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DUNHAM TAVERN MUSEUM MEMBERS WANT OHIO SUPREME COURT TO RULE ON CLEVELAND FOUNDATION LAND DISPUTE
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Conceptual rendering of proposed new Cleveland Foundation headquarters on the Dunhan Tavern Museum property at Euclid and E. 66th.
A BRIEF FILED WITH THE OHIO
Supreme Court last week argues that lower court decisions in a dispute over the proposed location of the Cleveland Foundation’s new headquarters have sent a clear message: Laws don’t matter in Ohio “for those who are wealthy or powerful enough” to circumvent them.
Both the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas and the state appellate court in Cuyahoga County have ruled against plaintiffs who sued in 2019 to invalidate the sale of greenspace by the Dunham Tavern Museum to the Cleveland Foundation. The state’s high court is the last venue where an appeal may be heard. If it declines to adjudicate the case, the Cleveland Foundation may go forward with the construction of its proposed $25 million building on E. 66th Street between Euclid and Chester Avenues.
The Dunham Tavern Museum is the oldest standing residence in Cleveland. It had recently purchased the land in question, more than two acres adjacent to its structure on Euclid Avenue, following a fundraising campaign between 2012 and 2017. With nearly $700,000 in hand, the museum demolished a vacant industrial property on the site and planned to convert it to a public park, with enthusiastic support from its membership.
“We demolished the [warehouse], making Dunham green space the largest in Midtown Cleveland,” the Dunham Tavern Museum’s website read shortly after the demolition. “Your tax-deductible contribution is an investment in Cleveland’s cultural heritage and our community’s thriving green space.”
But shortly after the land was acquired, the 2019 lawsuit alleged, the Cleveland Foundation engaged members of the Dunham Tavern Museum’s board of trustees and privately negotiated a sale.
The terms were ironed out in secret, and many of the museum’s members and donors felt betrayed after they’d contributed money to see the land converted to a park. Twentysix of them signed a letter calling the board’s actions “reprehensible” and vowing to remove the small museum from their estate planning. A few filed suit to invalidate the sale.
Last week’s brief, filed by attorneys Peter Pattakos and Rachel Hazelet on behalf of their clients Christeen Tuttle and other former trustees and members of the museum, summarizes the case and argues why it’s crucial that the state supreme court intervene. Allowing the lower courts’ decisions to stand would not only set a dangerous precedent for corporate governance in Ohio, the brief asserts, it would undermine public confidence in the judiciary by conferring immunity on a large and politically connected organization that engaged in an unlawful transaction.
“With the release of recent census data giving rise to widespread reports that Cleveland is now the poorest large city in the U.S.—on top of what was already known about the city’s staggering inequality, poverty, and infant mortality rates,” the brief reads, “it would be hard to think of a worse time for Ohio courts to send the message that such an enormously influential and wealthy community foundation [the Cleveland Foundation], the oldest in the nation, is above the law; particularly in a case where the foundation seeks to usurp historic greenspace that was reclaimed by charitable donations intended precisely to preserve the land for the public’s enjoyment.”
Pattakos, (who is representing Scene in a concurrent, unrelated case), told Scene that after the initial suit, the Cleveland Foundation launched a “full-court press” of publicity which built premature excitement for the new location and its “transformative potential” while simultaneously pretending the lawsuit didn’t exist.
Ward 7 Councilman Basheer Jones, for example, in a comment to Plain Dealer reporter Steve Litt last year, said he was so excited by the Cleveland Foundation’s proposed relocation that he wanted to “yell it from the rooftops.”
“If I don’t achieve anything else, this move with the Cleveland Foundation moving to Ward 7 will be the best accomplishment I could achieve,” he said. “There could be nothing else that’s as great. It almost brings tears to my eyes.”
Cleveland Foundation President and CEO Ronn Richard has called the proposed move a “clear and emphatic statement” that the foundation intends to walk the talk by investing in historically poor, overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods and ushering in auxiliary development while doing so.
But the Dunham Tavern Museum members have been dismayed throughout the process, especially as they’ve watched the parade of plaudits from Cleveland’s political and non-profit elites.
