Here’s the thing about Safe Streets Morgantown’s (SSM) proposal to regulate heavy truck traffic downtown: it is exceptionally clever. Rather than attack the problem throughout the city, SSM attempts to regulate downtown truck traffic. This has the (very) welcome side-effect of encouraging trucks to use the Greenbag Road instead. But perhaps that’s too much too soon. Let’s start at the beginning. 

Anybody who has ever been on Brockway Avenue knows about the scourge of heavy trucks coming through. Between the damage to the road, the intense and prolonged amount of sound the trucks produce, and the degradation to the surrounding neighborhoods (both Marilla and Greenmont), the reality is that the city almost certainly isn’t benefiting from their presence. Neither are homeowners. Neither are taxpayers. Neither are neighborhoods. But SSM doesn’t propose to deal with any of this.

Instead, SSM attacks the heavy truck presence downtown, and specifically, on Walnut Street. By preventing their presence there - something that the group’s organizer feels the law specifically allows - there is no reason for those trucks to come all the way through Sabraton, nor to use the hogback turn in Marilla, nor to then rumble up Brockway through Greenmont. 

By doing right by the city’s downtown, two of the city’s most maligned neighborhoods potentially benefit. Without the heavy truck traffic coming through at what literally seems to be all hours of the day, those neighborhoods have the opportunity to breath and, potentially, to regroup. 

Objections

Will there be objections to this proposal? Yes, of course, and they’ll come from two sides. The first will be from the heavy industries that currently abuse the city’s neighborhoods. They’ll claim that any attempt to prevent their trucks from rumbling through is tantamount to the jackbooted thuggery of an out of control government. These though are the cranky claims of John Raese types, people who genuinely believe that the world exists only to benefit certain very entrenched interests. 

The second set will come from people like Twitter's bitmapped. He’s somebody that you should already be following if you care about anything local, but his objections are very good. He argues that if the city wants to regulate the traffic, it should absorb the road and pay for its maintenance. He argues that the agency that pays for maintenance gets to say who drives the road. It’s tough to formulate an argument against this position. But, if the law says what SSM claims it does, the logic of @bitmapped’s position might not matter.

Tuesday Meeting

There’s a City Council meeting on Tuesday, June 24. It’s what’s known as a Committee of the Whole meeting. It’s where SSM will first be rolling out its proposal. There will be a public comment section. This is something that will also be discussed in future meetings. Needless to say, the potential exists for a protracted fight between our changing community and longstanding entrenched interests. We’ll continue to write about this story as it unfolds.

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.

At the tail end of last month’s Morgantown City Council election - after more than 1100+ residents had already voted - Ron Bane (or whoever it was that ran/runs his Facebook group) made an absolutely incredible claim:

The next morning, The Dominion Post jumped all over the story, reporting that Bane, Wes Nugent, Jay Redmond, Eldon Callen, and Al Bonner had each contacted either The Dominion Post or City Clerk about the thefts. George Papandreas, a longtime local activist who has repeatedly and baselessly sued both the city and city councilors, stepped forward to offer a staggering $10,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of those guilty of stealing and/or defacing campaign signs. 

It is now more than three weeks - and one great big electoral blowout - later. The story seems to have petered out. No arrests have been made, nobody has been charged with anything, no video has surfaced, and The Dominion Post has not followed up with any additional coverage.

There is a very good reason for all of this: it is very likely that none of it ever happened. 

—

Buried with Bane’s original post are three very specific claims: that there is a video of multiple people stealing campaign signs, that this video has been turned over to the Morgantown Police Department, and that more than 100 signs were stolen. Two of these three things (the existence of a video, and it having been turned over to the MPD) are very easily proven. The third of them is less easily proven (that more than 100 signs were stolen). Fortunately, Bane’s telling of the story gives us a followable timeline of events: signs were stolen, video of signs being stolen was recorded, that video was turned over to the MPD. It should then be easy to work backward from there. 

I sent an email to Ed Preston (Morgantown’s Chief of Police), Deborah Mogus (Morgantown’s Captain of Police), and City Manager Paul Brake. I asked about the status of the ongoing investigation into the stolen signs and the video that had been turned over to the Morgantown Police Department. I received the following replies and have bolded the most relevant portions:

“I am unaware of any investigation regarding campaign signs.”

