Mayor Jane Campbell

View the three videos as she answers questions on regionalism [Windows or Mac]; on racism in Cleveland safety forces [Windows or Mac]; and why she isn't getting credit for her accomplishments [Windows or Mac].

What are some of your major accomplishments as Mayor, and why do you think you’re not being given much credit for them?

One of the biggest accomplishments was getting the government to function. Everybody expects it to function. Once it functions, well it was supposed to all along. When we came in, there was supposed to be $11 million, but there was $61 million deficit. There were so many flaws in the way things were being done. That took the majority of my time for the first couple of years. If you think about it in a business sense, that was a big turnaround. We have a billion-dollar business. We finally now have crafted a development strategy, including housing. We hit 1500 homes last year.

That’s 1500 new residential homes per year.
In Cleveland we now produce more single family homes. We led the region, two years in a row. The region includes Brunswick and Avon, and all of those places that people think are fabulous growing places. We built more single family homes. And the market for single family homes is very strong. Residential property values rose 13% last year. So we led most of our suburban competitors for residential property values.

That’s big news.
Big news…

I don’t know where you can get that kind of return on investment.
You can’t get that kind of return anywhere else. The fact is, we didn’t raise city taxes. So that’s an important piece. For most Clevelanders, that’s their biggest investment. We work hard with the Cleveland Housing Network, the Homeownership Zone. We really try to make home ownership an opportunity for Clevelanders at a much broader level.

Why do you think you’re not getting credit. Why don’t the business leaders look at this and say, “Property values are rising, this is a good thing”?
I got into a controversy with the business community over the convention center. And there’s no question that our current convention center needs to be updated or replaced. However, the push was to create a property tax to create a $400 million facility. That just wasn’t sustainable.

Well, it wasn’t going to pass…
The polling data was 90% against it. I said if we’re ever going to get a convention center upgrade, we’ve got to take it off the table right now. We were laying off city employees, we were going for a school levy.

At least there’s a process in place and the public is involved now…
I took a lot of criticism for pulling it off the table. If we put it on the ballot and we lost big time, it would have delayed the process for years. We’re not going to build or rebuild unless the County participates in a major lead in the funding. So we created the Convention Facilities Authority to balance the interests of the Mayor, the Commissioners, the City Council, and the suburban Mayors. That entity is now a useful entity to get this thing moving.

I think it’s ironic that the one case where you were decisive and actually took leadership and actually said, “We are going to direct the agenda in this way,” It was done in a negative way, but still, it was a decisive move and took political guts, and still you get no credit. I’m trying to understand how you feel as someone who I’m sure has the best interest of the city and the region at heart, and yet I wonder if you can extrapolate why you think your efforts are not gaining traction.
I made a decisive move. We were going to set the discussion aside and focus on the schools. Because there were certain interests in the community who wanted a convention center built at all costs, paid for by the public. Since the decision was clearly a decision supported by a majority of the public, they attacked the person, rather than the decision.

Why did you allow the Cleveland Public School levy to proceed in August in a special election that was expected to attract low voter turnout and doomed to fail, unless you were trying to separate the negative school vote from your re-election campaign?

Well, you know, I from the get-go said it ought to be on the normal election cycle.

I didn’t know that. I understood that you were pushing for it not to be in the normal cycle.

There was a conversation for it to be put in May. But in May, there was nothing different. If it had gone in May, our teachers would have been taken out when there were proficiency tests in April. The administrators didn’t want to pull the teachers off in May. So Barbara suggested it wasn’t right for the district, for the kids.

But why didn’t it go into the November election cycle?
Then there was this groundswell from the faith community, The Council President was a big supporter of putting it on in August. What happened was, ultimately, the state legislature changed the law with regard to reimbursement. You would be reimbursed for the tax rate that was in effect on September 1. We would have gotten $3 to $10 million more if we had raised the tax rate before September. The school system wanted to do it, the school board wanted to do it, so I said, OK let’s try it. So we did. We got the worst results we’ve gotten from a school levy in some time. It is a couple of things. It is a real loss of confidence in the schools. August is a tough time for an election, for a levy. People of goodwill were saying, “We care about our kids, we care about our schools, but we just can’t afford it.” And people know that the state absolutely has an obligation. It has been declared unconstitutional four times. The day after it failed, Barbara and I were in Canton meeting with the school administrations around the state. We’re looking for a political consensus that would allow us to put on a ballot initiative to have a constitutional amendment. We need 330,000 signatures statewide. So what are we going to do about the schools now? Long term, we have to deal with this constitutional amendment. Short term what we’re doing is to redirect as many resources as we can to the teachers in the classroom. We have three active audits that are underway: a financial audit, educational success audit, and a management review.