“Why the Cleveland Foundation would act in concert — in concert — with a portion of a board that was | clevescene.com | October 7-13, 2020 5
defiling its organization’s purpose “My clients are not opposed to the and shattering its membership is Cleveland Foundation building its a mystery,” wrote Dunham Tavern new headquarters in the Midtown Museum member Thomas Bier in a neighborhood, and would welcome bitter condemnation of the backroom such a development,” Pattakos said deal last year. “No end, no matter last year. “It just doesn’t belong on how grandiose its vision, justifies the Dunham Tavern greenspace such means. The foundation’s that community members recently conduct was wholly out of character.” donated $700,000 to restore,
Chief among members’ questions consistent with the Museum’s is why the exact site that they’d just mission and historical character. acquired for another purpose should There are plenty of alternative sites be the only viable parcel in Midtown that would do, and my clients are in the eyes of an organization with entitled to answers in court about sufficient financial reserves (at least who Mr. Collins and Mr. Wagner $2.5 billion) to locate anywhere. sought to benefit by rushing this transaction through in violation of the Museum’s bylaws.” Tim Collins and David Wagner DIGIT are the named defendants in the case. They are museum trustees who work as an attorney and a real WIDGET estate manager, respectively, and who negotiated the sale with the Cleveland Foundation. Alongside other trustees who voted to approve $35 million the sale, they were alleged to have conflicts of interest and so-called Unpaid principal mortgage “conflicts of responsibility,” which left on the Westin hotel in should have rendered the sale downtown Cleveland still void, according to the plaintiffs’ owed by Otima 777, one of interpretation of Dunham Tavern the companies allegedly Museum’s bylaws. When reached by used by Ukranian oligarchs Scene, an attorney for Collins and to launder money. The Wagner said he had no comment, as Cleveland International litigation is pending. Fund filed a foreclosure One of the 2019 lawsuit’s lawsuit on the property last week. arguments was that Collins and Wagner, who work in or adjacent to real estate development, could have reasonably inferred that the $28 million Amount of previously issued construction of the foundation’s headquarters, and the stated plans for additional development, would tax breaks a state agency increase property values in the has ordered GM to repay surrounding area, where they or Ohio for broken promises to their clients have investments. keep the Lordstown plant The lower courts dismissed these operating. concerns as “speculative.” And yet, the speculation was rooted in strong circumstantial 35% evidence, not least the fact that Year-over-year increase in the area in question is located in a domestic violence deaths federally designated Opportunity in Ohio, according to a new Zone. The Cleveland Foundation state report tallying data itself has promoted the idea of new from June 2019 to June 2020. development in the immediate vicinity. Sure enough, three days after the Supreme Court filing, a collection 33 months Federal prison sentence of “nonprofits and colleges” saw fit to publicize that they had selected a developer to design a new for Tamiko Parker, who “innovation district” on and around pled guilty to stealing more the Dunham Tavern Museum land in than $150,000 from the dispute. The group, which includes Collinwood and Nottingham the Cleveland Foundation, JumpStart Villages Development Inc. and the Midtown community Corporation during her time development corporation, “wants as executive director of the to see the district grow over time CDC. and include office space, retail and housing.” 6 | clevescene.com | October 7-13, 2020
“MidTown Cleveland Executive Director Jeff Epstein said the soonest construction would start is in late 2021,” cleveland.com reported. “The building will go up at East 66th Street and Euclid Avenue, at the same intersection the Cleveland Foundation chose as the site of its $25 million new headquarters... That timetable may be optimistic, Epstein said, as that is contingent on finding the right mix of tenants to fill the building before construction, envisioning a setup where established companies and startups can work together in labs and other research.”
The timetable is evidently not contingent on the outcome of the current lawsuit. There was no mention of the suit, or for that matter of Dunham Tavern Museum, in the coverage of the proposed Innovation District. -Sam Allard
90% of Traffic Citations Issued by University Circle Police Since 2015 Went to Black People
Members of the Cleveland Clinic and University Circle Police Departments assisted in various patrol and security details at last week’s presidential debate in Cleveland.
In advance of the event, the national nonprofit news organization ProPublica published a detailed report which put these private police departments — and University Hospitals’ — under the microscope. Reporter David Armstrong analyzed arrest and citation data, exposing an alarming picture of biased policing in the prosperous “medical zone” surrounding the Cleveland Clinic and into University Circle. He speculated that this might be among the most heavily policed areas in the country.
The University Circle Police Department, with only 21 full-time officers — compared to the Clinic’s 153 — was responsible for the most extreme racial imbalances in their citations, particularly for traffic violations. Of the 1,965 drivers cited by University Circle police since 2015, Armstrong reported, 1,723 (88%), were Black.
“The most common traffic citation issued by University Circle police is for driving with a suspended or revoked license,” ProPublica reported. “Only 26 of the 813 charged with that offense were white; 774, or 95%, were Black.”