“As I said, I am unaware of any such investigation.” 

“Check with the city clerk because there was no report to the police.”

Uhh. Oh. Okay then. Thinking that I must have misunderstood something about the original claim, and the reporting that proceeded it, I then contacted Linda Tucker (Morgantown’s City Clerk). I asked her about the stolen signs. 

there are no reports on stolen signs 

…That’s weird. Ron Bane wrote that evidence had been turned over to the MPD. The MPD is denying this. The City Clerk is too. That last part is particularly interesting, as Tucker was specifically cited in The Dominion Post’s as having received these complaints. Tucker is saying the opposite.

Work backward from these denials and we end up in some particularly dark territory. Video tends to be a very conclusive thing after all. A video of multiple individuals stealing campaign signs would have been huge news in a generally quiet town. That a candidate would claim that such evidence exists, and that it had been turned over to the police, only for both the MPD and the City Clerk to deny having heard about it? We are left with two very different explanations. 

The first is that various city officials are engaging in a conspiracy designed to bury the truth of the stolen campaign signs, including a video of the guilty parties. That seems unbelievably far-fetched. 

The second is that Ron Bane was, intentionally or otherwise, misleading people when he wrote that video of multiple people stealing campaign signs had been turned over to the MPD. Although the uglier and more obvious conclusion is that he was doing this intentionally - in other words, that this claim of a video, of MPD’s involvement, and of stolen signs was simply the dirtiest of political tricks, one designed to convince potential voters that his opponents and their supporters were thieves - my sneaking suspicion is that Bane was told that all of these things had happened, and that he (or whomever ran his Facebook group) posted the claim without bothering to verify it. The question remains as to who it was exactly that mislead Bane, assuming of course that this kinder version of the story is the accurate one. 

The effect was the same of course. Some interested parties who encountered the claim took it (and Papandreas’s offering of a reward, and The Dominion Post’s barely sourced coverage) at face value, concluding that Bane’s opponents, and their supporters, were thieves. You can see precisely this conversation taking place on Facebook, where a local developer (Timothy Guminey) shared Bane’s post into the Morgantown, WV - Forum, and asked, perhaps jokingly, if anybody was getting nervous. The implication was that the accusation was true. What plays out in the comment thread is a back-and-forth between those convinced that this story must be true and various skeptics asking for any sort of evidence. The skeptics appear to have been entirely correct. 

It did not matter in the end. Bane and the rest of his running buddies were blown out by city voters sick and tired of a group of candidates whose very loose definition of “truth” stretched out like so much taffy. After countless meltdowns, stunts, setups, accusations, recriminations, and complaints, Victory For Morgantown’s final attempt to mislead the voters fell on ears that had long ago stopped listening.

Worth Noting

One final thing about all of this. In the Facebook thread above, an individual named Williams Miller dropped in to insist that the tape itself was real, but that because it showed a single person removing the signs - a person that Miller claimed is a locally elected official - that the recording was being held onto until that person runs for office. He offered no explanation as to why his story differed from Bane’s, and in short order, the post was removed. You can see the claim below:

Tonight’s election results were a stunning and entirely unexpected evisceration. What was hyped as a competitive race between fourteen candidates - seven loosely affiliated candidates on one side, and seven other candidates running as a unified group on the other side - turned into an electoral bloodbath within an hour of results starting to roll in. 

Three incumbents lost by more than 1900 total votes. Ron Bane lost to Rachel Fetty by more than 700 votes. Mark Brazaitis beat Jay Redmond by more than 600 votes. Ryan Wallace beat Wes Nugent by more than 600 votes. The city’s voters took the opportunity to declare that they were sick and tired of conspiratorial nonsense and what seemed to be nonstop litigiousness on the part of these three incumbents. 

The council’s two other incumbents won rather easily, although by not nearly as much. Jenny Selin beat Eldon Callen by more than 300 votes, and Bill Kawecki beat Al Bonner by more than 300 votes. 

Which leaves the city’s last races, both for open seats. In what turned out to be the worst of the defeats, Ron Dulaney Jr. beat Kyle McAvoy by more than 800 votes. Then, in the city’s closest race, Barry Wendell beat Bill Graham by more than 225 votes. 

