After 36 years, will Kucinich’s City Hall portrait debut in 2015?

This could be the year that Cleveland corrects a historic snub. Thirty-six years after he left the office, Dennis Kucinich is the only modern Cleveland mayor who doesn’t have a portrait hanging at City Hall.

Now, an official portrait of him is finally finished, and Kucinich says he's pleased.

“I’m very happy to learn about its completion,” Kucinich tells me. “I appreciate all people who made the effort to bring it about. I look forward to seeing it. If it’s posted at City Hall, I will be very glad to attend an unveiling.”

Artist Matthew Hunt completed his portrait of Kucinich as mayor last year (see my earlier story here). Kucinich says he doesn’t want to judge the portrait based on the photograph on my blog.

“I can’t comment about portrait unless I see it,” Kucinich says. “I don’t think it’d be fair to assess its value.” He says he doesn’t know if it’s up to him to approve or disapprove.

That’s significant, because some supporters are pausing to be sure Kucinich really wants the honor.

When a Cleveland mayor leaves office, the business community usually pays for a formal portrait to hang at City Hall. But the city fathers were in no mood to honor Kucinich, the fiery young populist, when his two tumultuous years as mayor ended in 1979.

So Kucinich is missing from the mayor’s Red Room -- where, during press conferences, legendary former mayor Tom Johnson looks over Mayor Frank Jackson’s shoulder. Recent mayors — Mike White, Jane Campbell, George Voinovich — gaze down from other walls.

In 2002, after Kucinich revived his career and was elected to Congress, supporters set out to right the wrong. City councilman Joe Cimperman and John Ryan, then president of the local AFL-CIO, got then-mayor Campbell to agree to accept a portrait.

Cimperman, Ryan and others held a pierogi and kielbasa fundraiser in Tremont with tickets at $20 a person. Kucinich attended; so did Campbell. (Here’s my coverage of the event.) Hunt won a competition to paint the portrait in 2003.

Then the project stalled. First, it took Kucinich three years to meet with Hunt. Finally, in 2006, Hunt spent a morning observing Kucinich in his Lakewood office and ten minutes photographing him. Then the portrait took Hunt eight years to finish, due to health problems, business setbacks and a flooded house.

Now, the portrait waits in Hunt’s Akron home. The artist is unsure whose job it is to accept the portrait and pay him.

Ryan, now an aide to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, says he’ll get it done. Cleveland Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit he founded, is holding the money in an account just for the portrait, and will pay the artist, Ryan says.

“My guess is, what they have to do is see if there’s a way to get the former congressman and mayor to participate, even if they have to hold it off for a couple months,” Ryan says.

“If he just refuses, well, we’re going to put this darn thing up,” Ryan adds. “I think it should be some kind of event. Mayor Kucinich’s term of office was not just about him, but about the whole town.”

Officially, City Hall is ready to take in Kucinich's likeness. “We would welcome the opportunity to place his portrait here in City Hall,” a spokesperson for mayor Jackson told me.

But Cimperman says Jackson and Harriet Applegate, Ryan’s successor at the AFL-CIO, want to make sure that Kucinich is OK with the portrait going up.

Though no one says so, Kucinich’s Cleveland friends seem to wonder if he is ambivalent about the honor. Ryan says Kucinich accepted the portrait effort “reluctantly” in 2002, and that he “disappointed” some supporters by taking years to meet with the artist. Perhaps being enshrined in an establishment institution like City Hall feels odd to Kucinich, the proud maverick.

The worst-case scenario, Cimperman says, is that the portrait will end up displayed somewhere other than City Hall. He hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“I’m feeling the need to get the portrait closer to the city, closer to the Red Room, where it deserves to be,” Cimperman says. (Though Cimperman challenged Kucinich in the 2008 Democratic primary for Congress, the two have reconciled since, most publicly at a 2011 benefit for Cleveland Public Theater.)

“Like or dislike, support or not support, history is history,” Cimperman says. “This was a person who served as mayor during a fundamental time in the history of Cleveland. The absence of his portrait is conspicuous.

“I think if people saw it, they would recognize it for being a great piece of art and a missing piece in that portion of our history.”

After 35 years, Dennis Kucinich’s City Hall portrait is finished at last

Matthew Hunt pauses before the reveal. From an easel, he lifts his painting of a young woman looking over her nude shoulder. Behind it stands a portrait Cleveland has awaited for 35 years.

Dennis Kucinich, his hair still black, looks to one side, his eyes narrowed into a thoughtful squint, serious and enigmatic.

