Bent Corner

If the Herald-Mail newspaper is going to continue smearing the reputation of Hagerstown City Councilperson Kelly S. Cromer, I guess I will continue to blog about it.  Being that the Washington County Ethics Commission cleared Cromer of acting unethical the day she was pulled over by a Hagerstown police officer for speeding, I thought the Herald-Mail would move on.

Evidently I was wrong.

Today’s edition included a front page story reporting that the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) voted unanimously on July 16 to rescind Councilwoman Kelly S. Cromer’s associate membership. This was before the Washington County Ethics Commission even ruled on the matter. Their decision wasn’t made public until July 31.

Today’s article included something that appears to be factually wrong. It reads:

She also was quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her because she questioned the validity of a program under which some city employees are permitted to drive city-owned vehicles to and from work.

She was never quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her. Someone who claimed to have been with Cromer when she took a phone call from the reporter from the Herald-Mail asking about the incident claimed on a message board that at no time in the phone conversation did Cromer say the word “vendetta”.

Shortly after reading that, I emailed Dan Dearth, the reporter who wrote the article, and asked him if Cromer actually said the world “vendetta”.  He promptly replied:

Rick,

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

Thanks.

Dan

Dan Dearth was the one that chose the word vendetta, not Cromer.  She only answered in the affirmative when asked if she felt “some” city officials and “some” members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She did not answer in the affirmative that she felt that the entire police department had a vendetta against her.  The key word is “some”.  The way it reads in today’s paper is that Cromer was quoted as saying the entire Hagerstown police department had a vendetta against her.

She never said that.

Can anyone even blame her if she does feel that some in the Hagerstown police department have a vendetta against her? How else did the newspaper learn about the traffic stop three weeks after it happened?  Someone leaked the story to the newspaper and it wasn’t because they were a supporter of Councilperson Kelly Cromer.  They did it to make her look bad and the Herald-Mail seems to be going out of their way to do everything they can to help.

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I blogged a while back about the local newspaper’s war against one of Hagerstown’s city elected councilmembers, Kelly Cromer. I read an editorial that was even more of a hack job then normal. I decided to temporarily lift my self-imposed ban on writing more letters to the newspaper. I originally blogged that if the newspaper didn’t publish my letter, I would go ahead and publish it here.

I don’t think they ever published my letter, so here it is:

I read the editorial published June 24 (Cromer’s apology for incident isn’t enough) and I was amazed at what I read. By demanding that Hagerstown City Councilwoman Kelly Cromer prove that her version of events concerning the May 26 traffic stop are true, you are in a very real sense demanding that she prove her own innocence. That’s not the way that it works. If Cromer committed some type crime or abuse of power, it’s up to her accusers – mainly the Hagerstown Police Department and the Herald-Mail — to prove her guilt. So far that hasn’t happened.

Much of what we know about this traffic stop was learned from reading a special supplemental report written by the officer that stopped Cromer, a supplemental report that was written the day after the actual traffic stop. We know from reading the supplemental report that the officer had to call his supervisor during the traffic stop and ask for advice. I wonder, did this officer receive any more advice the next day while writing the supplemental report? If so, how many people helped him write the supplemental report? Do any of them drive city owned take-home vehicles?

Cromer made no public mention of this incident until three weeks later when a reporter from the Herald-Mail contacted her while she was on vacation. The reporter asked if she believed there was a vendetta against her and she answered in the affirmative. Cromer didn’t choose that word “vendetta” to describe the situation, it was your reporter.

What I find to be the most peculiar thing – and that’s saying a lot — about this whole controversy is how the Herald-Mail found out about the traffic stop in the first place. It would appear that someone from the Hagerstown Police Department or some other city employee leaked the story to the Herald-Mail. Three weeks after the fact. It appears to me that this was done to make Cromer look bad in the eyes of her constituents. She is certainly taking a lot of heat for a word she herself never said. What would motivate someone to do such a thing? Maybe just maybe it was in response to her suggestion that the city investigate the validity of the take-home vehicle program. I can’t help but wonder if the person who leaked the story to the newspaper drives a city owned take-home vehicle. Since we will never know the identity of this person, we are left with only our suspicions.

Rick Rottman
Hagerstown

I promised myself a while back that I would stop writing letters to my local newspaper, the Herald-Mail. I wrote a letter last year where I referred to the deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell as “an idiot”. My comment was edited by someone at the Herald-Mail to read that I called him “a fool”.

They made me sound like Mr. T.

I read something this morning that made me do a reversal on my self imposed no-letter to the editor policy. It was a heavy-handed piece of drivel pretending to be an editorial calling for, among other things, Cromer to write a check to the United Way (huh?) for claiming that a Hagerstown police officer was “lying” when he submitted a report stating that she asked him if he “knew who she was” when he stopped her for speeding.

I doubt they will publish my letter. If they do, I will make sure to link to it. If don’t publish it, I will post it here.

This isn’t the first time the Herald-Mail has editorialized about the Cromer traffic stop. On June 14th they published an editorial accusing Cromer of being too quick in accusing the police of a vendetta.

What they failed to mention was that it was the Herald-Mail — not Cromer — that came up with the word “‘vendetta’.

