And so it begins in earnest...

It’s unfortunate Mayor Tilghman has lowered herself to engage in the politics of personal destruction again. In her press event today, she accused Jim Ireton of lying about crime and disparaging city employees.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

So what did Jim say Tuesday that has the Mayor so infuriated? Watch for yourself.

Crime Speech PART ONE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeDJ3yLkNMU  

Crime Speech PART TWO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTbcY9uJ5_c  

Here’s most of the data he cited Tuesday:
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We stand here today in a city that was second in 2007 only to Baltimore City among municipalities in violent crime incidents. A city second only to Baltimore City among municipalities in forcible rape incidents. When looking at acts of violent crime per resident, Salisbury is actually ahead of Baltimore City. As of 3 weeks ago, we are still seeing more Part One crimes year-to-date than we have seen in the last two years in the same time period. 

What does that mean to us? Part One crimes, year-to-date for January and February: 2007, 495 and in 2008, 489 and now in 2009, 522.

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That’s what he said. EVERY WORD IS TRUE. Every. Single. Word. And the per capita statistics he cited were true, too. No apologies needed.

Changing "Maryland! My Maryland!"

From delmarvanow.com:

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller is suggesting that a state commission examine Maryland's state song and consider changing some stanzas.

Legislation that would have changed some of the words to "Maryland! My Maryland!" has failed in a House committee. A Senate version of the bill remains in a committee.

And why would the legislators of Maryland want to change such a historic state anthem? Well, let's take a look at a few of the lyrics:

The despot's heel is on thy shore, 

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore,

And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!

So who's the despot whose heel is on thy shore? This guy:

Yeah, Abraham Lincoln.

Maryland's state anthem (sung to the tune of "O, Christmas tree", by the way) was a call for secession to the South in 1861. So I can see where some may feel it's just a little out of date.

Some other chocie lines from the state's official song:

I hear the distant thunder-hum,Maryland!The Old Line bugle, fife, and drum,

Maryland!

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-

Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!

She breathes! She burns! She'll come! She'll come!

Maryland! My Maryland!

So, uh, really - "She spurns the Northern scum?"

I don't need a tune like "Almost Heaven West Virginia" or "Hang On, Sloopie" (official state rock song of Ohio, really), but I do think we can do better than "She spurns the Northern scum!" Even if I agree with it whenever I get cut-off by a car with New Jersey tags on the Rt. 13 Bypass...  

Swimmable and fishable in 10 years

http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20090317/NEWS01/90317059&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL

That's what Jim Ireton promised today. Within the next 10 years, we will see the Wicomico River swimmable and fishable again. 

On a day when Gary Comegys laid out his vision for the city, called "One Salisbury," all anyone is going to remember is "Swimmable & Fishable in 10 years."

Twenty one days until the election. Just sayin'. 

Three weeks left, and nowhere to go

DISCLOSURE: I'm now volunteering for Jim Ireton's campaign, so take my takes with a grain of salt. Or a whole salt mine. Whatever works for you.

So, The Daily Times decided there was sufficient news interest in the dirt being tossed around in the Salisbury mayoral race, and decided to address it all in one fell swoop.

My first reaction was, "Really? This is what you're covering? Admitted gossip and rumor?"

And after a few reads of the article on Gary Comegys and the article on Jim Ireton, I changed my mind. Slightly.

To its credit, The Daily Times did present each man with every known rumor, allegation and possible slander and allowed each to answer. They brought each candidate in and asked the questions to each man's face.  

I would have preferred to read their complete answers - it would have made for a great read on the delmarvanow.com site - but, if nothing else, each man got to answer the questions directly. And we get all this nonsense out of the way with three weeks still left to discuss the issues the citizens of Salisbury REALLY care about.

So, here's what we learned about Gary Comegys:

*Gary Comegys lost a child support suit with his ex-wife. He disputed the amount of time he needed to pay an increased amount of child support, and apparently reverted back to the original amount when the child reached 18. She sued, she won.  Next question. 

*Gary Comegys started a business with his 2nd wife and it failed. He declared bankruptcy. He says now he wished he hadn't declared bankruptcy. [EDIT: To be clear, they had the business declare bankruptcy.] [EDIT AGAIN: After re-reading the passage again, it's not clear if this was a personal banruptcy or a corporate one. I could only find online records of banruptcy in federal courts back to 2004.]

*Gary said he voted for zoning for the old mall under assumptions that later proved not true. I don't know enough about the whole mall mess to even have an opinion on the believability of this assertion.

*Gary didn't finish college. I don't know that Gary has ever said he did. There is some confusion over the use of the term "engineer" that I do think he glossed over.

