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SECOND DEATH AT CUYAHOGA COUNTY JAIL IN TWO MONTHS WAS TRANS WOMAN LEA DAYE

THE SECOND DEATH AT THE

Cuyahoga County Jail in as many months was a black 28-year-old trans woman named Lea Rayshon Daye. She was found unresponsive by jail guards very early Sunday morning and had been in custody, according to county court records, since May 17, when she was arrested and jailed on robbery and assault charges. The cause of death has not yet been released.

Daye is the second person to die at the facility this summer, after more than a year of no reported deaths. That spell of inmate survival followed a nearly yearlong span in 2018 and 2019 in which nine people died, eight by suicide or drug overdose.

Cleveland.com’s Adam Ferrise, who has covered the county jail scandal and its aftermath in rigorous detail, reported last week that after attempts by officials early in the coronavirus pandemic to drastically reduce the jail’s population, the numbers have spiked once again. The jail had been at its lowest population level ever, 950, in March, but has now risen to more than 1,500. In the past month alone, the population has increased by 300.

The increased population has ripple effects. The amount of jail guards becomes insufficient, and inmates are locked down for hours at a time, a process called “redzoning,” which in turn limits their access to medical care.

The cause of Lea Daye’s death is under investigation by the county medical examiner. But local nonprofits are decrying it regardless, hoping to call attention to the persistence of danger and inhumanity at the county jail and the particular plight of trans people in state custody.

“Transgender people are being murdered across the United States, and the City of Cleveland has one of the highest rates based on our population,” said Maya Simek from Equality Ohio, in a statement provided to the media. “The system that continues to fail Black, brown and LGBTQ+ Ohioans is completely inept when interacting with those at the intersection of race and LGBTQ+ identity.”

Eliana Turan, the Director of Development at the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland who wrote an oped for Scene last month about the murders of trans people in Cleveland, noted a direct correlation between recent racial justice demonstrations and increased public awareness about violence against trans people.

“The time we are living in is creating a spark that’s causing people to see the murders of our trans neighbors as a major problem,” she said. -Sam Allard

RTA Cancels Fare Increases, Slashes Price of All-Day Pass

Fare increases slated for the next two years are now officially off the table, and RTA has lowered the price for an all-day pass.

Those were the two major developments out of last week’s RTA board of trustees meeting that signaled progress but which local advocacy group Clevelanders for Public Transit cautioned didn’t go far enough. (The fare increases were approved in 2016 but have been repeatedly postponed and, of late, tentatively slated for 2021 and 2022. There was some confusion amongst board members last month after they were alerted that the then-proposed policy to reduce all-day fare included cementing the fare increases, which led to the issue being pushed back until the meeting.)

“Pre-COVID, RTA Ridership was already at an all-time low due to RTA charging riders double the fare for declining service,” said Dana Beveridge, daily RTA rider and CPT Lead Organizer. “Higher fares decrease ridership, and lower ridership is used to justify service cuts. This death spiral must be reversed.”

An all-day fare now runs $5 instead of $5.50 and regular fare rates will remain steady for at least the next two years. That’s good news for riders — as CPT has told anyone who will listen, RTA’s fares have doubled in the past 15 years coinciding with a 25-percent reduction in service.

RTA, like other public transit agencies, is facing significant | clevescene.com | September 9-15, 2020 5

UPFRONT

financial issues thanks to the pandemic. Its situation is unique in other ways though, as we wrote earlier this year:

“While fares account for only 10-15 percent of the RTA’s revenue, declining ridership could accelerate a death spiral that the agency has been plummeting down for years. Since 2006, CPT’s Chris Stocking reported, RTA has raised fares five times while service has declined by 25 percent. On top of that, RTA is now losing roughly $20 million each year after former Gov. John Kasich made changes to how the state collects taxes on Medicaid managed care organizations.”

Sales tax collections, which make up the bulk of funding for RTA’s budget, were down heavily in the summer but only 3.5% yearover-year so far. Ridership levels hit a pandemic low of 780,000 in April but had grown to 1.2 million in June, RTA said last month, about half of what that number was in June of 2019. Fare collection has obviously been hit heavy but RTA received $111 million of pandemicrelated federal aid, more than half of which it has already spent.

CPT, meanwhile, noted that cash fares are still not eligible for free transfer, which is one of the many facets in which RTA is failing its riders, many of whom are doublepaying for trips. Fare equity and dependable service, the group has long argued, will be what drivers riders back to the service.

CPT is also calling on RTA to rescind a temporary $0.25 fuel surcharge instituted in 2008 during peak gas prices that became permanent in 2010.

