
rush for 4 yards
incompletion
punt
Grier was 4/8 for 17 yards and had been sacked once. Running backs had carried twice for 6 yards. WVU had not scored, or substantively moved the ball, and had punted three times. This was literal garbage.
Spavital finally - finally - woke up after four drives, apparently realizing that, yes, in fact, his trio of running backs actually were on the sideline and were available to play in the game. That got us this:
rush for 5 yards
completion for 9 yards
rush for 12 yards
incompletion
pass for 2 yards
completion for 11 yards
rush for -1 yards
incompletion
completion for 12 yards
incompletion
rush for 5 yards
completion for 3 yards
interception
The interception was bad, but the balance was suddenly there, and WVU’s offense was off and (ha, ha) running. For the rest of the game, Grier would huck the ball all over the place, throwing three touchdowns, and WVU’s nonexistent running attack would get 200+ yards. It would be extremely difficult to come away frustrated, but throwing away an entire quarter on a new quarterback who could have simply been eased into his first game back in almost two years still gnaws at the “Coach smarter!” fan in me, especially when we know that last year’s running attack worked great.
In fact, if we think back to last year’s offense, its primary problem was that Sklyer Howard’s throwing was just never quite good enough. Spavital’s solved that problem by simply doubling down on the throwing while abandoning what had worked just fine. He eventually adjusted, mercifully, and hopefully learned a valuable lesson, but it remains incredibly tempting to imagine what might have been if only WVU had come out of the gate more strategically.
Other Thoughts
-Will Grier’s offensive decision-making appears to go like this: “I have a football in my hand, I’m gonna throw this thing as far as I can, GO!” That’s a very exciting approach in theory, but dumping the ball off to open receivers who are only a few yards in front of him never hurt anybody.
-WVU’s delayed draw play worked like gangbusters. Run it more.
-Did WVU get a fair shake from the referees? No. Every single call that could have gone against WVU did, including a disastrous second half that saw WVU repeatedly punished with huge calls: an out-of-bounds hit penalty against WVU’s kicker who knocked a guy tip-toeing down the sidelines, a phantom holding penalty followed immediately by a flag against Holgorsen (who had rightly gotten angry about the phantom holding penalty), followed by a fumble review that referees refused to initiate themselves and then botched anyway (that cost WVU a timeout too), followed by an absolutely inexplicable pass interference call on a thoroughly uncatchable ball. This will always be WVU’s lot but damned if it doesn’t get extremely frustrating at times.
-Kyzir White flying around the field destroying people is great, and I am here for it and will continue to be here for it. He is literally a missile out there. He reminds me of a linebacking Bruce Irvin in that way.
-Something I am less here for is a defense that apparently gets not only beat on blown coverages, but then is incapable of adjusting, and gets beat again on the same blown coverage on the same play. That is no good at all and has to get fixed, because even though it is tempting to say that Sunday night was a coming out party for Virginia Tech’s Josh Jackson, WVU’s defense made it way too easy for him.
-Don Nehlen was at the game and WVU’s immediate tribute to him - going three-and-out with an overly enthusiastic and poorly executed first drive - was so touching.
In 2013, Jay Redmond ran for Morgantown’s City Council and lost. He ran as part of a group called Victory For Morgantown, a group that lied about its very existence despite considerable evidence of its existence. Despite his love for coordinated campaigning, he criticized his opponents for their coordinated campaign.
In 2015, Jay Redmond ran for Morgantown’s City Council and won. He ran with the same group of people that had supported him in 2013, and worked together with them on numerous efforts to unseat his opponents. Despite his love for coordinated campaigning, he criticized his opponents for their coordinated campaign.
It is 2017 and Jay Redmond is running for Morgantown’s City Council. He is running with the same group of people that supported him in 2013 and 2015 and is working together with them on numerous efforts to unseat his opponents. Despite his love for coordinated campaigning, he is still asking you to believe that coordinated campaigning is bad. Hypocrisy is a hell of a drug.
We should start with Redmond pointing his supporters toward this, a blog post written by a man named Roger Banks. Banks is a local who has worked tirelessly to suppress voter participation, and who has also been involved in an ongoing effort to gerrymander wards represented by his political opponents.
To read that post, and to look at Redmond’s endorsement of it, you would swear that Redmond must oppose coordinated campaigns. If that didn’t do it for you, Redmond’s double-down at last week’s Evansdale Neighborhood Association’s candidates night would do it for. There, he said,
To me, it is very easy to identify what the cause of that rancor is and I think it is the fact that a voting bloc was created on City Council by a past special interest political action committee. I think you could trace just about all of the problems on council in the last two years back to that bloc. Most of the things on council were decided before we got in the room. Input was not welcome from people who were not in that particular bloc.
So the issue that I think is really important is that we have another political action committee, another special interest group that is involved in this election. And they have recruited and selected and are backing and supporting with finances and labor several candidates in this election…
…I think we’ve already seen the effects of what happens when that happens. I don’t think that’s good for the city. I don’t think that’s good for council. Anybody that thinks that City Council should have seven like-minded individuals on it, I’m afraid I have to say to you that you do not understand democracy.
