Ted Gatsas’ Handling of 2014 Spice Crisis Sparked Criticism
Former Mayor Closed Public Park & Convenience Stores
Manchester, N.H. — Six years ago, in August 2014, the city of Manchester became engulfed in the “Spice Crisis” as synthetic marijuana sparked a public health crisis. In the wake of a wave of overdoses related to the synthetic marijuana product known as “Spice”, then-Mayor Theodore Gatsas issued a ukase closing Bronstein Park, a public park located near Central High School. No one who was not affiliated with Central, whose students used the park for band practice and other activities, was allowed access when the high school was in session.
The business licenses of three convenience stores were revoked by the City Clerk’s office after as search of their premises by the Manchester Police Department. The businesses reportedly were selling “Smacked,” a brand of synthetic marijuana being marketed as potpourri.
The action came after the mayor had convened a task force to deal with the public health crisis.
Nemesis
At the time, many observers of the Queen City political scene believed that the mayor had overreacted to the situation and acted inappropriately, particularly as regards the business closures. Then-Mayor Ted Gatsas’ then-nemesis Joseph Kelly Levasseur, an attorney-at-law, was engaged by one of the closed stores, TN Gas — a gasoline staton and convenience store located on Bridge Street in Manchester’s Ward 3 — to fight the business license revocation.
No synthetic marijuana has been found on the premises of TN Gas. Patricia LaFrance, then serving as the Hillsborough County Attorney, said on reaction to Gatsas’ crackdown on peddlers of Smacked that it was difficult to ban Spice, legally, as the chemicals that caused intoxication used to create synthetic marijuana were changed often. Non-banned chemicals were substituted, giving the Spice product legal cover until those chemicals, too, were banned.
A former Ward 2 alderman who was elected Alderman-at-Large in 2011, Joe Kelly Levasseur’s bid for reelection had been vigorously opposed by Gatsas. The mayor prevailed upon the City Republican Party to refuse support to Levasseur. The man known to his fans as “JKL” or just plain “Joe” won easily.
Levasseur — who at the time of the 2014 Spice Crisis had a contentious and antagonistic relationship with the Manchester mayor, then in the middle of his third term — believed Ted Gatsas had exceeded his authority by closing a public park to the public the park is meant to serve. JKL also was adamant that the revocation of the convenience stores’ businesses licenses was illegal under city ordinances.
Just as he had done in his 2013 bid for reelection, Joe Levasseur would prevail over Ted Gatsas in court.
Reputation as a Successful Manager
Ted Gatsas had used a reputation as a successful businessman to promote himself as a politician possessed of extraordinary management skills. Unfortunately for the Queen City, those management skills, for many critical observers, had been proven to be nothing but hype by the middle of his third term. Alderman-at-Large Levasseur, even questioned Gatsas’s business acumen, attributing the success of the Gatsas family company, which was sold for millions, to Gatsas’s brother.
It was Joe Levasseur’s humiliation of the Gatsas administration, in court, that likely triggered the executive order closing Bronstein Park to the public, an act that the New Hampshire chapter of the ACLU declared was probably unconstitutional.
In 2009, Ted Gatsas was elected mayor and easily won reelection two years later due to his reputation for being a successful businessman who would use those skills to successfully manage Manchester, the largest New England city north of Boston. His reputation, in kind if not degree, was similar to that of Donald Trump, with the caveat that Gatsas had been successfully elected to public office, alderman and state senator, before winning the catbird’s seat at City Hall.
Ted Gatsas has only lost one election in his long political career, his bid for a fifth term as Manchester mayor in 2017, when he lost to former Ward 1 Alderman Joyce Craig.
However, like Trump, by 2014, Ted Gatsas’ reputation as a successful manager had begun to unravel, as the Queen City faced many challenges. The previus year, Ward 12 Alderman Patrick Arnold — barely into his 30s and considered a political light-weight by the Manchester political establishment, who thought of the Maryland-born outsider as just cannon fodder for Gatsas — polled very strongly. Arnold’s superb performance in the 2013 election, where he came within 1,000 votes of a venerable political powerhouse, weakened Gatsas, politically.