I read a post over on the Herald-Mail message board written by someone claiming to be a friend of Cromer’s. Among other things, this person claimed to have been with Cromer when she received the phone call from the Heard-Mail reporter asking about the incident. This person claimed that at no time did she hear Cromer use the word “vendetta” when talking with the reporter.

Huh?

Last week I emailed the reporter who wrote the story and asked him if Cromer said the word “vendetta”. I got a response almost immediately. He wrote:

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

So there you have it. The mystery is solved.

Hagerstown Police Chief Arthur Smith is weighing in on comments made by Hagerstown City Councilwoman Kelly Cromer concerning a supposed vendetta against her for looking into the city’s take-home vehicle program.

He wrote a memo to Hagerstown City Administrator Bruce Zimmerman asking that something be done.

From the Herald-Mail:

“This traffic stop was conducted on May 26, well before any contentious debate in reference to take-home vehicles.”

That’s not entirely correct. I remember reading about Councilwoman Cromer’s interest in the take-home vehicle program before May 26. In fact, I emailed both Councilwoman Cromer and Herald-Mail reporter Dan Dearth about this subject on May 19. Something I read in the article caught my attention:

In February, The Herald-Mail filed a public information request seeking the cost the city incurred to provide employees with vehicles for fiscal year 2006-07 and to date for fiscal year 2007-08. The city responded almost a month later, saying, “There is no document that satisfies your request.”

This didn’t sound right to me. I used to have a job where I was given a company car. One of the things I had to do was to keep a detailed record of the miles I drove each week. I had to keep track of both the miles I drove on company business and the miles I drove for personal reasons, such as driving back and forth from my home. These personal miles had to be kept track of so that a dollar value could be determined and then this dollar amount would be reported on my W-2 as taxable income.

The City of Hagerstown has to keep track of the cost of all personal mileage. Otherwise they would not be able to correctly report this figure to the IRS. That’s something they simply don’t have a choice in doing.

As far as vendettas are concerned, why did someone from the Hagerstown Police Department leak the story about the traffic stop to the Herald-Mail three weeks after it happened? If Police Chief Arthur Smith doesn’t appreciate what Councilwoman Cromer is saying about one of his officers, maybe his police department shouldn’t have leaked the story to the newspaper.

From the Herald-Mail:

A Hagerstown resident told the City Council on Tuesday that she intends to file an ethics complaint against Councilwoman Kelly S. Cromer over a traffic stop in which Cromer was given a warning for allegedly speeding last month near City Park.

During a council meeting, Cathy Ridenour said a “can of worms” had been opened after Cromer was given a warning rather that a ticket on May 26 for allegedly driving 43 mph in a 25-mph zone — an infraction that carries a $90 fine.

“I, as a tax-paying citizen of Hagerstown, am asking that the (Washington County Ethics Commission) investigate in full the incident that occurred in regards to Councilwoman Cromer being stopped …,” Ridenour said. “My belief … is that no one is above the law and using one’s position of authority is inexcusable, unprofessional and wrong.”

Now this is just getting silly. Unless Cathy Ridenour knows something that the rest of us don’t, she has no basis to accuse Cromer of anything. She certainly has no basis of going to the Washington County Ethics Commission.

Even if Cromer somehow used her position on the City Council to get out of a ticket — and there currently is no evidence showing that she did — it’s the police officer that made the decision to NOT give her a ticket.

I think I’m going to do my best John Kerry impersonation now and flip-flop on this. At first I was ready to criticize Cromer for trying to get out of ticket, but now I’m not so sure if she has anything to be criticized about. She claims she didn’t say “Don’t you know who I am“. She claims that since the officer obviously knew who she was, she asked him if she needed to look through her luggage for her license.

The more I think about it, the more I believe she didn’t ask the officer if he knew who she was. She obviously knew the shit-storm that was created when her fellow City Council member Alesia Parson-McBean said that when she was stopped by the police.

Of the two versions of the story — Cromer’s and the officer’s — it’s Cromer’s that makes the most sense.

Hagerstown city councilwoman Kelly Cromer on the the Herald-Mail online forum:

The Mayor doesn’t care one bit if we look bad, as a matter of fact he tries very hard and goes out of his way to try to make some of us look bad. He only cares about himself. He is a liar and a phony. His day is coming, I have an ace up my sleeve that will be life shattering for him.

Cromer is referring to Hagerstown’s mayor the honorable Robert E. Bruchey. Either they are playing a lot of poker or she doesn’t like him.

Not that there is anything particularly wrong with a city councilwoman not liking a mayor, especially if one is a Democrat and the other is a Republican. Sometimes I think government works better if everyone involved hates each other’s guts.

It’s not like this is unprecedented. In 2006, Hagerstown Mayor Richard Trump resigned after only nine months in office. It was reported that he quit because of his inability to get along with the city council. Bruchey — who already had one term as mayor under his belt — stepped in to fill Trump’s position of mayor.

I have no idea if Cromer’s criticism of Bruchey has any validity to it or not, but I do appreciate her candor. She is an elected official that says exactly what she thinks. And considering the fact that she is a criminal defense lawyer, I think she knows a thing or two about the legality nuances of libel and slander. If she says that Bruchey is a phony and a liar, I have to believe she has some kind of credible evidence to back it up.

We all know that people don’t say stuff on Internet message boards unless it’s true.