If Redmond really believes this, he has apparently changed his mind very recently, because he has spent an awfully long time believing in something very, very different.
Blocs Of Candidates Throughout Recent History
In 2013, Morgantown Together was created. It was a group of five candidates who ran for City Council. Morgantown Together was open about the fact that they were running together, using the name in advertising materials and social media efforts. They made no attempt to hide the fact that they were, in fact, united.
This enraged the City Council’s then majority. That group - led by former mayor Jim Manilla, and joined Wes Nugent, Linda Herbst, and Ron Bane - cried foul, insisting that candidates working together was an (unheard of) affront to Morgantown’s electoral history. How, they wondered, could anybody possibly think it was appropriate for candidates to coordinate with one another? This just wasn’t done, or at least, it wasn’t done in the version of the story that they were telling publicly.
What those four left out of the story was that, behind the scenes, they had formed their own electoral group. It has had various names over the years but it generally was identified as Victory For Morgantown.
2011
The group emerged in 2011. It was led by a man named Roger Banks. He called that group The Citizens Collective Of Morgantown but used “Victory For Morgantown” in his marketing. You can see that below:
That’s blurry, but if you look closely above the yellow box, you can see the first-ever reference to the group. Banks didn’t stop there. He also bought a billboard which he proudly bragged about his voter suppression efforts. It indicated his stalwart opposition to various candidates including two still serving today: Jenny Selin and Marti Shamberger.
Banks created the group in his successful bid to making voting in Morgantown’s elections much, much more difficult than it needed to be. He hated the idea of people participating in democracy, and he ran his campaign on it. He was joined in this opposition by candidates Manilla, Nugent, Herbst, and Bane, all of whom wanted to make voting significantly harder for the city’s residents.* Nugent liked Bank’s Citizens Collective Of Morgantown so much that he publicly praised them at the height of the 2011 election.
2013
Then, in 2013, the city’s winds had shifted, and Morgantown Together was formed in opposition to what the-then council majority was doing (which included intentionally suppressing voter participation by ending the Vote By Mail program). Morgantown Together was open and honest about its existence, and never claimed it wasn’t coordinating its activities.
Manilla, Nugent, Herbst, and Bane publicly objected despite knowing at the time that they were part of a coordinated political effort behind the scenes. This effort involved many of the same people from 2011, including Banks, and also Guy Panrell and George Papandreas. They were also joined in this opposition by two more candidates that they had recruited to run: Bill Graham and Jay Redmond. This effort, this time under the header of Victory For Morgantown, recruited candidates, fundraised, and created a targeted voter list. You can see the evidence for all three below:
Unbelievably, these candidates most definitely wanted to have things both ways: they wanted to coordinate behind the scenes for themselves, and they wanted to viciously impugn their opponents for coordinating publicly. Needless to say, Morgantown’s voters didn’t buy any of this nonsense, with the exception of Nugent and Bane (who had run unopposed), each of Victory For Morgantown’s contested candidates lost badly.
2015
By 2015, Victory For Morgantown had concocted an incredible scheme in which two of the group’s members - the aforementioned Roger Banks, and a second man named Guy Panrell (who had run, and lost, in the 2011 election) - worked to gerrymander city voting districts after having convinced themselves that anything done by the city’s Ward And Boundaries committee had to be then be approved by the city council, regardless of what the committee had actually done. The council’s majority balked at the blatant gerrymander and voted it down.
Victory For Morgantown howled bloody murder, “They can’t actually vote down our blatant gerrymander, just because of how unbelievably blatant it was, can they?” This breathtaking legal argument led to one of Victory For Morgantown’s members - Papandreas, who has twice run for city council and twice been beaten badly - to sue the majority and insist that they be literally removed from office. (Papandreas, if you’re wondering, is in the picture above headlined “Meet leadership for Morgantown” as the final photo of a definite attendee.)
To file this lawsuit, Papandreas had to petition for the majority’s removal. That necessitated getting signatures, something he managed to do within a four day window. He must have been very motivated. Here are some of the totally random names you’ll find in that petition, in no particular order: Roger Banks (created Citizens Collective Of Morgantown/Victory For Morgantown in 2011, served on Wards and Boundaries for gerrymander), Bill Graham (ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017), Ron Bane (ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017), Guy Panrell (ran in 2011, served on Wards and Boundaries for gerrymander), George Papandreas (ran in 2011 and again in 2015, supported Victory For Morgantown in 2013), Linda Herbst (ran in 2011 and ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013), Wesley Nugent (ran in 2011 with Banks’s support, ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017), and there, at the very bottom, Jay Redmond (ran with Victory For Morgantown in 2013, 2015, and again in 2017). Here are those signatures, in case you’re wondering (and for some real fun, pay attention to the dates):
So now we are back in the current, and Jay Redmond is busy asking voters to believe that all of the city council’s rancor is the result of a group of candidates working together to undermine democracy throughout the city. So let’s give Jay Redmond some credit, in that he’s very, very right in part of his assessment: there absolutely is a group of candidates working together to undermine democracy throughout the city. He’s just wrong about which group. It isn’t his opponents, in other words. It’s his own.