“I was hired to go in and try to find the person behind the name and TV interviews, the stuff that everybody knows,” says Hunt.

When Kucinich was voted out of the mayor’s office in 1979, no one commissioned the traditional City Hall portrait. Moneyed civic leaders, aghast at Kucinich’s confrontational two years as mayor, wanted to forget him.

“I wanted a more quiet side,” says Hunt. “Especially because this was such a wrong that was done. I felt that I had a responsibility to try to make it right.”

In 2002, a new generation tried to correct the snub. Then-mayor Jane Campbell, city councilman Joe Cimperman and labor leaders threw a $20 kielbasa and pierogi fundraiser in a church hall in Tremont. The party raised about $12,000.

Then? Silence, delays, small occasional updates in The Plain Dealer’s “Whatever Happened To” feature.

Now, 12 years later, the portrait is finished.

Hunt, 42, won a contest to paint it in 2003. “They said [Kucinich] saw my work, and he really loved it,” he says.

Self-taught, Hunt began painting in 1998 and debuted with a show that year at the McCormick Place gallery in Hudson. He has a gift for painting realistic, psychologically profound depictions of people that invite the question, what is he or she thinking?

Paid a $7,250 advance to paint Kucinich, Hunt tried for three years to meet his subject. First, the then-congressman’s 2004 campaign for president got in the way. Then his office cancelled a post-election photo shoot in Washington. A year later, Kucinich called Hunt to say he’d make it happen. At last, in September 2006, Hunt spent a morning observing Kucinich at his Lakewood office.

“He would look down when thinking about something,” Hunt recalls. “He would hold his left hand to his head, but he would do this sort of squinting. It was really warm the way he did it, but it was very sincere, and it wasn’t for anyone else.”

Hunt watched Kucinich during a press conference and a meeting with aides and spent ten minutes taking reference photos of him. He headed back to his home studio in Copley, that look on Kucinich’s face still in his mind.

It took Hunt seven years to paint it. “I own the fact that it’s taken as long as it has,” he says.

At first, Hunt’s other work took precedence. Commissions rained down. Parents hired him to paint their children, companies their CEOs, universities their administrators.

Then, three setbacks brought Hunt’s work to a halt. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes; when it was uncontrolled, his painting hand shook. His basement studio flooded, destroying much of his work. The financial crisis hit, and clients cancelled and retreated.

Now, Hunt has recovered. A sharp doctor helps keep his health troubles in check. “I’m able to work now the way I was,” he says. Jobs are flowing to him again. He recently accepted a commission to paint retired Lincoln Electric CEO John Stropki.

He also turned back to Kucinich. He collected ’70s photos to re-create how Kucinich looked in his early 30s. He studied ’70s suits and tie patterns to paint wide lapels and a diagonally-striped tie.

Thinking hard about Kucinich’s two years as mayor, he decided to add no symbolic props -- concerned that a hint of, say, the Muni Light battle might reduce his subject’s work to a single accomplishment.

Instead, Hunt depicted Kucinich in the mayor’s office, sitting on the edge of a bare desk. The viewer looks on from just above him, an unusual perspective meant to evoke Kucinich's populism. “I don’t think he has the need to be above anyone,” Hunt says.

Kucinich’s interlocked hands rest in the foreground, a symbol of him “bringing together people and different sides, and the struggle that he had,” Hunt says. (That’s a generous interpretation of Kucinich’s mayoralty, commonly criticized as divisive.)

Hunt worked hardest at Kucinich’s face, especially his mouth, which is caught between a slight smile and a hint of satisfaction.

“I didn’t want to have a degree of defeat or worry,” Hunt says. “I wanted to convey someone who was in charge, but someone who was taking the issues very seriously. He might be young, but he’s not a boy.”

Hunt painted the final brushstroke about six months ago. He plans to take it to Cleveland’s Bonfoey Gallery for framing.

When will the public see it? That’s unclear. Hunt’s not sure what’s next, because “there’s no client,” he says.

A portrait committee, made up of representatives of two unions and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, owes him a second payment of $7,250 if the portrait is accepted. But whose job is it to accept the painting? The committee? Mayor Frank Jackson? Kucinich himself?

The long wait for Kucinich to join the pantheon of mayors is subtly symbolized in the painting itself. In 2006, Hunt noticed that Kucinich wore his watch upside down -- clasp up, face downward. He painted it that way. The clasp is just barely visible under his sleeve. “Time did sort of get flipped,” Hunt says.

