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JONES FLIPS SCRIPT, ENDORSES KELLEY IN MAYOR’S RACE
CLEVELAND CITY
Councilman Basheer Jones has endorsed City Council President Kevin Kelley in the Cleveland mayor’s race.
Jones ran for mayor this year as well, placing fifth in the primary election last month. He frequently butted heads with Kelley on the summer campaign trail, accusing Kelley of being a roadblock to progress on City Council.
But last Wednesday morning, at an event that doubled as a ribboncutting for a new community park in Ward 7, Jones said that while he may have disagreed with Kelley on a number of issues in the past, he respected that Kelley was “a man of his word,” and one who was “courageous enough to stand up for what he believes in.”
Jones said that the mayoral election was about three Rs: renaissance, results and resources. Under a Kelley administration, he argued, Cleveland neighborhoods would see ongoing investment of the sort that he and Kelley had cooperated to secure in Ward 7, things like the new Cleveland Foundation headquarters and $15 million in parks and recreation spending.
He described a professional relationship in which he, as a bushytailed freshman councilman, would frequently bring big plans and bold ideas to Kelley, who by dint of his wisdom and experience could convert those ideas into action, all for the benefit of residents in the Hough, St. Clair-Superior and Asiatown neighborhoods that Jones represents.
The endorsement, which Kelley described as an “awesome moment,” was met with ambivalence, if not outright disappointment, by many of Jones’ former supporters and other election observers. Jones had regularly aligned himself with Justin Bibb during the primary. Both were young leaders who were explicitly challenging the status quo. Jones frequently and eloquently called out the entrenched interests that governed Cleveland and, in his view, refused to pass the torch to the next generation of leaders.
“You’re not gonna catch me attacking Bibb,” Jones said during an early mayoral forum on the west side. “He and I have the same mission to make this city better, even if we’re riding in different cars.”
Jones’ language was radically different Wednesday. He did not refer to Bibb by name, but said he and other voters in Ward 7 “would not be fooled” by candidates with limited experience. “We have no idea who they are or where they come from,” he said, an allusion to Bibb, who has never held elected office.
Jones also introduced the idea that he shouldn’t be expected to endorse the Black candidate in the race simply because he, too, was Black.
“This race is beyond race,” Jones said more than once. He even invited the crowd of supporters to repeat the mantra after him. “We know that a person can look like you and still be your worst enemy.”
These remarks seemed to represent a stark shift in tone and allegiance, but when asked directly about this perception, responded that the only reason the media would have expected him to align with Bibb is because they were
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both Black. Norm Edwards, the president of the Kelley-aligned Black Contractors Group, shouted “That’s gotta stop!” as Jones accused the media of laziness to a round of applause. Jones emphasized that he was endorsing Kelley only after he’d conducted a thorough investigation of both candidates and sided with Kelley’s experience.
“If you know me,” he said, “you know I don’t stand for nothing I don’t believe in.”
-Sam Allard
Council Begins Depressing Progressive Field Deal Ratification Process
Cleveland City Council met Monday afternoon to begin the process of ratifying a handout of $117 million over the next 15 years to the Dolan family and the Cleveland Guardians.
The $117 million will be the city contribution in an elaborate cooperative agreement announced last month that includes $285 million in total public dollars. This is money that’s framed as a necessary investment in the preservation and enhancement of Progressive Field to secure the Guardians’ presence in Cleveland for an additional 15 years.
Just as in the Q Deal hearings of 2017, City Council is likely to greenlight the deal as constructed — that is to say, a deal constructed in private, without public input of any kind, and presented with only general notions of what the massive subsidies will be used to pay for. Paying this ransom to billionaire owners is simply the cost of having a pro team in your city, citizens are instructed to internalize.
Familiar lines of argument for and against the deal were voiced by members of council Monday, in what Council President and Mayoral candidate Kevin Kelley described as the first of several hearings on the deal. Though it was initially on the agenda for a vote at Monday’s evening meeting, this was likely an error. Kelley assured his colleagues that there would be ample opportunity to question team representatives about the particulars of the deal’s finances and community benefits in the coming weeks.