The weird part of all of this is that all Victory For Morgantown really needed to do was acknowledge itself, run together as a group, and see what resulted electorally. Nobody forced the group to the lie about itself and, when confronted with evidence of their obvious coordination, to double-down on the first lie, and to then continue to double-down every single time the issue has come up. All the group had to do was be honest about its existence, and it would have immediately become a non-issue.
Jeff Mikorski is Morgantown’s City Manager. He is arguably the single most important figure in Morgantown’s politics. He sits atop the city’s administrative hierarchy. He makes the city move in a way that no other single individual can. But despite this, his is a particularly weakened position.
Perhaps we should start generally. Morgantown has a council/manager government. The city council is elected, and then appoints a manager to execute the council’s wishes. As such, an uncooperative manager can be dismissed and replaced with somebody else.
Mikorski’s rise to City Manager came after Terrence Moore left the position in 2013. It remains an open issue as to why he left. Some claim that he was pressured to leave by the then City Council majority: Jim Manilla, Wes Nugent, Linda Herbst, and Ron Bane. Others claim he simply decided to leave for another opportunity. Whatever the case, Moore was quickly replaced by Mikorski. It should be noted that Mikorski had sought the job that Moore was hired for in 2010; the council voted 4-3 in favor of Moore, but those 3 votes against were votes in favor of Mikorski (The council selected Moore by a vote of 6-1, with Bane opposing him. My bad! Also, my thorough thanks to huge City Of Morgantown fan Guy Panrell for pointing out the error!)
Needless to say, Mikorski owes his position to Jim Manilla, Wesley Nugent, and Linda Herbst. They voted to back his application for the job just before having their side blown out in 2013’s city council elections. What this practically meant was that even though the city had thoroughly rejected Victory For Morgantown’s slate of (lied about) candidates, those candidates still had their man running the show. But what this meant for Mikorski was something very different: he now had to straddle a line between those who had hired him, and the new council majority that controlled his employment.
This managed not to be a significant issue for two years. Mikorski was largely left alone to manag Morgantown while the city council’s minority repeatedly waged war on the council’s majority. But after the 2015 elections did not deliver what the city council’s minority wanted (although Jay Redmond won, the minority only went from two to three seats, meaning that it was effectively outvoted on every issue), that minority took whatever shred of sanity it had left and threw it directly into the Monongahela River.
Part of the plan was compelling Mikorski to testify about alleged misbehavior. The lawsuit was heard in February of this year. Mikorski did note that city councilors had communicated with city officials, but waffled on whether or not what they were doing was specifically forbidden by the city’s charter.
Several city employees were called to testify Friday including City Manager Jeff Mikorski. Mikorski was asked to explain an interference with administration.
“An order from a council member to an employee for their direct action I guess,” stated Mikorski.
“And that’s what we know that all four of these folks did, correct?” asked Papandreas’ attorney, Mark Kepple.
Mikorski responded, “There are emails that are direct communications to employees. Yes.”
Papandreas testified on the matter reading from the city charter.
“Except for the purpose of inquiries and investigations under section 2.09, council or its members shall deal with the city officers and employees who are subject to the direction and supervision of the city manager solely through the manager and neither the council nor its members shall give orders to any such officers or employees either publicly or privately. Violation of this provision shall constitute grounds for removal from office,” he recited.
This site has bolded the evidence of his uncertainty. “I guess” is hardly the language of a man convinced that something untoward has occurred. But in between February’s hearing and last Thursday’s hilariously thorough rejection of the lawsuit entirely, Mikorski’s position got even more tenuous.
So now Mikorski finds himself in the following position: he can refuse to introduce a motion to overthrow the city’s elected council majority (and never again enjoy the support of the people who hired him for the position) or he can introduce a motion to overthrow the city’s elected council majority (and never again enjoy the majority’s support if, as literally any reasonable person expects, subsequent lawsuits threw out the minority’s ridiculous plot). There is no needle to thread here. Those are literally the entirety of the positions which Mikorski can choose.
It might be the case that the lawsuit’s conclusion will change Nugent’s and Bane’s and Redmond’s tone. It might be that they will acknowledge that they were wrong, that they will apologize to the council’s majority, and that Mikorski will not be asked to make this professional Sophie’s Choice. But considering how utterly insane things have been so far, it seems unlikely that common decency will rule the day.
And finally, this:
Morgantown City Council Watch is George Papandreas’s propaganda effort. This, from two weeks ago, seems to indicate that he has little faith in Mikorski to introduce the coup d’etat motion necessary to execute the minority’s planned overthrow of the majority. One wonders why this group cannot simply hold on until 2017 to, yknow, win an election, but when you have lost an election as badly as Papandreas has, maybe overthrow is the only chance you have got.
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 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.
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.