This year’s turnout was thoroughly good, by the very low standards that Morgantown has. 2707 voters participated in these past few weeks, including almost 1200 voters who showed up early. This is a significant improvement on participation in both 2013 (2094 voters) and 2015 (1521 voters), but sadly comes nowhere near the city’s high-water mark from 2011 (3699 voters). Vote By Mail becomes more successful with each passing election, as it becomes clearer that competitive elections are simply not nearly enough to drive high numbers of voters to the polls. (Hopefully this election will be the end of that absurdly silly theory.)

There will be lots to sink our teeth into over these coming days, including the second round of campaign finance reports, as well as the electoral fallout from all of this - exactly how many lawsuits will George Papandreas be filing as a result of tonight’s results? - but for now, there is only looking at what appears to be a shockingly thorough thumping of the city’s good old boy network. 

Gracious. 

One side of the heavy trucks debate would like to ensure that nobody thinking seriously about this issue has good data to work with. That side is represented by, amongst others, our local media establishment, including WAJR and The Dominion Post, as well as various city officials, including Jeff Mikorski and Glen Kelly.

WAJR and The Dominion Post are easy to understand, as they’re owned by the Raese’s, the same family that owns Greer Limestone, the same corporation whose heavy trucks are the ones being targeted by proposed regulations. Thus, the apparent inability of WAJR and The Dominion Post to produce any sort of journalism that’s worth a damn makes perfect sense. It isn’t an accident. It’s intentional. 

But Mikorski and Kelly are a different story. They’re alleged “professionals” and, as a result, are afforded a certain amount of respect that outfits like WAJR and The Dominion Post obviously don’t deserve. Respect has its limits though. It has to be earned. 

One way to earn it would be the provision of thoroughly researched, easily available data, preferably the data used to create this bit of hokum from last Friday. Kelly is the one who prepared the letter referenced in WAJR’s coverage. It includes a list of the twelve companies which have had the most accidents in an eight year period (from 2006 to 2014) within Morgantown’s city limits. However, the list contains no context. There are no hard numbers. There are no opportunity measures. There is no attempt to control the data in any meaningful way. There is just a stupid list, bereft of what any reasonable person might describe as intellectual curiosity. 

In the comings weeks, as the city council fights this issue out, Mikorski and Kelly should be expected to provide answers to all of the following questions:

-How many of the 268 accidents involved the sorts of trucks that Safe Streets Morgantown is proposing to regulate? 

-How many of the 268 accidents occurred on the roads that Safe Streets Morgantown is proposing to regulate? 

-What is the ratio of opportunities-for-accidents to actual accidents, as broken down by vehicle type?

None of this data should be particularly hard to assemble, especially if there exists somewhere a raw breakdown of the numbers that went into the 268 total accidents.  

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. 

Or at least, you attempt to.  

To watch the Morgantown City Council operate, you come away believing that they live in another dimension in which the town’s realities on the ground are entirely different than the ones the rest of us understand. Take for example their newly developed opposition to a city wide smoking ban. Forget the fact that they’re beating a cowardly retreat from a practical decision they made only three months ago, and instead focus on why they need to delay the ban’s implementation.

The why matters, you see. To hear them tell it, the five City Councilors suddenly in favor of chickening out on a popular policy are doing so because they’re afraid it would be unfair to Morgantown’s bars if bars everywhere else in the county could still welcome smokers. “We can’t vote against the businesses within our boundaries!” they might as well be shouting.

Presumably, these City Councilors are absolutely quaking at the possibility that they’ll vote for something that causes unnamed bars to leave Morgantown’s city limits to set up shop beyond the scope of the law. Except that, in the very next breath, those same City Councilors will tell you that the Monongalia County Board of Health is on the precipice of passing their own smoking ban. Here is the problem with all of this:

1. Let’s suppose you think businesses are going to leave Morgantown’s city limits. What is the benefit to them? They’re going to be hemmed in by a county wide smoking ban that everybody with authority assures us is coming soon. So a local, townie bar is going to risk walking away from its customer base for three to six months of continued lawful smoking? Come on.