*Gary says he really can do math. I'd point at Salisbury's city budget deficit and argue differently, but he's right in saying his job requires it. No argument there.

*He says he left the board of the Wicomico Humane Society on his own. I didn't know he was even ever on it.

*He and the firefighter volunteers don't seem to get along on the topic of seceding from city control.  Except that the paid firefighters just voted to endorse Jim Ireton. Make of that what you will. He did apparently abstain from the pension vote.

*The Sassafras Meadows mess, is, well, a mess. The way it reads, Gary had no idea his buddy Mike Dunn's family had been involved in the transaction. Right.

*And since the Cottages at Riverhouse campaign event never took place, everything's just hunky-dory. Right.

*And his infamous nap apparently happened while he was home recovering from shoulder surgery. Seems reasonable. And no, no sarcasm is intended there. I've had shoulder surgery, and the recovery is not fun.

And about Jim Ireton:

*He left the city council in 1999 to move away from Salisbury mostly over money, but some personal issues were involved, too. His time on the council doesn't come across as very pleasant. Since he left before the end of the school year, his certificate was "held" for a year by the state. Standard procedure in Wicomico County, by the way.

*His Open Meetings Violation was the results of a procedural mistake that he owned up to.

*He is going to serve his full term as mayor. Period.

*The $25 ticket in Rehoboth was addressed. Really, it's a non-issue. 

"I beat myself up now for being stupid and being out on the beach," he said. "Maybe if I thought at one point three years ago I was going to run for mayor of Salisbury, maybe I would have had my watch on."

*He's consistently said the city needs better control over the conditions of rental properties and that landlords need to be licenced.

*He supports impact fees, but did vote not to assess them on one project while he was on the city council. He does want an Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance.

*He was against the city's solution for Camden neighborhood flooding, because he says it didn't solve the problem, just create new problems.

*Jim is probably going to go half-time teaching.  The quote they used from Jim wasn't the nicest thing he's ever said, but then again, I didn't expect the Times to make him look good, either. 

*Jim hasn't asked that the mayor's salary be raised. He has questioned the timing of the mayor's Salary Commission report, which will be released after Barrie Tilghman is gone. How convenient for Barrie.

OK, now that THAT'S out of the way, can we talk about crime, neighborhoods and the river now?

Guitar Hero: Metallica

I just may need to take a day off of work to enjoy this one.  Street date is March 29.

And, I'm back: Reactions to Tuesday in Salisbury

Jim Ireton won, and won big Tuesday night in the primary of the Salisbury mayoral race. Disclosure: I volunteered on a couple of occasions and made a bunch of phone calls Tuesday for Jim.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at what we know from the results, what’s reasonable to extrapolate from the data, and what comes next.

First, the raw numbers:

=================
Registered Voters 12557 - Cards Cast 1394 - 11.10%
Total Votes - 2053

• Robert Caldwell - 522   /  25.43%
• Gary A. Comegys - 560 / 27.28%
• Michael Della Penna - 132 / 6.43%
• Jim Ireton - 839 / 40.87%

=================

A few reminders about Salisbury's primary process:
* It is a non-partisan primary - no one has party affiliations next to their names.
* Each voter can select two candidates, but it not mandated to - if you desire, you can vote for just one.
* Voters cannot give both votes to just one candidate. You can vote for one, you can vote for two, but you can't vote for one twice.
*Top two candidates proceed to the general election, conveniently held a month later, April 7.

WHAT WE KNOW:
Jim Ireton will proceed to the general election with 40% of the cumulative vote total.

Gary Comegys currently holds a 38 vote lead over Robert Caldwell for the second and last spot on the general election ballot.

Absentee ballots will be counted Thursday. There are 149 to be counted. Those voters may have voted for one or two mayoral candidates, and there's no way of knowing until they are physically counted Thursday. We may have an additional 149 votes or an additional 398 votes. If they break the way the general did, about 60% will vote for one candidate only, and the remaining 40% will have voted for two. In either case, some, and probably a majority, of those ballots will be marked for Jim Ireton, either alone or in additional to Caldwell and Comegys.

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW:
Gary Comegys should, but may not, advance as the second candidate. Since there's only a 38-vote difference, it's possible, though not probable, Robert Caldwell could pass him. But I'd rather be Gary Comegys than Robert Caldwell going into the absentee ballot count.

As Joe Albero noted on SBYNews, some of the math from Tuesday isn't heartening for Gary Comegys. There were 1394 voters in the election casting a total of 2,053 votes. That means, as Joe points out, that 738 people cast just one vote for mayor. And that's more than half the people who voted.