Me & Feagler, CMHA and City Hall

I'm a guest on WVIZ's Feagler & Friends this weekend. We're talking about the Cleveland City Hall cuts, the arrest of the housing authority director, and the proposed fee hike at Kent State.

My favorite part was talking about the wiretaps of contractor William Neiheiser describing the goodies he allegedly offered CMHA director George Phillips-Olivier. ("I said, 'George, you want a place in Florida, get me Phase II.' I says, 'I'm desperate for a f---ng good job like that.' I says, 'You want a good life,' and he agrees. We went to the game [Cleveland Cavaliers playoff game] last night.")

The show airs tonight at 8:30 and Sunday at 11:30 am on WVIZ. It'll also run on The Ohio Channel Monday at 1:30 pm and 9:30 pm and Tuesday at 5:30 am. A podcast will go up Monday morning here.

I'm on the show's second half, with host Dick Feagler and Ed Esposito of WAKR. In the first half, Feagler interviews Joseph Jankowski of Case Western Reserve University and George Newkome of the University of Akron about cutting-edge research at the two schools.

Jackson to lay off 350-400 city workers, blames state cuts

For five years as mayor, Frank Jackson has prided himself on managing Cleveland's budget with very few layoffs. He can't do that anymore.

Jackson has just announced that he'll have to lay off 350 to 400 city workers because of a $36 million cut in funds from the state. He calls out Gov. John Kasich, who called the mayor his "new best friend" in January.

Typically, Jackson is judging the governor by deeds, not words. The mayor's statement clearly blames Kasich's budget for the layoffs and defends his own management of the budget.

The mayor's complaint to Kasich and the legislature, re-released today, argues that since the state needs to cut 17 percent of its budget to close a deficit, it should cut the local government fund 17 percent, or at most 25 percent. Instead, it'll be slashed in half by next year.

The mayor also released a list of all the cuts he expects to make to city services: in police patrols, fire protection, slower snow removal, fewer flu vaccinations, delays in building and housing inspections. Layoff notices are coming in mid-May.

Here's the press release:

Earlier this month, I shared with you my concerns regarding Governor Kasich’s proposed budget and the drastic impact it would have on the City of Cleveland if it is adopted. Since then, I have continued to analyze the proposed state budget to determine what course of action the City of Cleveland must take to handle the proposed loss $35.7 million in state revenue by the end of 2012.

This state-imposed deficit situation comes after five years of strong budget management by the City, including the use of five-year budget projects, strategic cost cutting measures and significant increases in efficiency. By using these management tools, the City had the flexibility it needed in order to balance the budget every year with few layoffs and very little impact on service delivery, despite a global recession. Today, the state-imposed budget deficit takes away that flexibility.

Now, in order to balance the budget for the remainder of 2011 and to prepare for 2012, the city must reduce its workforce by 350 to 400 employees by the end of May. This will include seasonal, part-time and full-time employees.

These state-imposed cuts will result in service reductions. Despite these cuts, my goal is to continue to provide the best service to the City of Cleveland that we can. For that reason, I am continuing to analyze staffing levels and will finalize the specifics of our plan to cure this state-imposed deficit in the near future. As we move forward, I will provide you with additional updates so that you can understand the impact the state-imposed budget cuts will have on Cleveland.

Until then, you can find more information in the impact statement (pdf) I delivered to Governor Kasich and the Ohio General Assembly and the presentation (pdf) I gave to my management team this morning.

Mayoral candidates debate at City Club

The five candidates for mayor debated at the City Club yesterday. You can download the podcast here if you'd like to listen. Here's WKYC-TV's coverage of the event.



I couldn't make it, but Henry Gomez did. The Plain Dealer's City Hall reporter was unimpressed. "Jackson's opponents miss key chance to score points," reads the huge headline on his analysis on page 1B today. (He's followed up with further thoughts on his City Hall blog.) But Leon Bibb of NewsChannel 5 says the challengers hit the mayor on the state of the Cleveland schools.

This isn't the first time the candidates have debated. Gomez live-blogged from an August debate in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood: you can read his reports here and here.

U.S. Attorney: "Very, very little" connection between city, county corruption probes

Why hasn't the FBI investigation of Cleveland building inspectors gotten more attention? Because the Plain Dealer keeps treating it as a sideshow to the probe of Jimmy Dimora and other county officials. (Take this May 16 story, for instance.)

But check out what Bill Edwards, acting U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio, said after yesterday's press conference about the inspectors. A reporter I didn't recognize walked up to Edwards and asked him, "What information did you gather that’ll be helpful in the ongoing corruption probe in Cuyahoga County?"