Responding to Armstrong, UCPD Chief James Repicky attributed the data to the demographics of surrounding communities. His officers don’t specifically target Black people, he said. It’s just that more Black people drive through University Circle’s main corridors, en route to overwhelming Black adjacent neighborhoods or the 90+% Black East Cleveland.
But ProPublica analyzed traffic tickets based on the home ZIP codes of cites drivers and found that Repicky’s demographic claims didn’t explain the vast discrepancies. For each of the 10 mostcited ZIP codes, the proportion of Black people among the population was lower than the percentage of Black drivers who were given traffic citations by
University Circle police. The same was true for eight of the top 10 most-cited ZIP codes issued to drivers by Cleveland
Clinic police.
Citations issued to drivers who live outside the Euclid
Avenue area also underscore the inequities. For example, 94% of citations issued by University
Circle police to residents of a
ZIP code in suburban Garfield
Heights went to Black drivers.
Yet only 38% of people in that
ZIP code are Black; 56% are white. Similarly, University
Circle police issued citations to 32 drivers from one ZIP code in
Euclid, a city northeast of the hospital area. All of those cited but one were Black drivers, even though the population in the
Euclid ZIP code is 54% Black.
Scene sought comment from University Circle Inc. on ProPublica’s reporting and received the following statement from Police Chief James Repicky:
“The University Circle Police Department is committed to unbiased policing in all encounters with the public. Racial profiling is not tolerated within our department. UCPD officers received ongoing racial equity and inclusion, conflict resolution, de-escalation and cultural awareness training to make sure that our community members are treated fairly and fully respected. We are committed to reviewing our policing policies and procedures to ensure that we are producing just outcomes for our community.”
But the data shows that at least since 2015, the outcomes have been anything but just. That’s one reason why a local police abolition group has emerged, calling for the dismantling of RTA’s transit police, among others, to reduce the number of overlapping police jurisdictions and relax the atmosphere of “hyperpolicing” created as a result. -Sam Allard
New Cleveland Bishop Says Abortion Should be :Paramount” Consideration for Catholic Voters
In an utterly wishy-washy preelection letter to the region’s 700,000 Catholics, newly installed Cleveland Bishop Edward Malesic invited his flock to prepare their consciences before casting their ballots, and in doing so, to make abortion their top priority.
While he acknowledged that neither President Donald Trump nor Democratic challenger Joe Biden reflected “the complete breadth” of Catholic moral teaching, he said it was Catholics’ “solemn duty” to vote for the candidate who best embodies the ideals of the faith.
Malesic might have made a splash by taking this preface to its logical conclusion and stating the obvious: that President Trump is a moral abomination; that he is surely one of the six or eight most repellant humans alive; that apart from his personal heinousness, he has presided over policies that vastly increase human misery and the likelihood of civilization’s collapse; that he should be disqualified instantly as a legitimate option by any person of faith.
Instead, Malesic trotted out the old abortion card. He hastened to make clear that Catholicism was not a “single-issue” church, and that Catholic social teaching didn’t particularly care for other “intrinsically evil” acts either: things like racism and “subjecting workers and the poor to subhuman conditions.” But all human rights, Malesic clarified, flowed from a fundamental right to life, and with that in mind, Catholics should make abortion their “paramount consideration” when voting for the President.
Well, that’s an endorsement of Donald Trump. And it’s not only repulsive coming from a faith leader, but frankly shocking coming from a Catholic one. Joe Biden, after all, is a practicing Catholic who for decades was an ardent pro-lifer. Biden famously said in 1974 that women “don’t have the sole right to say what should happen to their bodies,” and his record on reproductive justice is dismal, from a left perspective. He adopted a pro-choice position only recently and was still supporting the Hyde Amendment, which forbids federal funding for abortions, in 2019.
Biden’s official pro-choice political stance but pro-life vibe, basically the view that abortions are tragedies and elected leaders should enact policies that don’t necessarily restrict a woman’s right to choose, but create conditions whereby abortions happen infrequently, is probably the predominant position among Catholics, (a majority of whom believe that abortion should be legal in all/most cases.)
To read Malesic’s letter is to witness a church profoundly out of touch and out of tune. It might have been written about any two candidates in any election year. It’s boilerplate right-to-life stuff that occludes the pervasive, heedless theft of life under Trump. The administration’s Coronavirus response — 200,000 deaths and counting — is the marquee example, but the ongoing caging and torture of immigrants at the U.S. border, the (somehow) escalating militarism abroad, and the 2020 “execution spree,” in which more people have been put to death by the state than in the past 57 years combined, also convey well Trump’s stance on human life.