“Gas prices have dropped significantly since then, defeating the purpose of a fuel surcharge meant to relieve the agency’s budget from then-costly fuel expenses,” the group said in a statement. - Vince Grzegorek

Cleveland City Council to Drill Down on Slew of Problems Facing Cleveland Public Power

For the next six weeks, Cleveland City Council will conduct hearings each Tuesday to delve into the history, operations and finances of Cleveland Public

Power.

After the publication of a redacted briefing document which outlined critical issues facing the municipal utility, Ward 16 Councilman Brian Kazy, who assumed the lone chairmanship of council’s Utilities Committee in January, set out to more fully and more publicly understand the problems facing CPP. Kazy’s colleagues roundly applauded the oversight effort.

The hearings will occur adjacent to a process spearheaded by Council President Kevin Kelley which will investigate FirstEnergy’s actions in Cleveland as they pertain to CPP.

Last week, Kazy set the tone for the forthcoming hearings by saying he and his colleagues were frustrated by the lack of communication from the administration about a CPP assessment commissioned in 2018. This lack of communication has been a hallmark of Frank Jackson’s.

Like many in the media, council was provided a redacted copy of the briefing document which

DIGIT WIDGET

5,400 Miles of water mains that the Cleveland Division of Water maintains on a continuous basis.

1,500+ Cuyahoga County Jail population currently, up from a historic low of 950 in March, when judges made a concerted effort to reduce the population to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

17,000+ Weddings held at Old Stone Church on Public Square in its storied two-century history. Cleveland’s oldest downtown church celebrates its 200th anniversary Sept. 20.

116,000

Ohio voters who will be purged from voter rolls if they remain inactive through December. (Sec. of State Frank LaRose said that no one will be purged before the November election.) highlighted the organization’s dysfunctional culture and financial mismanagement. WKYC’s Mark Naymik received an unredacted copy and reported that it contained recommendations for rate hikes in order for CPP to remain sustainable.

Kazy asked Cleveland’s Utilities Director Robert Davis to provide council with an unredacted copy of the report, but Davis sounded uncertain in his ability to do so. He did agree to provide the contract with the consultant, NewGen, so council could learn the cost of the assessment and its scope of work.

The briefing document outlined five “critical issues” facing CPP, which Councilman Kerry McCormack accurately referred to as “pretty scathing”: 1) Poorly vetted decision making resulting in costly investments; 2) Dysfunctional culture focused on short-term survival, not longterm sustainability; 3) Poor system conditions; 4) High power supply costs; and 5) Weak financial condition.

Director Davis pushed back on all of them, noting foremost that the briefing document was incomplete, contained proprietary information and was never meant for public consumption. He said that, alongside the NewGen assessment, CPP was undertaking a system-wide “facilities assessment,” which could take 12- 18 months to complete, and which would inform the NewGen work. All this would be completed before CPP would ask for a rate hike, in theory.

Davis was flustered early on, stressing that CPP had been making management and infrastructure improvements long before the briefing document was published. He said that while CPP’s financial position was neither “great” nor “good,” it was “fair” and “sound.” He said CPP was doing every possible thing it could — including implementing recommendations from the NewGen document — to reduce expenses and enhance quality. Only after CPP had demonstrated these efforts, Davis said, would they come to council asking for a rate hike.

Kazy said rumors were out there that a CPP rate hike was on the horizon regardless. He said he thought he should be able to say “emphatically” that there will be no rate increases in 2020 or 2021 due to the projected timeline of the current and forthcoming studies.

Said Robert Davis: “I have no

24 Signs You Might Hate America Without Even Knowing It

YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A PATRIOT. YOU’RE WILLING TO

die for your country.

Okay, maybe not die, exactly. But you’d be willing to do something. If you weren’t busy that day. And it didn’t involve anything more strenuous than yelling at a lady for speaking Mexican in the school supplies aisle at Walmart.

But what if you hate American without even knowing it? Based on not fake science, we’ve developed a test to precisely measure your patriotism. Simply tabulate the number of statements that apply to you, then register your score at the end:

• You have never fantasized about a Caribbean weekend with Mike

Pence. • You’ve been known to put the needs of others before your own. • You filed for conscientious objector status during the War on Christmas. • You have yet to ask an usher to seat you in the whites-only section at a professional wrestling match. • You see the irony in telling an Apache woman to “Go back to your own country.” • You’ve never starred in a viral video for calling police on black kids running a Kool-Aid stand. • You have yet to tell your son that if he’s nice to other children, he won’t grow up to be Jared Kushner. • You think Antifa is an insurance company whose mascot is a talking duck. • You took down your Confederate Flag at home because it collided with the mauve accents of the trim. • You once vacationed in Europe. And liked it. • You find Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” derivative and hard to party to. • You once bought a futon from IKEA, knowing full well it was made by

Scandinavian socialists. • You keep forgetting to wear your Kevlar vest at the Cheesecake Factory. • You think Jefferson Davis is a weak hitting second baseman for the San

Diego Padres. • Your nieces have yet to unfriend you on Instagram. • You’ve never berated a Costco cashier over your Constitutional rights to endanger the health of others. • Your church’s lightshow budget comes in at under $700,000 annually. • You once spent an evening at a vegan restaurant without punching anyone. • You consider “happy holidays” a perfectly festive seasonal greeting. • You believe in sacrificing for your country – even when it’s inconvenient. • You’ve never applied for a license to marry a Beretta ARX160 assault rifle. • You secretly believe Canada has a better national anthem. • You don’t tell your kids how cool it would be to shoot the animals while visiting the zoo. • You’ve never excoriated the handicapped over their special parking privileges.