WHAT WE CAN GUESS:

Jim's 13 percentage point victory is a problem for Gary Comegys, no matter how he chooses to spin it. Even if you take the favorite theory of Comegys' apologists - that his people just voted for Comegys while Ireton piggybacked on outsider support for Caldwell along with Ireton's base - the numbers don't work for Comegys. Those "Caldwell and Ireton, too" votes would have to break somewhere on the order of 65/35 in favor of Comegys for him to overtake Jim Ireton. And I can't foresee a circumstance where Comegys picks up a substantial amount of Caldwell supporters, let alone two-thirds of them. If they were voting for Caldwell, and adding Ireton as a message or a second thought, they aren't going to suddenly switch to the government incumbent.

A vote for Caldwell was a vote against the status quo, and the status quo is exactly what Gary Comegys represents and wants to continue. If he wants to run on his record, there will be some very happy people running the Jim Ireton campaign.

QUESTIONS THAT ARE LEFT:
Does Gary Comegys go negative? Some of his supporters certainly are. Just browse the comments on delmarvanow.com and other local blogs. Some of the stuff is vile, and most importantly, irrelevant. I won't even validate the smears by repeating them here. It may indeed get worse. I wouldn't read the Grapevine on delmarvanow.com if you're squeamish until after the election. And you might want to wait an additional week.

Does Gary Comegys run on his own record, or against the 16 months Jim Ireton served on the City Council 10 years ago? He's kind of between a rock and a hard place - if he harps on Ireton's votes from a time when Clinton was still president, he's wallowing in the past. If he runs on his own record, he's opening himself to charges of being beholden to landlords and other special interests with the evidence being contained in his comments and votes while on the City Council. Don't be surprised if he tried to wage a campaign focused on Jim Ireton 10 years ago instead of Salisbury 10 years from now.

How does Jim Ireton deal with his time on the council? The facts are there - he was elected, and well short of the end of his term, he resigned and moved. Now he's back, and wants to be mayor. People are going to have tough questions he needs to be able to answer.

Is The Daily Times guilty of bias? More disclosure - I worked for The Daily Times as a reporter and editor for 3.5 years back in the early 1990s, and enjoy good personal relationships with Erick Sahler, Managing Editor, and Greg Bassett, Managing Editor. They were great co-workers, and have been great professionals in all my dealings with them since I left. I've called concerning stories on my Wi-Hi Wrestling Team and also when I worked on the campaign to reject the 2000 Revenue Cap proposal.

But I am left wondering after looking over some of the coverage in the last week. Politicians always complain they aren't treated fairly, so I was pretty cynical. But here's a few quotes from stories the last week that made me say "Huh? Really?"

From the Voter's Guide on Sunday, questionable phrasings in bold and italic:

Ireton, 39, has been a teacher on and off for 17 years. He taught at St. Francis de Sales School in Salisbury from 1993-97 and at Northwestern Elementary in Mardela Springs from 1997-99. He served 17 months on the Salisbury City Council from April 1998 to August 1999 before quitting and taking odd jobs with Alternative Resources Corp. in Linthicum, Md., then came back to Salisbury to work at WBOC-TV for the remainder of 1999. From 2000-2004, he started a master's program at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and taught at Mount Royal Elementary/ Middle in Baltimore, then taught the next two years at Medfield Heights Elementary in Baltimore. He returned to the Lower Shore in 2006, teaching for two years at East Salisbury Elementary. His current place of employment is Westside Intermediate. Ireton is active in the Democratic Club and is chairman of the Wicomico Neighborhood Congress and a member of the city of Salisbury Recycling Committee.

Really, he's taught for the vast majority of those 17 years. Government officials traditional resign, not quit. And I have no idea why the writer used "taking odd jobs" as a description of his work in Linthicum. And why not note Jim's finished his mastered, instead of just saying he started it? And he's a teacher at Westside Intermediate. Current place of employment? What's that's about?

And from the article concerning Tuesday's results:

SALISBURY -- Former councilman Jim Ireton made it through the city primary Tuesday by a landslide vote, more than 300 ahead of City Council Vice President Gary Comegys.

Comegys said he was still delighted to get the support he did.

"I'm going to work extra hard between now and the general election to win this," he said.

Ireton gave a confident speech to a captive audience at Flavors of Italy on Main Street.

"I'm going to be the next mayor," he said.

Well, Jim said a lot more than that, but that's a great quote for a reporter. But "made it through"? How about, oh, I don't know, WON? There's a pretty short way of saying what Jim Ireton did Tuesday.

But, more importantly to me,  why does the man who just got beaten by 13 percentage points get the first quote? Everything I learned at the University of Maryland's Journalism school says most important first, then give facts in descending order of importance. So Gary Comgey's reaction is more important the the man who garnered 13 percent more votes?

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but there's a case to be made there's a pattern developing.