PORTSMOUTH
Questions about race and whom to endorse for mayor have caused a rift in a predominantly white political action committee, and four of its 12 board members have quit.
People for Portsmouth’s president, Pam Kloeppel, says she wasn’t being racist at a council meeting in June when she spoke about who was being hired to run city departments. She was just stating a fact.
But Councilman Mark Whitaker, a frequent critic of the PAC and an advocate for minority hiring, implied otherwise.
It was the latest public example of the city’s racial and political divide, and Kloeppel’s presentation to the council was the last straw for at least three of the four members who have left her group.
People for Portsmouth, a PAC with more than 3,000 participants, was created in the spring of 2015 after the City Council slashed the city’s public safety budget, froze positions and raised taxes to close an $11.7 million gap.
The group had high hopes, stating it was “determined to make a positive change in local governance and leadership, beginning in 2016,” according to its website. Members wanted to remove “incompetent” leaders.
But Kloeppel’s decision to focus on race at the meeting went against the advice of some board members. She told the council that a white majority of high-level employees who had left since City Manager John Rowe was fired in April 2015 were replaced with black employees. Rowe, who is white, is now running for mayor in the November election.
“Do you have an issue with the racial makeup?” Whitaker asked Kloeppel.
“I think, for many years, many of us have been interested in the racial makeup being as much like the community as possible,” she responded.
Whitaker asked whether she had the same concern before last year, when most department heads were white in a majority-black city. Kloeppel only repeated her statistics from 2015.
But Whitaker wasn’t done: “I just find it interesting that your organization chooses to bring up race when it’s convenient, not when it’s truthful and not when there are issues of disparity that need to be addressed.”
For John Wright and two of his board colleagues, the heated exchange sealed the decision to leave People for Portsmouth, Wright said in an interview.
“That was about as racist as you could get,” he said.
Kloeppel said she presented the exact numbers the city gave her.
“And I don’t know how that can be racist because it is facts based on salary, gender and race and the change that went on,” she said.
What’s truly happening? She said former board members are trying to discredit People for Portsmouth and advocate for their preferred mayoral candidate, Shannon Glover, a black businessman.
Kloeppel wouldn’t say whom the organization plans to support, but Wright said he was 100 percent sure it would be Rowe.
Kloeppel let the board know she was going to give the speech at City Hall, Wright said, and some told her not to. She would just be opening herself up to criticism from Whitaker.
She said she was simply defending the data she had received after a Freedom of Information Act request on top-level employees who had left since the city fired Rowe, one of five candidates running against Mayor Kenny Wright. The data included 12 employees and showed a shift from 58 percent white to 33 percent. The mayor had told The Virginian-Pilot he didn’t believe the figures.
The Pilot made its own request about all top-level employees and found that half of the 18 are black, and half are white.
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John Wright said he and his colleagues had wanted People for Portsmouth to reach out to more residents than just “old whites.” Instead, it is “supporting the same old candidates who have given us the same old mess for years,” including Rowe.
“I just don’t think John was attentive to the needs of the corporate citizens of the city, and I think he can be painted with a lot of what’s wrong with the city now.”
Rowe did not return calls for this article.
Wright said Glover has work to do, but he doesn’t come with Rowe’s baggage.
Glover said via email that some of his opponents are “stuck in the failed practices of the past,” and that he offers a way to “move forward to heal, unite and grow our city.”
Wright and his colleagues didn’t want People for Portsmouth to be perceived as the white version of the influential Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Steering Committee, a political action committee of predominately black community leaders.
“That’s what blacks think we are,” he said.
Board Treasurer Fred Schoenfeld, who is white, said some members did think Kloeppel’s presentation was “poorly timed.” But, in his opinion, she spoke the truth, and it needed to be brought to the public’s attention.
“That’s not normal attrition,” he said of the recent hires. “There is something going on, and I think that needs to be brought out. You flip it around, everyone would be up in arms.”
Board Vice President Barbara Early was the first to leave, around the end of June, Schoenfeld said. The other three, Wright, Ross Cherry and Bill Hargrove, left in mid-July, according to a letter sent to Kloeppel. All four are white.
Early acknowledged that she left the board but wouldn’t say why. She’s still maintaining the group’s Facebook page and app because Portsmouth is “really in trouble politically.” Cherry and Hargrove did not return calls.
The letter of resignation said the organization had failed to represent “a broader spectrum of the community.”
“I don’t know why they would say that,” said board member Lee Cherry, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman who is white. “We have reached out to the black community, but it is what it is, and we are going to continue to reach out.”
Kloeppel said the organization is going to support a diverse slate of candidates, and, “We have gentlemen on our board who are black. We are doing the best we can to be inclusive.”
One of those black board members, Joe Wright, said he is concerned that the organization is mostly white. He didn’t have a problem with Kloeppel’s statements to the council because they were true, but the stats aren’t “really alarming because I have lived for years when the council and staff have been all white.”
Whitaker maintained his position Friday. He has criticized People for Portsmouth in the past for resisting “black progress” and frequently supports the mayor, who is also black.
The group’s attacks against black elected leaders, silence on white officials’ improprieties and lack of support for minority contracting and diversifying public safety show its desire to “turn back the clock and maintain the status quo,” Whitaker said via email.
“Persons with a social-justice consciousness understand that People for Portsmouth is not a novel concept, rather, it is an organization aligned with the Jim Crow philosophy of the past designed to prevent the progress of African-Americans,” he said.
Schoenfeld, the treasurer, said politicians are “throwing up the race issue as a smoke screen simply because they don’t want to face the truth.”
“The pendulum can obviously swing the other way,” he said. “And I think that is what happened.”
Another white PAC member, Marcus Gilmore, agreed.
“This new direction we are going in, it seems like racism in reverse. I am all about the most effective person.”
Johanna Somers, 757-446-2478, johanna.somers@pilotonline.com Follow @JohannaSomers1 on Twitter.
