Adelphia Building: Mulling Things Over

An Adopt-a-Block group  organized by Mike Mearan helped beautify the area in front of the empty Adelphia building with a plant that the State Police removed after identifying it as marijuana. 

One of the definitions of the word mull is to chop up marijuana so that it is smokable.  In “Committee Mulls Use of Adelphia Building,” an article in the Portsmouth Daily Times  (Aug. 29, 2013), Frank Lewis is up to his old trick of hiding the truth by blowing smoke, in this case about the Adelphia building. “One of the many city-owned properties sitting unattended may just have a use after all,” is the way he starts out his exercise in deception, by which he means the city’s water department might move there.  It has sat unattended for almost ten years for good reason: because it is a worthless moldy disaster. Anyone new in town  would have no idea from Lewis’s article what a long sordid history that building has and would have no inkling it had a serious black  mold problem, which is  likely to have grown only worse since it was first discovered and a lot of rain has fallen since. The history of building committees in the last ten years is the story of utter incompetence and bad recommendations, and the committee that is involved in  this crackpot idea is no exception. What else can you expect from a committee that has Allison Kalb filling the designated absentee seat? Yes, I can believe the committee mulled this proposal  over very carefully, following the example of Jim Kalb, who when he was mayor often worked in his office after  midnight, mulling things over. Because  the new editor of the PDT was probably not yet at the  newspaper when all this took place, he would have no idea based on Lewis’  report what a foolish idea it is for the Water Dept to be talking about moving there. The city getting stuck with the Adelphia building was a swindle perpetrated by shyster city council appointee Mike Mearan, and using money to try to repair it is a waste. If money is used for anything, it should be to tear the leaking, moldy eyesore down.  The Water Works chief said his crew could repair the place. Sure, and then we  would have a flock of city workers filing for disability because of illnesses caused by the mold, following the example set by former malingering police chief Horner who claimed mold in the Municipal building had made him ill.

I recommend that the editor of the PDT, and anyone else not familiar with the sorry history of the Adelphia building, take a gander by clicking on the following  River Vices articles:

Adelphia: O, Brother
Black Mold of Portsmouth
Mearan's Conflict of Interest