Scoring Your Patriotism:

0: You’re 100 percent red-blooded American. Everyone admires you. Don’t be surprised if random citizens approach hoping to have your baby. 1-5: Your access to the gun range has been suspended. You can only be readmitted by harassing the Puerto Rican kids who moved in upstairs. 6-10: Go immediatly to confession. Tell God you purposely tanked the test to keep the Deep State off your trail. 11-15: WTF is wrong with you? 16-20: You’re a traitor to your country. You think 189,000 deaths is an unacceptable price to restart the economy. No, you cannot bring a kayak to the Trump 2020 Boat Parade. 21-24: Don’t even try to donate to the Kyle Rittenhouse Legal Defense Fund. We don’t want your blood money. - Pete Kotz | clevescene.com | September 9-15, 2020

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comment on that.”

The city’s Assistant Director of Public Utilities is now Martin Keane, the former Ward 17 councilman and Utilities Committee Chair who abandoned his council seat at the first moment it was possible to appoint his successor, Charles Slife, and avoid a democratic election. It was Keane who volunteered that the facilities assessment would likely take 12-18 months, and who estimated its cost at roughly $2 million.

Individual council members brought up additional areas of concern — the so-called “energy adjustment” fee, poor customer service, an ill-advised partnership with American Municipal Power (AMP) — all of which Kazy stressed could be discussed in detail at meetings over the next month-anda-half.

The current hearing schedule, with daily topics for discussion, is as follows: 9/8: History of CPP 9/15: Financial Position of CPP 9/22: CPP’s Customer Service 9/29: CPP’s Purchase Power

Contracts, Rates and Energy

Adjustment Charge 10/6: Operations 10/13: CPP Capital Projects

-Sam Allard

Civil Rights Commission Reverses Decision on Cleveland Epidemiologist Who Alleged Discrimination

The Ohio Civil Rights Commission has reversed its decision in the case of a Cleveland Department of Public Health epidemiologist who alleged that her supervisor had harassed and disrespected her based on her age and country of origin, (Colombia). Based on new testimony, the Commission has now ruled that there is probable cause to suggest Karen Aluma was subjected to unequal treatment.

Aluma filed charges with the Commission in September 2019, alleging that as an employee of CDPH she was subjected to extra scrutiny, that her sick time was questioned and that she was assigned menial tasks which her coworkers were not. Aluma’s colleagues corroborated the allegations, saying that her supervisor, Katie Romig, was dismissive of her work and made disrespectful comments about her accented English. Scene reported on Aluma’s grievances as part of a larger investigation into a culture of discrimination at CDPH this Summer.

The Ohio Civil Rights Commission ruled in May that there was insufficient evidence (“No Probable Cause”) to suggest that Aluma was treated unfairly due to her age or nationality. The Commission agreed that there was a “tense working relationship” between Aluma and Romig, but that Romig’s behavior was not motivated by Aluma’s class membership.

In an August 27 document shared with Scene, the Commission reversed its decision. New affidavits from two CDPH employees who also worked under Romig corroborated Aluma’s allegations. This new evidence, the Commission wrote, refuted Romig’s initial claim that Aluma’s charges were “utterly without merit” and challenged the “integrity and impartiality” of CDPH’s internal investigation into the matter.

The new statements came from employees Stephanie PikeMore and Dreyon Wynn, both of whom have pending cases of their own with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission (they allege the city retaliated against them for speaking on Aluma’s behalf) and whose experiences were featured in Scene’s CDHPH exposé.

The city of Cleveland declined to comment on the Ohio Civil Rights commission finding and said the city’s own internal investigation is ongoing. Spokesperson Nancy Kelsey also confirmed that Austin Opalich, a labor relations manager for the city who handled the initial investigation, had resigned.

The Ohio Civil Rights Commission, under its rules, is required to attempt to reconcile or settle the case following this finding. If that fails, a formal complaint and the case are sent to the Civil Rights Section of the Ohio Attorney General’s office for a civil prosecution, according to Mary Turocy, director of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement for the OCRC. -Sam Allard scene@clevescene.com @clevelandscene