Maine: Scarcelli's firm under fire Down South

My Portland Phoenix piece on Maine Gov. Paul LePage's very cozy relationship with corporate lobbyists has taken most of the attention, but in the same issue I have a short article on former Democratic gubernatorial candidate (and U.S. Senate hopeful) Rosa Scarcelli.

In short, Ms. Scarcelli's property management firm is under fire in Natchez, Mississippi, where its buildings have reportedly been "abandoned" after years of serious complaints by residents, code inspectors, and unpaid contractors. As you'll see in the piece, Scarcelli tells me her firm is a victim of a deadbeat property owner: her wealthy mother, Pam Gleichman. (Ms. Gleichman also owns dozens of properties in Maine, many of them housing the elderly.)

Scarcelli also took issue with a previous blog posting here, where I called her out for lying to the readers of the Portland Press Herald about her knowledge of her husband's involvement in the creation of the now-infamous Cutler Files website.

She contends that she didn't lie because she didn't learn that her husband, Thom Rhoads, had been involved in actual editing of the website until "around Thanksgiving." In September and October she says all she knew was that (a) her husband had done opposition research on Cutler; (b) her husband had given the research to her former campaign advisor, Dennis Bailey and (c) Mr. Bailey appeared to have made a website with it. Therefore, she argues, she wasn't lying to the Press Herald on Oct. 27 when she said she and her husband had nothing to do with the website (and that she was offended they were accused of involvement.) She says she was furious when she learned a month later that her husband had helped edit the website as well.

I told her it seemed to me that her husband having provided the content from which the Cutler Files was created was, indeed, "involvement," and that the distinction she was drawing between content creation and the technical production of the website itself was unimportant. But I said I'd share her point of view with my readers, in case some of you will see it differently.