Kennison deals with tax, legal trouble amid mayoral bid
Mark Kennison
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Mark Kennison stands in front of Presidents Pub in December 2015.
Making his way through the old VIP Night Club on Main Street, Mark Kennison pointed to water damage marring the plaster and ceiling tiles overhead in the various rooms.
“This was all repaired before the demolition,” he said.
Kennison, a GOP candidate for Washington mayor who’s been involved in a series of downtown ventures, blames the half-demolished building next to his property at 19 N. Main St. for a series of overdue liens for delinquent property taxes he recently settled.
“No one planned for that building collapsing,” he said. “It was just financially devastating.”
Kennison also said the tax liens and other court records – including a recent reorganizational bankruptcy filing by his restaurant, Presidents Pub, this year – reflect problems he’s worked to address.
“I would say as of February of this year we made our final payment to make all our properties current,” he said. “Despite no relief, we’ve paid all our taxes currently.”
Kennison, 35, wrote on an ethics disclosure that he has a 40% stake in the restaurant, which he started in 2015 after successfully founding and selling several other Main Street businesses. He said he has a 15% stake in Kennison Strategic, which he owns with his mother and brother.
The restaurant building, an adjacent one where a yarn shop is now a tenant, and the former VIP all belong to the development company.
He said he’d been renovating 19 N. Main St. – which housed a nightclub and sports bar before city officials deemed it a nuisance and shut it down five years earlier – before the July 2017 collapse of the neighboring building at 15 N. Main. Kennison bought 19 N. Main a little more than a year earlier.
The plan is to turn the building, which has two stories and a basement, into an entertainment and wedding venue and banquet hall – the type of thing he said the city’s sorely lacking. After a year of renovations and kitchen upgrades, Kennison said he anticipated opening within about six months. Instead, the three-story structure next door caved in, setting that process back about two years.
He was unable to enter his own building for months while demolition went on. When he finally did, he found tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damages.
The rubble-strewn ground floor of that building still stands beside Kennison’s.
Because of its collapse, the bank he’d been working with to refinance the company’s real estate and secure a Small Business Administration loan to finish that project decided the investment would be too risky.
He’d also been counting on the loan to pay off back taxes he’d become responsible for as part of the $300,000 purchase from its previous owner, Pat Clutter of Ohio.
Portnoff Law Associates, which collects delinquent taxes for the city and Washington School District, filed a total of $56,900 in liens against Kennison Strategic from 2016 to ’18 for unpaid real estate taxes. Those liens concerned taxes due on the properties from 2015 to ’17.
The earliest of the liens dates to 2016. They pertain to taxes on 19 N. Main from the year prior.
City deputy treasurer Susan Bonus confirmed Kennison has since paid the outstanding real estate taxes.
“I just got off the phone with Portnoff, and they are verifying that he has paid in full,” she said this week.
Kennison said he’s still overseeing work on the 19 N. Main project.
“We believe that we can have the main hall renovated and open by the end of the summer,” he said. “The frustration is, with the (adjacent) building half collapsed, it restricts the value and usage of the building. But despite this, we’re going to continue with our original plan and renovate the venue to be open by end of summer of this year.”
The setbacks to his plans for that location overlapped another string of legal and financial problems. In 2016, Sysco Corp. and a subsidiary located there filed a lawsuit in Butler County accusing Presidents of violating its agreements with the food supplier.
Kennison said he’d initially tried to work out a payment plan to cover the disputed amount – about $14,000 – but Sysco wasn’t receptive. Instead, it went after Presidents for the money, plus attorney’s fees and other costs, in court. In May 2018, court records show the corporation won an award for $67,900 during a one-day nonjury trial.
“If we had spent $50,000 to plead our side of the case, there’s a good chance that we would have won,” he said, adding he doesn’t have the budget for that. “So we just felt like we were taken advantage of.”
Sysco’s now pursuing the award, plus interest and additional costs, in Washington County. Kennison said the bankruptcy petition that Presidents filed on March 29 was a way to work out a payment plan.
“A Chapter 11 is a way to reorganize debt, not a way to get out of it,” he said. “They demanded a lump sum for the legal fees, and I didn’t have a lump sum.”