By Roldo Bartimole
A number of issues popped up on the community agenda this week.
One is the movement to reduce Cleveland City Council.
When I first frequented City Hall, there were 33 Council members. It was a simpler time and a simpler body. Council members were complaint expediters.
I remember they worked in one large room with a few cubicles with telephones. There was no such thing as cell phones. The 33 competed for phones to do their business. It was essentially a low-cost operation. It has grown. Big time.
Now there are 21 Council members, each with a computerized office. Each has publicly paid aides, ample expense accounts and additional support staff with at least two or three times the office space of the dowdy old cramped office.
Council also has gone on an extravagant spending binge on “consultants” and private legal counsel in recent years.
Expansion in all ways has been Council’s modus operandi for years. Bigger, however, may not be better. (They even took over what was once a busy pressroom but very few reporters watch Council these days.)
Added to all this, Council members – until recently – received a nice annual 6 percent pay increase whenever city employees got any raise, even 2 percent. So their salaries rapidly jumped for a part-time job (some do work fulltime, I think).
The question is: Have they priced themselves out of jobs?
It might not be a hard case to make.
Thus, a movement has been started to reduce Council to 11 members. Seven members will serve districts and four will be elected at-large.
Presumably, this will create a less cumbersome, less troublesome and less expensive legislative body.
However, unless I have lost my political instinct, it could cause other political headaches. Lots more unpleasantness, particularly for the sitting mayor.
That’s because each of the four at-large Council members will immediately believe that he or she has a citywide appeal and maybe even a mandate. A citywide mandate means that each will believe he or she can – probably should – be the mayor.
It could produce a permanent mayoral campaign. One that is automatically crowded. It could start the same day the citywide members and a mayor take office.
So we will have constructed a situation where the mayor will constantly be faced with a Council of one, two, three, but likely four citywide opponents who believe they should have the top job.
Big Money guys also could more easily control a reduced body even though a smaller Council may not produce what the city really needs.
That need would be a legislator the Pee Dee would label an “obstructionist.” Others might label him or her a populist, or better, a Council member who actually represented Clevelanders rather than the raft of gimme parasites usually getting attention.
So there are good reasons for trimming Council. There are also reasons to keep it at 21 or even make it larger.
The reason, some believe, for the move by the innocuously named Ohio Citizens’ League, is to elect some Republicans. All Council members now – and for years - are Democrats. Likely, Corporate Money could elect one or more citywide Republican candidates. How? With hefty campaign donations.
Does it really matter either way? Right now it’s hard to see how this city beset by impenetrable problems - correctable only by unforeseen and unlikely economic good fortune - could be hurt if the vote went either way. Reduced or not. Who really cares?
ANOTHER matter that caught my attention was Mayor-elect Frank Jackson’s move to create – shall I use that word – a Czar of Regionalism.
I get the feeling that Jackson – probably already realizing the predicament he’s put himself in by assuming the Mayor’s mantle – is looking for aid and comfort. Anywhere he can get it.
Therefore, he’s looking to accommodate to the elite’s agenda-setters (Pee Dee and those it serves). Regionalism “Good,” they harp.
I suggest that Jackson start with the schools. Why not recruit all nearby suburbs to combine their state school construction budgets with those of the Cleveland school system and build REGIONAL schools that will serve both suburban and city children? Why not, indeed.
That should be a decisive test as to whether the suburban communities really mean “regionalism” or whether they simply want to regionalize what the city has left – which ain’t much. (Cleveland sold cheap or gave away its sewer system, its transportation system, its port facilities and much of its park land during Ralph Perk’s administration. Now, presumably, the powers that be would like to strip the city of its water and electric systems and airports. Frank, you can keep the streets).
As tax revenues continue to shrivel, fewer and fewer alternatives will be open to Jackson.
HOWEVER, the city can always manage to give away money. This represents a third agenda item this week.
Jackson (he’s still Council President) buckled under last week, allowing neighborhood money to be shifted from neighborhood uses to downtown developers. He allowed this shift as it was pushed by the outgoing administration of Jane Campbell.
However, some thought he was the neighborhood guy.
And to what great purpose? Subsidizing a bowling alley with a restaurant. Believe it – a bowling alley. This subsidy represents another gift for MRN, Ltd, the Maron family development at the E. 4th Street entertainment complex. It has already received gobs of city money.
Jackson allowed developers to raid the Core City fund – bond money supported via Chagrin Highlands' profits – with a shift $1.5 million for the bowling alley. Another $3 million will go to multi-millionaire Scott Wolstein’s family for an already heavily subsidized Flats development. Please, tell me is this what Cleveland really needs to be subsidizing now.
Catalyst Cleveland, a publication dealing with urban schools, reported recently that the financially strung out Cleveland school board voted to give the Wolstein group “a tax exemption for retail and residential development on the east bank of the Flats.” Now, you know that’s more important than education.
Catalyst went on: “According to documents released by the board, the district won’t lose any of the revenue, currently about $200,000, it receives for the property. The exemption is for the value added from new construction that’s part of developer Scott Wolstein’s $230 million plan for the area.” The schools will get half of what they would be entitled to receive, the article said. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Can we give them anything else? Should we pay for any lap dancers that might locate there?
This is not a good start for Jackson.
It suggests to me that he’s bowing to the same old interests. It says to me that he’s fearful of getting a spanking from the Pee Dee for not being “flexible” enough when it comes to giving the Big Boys what they want.
Time for someone to remind Jackson who elected him. It’s not too early to be critical. In fact, now’s the time when his four-year term will set its pattern.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATadelphia.net (:divend:)