In redirecting some of the resources, will we lose some of the arts in education programs?
No I see there’s a strong support for the arts from the board level, from the administration level. Kids tend to do better, they stay in school. The evidence is compelling. When kids are exposed to arts, their math scores go up. We just restarted the band at South High. You should have seen the band, and the Senior Citizens Walk. I have to tell you it’s mostly percussion at this point. They’re so cool, they have uniforms they have the dancers, the Raiderettes.

A couple of years ago, there were two Arts Summits at City Hall, but since that time, there hasn’t been much progress on local government working to support the arts and culture industry to help grow the local economy. Why?
You know, I think a piece of it is, we went for the Arts Levy at a county-wide level (Issue 31), a great campaign put together very quickly. There’s a regrouping now, including some conversation about how can we have a broader reach, should we have an arts council that picks up the 7 county region that is Cleveland.

Seven counties?

Seven or eight counties. When you look at the draw for our arts community. Take a look at the Tremont Art Walk, people are not all from Cuyahoga County. They are from Medina, they’re from Brunswick, from Avon, from Lorain. If we can broaden the base, we can reduce the amount we ask for from each citizen and I think have a lot more exciting response. Meanwhile, we’ve been working on projects that are art-based. Certainly what you and James [Levin] did with Ingenuity was a fabulous show with art, technology, vitality, diversity… A lot of people who were focused on dealing with the arts got focused on Ingenuity, which was great. We’ve got a whole piece going on in Detroit Shoreway with the Detroit Avenue Streetscape that is designed to be supportive to Near West Theatre, Cleveland Public Theatre and the creation of an avant-garde theatre district that will anchor Detroit Shoreway as an artists' community. So, while there hasn’t been a Summit, the engagement with the arts continues. You see it with Little Italy. Now we have lofts being built in Little Italy, that are spin offs from the earliest investments from when Holy Rosary School was made into artists lofts. So I would counter point you that while there hasn’t been an arts summit, but some of the seed that were planted from the arts Summit continue to flourish and grow. And we now have the 1% for the arts. And we dedicated the Bridge at St. Colemans that was built with arts in mind. And the fence is completely different…

An artist-designed fence around it…
So we’re starting to see there is a lead time, you pass a piece of legislation that is Percent for the Arts. Then a couple months later, you start to implement it, then you do the design, then you award the contract, now we’re actually building those things.

Would you be in favor of a cabinet-level Arts & Culture officer for Cleveland?
Here’s my concern: I don’t know how we’d pay for it out of the City budget, and whether it’s better to have that be a broader-based person who participates in the cabinet. The city of Cleveland can’t carry the arts investments on our own. If we’re going to invest to have a Cabinet level person, you’re talking $70 to $80,000 plus fringes and secretary, you’re talking $200,000. Is it better to spend that on a person, or is it better to participate with the community-based arts and culture effort and say we want to have a person who’s going to be engaged with the city and engaged with the broader community. Think about our Sustainability Coordinator, Andrew Waterson. We reached out, we got foundation support. And Andrew is now working with everyone across departments about how they incorporate environmental sustainability into our work. What we need to do is engage the artist community in our work at City Hall, rather than hire an individual person. We worked extensively with Susie [Frazier] Mueller on Sparx in the City, we worked with you guys on Ingenuity, we worked with Detroit Shoreway on the Detroit Avenue Streetscape, and you have several different departments. I’d be real open to having the community join in a sort of Minister of Arts who could participate with the City and the County was well.

How about getting it funded from the outside?

That would be great. There’s models for this with the Lakefront Plan. We had it externally funded for 18 months, and we brought a person in to manage the Lakefront Plan, Debby Barry. Now we’ve got significant dollars to implement that plan.

You got the money from where?
From Gund [Foundation], Cleveland [Foundation], and what is now the Greater Cleveland Partnership. After 18 months of doing the plan, we then were able to identify with the monies that were coming in to implement the plan, the money to keep her to implement it.

To make that position sustainable…
That’s what we’re doing with the Sustainability Coordinator. We think that Andrew is gonna put together enough of an imaginative package, and we’ll be able to get a grant for the Brownfields…

