East Clevelanders don't want to merge with Cleveland

"Cleveland takes small steps toward merger with neighboring East Cleveland," reads a Cleveland.com headline today.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and council president Kevin J. Kelley have asked Cleveland State's urban school for info on mergers. Councilman Jeff Johnson told reporter Leila Atassi Monday night what he's also told me: he thinks the big city should annex its troubled neighbor, for the sake of both towns.

There's just one problem.  East Clevelanders don't want to be annexed.

While reporting in East Cleveland for my new commentary, "A City's Limits," I discovered public opinion there is strongly against a merger. The idea got booed down at a public forum in December. The long-suffering town doesn't want to give up its independence, its City Hall and cops, its mayor and council. Only one out of the town's 12 elected officials is pushing for a merger.

East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton is against merging with Cleveland. Norton is evasive about this with reporters, and Plain Dealer columnist Brent Larkin is slamming him for not giving him a straight answer. Larkin doesn't know that when Norton was sworn in for a second term as mayor Jan. 2, he came out against a merger.

What's going on? Norton got burned by George Forbes, who claims Norton supports merging. But Forbes told me his conversation with Norton happened off the record, during Norton's reelection endorsement interview with the Call and Post. (Forbes is general counsel at the Call and Post and has a strong say in its editorials.) Forbes, trying to play journalist and power broker at the same time, botched both roles. He told the whole town about the "off the record" conversation with Norton -- or at least, his version of it.

East Clevelanders, who've been abandoned after waves of white flight and black flight, are skeptical that anyone else really has their interests in mind. Any move that comes off like a hostile takeover will backfire. Merger supporters like Forbes and even Larkin are in danger of coming off like Vladimir Putin coveting Crimea.

Johnson's metaphor of a marriage sounds a better note. But it'll be a long, difficult courtship.

For more on the fraught politics of a merger, check out my commentary, "A City's Limits." Written for the April issue of Cleveland Magazine, it's online now.

32 Years of Roldo’s Point of View now online

You can’t tell Cleveland’s story of the last five decades without a word from Roldo Bartimole.

He’s the city’s original alternative journalist, icon-smasher, press critic and radical muckraker. Whether you think the white-haired, reedy-voiced reporter is Cleveland’s conscience or the town crank, he’s a necessary corrective to 45 years of boosterism and power-elite conventional wisdom.

“I don’t have a lot of heroes. Roldo Bartimole is one,” Esquire writer and Cleveland native Scott Raab tweeted last month, when his hero turned 80.

Now, Roldo's life's work has been liberated from library shelves. The Cleveland Memory website has recently scanned and posted the entire 32-year print run of Roldo's Cleveland politics newsletter, Point of View.

The generation of Clevelanders who know Roldo through his Cool Cleveland columns can read him as he takes on his great nemeses of the '70s, ’80s and ’90s: George Forbes and George Voinovich, The Plain Dealer and Alex Machaskee, Forest City and Dick Jacobs, sports team owners and their sweetheart deals.

My quick dig in Cleveland Memory's Roldo archive turned up gems:

• “Buying Peace the Private Way,” June 26, 1968 – Roldo breaks the news that businessmen paid black militants $40,000 in summer 1967 to help prevent a repeat of the Hough riots.

• “Resign Now,” April 26, 1980 – One of Roldo’s many screeds against George Forbes.

• “Sohio Forbes/Shoves,” April 4, 1981 – The story behind the legendary photo (above) of Forbes physically throwing Roldo out of a meeting of city councilmen at the Bond Court Hotel.

• “On to the 90s: White, Westbrook break old guard,” Nov. 25, 1989 – Roldo captures the moment when new political characters stepped up to replace Forbes and Voinovich: Mike White, Jay Westbrook, Jim Rokakis, Pat O’Malley, Mike Polensek, Jeff Johnson.

• “Saying Goodbye,” December 2000 – In Point of View’s last issue, Roldo looks back on 32 years of combat against Cleveland’s political and economic powers. 

I’ve blogged about Roldo before – here’s a post about how downtown looks through his eyes, and one about his emergence as a critic of Mayor Frank Jackson. I’ve just posted two articles about him from Cleveland Magazine’s archives:

• “Knight Errant,” May 1972 – In which Roldo describes his journalistic vows of poverty and comes close to calling himself a socialist and anarchist.
       (shortlink: j.mp/Roldo-KnightErrant)

• “Last of the Great Muckrakers,” September 2000 – Michael D. Roberts’ profile of Roldo, which explores his single-minded devotion to his work and reveals the origin of his unusual first name (“the hero of… a cheap Italian novel”).
       (shortlink: j.mp/Roldo-Muckraker)

(photo by Timothy Culek, Cleveland Press, from clevelandmemory.org)

Kucinich & Forbes' redistricting moves, Election Day preview on WCPN's Roundtable

I just appeared on WCPN's Reporters' Roundtable, where we talked about two Cleveland personalities' reactions to the latest twists in Ohio's redistricting battle.

