Remember Morgantown city politics? I tend to write more about those when West Virginia University isn’t engaged in serious athletic activities. But I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Nelson France has popped up again, this time as a potential candidate for City Council. He would represent Wiles Hill, the neighborhood where I grew up. I don’t like Nelson France. His initial foray into important local politics (being a representative of the University’s Student Government Association doesn’t count) was voluntarily accepting a role as the obvious puppet of our unconscionably awful City Planner Chris Fletcher. Fletcher fronted France as a great candidate for the City’s Planning Commission. It was a position that France had no business being anywhere near. Fletcher wanted a guaranteed yes vote and recognized in France the desire for political office. It was really a perfect marriage of political opportunists. That plan fell apart though. So France disappeared for awhile, at least in mind of Wiles Hill’s residents and those that still care about the neighborhood. Until earlier this week anyway. He reappeared as a possible candidate for City Council. He’d replace outgoing Charlie Byrer. The Daily Athenaeum, a newspaper I once worked for (itself a fact that I was once proud of), published an article which explored France’s consideration of running. Brief Aside That isn’t a fucking story! Are you kidding me? If I’m considering running for City Council, is that news? Jesus Christ, get your shit together. If you’re going to write a story like that, how goddamned difficult would it be to ask France what he actually wants to do? I understand that he wants to hold political office. I don’t understand what he plans to do if he, god forbid, got elected. How does it not dawn on the reporter to ask? Have things gotten so bad at the Daily Athenaeum that they’re not teaching the writers to ask anything more probing than what ended up being published? Back That isn’t the focus. France is. More to the point, my belief that France is entirely unsuited to represent any neighborhood in Morgantown, much less the one I happen to love the most. The simple fact is that he is an entirely unknown quantity in that area who has no reason to care about that neighborhood. He is a transient college student still, without encumbrance or attachment, a man without the sort of roots-in-the-ground connection that you’d like to see from somebody proposing to represent a group of people. To him, it isn’t about doing what’s best for Wiles Hill; it’s about putting one more thing on his resume, something voters really ought not be worried about. It’s also about representing students, the same students whose disregard for the neighborhood is one of the primary issues that any City Councilor is going to have to deal with. The candidate who would be running against France, Wesley Nugent, is a good man. He lives in Wiles Hill. He knows his neighbors. He attends meeting. He advocates on behalf the neighborhood’s residents. Unless another candidate enters the race, Nugent is the only man for the job. Worth nothing, however, is this: I contacted France with a list of three easy questions. They are below:

Why do you want to represent the Wiles Hill area? What do you plan to do for the Wiles Hill neighborhood? What are your top five goals for the Wiles Hill neighborhood?

I took my daughter to the dentist today. When we left the dentist’s office, which was across from the Warner Theater, she remarked sadly that she couldn’t believe that Carvel Ice Cream had closed. I explained to her that its business location wasn’t particularly good, especially after the closure of the theater itself. She accepted this and moved on, as kids do, but I thought back to what I knew of the theater’s closure, and I got relatively angry, not because I was fond of Carvel, but because I loved the theater.

The story that floated around at the time of the Warner’s closure was that it had been brought to its knees by fire safety violations reported by a city inspector. Because the repairs necessary to bring the building into code were so expensive, the theater’s owners chose instead to simply walk away, putting the building up for lease to somebody willing to pay the money it would take to get the doors open again, thus creating an incredible amount of front-end cost. What we’re left with is the following grim reality: the Warner Theater is unlikely to ever re-open.

I’ve heard a different version of the same story. In this version, one of the city’s fire inspectors went to the theater to see a movie and, while there, walked into the theater’s offices. The kids working behind the counter at the theater told him repeatedly that he wasn’t allowed into the theater’s office. He repeatedly refused to identify himself, staying to poke around, and allegedly getting incredibly offended that anybody would dare question his presence anywhere. The next day, he came back for an official inspection, and punished those kids behind the counter for doing their job by documenting fixes so expensive that it drove the theater out of business.

Perhaps the first the version is true. Perhaps the second version is true. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because the theater was killed and now the business attached the theater has gone down. In other words, instead of having an attraction to bring people downtown, the city’s inspectors decided that it would be a better idea if the area was vacant and abandoned. Good plan guys.

I am biased of course. I loved the Warner Theater. I loved watching movies there as a child. I loved “watching” movies there as a teenager. I loved watching movies there as an adult. And although the building was old and creaky, I don’t ever remember sitting inside it, thinking to myself, “I am in grave danger.” But that fire inspector did. He is the expert of course but one has to wonder what changed, because I remember that building as a child and as a teenager and I don’t remember it being any different than it had been for years on the day that it closed. Surely fire inspectors had been there before. Surely fire inspectors had signed off on that building before. This is the tripping point for me, the point where it becomes very easy to imagine that a fire inspector settled a score against the theater rather than a fire inspector heretofore undiscovered piles of gasoline soaked rags placed below every electrical socket.

At the end of the day, I am left with this one question: what was really accomplished by closing that theater? And how did anybody benefit from it? The answers to both questions, as of right now, is that nothing was accomplished and nobody benefited. As I said: good plan guys.