Gateway Economic Development Corporation Chairman Ken Silliman, Mayor Frank Jackson’s former Chief of Staff, presented the broad strokes of the deal to council’s finance committee. This included the various revenue streams being cobbled together to get to $8 million per year from the city’s coffers. That’ll include $3.2 million annually from a sports facility reserve created as part of the Q Deal, $2 million from parking garage revenue, an estimated $2.55 million from Guardians admission tax revenue, $333,000 from naming rights on the Gateway East garage, (assuming some corporation buys these naming rights), and $350,000 in “unspecified” money.
Councilman Mike Polensek, who was one of the main council opponents of the Q Deal in 2017, gave nearly the identical speech he gave when the Q Deal was first presented to council. He said that the pro teams had systematically lied to legislators (and by extension, Clevelanders) to force deals through city and county council. He even recalled a conversation he’d had with an unnamed businessman in which he (Polensek) questioned the figure of 28,000 jobs promised as part of the Gateway project. The businessman joked with Polensek that that’s just what they’d said to get the public money, an admission that didn’t seem to bother anyone else at the table.
Polensek said Silliman and the team reps should be prepared to answer pointed questions when they came to present to council, because he planned to be very clear about just how bad things have gotten in Cleveland, including, notably, the poverty rate.
Councilman Brian Kazy also said he suspected the deal would be a “hard sell” for Cleveland voters, given the profit margins of the team and, by contrast, the poor economic condition of the city in the wake of the pandemic.
This opposition was tempered by the scripted softball questions and clarifications from reliably pro-deal councilmembers. Kevin Kelley interrupted Silliman early on, for example, to stress the public ownership of Progressive Field and clarified that if the team were to leave Cleveland, the maintenance of the facility would fall entirely on the city’s shoulders. He trotted out the same line he likely gave to councilman Blaine Griffin in supporting the 60-year Tax Increment Financing agreement for the Flats East Bank development project and intoned that “there is a cost to doing nothing.”
Brian Mooney, who represents the West Boulevard area, chimed in to say that he viewed these deals kind of like tax abatements -- as unpleasant, but necessary, tools to promote economic development. His shrugging attitude was that this was simply the way the world worked and there wasn’t much Cleveland could do about it.
Councilman Blaine Griffin said he hoped the discussion could move away from how the city is enriching billionaire owners and toward how the city would continue to benefit economically from the team’s presence. (The team owners and their propagandists no doubt feel the same!) He said he knew there were midsize cities -- San Antonio, Nashville, Indianapolis -- that were setting up commissions to try to lure the Guardians away from Cleveland and, in that context, felt the deal was prudent.
In response to questions about the length of the lease (15 years) and the size of the public contribution ($285 million), Ken Silliman said that council should compare the deal not to cities with longer terms and small contributions but to those where a new stadium was built with lots of public money, in which light the Cleveland deal seemed downright cheap.
“By investing in our existing asset, and by keeping it contemporary,” he said, “we are maximizing the likelihood that the city and county will not have to tackle a billion dollar facility.” -Sam Allard
Maurer Files OEC Complaint, Alleging Improper Campaign Spending in Ward 12
Ward 12 Cleveland City Council candidate Rebecca Maurer has filed a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission arguing that the Council Leadership Fund, a political action committee controlled by Council President and mayoral candidate Kevin Kelley, has donated far more than the maximum allowed by law to incumbent Anthony Brancatelli’s campaign.
Brancatelli and Maurer finished in the top two spots in the Ward 12 council primary last month. Maurer, an attorney who wrote the legislation for Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing, came within 80 votes of Brancatelli.
The Council Leadership fund is a PAC that exists to support incumbents in the good graces of the council president and has been wielded in the past as a weapon to stifle dissent. It wrote a check to Brancatelli in July for $3,000, the maximum allowed under the city charter. But it subsequently paid for three pro-Brancatelli mailers in Ward 12, in-kind contributions worth thousands of dollars.
Maurer filed the complaint Thursday, she said, only after giving Brancatelli and the Council Leadership Fund the benefit of the doubt. She wrote a letter to Brancatelli’s campaign asking him to return the excess contributions.
