A Local Tale

Hard to tell the difference sometimes

clumsily cobbled together with the software I have, but you get the picture

My husband remarked recently that, the way the Democrats are running the city and county (Cleveland), they might as well be Republicans. It only took me a minute to think about it and realize that he was right. We’ve known that there’s been corruption in City Hall for at least several decades. Zero concern for what citizens want. Back in about 2005, one mayor flat-out told me, to my face, in very explicit terms, that public comment sessions for local projects are simply a matter of obeying the letter of the law. That is, technically the people can meet and have their say, but in reality, by the time public comments are allowed, a given project has long since been written in stone, with no possibility of changing anything. We saw that first-hand, with a project the city pushed through despite our neighborhood’s objections. The then-mayor secretly torpedoed our attempt at stopping the project by putting a landmark in the relevant area on the National Register. She personally spiked the application, rushed the paperwork through with no notice and no hearing, and that was that. Dirty operations, barely concealed, done totally shamelessly. Nobody had any money to go to court. The attorney I consulted said we likely had a good case, but his $5K retainer was beyond us. The result was that the ungodly expensive, unnecessary vanity project proceeded, costing the taxpayers many millions of dollars. Even at that, the shoddy construction began to fall apart before the project was even completed. Rather reminiscent of other, more recent projects in a more well-known venue, ordered and carried out by the R party.

The Dems around here are like their counterparts across the aisle in other ways, too. A guy from the neighborhood who I’d known for a couple years decided to run for City Council. I knew him to be a bit nerdy, but absolutely upright and honest, a real Mr. Smith Goes to Washington type. His only concern was for the people of the city, which was obvious because a councilperson’s salary is less than the salary he’d been making at a private company. Also, being on the Council around here really isn’t a stepping stone to anything except possibly mayor, and this guy definitely didn’t have that ambition. He simply wanted to give our neighborhood a voice.

He won his seat, and everybody in his ward was happy at the news. He continued to come to our community organization meetings, and we had a meeting right about the time he was due to be sworn in. He came over to me and confided his hopes about holding office; he was enthusiastic about accomplishing things for the community. He said that the only thing that worried him was that he might be forced to sacrifice his ideals and his principles for the sake of getting things done. He thought that given the conditions in city government, he might have to make trade-offs that wouldn’t sit well with him. I agreed with him that he might be pressured into compromises that he wouldn’t like. The mayor and a number of other councilpeople were known for back-office dealings, along with suspected payoffs from “interested” parties. There was an old-boys network, and my friend wasn’t part of it. That had been the case back in the ‘70s, when Dennis Kucinich was elected mayor. He’d rejected all the pay-to-play arrangements, refused all the double-dealing, wouldn’t pay off the mob when it came to city contracts. Kucinich supposedly even had a contract put out on him at one point. How he survived, I don’t know.

My friend wasn’t concerned about physical danger, but his ideals defined him as a person. He was determined to stick to them.

He was successful. He also accomplished several big wins for his ward. Most notably, he kept the fire station in full operation. In their zeal to cut costs, the city ordered that the fire station in our neighborhood be “browned out.” Not permanently closed, but shuttered until further notice. Within that station’s coverage area are the Cleveland Zoo, a school, a couple of senior citizen complexes, a church or three, various small businesses, and many hundreds of closely packed, wood-construction century homes. The next-closest station covers its own section of similar buildings, and is also responsible for responding to accidents on the nearby expressway, so adding our neighborhood to its responsibilities would severely limit response capabilities all around. How the city could possibly justify browning out the fire station that covers the Zoo, let alone all the dwellings and public buildings, is beyond me. My friend got the neighborhood mobilized, and a bunch of us went downtown to picket City Hall during a Council meeting. After the meeting got underway, we all filed in and sat down. When our hero got up to speak, we gave him a long, standing ovation. He made a very powerful case for keeping our fire station open, and….he won. The community won.

He also single-handedly got the Council to turn down a deal with a shady overseas company to provide a new kind of public lighting. He was the only one to do the research and reveal the unsavory facts about that company. Everyone else had just rubber-stamped the acquisition. I have no idea how much money he saved the taxpayers, but it wasn’t insignificant. I won’t speculate on any kickbacks he may have eliminated.

And so, in return for those services, the powers-that-were at City Hall focused on my friend when it came to drawing new ward boundaries. The 100% Dem controlled city government conveniently drew my friend’s ward out of existence. His only recourse was to run against a Latina in an almost completely Hispanic adjacent neighborhood. Needless to say, he lost.

He debated what to do for awhile. He could have gone back to the private sector, and with his skills and knowledge, could have been quite successful. But he set a course to work for the public good, as corny as that sounds.

He decided to go back to a place where he’d been happy in his post-college days. Today, about 15 years later, he’s the director of management and operations for the Peace Corps. The last of his assignments that I heard about was running a relief workshop in the Philippines.

I’m very glad that this particular tale has a happy ending. This, despite our area Dems’ efforts to the contrary and their insistence on toeing the party line, just like the GOP. If all politics are local, then the Dem party has a LOT of reforming to do.