Drama Heightens In Bitter Town Feud

Md. Man Refuses To Cede Mayor's Post

Myles Spires Jr. arrived early, climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Forest Heights Community Center and installed himself in the mayor's seat at a long table where the Town Council was about to meet.

Although he had been -- and, in his view, still was -- mayor of the tiny Prince George's County town, Spires had been accused of misconduct, and the council had done everything in its power to expel him, suspending him repeatedly by resolution and removing him by charter amendment.

"We were concerned. Even the police were concerned," council member Jacqueline Goodall said, recalling his appearance at the March meeting. "No rational person would react in the way he has."

Even in the context of the oddities of small-town politics, the latest development in Forest Heights is unusual. Spires, who became mayor as an advocate of clean government only later to be indicted as an embezzler, is refusing to leave office.

"It's our position he's still the mayor," said Paul Sciubba, his attorney. At Sciubba's urging, Spires declined to comment for this story.

Spires has not generally been recognized in town as having the powers of the office for quite some time. His March effort notwithstanding, he has neither led a council meeting nor answered the phone in the mayor's office since September, when he was suspended for the first time. If Spires is the mayor, he is running a government very much in exile.

According to Goodall and others at the meeting, Spires banged a gavel and thus began a brief standoff that was typical of the town's recent political theater: Spires was asked to leave. He refused. The police were asked to remove him. They refused. The council voted 5 to 1 to order the police to remove him, and Spires voluntarily, temporarily, gave up his seat.

Until a few years ago in Forest Heights, a town of fewer than 1,000 homes that straddles Indian Head Highway near the District border, two long-serving mayors governed for, between them, five decades. Spires was in office fewer than eight months when the council first suspended him as questions swirled about his spending of public funds.

The scandal, following the hasty collapse of his predecessor's administration, has roiled Forest Heights -- a place apart, residents say, from the urban travails beyond its borders. Until recently, little had changed in some respects since the town's early days, when the local paper carried the motto "Everyone a Neighbor."

The controversies of late have cost Forest Heights dearly. A mention of the Spires indictment left lawmakers cold when state Sen. C. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George's) and town officials appeared in Annapolis recently to ask for a $300,000 bond bill to pay for renovations at Town Hall. "There was nothing left for me to say other than, 'We're going to work on fixing these problems, and we'll come back next year,' " Muse said.

Spires was indicted in February on charges of forging a council resolution that allowed him to seek reimbursement for more than $21,000 in personal legal expenses and of embezzling money by submitting false expense reimbursement claims. He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial is scheduled for July.

Spires, 40, the bishop of an Internet church, first drew attention late in 2004, not long after he moved to Forest Heights from the District, when he sued the town for what he said was "illegal taxation." Spires, then chairman of the Forest Heights Ethics Commission, alleged that that the council deceived residents about the purpose of a tax increase and that the mayor had ordered him to destroy tapes of town meetings. Spires publicized the lawsuit in his newsletter, the Forest Heights Herald Examiner. "The Mayor and the Town Council lied to the citizens of this town," he wrote.