“I assume that this spending by the Council Leadership Fund, and the subsequently inaccurate disclosures filed by your campaign, were an oversight,” Maurer wrote. “It can be easily rectified. We are requesting that the in-kind donations of the [three mailers] be accurately reported to the Board of Elections and that the cost of those mailers be refunded to the Council Leadership Fund so that the Fund does not exceed the $3,000 spending limit.”
As Maurer notes in her complaint, the Council Leadership Fund, having donated the max, is precluded from participating in campaign activities “in coordination, cooperation or consultation with” a campaign.
The PAC nevertheless paid for the three mailers and sent them to residents of Ward 12, which is composed of Slavic Village on the east side and portions of Old Brooklyn, Brooklyn-Centre and Tremont on the west side. All the mailers purported to be from Brancatelli himself.
“There isn’t a big mystery here,” Maurer wrote in a social media thread explaining the complaint Friday. “These mailers use the incumbent’s official logo, phone number, and e-mail. They are written by the incumbent—they say “me” and “my.” One even has a letter encouraging people to vote signed by the incumbent. Printing and sending these three mailers undoubtedly cost thousands and thousands of dollars. And because the PAC was sending these out, I don’t think the incumbent sent a single piece of mail that he paid for himself — one of the largest expenses in a campaign.”
All three pieces of mail were paid for by the Council Leadership Fund, and the complaint alleges that the coordination between the Fund and Brancatelli appears “unambiguous.”
Councilman Brancatelli, when reached by email, denied involvement. “I do not control or approve expenditures for the Council Leadership Fund,” he wrote, and invited Scene to seek an explanation from the fund itself.
The fund is controlled by Kevin Kelley. His campaign spokesperson, Maureen Harper, provided the following statement:
“Rebecca Maurer’s campaign
raised this issue just before the primary election and the PAC responded to it then. Not surprisingly, she’s raising it again before the general election. Our response is the same. The standard is that PACs can make contributions to candidates and that they can undertake independent expenditures. Now, it’s up to the Commission to decide if they will review this issue.”
Brancatelli’s claim is that the mailers were “independent expenditures,” paid for and created by the Council Leadership Fund without his involvement. Rebecca Maurer’s campaign says that even if that were true — which is highly unlikely — the Council Leadership Fund would be violating another campaign finance law by “impersonating Brancatelli and failing to include the proper disclaimers.” The first of the three mailers literally includes a letter to residents signed by Brancatelli himself.
“From the campaign’s perspective, this looks like textbook coordination,” said Nora Kelley, Rebecca Maurer’s campaign treasurer. (No relation to Kevin). “The letter is signed by the candidate and the mailer has the campaign logo on it. But there is the possibility that the Council Leadership Fund did this without Councilman Brancatelli’s approval. But then they’d be misrepresenting the councilperson, another campaign finance violation. One of the two has to be true.”
In a follow-up conversation, Maurer told Scene that the complaint got to fundamental reasons why she launched her campaign in the first place: to promote transparency and accountability in government.
“We should be playing fair and playing by the rules,” she said, “but it’s not just following rules for the sake of following rules. In small campaigns, these are really high stakes. If [Brancatelli] is getting multiple pieces of mail from the Council Leadership Fund, that’s thousands and thousands of dollars that he doesn’t have to spend. And on the flipside, if the Council Leadership Fund can pretend to be a councilperson and send infinite mail into the ward and claim it’s an independent expenditure, that clearly flouts the rules. It makes it hard for us to concentrate on what really matters in the ward.”
DIGIT WIDGET
1960
Median birth year of Clevelanders who cast votes in the 2021 mayoral primary. Ward 1 (Lee Harvard) had the lowest median birth year (1956), while Ward 3 (Downtown, Tremont, Ohio City) had the highest (1981).
$50 million
Gift from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation to the Cleveland Orchestra, the largest gift in both organizations’ history. Severance Hall will now be known as the Severance Music Center and the concert hall will be redubbed the Jack, Joseph & Moton Mandel Concert Hall.
10/11/2021, 7:30 p.m.
Date and time of the Mayoral Debate between Justin Bibb and Kevin Kelley. It’ll air on WVIZ, WCPN and will be streamed live on CityClub.org.
