Jim Rokakis, part 1

James Rokakis spent over 19 years on Cleveland City Council, and as the current County Treasurer, he's ushered in broad amendments to the Treasurer's office, transforming Cuyahoga County’s property tax collection system. His accomplishments include launching an effective collection system and disbursement of tax revenue which resulted in income for school systems throughout Cuyahoga County. In this first part of a 2-part interview, Cool Cleveland speaks with him about his experiences on Cleveland City Council, using the Treasurers Office as a bully pulpit, and his opinion on seeking higher office.

Cool Cleveland: What is your background?
Jim Rokakis: I’m one of seven kids and a first-generation Greek-American. My father immigrated to the US in 1951 leaving my mother and my four sisters behind. They arrived in Cleveland, Ohio in July of 1954; I was born about nine months later, and I have brothers who are twins born a year later. We grew up on Prospect Avenue, then moved to Tremont and lived in the Valley View housing project. We scraped up enough money to afford a home which my father bought in 1960 near West 25th and Denison. I’m a product of the Cleveland Public Schools when they did a fantastic job; I was in the Major Works Program, where they took gifted kids and did great things with them. Mike White was also in the Major Works Program. I went to James Ford Rhodes High School and then went to Case Western for a year, then transferred to Oberlin College.

What did you study at Oberlin?

Government and Urban Studies, then I went to Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University and passed the bar in 1984.

When did you run for Cleveland City Council? I was elected in 1977 when I was 22, the year I graduated from Oberlin. I was the youngest member ever elected. I was elected at the same time that Dennis Kucinich was elected Mayor. You could say it was a baptism by fire. I was not a supporter of his then, but I respect him now. In politics you can be blood enemies; then it changes. I worked against him in the recall campaign, and then he worked against me in the elections of 1979 and 1981. We’re friends now and we work together, plus I have a great deal of respect for him. City Council was a thirty-three member body in 1977, so getting elected was not that difficult. We used to joke that if you went to church and were popular in two different bars, you could get elected to Council. Most of the people I served with early on fit that model.

Was that a good thing, or is the reduction of the size of City Council a bad thing?
When they made the change in 1981 it went from thirty-three to twenty-one, and all those people I just described lost their seats. What happened was that the education levels of people increased, and the quality of representation went up over night. You found people like Helen Smith, Ray Pianka, Dale Miller, Dan Brady, and Jay Westbrook. They were all educated, articulate and hard working. Many of them moved on to higher positions. I’m most proud of a guy like Ray Pianka, who is one of the best Housing Court Judges in the Country.

How did that Housing Court start?
It was in 1974; I wrote a paper for Oberlin and helped to elect Charlie Butts to that position. We felt that dilapidated housing was such a problem that it deserved its own court, and before that, no single judge took ownership of housing code violations and things fell through the cracks. With a single judge becoming an effective expert in that area, for enforcement and potential remedies [Ray Pianka], we finally got the judge that the position called for.

Why did you want to be County Treasurer?
I’ll tell you what happened. I spent a lot of time in City Council, since 1978, and toiled for a long time under George Forbes, who I was not in favor of. All the way through 1989 I was in the freezer because I was not popular with Forbes, and I did not have a leadership position. But I worked on my neighborhood and did things like passed the first non-smoking legislation in the City of Cleveland. I'll tell you a story: my mother was dying of pulmonary fibrosis because my father was a very, very heavy smoker, and we were at Metro Hospital, and she was having a bad spell, and the waiting room was completely filled with smoke. I worked with a guy from Xenia, Ohio on a no-smoking bill they passed there. And I introduced a bill to Cleveland City Council to ban smoking in workplaces and hospitals and in public lobbies, which forced the creation of non-smoking sections in restaurants. And the tobacco industry made their last stand and fought the bill for over a year. All the lobbyists they hired were African-American, and they tried to create the impression that the bill would be used against African-Americans.

What exactly does a Treasurer do?
I’m responsible for collecting all the real and property taxes in Cuyahoga County, and that’s the 540,000 parcels of property in the County. I’m responsible for investing all that money, something that you take for granted...except for the fact that my predecessor Frank Gaul, who created the Cuyahoga County S.A.F.E. Investment Program [Secured Assets Fund Earnings], the collective fund from which local government bodies could invest their short-term surplus...

Which was anything but safe...
Right. It was a program that took the County’s money and other public entities, and borrowed against it and invested in long-term securities, with an average of twenty-eight years to maturity. Every so often there is a reversal of the bond market, and long-term yields and short-term yields reverse themselves. This shift happened in 1994, and all the communities that were invested in the S.A.F.E Program wanted to take their money out, and since the yields had shifted and short-term investments were paying more than long-term, so the County had to take a loss when they took the money out. None of the communities lost money, but the County lost $114 million. A few people were indicted but eventually the convictions were overturned. The practices used back then have all been outlawed.

What else can the Treasurer do?

I decided early on that I could use the Treasurer’s Office to speak out on issues and use it as a bully pulpit for change. One of the first things we did was hook up with the Inner Ring Suburbs, and realized that they have the same issues as the City of Cleveland: aging infrastructure, struggling schools, and difficulty in retaining young people. So we hooked up with First Suburbs Coalition and Lou Tisler and established a Link Deposit Program, in which we can invest 10% of the County’s money and dedicate some portion that we can accept less interest on, if we can create a public purpose. It had been used for farmers and small businesses, but this was the first time it was used for homeowners. We’ve done 5,292 low-interest loans totaling $63 million in the Inner Ring suburbs to homeowners. There are no income limits, and it allows for a lot of flexibility for the homeowner.