I hope to see it for the arts, is all I’m saying. Let me ask about Technology for a moment. Tim Mueller’s Chief Development Officer position was an experiment in focusing on entrepreneurship, technology and customer service by engaging a businessman who was not a politician. Why didn’t that last longer? What happened there that didn’t allow him to continue that great work?
Tim gave us great service for the time he was with us. He is fundamentally an entrepreneur. He added a lot of value, he gave us an important perspective. He got very frustrated with the operations of government, the complexity of going to City Council hearings, the public records engagement… When you are an entrepreneur, you make a decision, you follow through on it, and you do it. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder every minute, offering sixteen different opinions. He just said, I want to go back to doing what I love. He’s glad he did that. And he said it to you in your interview. We’re a better city for him having spent time with us, and he’s a better person for having spent time with us. He was there at the worst of times. We had no money, the Finance Department was a mess, we spent a lot of time doing business turnaround, getting the house in order. Now the development projects that are underway, leads us to about $3 billion dollars worth of construction. The East Bank, the activity at the Shoreway, the implementation of Lakefront Plan, Battery Park, the Steelyard Commons, just to mention a few. So our next engagement around technology was to engage technology in two ways. One, inside our economic development department, Tim Mueller helped us recruit Tim Moran as the economic development tech person. Tim Moran we gave him a goal, we said we want you to bring eight companies in, and he did. And, as often happens in government, he got offered twice as much money to go and do technology for the Cleveland Clinic. So he’s still in Cleveland, he’s a Cleveland resident, he’s bringing business to Cleveland, somebody else is paying him, they’re paying him more to do it. God bless him. The technology agenda hasn’t left us, even though there are different players. Now with the Red Room Revolution piece, we have 50 companies working with us, on how do we support and enhance their work. We’re working on engaging technology more fully into our own operation as government, and we’re teaching our own people how to use technology with Computer Learning In My Backyard [CLIMB], and efforts to address the Digital Divide.

One of the complaints about the Red Room Revolution is that it is limited to corporate CEOs and not broad-based enough to make an impact, and that it resembles a campaign committee for Jane Campbell. I disagree with some of that characterization personally, because what do you do, not engage with the Mayor because she happens to be running for re-election? Do you stop for 6 months, 8 months, 12 months before the election? I think that’s silly. But, what are you doing to see that Cleveland takes advantage of its current leadership in ultra-broadband connectivity, Wi-Fi coverage and visionary ideas coming out of Cleveland? These are some of the places we are leading the country, leading the world. What specifically are you doing in your leadership to see that Cleveland takes advantage of this?
We began the conversations that led to the Red Room Revolution almost a year ago. I wasn’t going to shut down the government because I was going to run in a year. We had to take advantage of technology. We had taken a lot of criticism for not engaging the business community more fully. So we brought in 50 CEOs of technology companies. And we said to them what do you want, what do you need, how can we help, how can we help you succeed. And they helped us craft this strategy, Meanwhile we also were engaging with people who were doing digital divide kind of things. Bill Callahan and that whole crowd. And out of that came Computer Learning In My Backyard, the IC3 certification efforts. And meanwhile we engaged our own staff about what were the opportunities inside the government about using technology. Plus we engaged with OneCleveland, and we’re one of the initial partners in OneCleveland, one of the first entities to sign on and help it come to fruition. And we were actively leading the effort to become an Intel Digital City. This effort built upon itself, and will continue to build upon itself.

Let me ask one quick question about the racism issue. Cincinnati and Toledo have recently been hit with full-scale racially-motivated riots lately. To some people, it’s a surprise, to others, it’s not a surprise. There’s charges now of racism, as there have been, in the Cleveland safety forces. What are you doing about this issue before Cleveland blows up as well?
We have been working with the department of Justice, the whole time I’ve been here. When I came in there was an allegation of racism within the Cleveland safety forces, and issues around the use of deadly force. The Department of Justice has been working with us and we’ve finally adopted a policy in March of 2005. We’ve done re-training of our police officers twice. We went 14 months without a deadly shooting until September and then we had two. We went directly from that, directly into finding… we’re doing the investigation, we’re doing it with the Department of Justice by our side. But we also went further. We called and said, “Who is the best in the business to do this?” And the answer was the Miami police chief. We brought him here. He’s been working with our folks, we’re going to upgrade the policy…

What’s his name?
Timoney. And when he went to Miami there has not been a shot fired for the first 20 months he was there.

Many people feel regionalism is the only way that our part of the world will be able to stay competitive. This would include joint purchasing, the elimination of redundancy, and eventually, eliminating the borders between Cleveland and its suburbs and joining school districts. What is your view on regionalism, and, as Mayor, what have you done to move the issue forward?
I think the first issue is, if we’re really serious about regionalism we have to deal with the school system. The school system and the safety forces are the two we have to navigate through. Interestingly, Cleveland has perhaps the weakest school system and the strongest safety forces. So if in fact our regional partners were willing to engage on those issues, we could have a very productive conversation.

You’re saying to the suburbs, it’s sort of a trade-off, “If you deal with us on the schools, we’ll help you out with safety forces”?
It’s a great dynamic...

Interview, photos and video by Thomas Mulready

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