Republicans have drawn a new map, in a failed attempt to please black Democrats. Dennis Kucinich is trying to kill the map, which revises the peculiar lakeshore district he wants to run in to favor Marcy Kaptur -- it throws in much more of Toledo and subtracts a piece of Lorain County. George Forbes, who tried to broker a deal, can't believe the black caucus didn't go for the new map. But most other Democrats hate the new map and the old map. They're using the threat of a referendum as leverage to shut down the whole process and try to get something better.

Roundtable host Rick Jackson ad libbed a question about Issue 2, Tuesday's referendum on SB 5, which prompted the usual torrent of anti-SB5 calls. (No one in favor of SB5 ever calls in to WCPN.) Polls predict a big defeat for Issue 2.

We also talked a bit about local school levies and a few mayor's races, especially Lorain's and Euclid's.

Bill Cervenik, Euclid's mayor, is facing challenger Charlene Mancuso in a race that revives the conflict I've written about between the town's pro-Cervenik and anti-Cervenik factions. Cervenik has survived past battles over whether he was right to let a black church move into town and settle a voting-rights suit with the Justice Department.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

Ellen Connally’s horrible week

Well, this isn’t what C. Ellen Connally expected. Belligerent Tea Partiers from “District Zero” getting in her face. A rival who cuts a deal with her, then publicly apologizes. Angry front-page headlines for four six days straight.

Yes, Connally, my November profile subject, had the Worst Week in Cleveland.

On Friday, Connally thought she’d nailed down the six votes she needed to become Cuyahoga County council president. Turns out it won't be so easy. News of the private meeting where she forged a pact with fellow councilman-elect Dale Miller reached the Plain Dealer, and the town went wild.

The council-to-be’s get-together yesterday at Cleveland State degenerated into a chaotic embarrassment, the likes of which I haven’t seen at a public meeting since Jimmy Dimora shut up and East Cleveland got rid of Eric Brewer. Now, an extremely scientific online poll of people who read the Plain Dealer’s angry editorial finds (as of tonight) that 84.75% think the “secret meeting” was “outrageous” and “must not stand,” while 9.36% think it’s merely “regrettable.”

Watching the pitchforks gather, I’m tempted to mount an extremely unfashionable defense of the old-fashioned art of politics. I'm as big a fan of transparency as the next reporter, but I also know how leadership contests in councils and legislatures really work. Of course candidates line up their support before the actual vote. Of course a three-way fight ends with two hopefuls cutting a deal to ice out the third. Connally's machinations look pretty mild by most political standards. And compared to the gladiatorial combat I’ve seen break out over the Cleveland city council presidency, the county councilors who met at Julian Rogers’ house look like nuns in a convent.

Still, I’m counting four errors Connally and her allies made that are impossible to defend as good politics, let alone good government.

#1: After Stuart Garson’s plan to hold a Democratic caucus was ferociously slapped down, she didn't take the hint that "secret meetings" are not in vogue in the post-Dimora era. She showed a tin ear for the public's desire for transparency -- and a simple lack of shrewdness by not striking her deal in a dozen phone calls instead.

#2: Connally called Chuck Germana to say there was a party, but he wasn’t invited -- thus assuring the friendly get-together would end up exposed on page A1. (Note how Dave Greenspan was “shocked” in the Saturday story, but Germana wasn’t.)

#3: Rogers invited five council members, but let a sixth in when he showed up. Now everyone can say they violated the spirit of Ohio’s sunshine law. Once the council takes office, it’ll be illegal for six or more of the 11 to meet in private.

#4: Connally tried to talk her way out of the mess and made it worse. Her possibly fatal quote, “Leadership is not the public’s business,” strikes me as a former judge’s failed attempt to be law-school clever. Trying to argue that the sunshine law doesn’t apply to leadership debates, Connally stumbled into a gaffe that may have done terrible harm to her reputation.

That’d be a shame. Connally doesn’t fit the arrogant caricature flying around Cleveland.com’s scabrous comment sections. She’s still one of the new council’s top talents. Like I said in my profile, “Change Agent,” she’s got a judge’s calm demeanor, rectitude and intellect, combined with a blunt honesty and sharp wit. Her op-ed takedown of George Forbes last year over a fawn-beating in Euclid is a classic of recent Cleveland political humor. It’s ironic how quickly someone can go from being the rotten-tomato-thrower to the splattered.