Was that the program that won the EPA award?
Yes, that was what we called back-door regionalism. It ties everyone together. We were happy that a program like this would catch on and is being replicated around the country.

What was the Heritage Home Loan program?
This is where the County makes money available to owners of historic properties who want to maintain and restore the historic integrity of their homes. These are larger loans and they are longer term. These are ten-year loans that average $30,000, and we work with a team of historic preservation experts from the Cleveland Restoration Society. They go in and help the homeowner with removing aluminum siding, restoring windows, the porch spindles, and adding the historic colors - it has been very successful.

Don’t you also collect the delinquent taxes?
That’s one of the things we do - collecting delinquent taxes. Within nine months, we changed the state law to allow us to sell delinquent tax liens, as they do in thirty-five other states. The private sector gives the County a discount for delinquent taxes and the next six tax bills, and it came out to 93 cents on the dollar. Usually, it is the threat of the sale of the lien that produces the response from the delinquent taxpayer. We send out 10,000 letters threatening to turn it over to the private sector, and we’ll get 6,500 delinquent tax payers sending us the money they owe. Make no mistake about it; Northeast Ohio is in severe economic stress; there are seven other counties around the State that are doing this, too.

What else are you working on?
There are a large number of senior citizens who have approached our office for a couple of reasons. When the market went south, a number of people found they had less [money] than they thought. The seniors have also been victims of predatory practices like sub-prime and predatory loan. There are a lot of pension funds, retired steel workers, manufacturing plants, and their pension funds are being cut. Also, these seniors have CDs that are tied to the Fed Rate and it’s only 1-2%, when they used to pay 6%. So, some people who used to get $1,000 a month are now getting $350 a month on their CDs.

So what are you doing about it?
We’re doing a program called Aging in Place that we're announcing in the Spring for the elderly poor; it’s a county sponsored reverse mortgage. If you can’t pay your property taxes, your income is less than 25,000 and you are elderly, we will establish a program that will, for a small fee, pay those taxes for you and allow you to stay in that home.

How does that work?
Let’s say you live in Lakewood with a high rate of taxes, and you pay $2,200 a year in taxes on a $100,000 home, and you earn $19,000 a year, and you’re paying for medication and food, and you don’t have the $200 per month to make the property tax payment. Instead, you will pay a small fee. We’re partnering with local banks, and they will make the payment. The County deposits an amount in the bank and instead of earning 4%, we only earn 1%, and with that money we buy the rate down. You would have to apply annually and go through credit counseling, and there is a lien against the property. But if you don’t use this program there would be a lien anyway, but you’d have interest and penalties building up. When the owner dies, the county gets their money with the lien. We’ve got to believe that it’s better to keep people in their homes rather than end up in foreclosure and in a nursing home.

How do you feel about the current proposal to create a no-smoking ban in all public places?
I’m absolutely in favor of it. The fact that Mayor Campbell is unwilling to use the influence of her office to pass something that is so clearly a public health issue speaks to her inability to make a tough decision. She knows it’s good for public health, she knows it won’t hurt business, but because of her precarious position, she’s decided to take a pass.

What's your opinion of Mayor Jane Campbell?
She has gone from being ineffectual to being dangerous.

What’s the biggest issue facing our region right now?
The collapse of the job market. I was at a foreclosure conference and a banker told me that if someone falls behind on their mortgage, they will not get as much of a chance to work it out with the owner. The bankers have found that there is much less chance for the owner to be able to get a job and pay it back. Can you believe they would admit that?

So, are you running for Mayor of the City of Cleveland?
It is highly unlikely and I’ll tell you why. I have spent over $30,000 in polls and focus groups. I don’t know how to say this and be politically correct, but I’ll say it in Cool Cleveland because everyone knows it; the chances of a white male becoming Mayor of Cleveland in my lifetime is slim to none. We had 172,000 votes cast in the City of Cleveland for President in 2004; between 95-98,000 were cast by African-Americans, so they clearly are the predominant voting block in the city. The leadership of that community is coalescing behind Frank Jackson, so it would be difficult, if not virtually impossible, to overcome those odds.

How much money do you think it would take to be elected? How much have you raised so far?
I don’t know that any amount of money would do it. Look at what happened in 2001: A virtual unknown, Ray Pierce, spent a couple hundred thousand - he was outspent two-to-one - and he came within 5% of beating Jane Campbell, who was a well-known candidate.

Why didn’t he run again?
Because it was clear to him that the black leadership that supported him in 2001 would not be supporting him in 2005, most notably Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

What is your base and who would vote for you?
Well, my polling showed that I would do very well West of the River, and that I would beat Jane Campbell in the primary and would end up against Frank Jackson in the election.

And then you would lose.
Right - I was more willing to consider this race when Ray Pierce was the candidate. But the dynamics changed when Frank entered the race. First of all, he’s a friend of mine; I went to law school with him and I served on City Council with him. He was a protégé of one of my best friends on Council named Lonnie Burton, who died of a heart attack at the age of 38. He was a vibrant, powerful, and bright man who chose to represent the poorest people in Cleveland. And Frank has chosen to do the same thing; he’s representing the poorest people in the poorest city in the country. I haven’t figured out, Frank, are you Christ-like, or are you crazy? Get the hell out of there. Of course, the rap on Frank is that he has tunnel vision, he hasn’t been able to see the big picture, and that everything has been skewed towards 40th and Central.

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Interview and images by Thomas Mulready (:divend:)