"Very little from this investigation," said Edwards, the top federal prosecutor in Cleveland. "Very, very little."

That’s not what people are writing, I said.

"I know!" Edwards said. He pointed across the room at Peter Krouse, the PD's federal courts reporter. "The Cleveland Plain Dealer keeps making these connections which we have never made."

The paper's angle seems based on a tip it got last July, right after the FBI raided the county building. It reported that a breakthrough came in the county probe when Steve Pumper, a contractor said to have done work on Dimora's house, was caught trying to bribe a Cleveland building inspector.* I mentioned that to Edwards.

"I can’t get into anything involving the county probe," Edwards said. "What I said to [the other reporter was], 'very little connection.' Maybe some, but it’s very small.

"This is not one investigation, which the Plain Dealer would lead you to believe," Edwards said. "These are really two separate investigations."

A small point? I'm sure the PD would say so. Edwards didn't deny there's some connection. But his comments show a few things:

-The Plain Dealer's angles have a huge influence on how everyone in town thinks about the news. (The other day, someone asked me if buddies of Dimora's had just been indicted.)

-The paper doesn't know much about what the feds are thinking.**

-The lead graf in today's front-page story is misleading.

-The paper doesn't really know how the county probe started.**

-Its assumptions about how the FBI is collecting evidence against county officials are more thinly sourced and speculative than they seem.**

-The first indictments from the county investigation are still to come.*

*Update, 7/9/09: The tip about Pumper and the inspector got confirmed in the charges filed against him on July 8, lending credence to the Plain Dealer's theory of the case. (I posted about the Pumper charges here, though I focused on Pumper's alleged relationship with Dimora, not the inspector.) The first charges in the county investigation were filed June 12, and one of those charges suggested another possible connection between the city and county investigations. See my post, with second thoughts about the PD coverage, here.

**Update, 1/5/12: At last, we know more about how the county corruption investigation started, and the Plain Dealer's 2009 theory of the case holds up very well. A new court filing strongly suggests that Cleveland housing inspector Bobby Cuevas was one of the FBI's two best sources about Dimora in 2007. See my post here.

City Hall corruption scandal grows: feds charge more inspectors

No, it's not some little offshoot of the county investigation. Cleveland City Hall has its own corruption probe on its hands -- an FBI sting of the city's building and housing department, complete with lots of video and audio surveillance and an undercover agent posing as a New York businessman.

If the charges are true, these building inspectors deserve their own scandal.

Federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and Mayor Frank Jackson held a press conference today to reveal that two more Cleveland building inspectors face extortion charges. That's a total of six current or former inspectors busted, out of 75 total in the department.

"They've now forfeited their careers, their reputations, and possibly their freedom for amounts of money that each inspector would now tell you were simply not worth it," said Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI Cleveland division's agent in charge. (The alleged bribes ranged from $200 to about $1,500.)

The six men may not be the last. Today's new charges mark the end of the federal investigation of Building and Housing, said Bill Edwards, acting U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio -- but the FBI is giving the Cleveland police more information that may lead to state charges or disciplinary action against more city employees. Figliuzzi also asked anyone "victimized by a building inspector demanding bribes" to call the FBI at (216) 522-1400.

The two men charged today, Juan Alejandro and James McCullough (pictured), have been suspended without pay, the mayor said. They're accused of manipulating violation notices to lower the prices of homes. (See today's press release here, as a pdf.)

I wonder how many businesses the six alleged extortionists chased out of Cleveland. So strong was the city building department's reputation for obstructing construction projects that (if you believe the feds) some of the accused inspectors seem to have played off of it to extort bribes. Edwards said they took cash for "speeding things up, making things easier, getting things done quicker."

That suggests the norm was slow and difficult! So the city's inefficiency created an opportunity for corruption: efficiency was rare, but buyable with cash.

Cleveland so badly needs new businesses and new homes. But if the feds are right -- and they spent three years investigating these cases, collecting what Edwards called "a lot" of audio and video surveillance -- then some of the accused inspectors shook down the contractors working on new businesses, including (how's this for heartless?) Sweethearts Ice Cream on Payne Avenue. If they did so, they not only risked their own reputations, but the city's; they undermined Cleveland's rebirth.

"I'm disturbed, as I know you are, by any dishonest behavior or wrongdoing by any public employee," Jackson said. "The violation of public trust is something we cannot tolerate."

The mayor said the police would investigate and the administration would look for structural changes in building and housing to make it more difficult for inspectors to abuse their power. He also said he planned to issue a new city-wide policy clearing up any "grey areas" and making it "very clear to people what is proper behavior and what is not proper behavior."