3-1
Cleveland Browns record after 4 games, the second consecutive season they’ve won three consecutive games after losing an opener. -Sam Allard
Cleveland Enters Era, at Last, of Public Comment at City Council Meetings
For the first time in a century, Cleveland City Council allowed members of the public to offer comments at its meeting Monday night. Ten civilian speakers provided testimony on a range of issues, from the allocation of American Rescue Plan Act dollars, to the urgency of testing for elevated lead levels in Cleveland children, to the forthcoming Progressive Field Deal, to the perils of local arts workers.
The allotted 30-minute public speaking time, which will now be standard at council’s Monday meetings, was the result of the advocacy efforts of the grassroots Clevelanders for Public Comment group. Through 2021, its members citywide mobilized citizen and council support for public comment
clevescene.com
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and wrote legislation that City Council could adopt if it chose.
Though council ultimately passed a rules change in lieu of an ordinance, it agreed at its Sept. 20 meeting to formally designate the public comment period at its Monday meetings and established a sign-up procedure for those wishing to offer their takes on issues of importance to them.
The ten speakers Monday instantly corroborated the arguments in favor of public comment: that it alerts council members to issues not currently on the council agenda or radar, that it provides a venue for direct communication and confrontation with elected representatives, and that it heightens transparency and citizen engagement on city legislation.
City Council did briefly allow public comment back in the 1920s, when Cleveland was under a city manager form of government. But since that time, the public has been excluded. Here were the 10 speakers Monday who helped launch a new era in Cleveland: 1) Grace Heffernan, representing the Northeast Ohio Worker Center.* Heffernan asked that council consider devoting a portion of ARPA dollars to providing hazard pay for essential workers and called for increased enforcement of labor laws, given widespread abuses in Northeast Ohio and the state’s limited investigatory capacity. 2) Robin Brown, representing PB Cle. Brown called on council to embrace a participatory budgeting model for the disbursement of ARPA dollars and reiterated a symbolic demand made by PB Cle: that $30.8 million be set aside for participatory budgeting, to represent the 30.8% of Clevelanders who live in poverty. 3) Sarah Gutierrez, representing the Cleveland Art Workers Collective. Gutierrez celebrated the work of full-time local artists and noted that cultural products are often what makes places like Cleveland such unique and desirable places to live. She said that if living conditions do not improve for artists, many of them are likely to flee. 4) Andy Schumann, representing the Cleveland Art Workers Collective. Schumann echoed the comments of Gutierrez and asked for council to help devote financial resources to the performing arts.
5) Michael Hardy, City Council candidate in Ward 11. After greeting the body in multiple languages, Hardy thanked council for instituting public comment and indexed the merits of civic engagement writ large. 6) Randy Cunningham. The veteran Cleveland agitator and author confronted council on its historical revulsion of local grassroots efforts. Even the public comment ordinance, he noted correctly, was “greeted with all the enthusiasm of an ordinance endorsing cannibalism.” He characterized the public comment period as merely the first step in democracy building efforts more broadly. 7) Ross DiBello. The longshot mayoral contender was back in his wheelhouse, approaching the mic with a festive, “Go Browns.” He called on council to reject the Progressive Field Deal, which he called yet another corporate handout, and said that the $117 million that the city is considering spending on the deal could be used to fund any number of urgent city expenses: from the schools to the West Side Market to lead paint remediation. 8) Yvonka Hall, representing Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing (CLASH). Hall called on council to spend ARPA funds to dramatically increase testing for lead poisoning. She said that money should be set aside to fund testing at two city health centers -- McCafferty Health Center in Ohio City and the J. Glen Smith Health Center in Glenville -- and a mobile testing unit to provide tests in nontraditional locations. 9) Mario Pollard, representing CLASH. Pollard echoed the demands of Hall. He said that lead poisoning is a public health emergency and noted that Ohio was recently found to have the second highest percentage of children with elevated lead levels in the country (behind only Nebraska). 10) Darrick Wade, representing CLASH. Wade offered a more personal side of the lead crisis, telling the story of his son Demetrius, who was diagnosed with lead poisoning at age of 9 and died as a young man after years of medical woe and personal challenges.
*Author’s wife.
-Sam Allard