By August 2014, his reputation was in freefall. This development partly was because of he constant battering Mayor Gatsas took from the very popular Joe Levasseur, who used a public access TV show as his bully pulpit.
Crime and drug abuse rose to disturbing levels under Ted Gatsas’ rein as mayor. For many of Gatsas’ critics, there was a bitter irony in the mayor closing Bronstein Park and permitting access only to students from Central High. Just as Gatsas’ refusal to adequately fund the public safety sector resulted in a plague of drug abuse and crime, they reasoned, his failure to adequately fund public education had resulted in Central High School nearly losing its accreditation.
The Manchester Police Department and the Manchester public schools had been severely hurt by the budget shortfalls caused by the tax cap championed by Gatsas as both an alderman and mayor.
The year 2014, Year 5 in the Gatsas Regime, saw a wave of “Spice” (synthetic marijuana) overdoses, a drug that was being peddled even by gas station convenience stores.
Ted Gatsas & The Tax Cap
As Joe Levasseur had said on his show many times in the past, Ted Gatsas was no fan of the tax cap. During his next reelection campaign which he won due to the miracle of having two voting machines break down in challenger Joyce Craig’s Ward 1, thus lowering her vote total in her home ward, Gatsas had pledged himself to the tax cap like a disgraced fundamentalist preacher pledges himself to God, all aquiver before his flock.
Gatsas’ early opposition to the tax cap, if he had acted on it, likely would have helped the city and himself in political terms, as mayor, had he used his authority to prevent the resulting budget squeezes from starving the public sector. In 2015, Gatsas would take each alderman into his office in the lead-up to the Board of Mayor and Alderman vote on the budget, saying that he’d support a tax cap override, as long as it was less than 3.9%. That pledge included vetoing BMA’s override, to portray himself as the tax cap king.
For Ted Gatsas’ reputation as a great manager was predicated upon his keeping spending in check. Many Democrats had supported Gatsas’ first run in 2009, in the basis that the city labor unions needed to be kept in check.
The austerity budgets of Gatsas’ first three terms weakened the public safety sector, allowing drug dealers to establish themselves in the Queen City. It was the 2015 Craig-Long budget, which broke the tax cap by increasing spending 3.99% over inflation, that finally provided the funding asked for by the Manchester Police Department to fund a full complement of police officers. An alternate budget, which would have overrode the tax cap by nearly the same amount, did not pledge as much to public safety, and targeted nearly a million dollars to refurbishing City Hall, a pet desire of Gatsas.
Convenience Store Closings
Joe Kelly Levasseur, who in addition to being an elected official also is a criminal defense attorney, successfully fought Mayor Ted Gatsas over his closing down of a convenience store that sold “Spice.” The store had been closed even though no Spiece was found on the store premises during a police search that the store owner allowed.
When dozens of overdoses related to “Spice” began to occur, Granite State Governor Maggie Hassan issued an order declaring a public health emergency. Not to be outdone, Mayor Ted Gatsas sicced the Manchester police onto convenience stores that allegedly had sold “Spice”, resulting in the shutdown of three convenience stores, including Levasseur’s client, TN Gas.
The police targeted TN Gas on the basis of a tip from a “Spice” user, a bit of hearsay whose validity was questioned by the judge who heard Levasseur’s appeal of the store closing. The judge lifted the ban on TN Gas and two other convenience stores. Later the owners of TN Gas and the other stores that had been closed down appeared before the Board of Mayor and Alderman’s Administration Committee and pledged not to sell any more questionable products akin to “Spice” and were allowed to keep their businesses licenses.
Levasseur appeared before the Committee as counsel for the TN Gas owner, and as the owner’s alderman. Within a matter of hours, Joe Kelly Levasseur had humiliated Ted Gatsas in court, and then before the Board of Mayor and Alderman’s Administration Committee when the court order mandating the reopening of the stores was validated by Levasseur’s fellow aldermen.
