Mr. Normans Nightmare

The temporary closure of the HCCA listserv to non registered users was apparently related to a post made late last night by Chris Carnavos. Mr. Carnavos is a neighbor of Marc Norman who has grown tired of Marc’s attempts to portray himself as a victim of evil developers. Marc has led the effort to try and keep Harris Teeter from opening a store in Turf Valley.

Chris takes issue with Marc’s moral character by pointing to a criminal summons from 2005 that was settled with a plea bargain. I am not comfortable with going into greater detail here but Chris did provide enough backup documentation complete with sordid details to prove his point. 

In a post on the listserv yesterday Mr. Norman claimed his “family has been harassed in Turf Valley for years.  In addition to workmen questioning my grade school daughter and taking her picture, Turf Valley was responsible for placing a port-a-potty on my back lot line last year to see if they could “have a little fun” with me and my neighbors.”

Chris provides a somewhat different version of events:

“Norman refers in the email I’m responding to about Turf Valley “workmen questioning his grade school daughter and taking her picture”. The circumstances of the incident with his daughter, as he describes it, are totally distorted. His daughter was found trespassing on the Turf Valley golf course property equipped with a walkie talkie talking to her father. So, who was spying on who?  In the last few days, Norman was “outraged” at being “monitored”, and now has distorted the circumstances around his daughters incident with workmen. I ask, how does she encounter workmen if she is not trespassing on Turf Valley property? I guess when he uses an underage kid to spy, and gets caught, it is harassment; when it’s done to him, its harassment.”

And finally, Chris takes issue with Marc’s failed petition drive and his association with the food workers union:

“And now, I get to the really big one, how the referendum issue against CB58 on the Turf Valley Town Square was planned and conducted, led by Norman. Under the guise of being a grass roots effort conducted by concerned citizens, it was really a collusion between Union 27 (who represent grocery employees), large retail grocers (e.g Safeway, Super Fresh, Giant), and activists led by Norman to get Howard County citizens to sign petitions by deceiving them as to the purpose, which was largely commercial – being to stop a non-union store (Harris Teeter) from entering the local Turf Valley/Ellicott City market. That was what I was prepared to testify about tonight because I get tired of hearing about disenfranchised voters when the very thing they signed for was based on total deception. This referendum effort severely injures proponents of good referendum processes when such a process is so severely abused. Again, I attach my testimony and my detailed backup proving the assertions in the testimony.”

I have reviewed the attachments that Chris references and they appear to corroborate his statements.