Furthermore, the church seems unwilling to acknowledge the way Christians have been, and continue to be, instrumentalized in a larger political project. Trump’s nominal opposition to abortion is meaningless as a reflection of personal values. What matters is the con: donning the pro-life mantle to convince single-issue Evangelicals and Catholics to keep voting Republican so the supreme court may be packed with archconservative justices who will promptly overturn Roe V. Wade to appease the sheep and then get on with the real work: dismantling Democracy and formally erecting the authoritarian state guys like Trump and Mitch McConnell prefer.
Outside of that larger context — which is no joke! — Catholics who take their faith seriously should consider the ways that “right to life” messaging has been weaponized, all while Jesus Christ’s own central teachings about the poor have been largely left by the wayside. It was candidate Elizabeth Warren who reminded voters, back in 2019, that reproductive rights were also economic rights, something to which Catholics, at least historically, were committed.
“When someone makes abortion illegal in America,” she told the New York Times last year, “rich women will still get abortions.” -Sam Allard
Sandra Williams, Mulling Cleveland Mayoral Bid, Has Donated FirstEnergy Contributions to Charity
With good reason, City Club of Cleveland CEO Dan Moulthrop opened a conversation with State Senator Sandra Williams last week by asking her to explain her position on the corrupt House Bill 6, the nuclear plant bailout which is alleged to have been the crown jewel of a $60 million racketeering scheme orchestrated by FirstEnergy and former House Speaker Larry Householder.
Williams, whose City Club appearance was occasioned by her interest in a 2021 Cleveland mayoral run, is the ranking Democrat on the State Public Utilities Committee. She not only voted yes on HB6 but was one of its co-sponsors. She reaffirmed her support Tuesday, saying she backed the bill in order to save Ohio jobs and an Ohio company and to reduce energy costs.
She acknowledged the bill’s deficiencies. She said she tried to ensure that energy efficiency standards would be included in the bill — instead of being rolled back, which they were, making Ohio one of the most retrograde states in the nation in terms of environmental policy — but was ultimately unsuccessful. She said she believes that right now, HB6 should be repealed and replaced.
Moulthrop wanted to know why the repeal was taking so long, (given that it was forged in corruption, and the repeal should be a no-brainer), and Williams said that there were “lots of moving parts.” The state legislature simply isn’t ready to vote. Many of the bill’s supporters, she said, don’t feel that they’ve done anything wrong.
For her part, Williams said that to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, she has donated the campaign contributions she received from FirstEnergy to Northeast Ohio nonprofit organizations. Williams was one of 54 state lawmakers to receive FirstEnergy cash since 2017, and received the most among Democrats in either chamber.
“If people believe that we have pay-to-play in the Ohio legislature, I want to be sure that people know and understand that that was never my intent,” she said.
With respect to her mayoral ambitions, Williams said she was considering a run for one simple reason: “I want to see Cleveland be better.” She said she has been actively consulting with “influencers” in the city, including those who do not live in Cleveland, to help make her decision.
Loosely outlining her policy prerogatives, Williams said she would continue the “great” work of Mayor Frank Jackson in building up downtown, developing the east side, and attracting businesses and conventions. She said that if she had been in charge for the past decade, she would have devoted more resources to cleaning up brownfields to attract development, crafting career pathways for Cleveland students who don’t attend college and cultivating minority businesses.
In her early conversations, Williams said that the “number one” concern she’s heard is the culture and inefficiency at City Hall itself. She said she wants to find where the bottlenecks are in various city departments and cut red tape where necessary to ensure that people and businesses are getting the services they need as efficiently as possible.
She said that in her legislative work she has always been “hands on” and vowed to have an “open door policy” with residents. “My only job is to make City Hall work as effectively as it can,” she said, “and make this city the land of opportunity that I know it can be.”
Moulthrop reminded Williams that she is, for now, the only female candidate who has openly considered a mayoral run. Williams said she had no idea why that gender imbalance still persists, and lamented the fact that people still believe the challenging work of leading a big city might not be women’s work. She wondered if there was even an appetite for female leadership in Cleveland.
“From this point forward, talking about my potential run, I’m going to take a page out of Kamala [Harris’] playbook,” she said. “I just eat ‘no’ for breakfast. I’m no longer going to allow people who don’t think I have the skillset to run this city deter me... Women are leading all across this country, and have been some of the most effective people through Covid-19.” -- Allard
scene@clevescene.com @clevelandscene