Ellen Connally: first county council president?

When the county executive race ends Tuesday, another contest will heat up: The 11 new county council members will choose a council president. Four Democrats are vying for the job. My profile of one contender, C. Ellen Connally, is out now in the November issue of Cleveland Magazine.

My story, "Change Agent," calls Connally "the feisty bookworm of Cleveland politics, a historian and legal scholar whose integrity belies a courageous bluntness." Connally, a former judge and frequent correspondent with the Plain Dealer's opinion page, jokingly calls her mischievous op-ed takedown of George Forbes "the best thing I ever wrote." She's also danced onstage with Morris Day & The Time.

Nina Turner dodges the hype

Everyone had an opinion about state Sen. Nina Turner back in November: A county executive contender, if you liked Issue 6; a marked woman, if you didn’t. Then the filing deadline for the May 4 primary revealed the drama-free truth: She’s running for re-election to the state senate. Unopposed.

What happened? Well, first, we know for sure now that the black political old guard is declining in power. I’m mostly thinking of George Forbes, widely assumed to be the mastermind of the Call & Post’s infamous Aunt Jemima attack on Turner. That in-house slur didn’t just backfire, winning Turner new allies and reluctant defenders among the anti-Issue 6 crowd. It wasn’t just made ridiculous by the actual voting results, which showed that a slim majority in black communities supported 6.

The threat to ruin Turner’s career was also empty. It lacked follow-through. Forbes, in his prime, would’ve lined up a challenger to chase Turner through the primary, accusing her (however implausibly) of selling out black folks. Instead, Forbes ally Zack Reed took a look at running against her, then passed.

Another part of the anti-Issue 6 coalition looks weak: labor. Kenny Yuko, a hardcore pro-union state rep, also considered running against Turner, but decided to run for his House seat again. He must’ve looked at the map of Turner’s 25th district, and realized it was a bad place to try to re-fight the November reform battle. It includes four Cleveland wards and 15 East Side suburbs, many of which — Shaker Heights, South Euclid, Beachwood, Orange — strongly supported 6.

As for that early buzz about Turner for county executive, it wasn’t coming from her. Issue 6 supporters were dropping her name to reward her for standing up to Forbes. But Turner knew better than to overreach. She’s only been in the state Senate for a year and a half. She may well want to move up someday -- but her time on city council and as an aide to Mayor Mike White position her better for a run for Cleveland mayor when Frank Jackson retires. She’s better off to wait, gather experience, and let the grudges over county reform become old news.

Retired judge Connally smacks George Forbes as "an out-of-touch, salty-mouthed curmudgeon"

George Forbes really went too far this time. The local NAACP president's claim that an elderly Euclid fawn-killer has been railroaded by racism drew angry responses from three black commentators in yesterday's Plain Dealer. Columnist Phillip Morris asks, "Has George Forbes lost his mind?" Radio host Jimmy Malone's letter to the editor says Euclid didn't deserve the cheap shot.

But the best of the three is former Cleveland judge C. Ellen Connally's op-ed piece. The judge proves herself a sharp-witted essayist, tracing Forbes' history of inflammatory one-liners from his city council days to today. Connally calls Forbes "fiery, foul-mouthed," and an "out-of-touch, salty-mouthed curmudgeon." She totally calls him out for overplaying "the race card" and acting as a "self-appointed spokesman for the black community," and says he's done damage to the local NAACP's reputation. She slyly reminds us that the state Supreme Court recently sanctioned Forbes.

As for the animal-cruelty charge against 75-year-old Dorothy Richardson, who beat the fawn to death for eating her flowers, Connally questions how Forbes found any racism in the charge -- unless "the deer had 'KKK' tattooed on its backside and ate flowers belonging only to black people."

In her semi-retirement, the esteemed former judge has become a frequent correspondent with the PD opinion page. Here she is criticizing the black ministers who opposed Cleveland's domestic partnership registry, smacking down Cleveland State Urban Studies prof Tom Bier for his op-ed complaint about a mental health facility moving to Euclid Avenue, asking why the PD considered it news that Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo hired defense lawyers, defending students who need more than four years to graduate, praising the president's international experiences, commenting on Sarah Palin's wardrobe shopping spree, and complaining that Continental Airlines starved her on a flight home from London.

Meanwhile, here's a history of the fawn scandal: the paper's original story about the charge, witness statements from neighbors (pdf), Richardson telling WKYC TV 3 she was defending herself against the fawn and reacting to her hate mail on Fox 8, and Morris' earlier column saying the outrage at Richardson was out of control.