2. Let’s suppose you think local businesses aren’t going to leave but that their customers are; which bars are going to be hurt by this? Specifically, name them. None of the downtown bars are going to be hurt because they count on primarily on student business, and students aren’t going anywhere. Outlying bars - like the Suncrest Pub, Classics, various Hot Spots - might be affected, but revisit the earlier point: are they going to leave the city limits, and their established customers, for three more months of access to geographic locations where smoking remains legal?

Unfortunately, this leaves us in a bit of a spot: why is the City Council doing this? The answer, plainly, is that they’re bailing on the smoking ban in the sneakiest way imaginable. By leaving the decision up the Monongalia County Board of Health, the City Council not only stops the implementation of the ban within city limits (thus benefitting a very small percentage of the entire population of Morgantown: bar-owners and their smoking customers), but creates an excuse for why a smoking ban hasn’t been implemented: “Hey, we wanted to do it, but not if it hurt local businesses, and when the Board of Health inevitably bailed on such a ban for the millionth time, our hands were tied!”

What you’re seeing then is a handout from five City Councilors (Selin, Manilla, Herbst, Bane, and Nugent) to local bar-owners on the faulty premise that a smoking ban is going to hurt those bar-owners. Rather than have the guts to make a decision that Morgantown overwhelmingly supports (note the lack of commotion when the ban originally passed), these five are willing to sell out the health and well-being of non-smokers because a few bar-owners played the pity-me card.

To put it simply, this is an abdication of authority by the city’s elected officials, people who frankly ought to know better.

Whether this city’s oldest timers like it or not, Morgantown is changing. There’s new construction everywhere. The university is expansive and omnipresent. Neighborhoods are changing. Predictably, this change creates tension.

One of the best places to find that tension is in local politics, and perhaps more specifically, in what representatives are doing with their time. Let’s use the ongoing heavy trucking ban as an example. But first, recent history:

In 2013, a heavily contested City Council election returned a very surprising result: two incumbents lost, three incumbents won, and the two remaining incumbents retained their seats only because they ran unopposed. Both of those incumbents - Wesley Nugent and Ron Bane - ran unopposed, and it isn’t difficult to imagine them having lost if they’d been challenged given how easily the other five councilors won their own contests. 

The 2013 election was contested along a set of rules that those losing incumbents had demanded, having scrapped 2011’s stunningly effective vote-by-mail process in a return to the previous model of in-person voting. What those incumbents didn’t realize was that much of their support found voting-by-mail easier, and when it wasn’t an option, they didn’t turn out.

My own protestations aside, it seems clear that Vote By Mail isn’t coming back, which means that future elections are going to be contested in the ancient model preferred by the candidates who own advocacy for it cost themselves the election. Meanwhile, the candidates who benefited from it (Jennifer Selin, Marti Shamberger, Bill Kawecki, Mike Fike, and Nancy Ganz) seemed to have genuine talent at turning out their own voters. And presumably, the voters that supported them are willing to do so in the future. 

That’s how we ended up with a City Council that was willing to aggressively challenge Brockway Avenue’s never-ending stream of truck traffic. The previous council bent over backward for established local industry. The idea of attempting to strike a balance between that industry’s needs and the neighborhoods those trucks rumble through was anathema. No more. 

So now we find ourselves at an impasse. We have a motivated council that seems to have sufficient local support against an entrenched local interest that has never been forced to give a damn about the people their policies effect. 

Enter the Monongalia County Commission. Rather than go to bat for Morgantown’s City Council, the cowardly commission has stood in opposition to proposed truck regulations. Tom Bloom leads the way, proudly insisting that those neighborhoods affected by the heavy trucking can go straight to hell. If it isn’t good for industry, it isn’t good for him. 

Here’s the potential problem: let’s assume that the 2013’s City Council election replays itself again in 2015. With new people moving into the city bringing with them new expectations, maybe the thing they want is a responsive City Council that fights for them. Maybe they want a different Monongalia County, or at least, a different Morgantown. 

But if the county commission insists on a continuation of this county’s industry-friendly and neighborhood-hostile history? We could have local political bodies at war with one another. It is difficult imagining a scenario in which that ends up being good for voters, the city, or the county. That isn’t to advocate for a unanimity of opinion, but rather, an attempt to find a middle ground that respects competing needs. 

But maybe that isn’t possible. We’ll have more soon about why it might make more sense to abandon hope for positive outcomes.

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.)