One reporter aggressively asked the mayor and Edwards why taxpayers should trust City Hall, since the scandal happened on Jackson's watch. But Jackson said the FBI kept him and the police informed of the investigation, and the city backed off to let the feds take the lead. At one point, Edwards told the reporter he believed the Jackson administration would take whatever steps it had to now.

The cost of corruption: "City Hall is like a Bermuda Triangle for builders"

Sometimes one article gives you the news and another explains why it matters.

The Plain Dealer reported Saturday that three more inspectors for Cleveland's building and housing department have been indicted on federal corruption charges. That's on top of a fourth guy indicted earlier. They're accused of shaking down business owners.

Now, in this week's issue of Cool Cleveland, Mansfield Frazier reminds us of the building and housing department's reputation: Impossible to deal with.

"Most local contractors would rather get beat with a two-by-four with a rusty nail in it than go down to B & H," Frazier writes. "The 5th floor of City Hall is like a Bermuda Triangle for builders."

Past stories about this department have always made it sound like a red-tape problem. Now the feds say it was corruption.

Think about how desperately Cleveland needs new commerce, how badly its 80-year-old neighborhoods need inspections. Then read these two stories and get mad. There's no way of measuring how many businesses have walked away from the city over the years because of practices like these.

Cleveland's domestic partnership registry opens

Cleveland's new registry for domestic partners opens this morning at Cleveland City Hall. About 300 couples are expected to register today, receiving official acknowledgement of their relationships.

Supporters of the registry will rally in front of City Hall from noon to 2 pm today. Meanwhile, several ministers who opposed the registry will meet this morning in city council's chambers for the National Day of Prayer, then head to Public Square around noon for a gathering there. That means they'll probably pass right by the pro-registry rally. Awkward!

The Plain Dealer profiles four couples who plan to make their relationships official today. WKYC has a good story online about the big event. The Gay People's Chronicle reports that 12 of the city councilpeople who voted for the registry will be co-grand-marshals of the Cleveland Pride parade on June 12.

Council cash

Local pols have filed their 2008 campaign finance reports, and Henry Gomez has dug through Cleveland City Council's at his City Hall blog.

Highlights: Martin Sweeney has $313,000 in the fund he controls as council president and $141,000 in his own campaign fund (as of Jan. 1). No wonder the coup plot against him failed. His rival Matt Zone has $19,500.

Joe Cimperman collected $53,000 at a September fundraiser. Dona Brady has $103,000 (what's she going to do with it?). Zack Reed "spent more than $10,000 on other campaigns, cell phone bills and hotel rooms for conferences."

Meanwhile, Mayor Frank Jackson has a $633,000 war chest, just in case anyone decides to run against him.

New City Hall blog

Last month Roldo Bartimole pined for the long-gone days when reporters swarmed Cleveland City Hall, digging for news. He lamented that he heard the Plain Dealer was cutting back from two City Hall reporters to only one. Well, at least that one guy's working hard.

Henry Gomez, our daily's watchdog at 601 Lakeside, is now blogging daily from City Hall, passing on politics news with speed and webby verve. I've posted a link to his Inside City Hall blog on my blogroll of local politics sites (over there on the right).

Now anyone who's wondering, what the hell is Cleveland City Council doing lately? Anything? can find out daily. Sadly, Gomez's post today is about how few council members showed up for an major hearing about which big projects Mayor Frank Jackson will ask President Obama to fund. (Want to stimulate the Cleveland economy? Build us an Inner Belt Bridge that won't fall down!)

Nice use of the web by the Plain Dealer here. Sometimes it seems like cleveland.com thinks "blog" just means "page where we post the news we're printing tomorrow." This one's different. The editors are letting an ambitious reporter post newsy and observational stuff that won't make the paper and play with a voice that wouldn't fit the Metro section. It's a newspaper blog that reads like a blog.

Yes, it's sad more of what Gomez is doing can't make the print edition. His report last week about Matt Zone's failed council coup shouldn't have been hidden on page 3B. But newspapers and Cleveland are shrinking. The city has gone from 750,000 people in 1970 (when Roldo was a young reporter) to 444,000 or less today. Also, since Cleveland is poor, City Hall doesn't have much money to spend. So most political attention shifts to the county or Washington, and those of us who want more news about the Zone-Sweeney battle can go online.

Turns out, plenty of readers want a daily fix of City Hall news. In 11 hours, 26 people have commented on Gomez's post! I'm jealous!