Jackson vs. Plusquellic, reform's coattails: the Inside Business Power 100

Give up on those "quiet mayor" complaints already. Frank Jackson keeps gaining in power and influence, not in spite of his mild personality, but because of it. That's my conclusion in one of several pieces I wrote for the Power 100, in the January issue of Cleveland Magazine's sister publication, Inside Business.

Plenty of politicians appear among the business and non-profit leaders on our list of Northeast Ohio's 100 most powerful people. Jackson ranked #2, below only the Cleveland Clinic's Toby Cosgrove. Hotheaded Don Plusquellic, Jackson's mayoral polar opposite, came in at #12, after shaking off his enemies in last year's recall election while retaining the confidence of the Rubber City's business community. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and congressmen Steve Latourette and Tim Ryan also made our top 25.

I handicapped Northeast Ohio's congressional delegation, scoring who's gained and lost power lately (George Voinovich down, Betty Sutton up). I also calculated Issue 6's effects on local political figures -- Jimmy Dimora, Tim Hagan, and Peter Lawson Jones dropped out of our top 100 entirely.

Of course, political buzz can shift fast: since IB went to press just before Christmas, Chris Ronayne seems less likely to run for county executive, Joe Cimperman lost some city council committee assignments, and Bill Mason's presence in the car when his campaign treasurer was pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving has sparked speculation about his political fortunes. (Oh, and Frank Jackson's "no layoffs" record? No longer true.)

One more Power 100 piece may appeal to political junkies: my interview with Sam Miller, Forest City co-chair and influential political donor. "The very person that, let’s say, is a precinct committeeman, a relative nobody politically — one day, you wake up and discover he’s a senator for the state," Miller counsels aspiring power brokers. "When you helped him as a precinct committeeman, that he’ll never forget."

The Professor's Amazing Time Travel Machine (or, 1912 or 2011?)

The Professor is inviting me to travel back to 1912 and help him fix the Ohio Constitution!

But I've got another idea. I want to jump ahead to 2011 instead.

My favorite anonymous blogger's had a great time lately over at Political Science 216, trying to start a movement to recall Jimmy Dimora. He created a mesmerizing pop-art logo for it, like Shepard Fairey's Obama poster. He founded a "Recall Dimora" Facebook group that now has 109 members, including Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett.

He even called the Board of Elections to find out how to get a recall petition started. (I hope he was going to use his real name and address, not "Peter Boyd" and Progressive Field.)

That's when he learned a shocking truth (one I didn't know either) -- we can't recall county officials.

You can read the Professor's entertaining law lecture here. But basically, the Progressive-era reforms in Ohio's 1912 constitution were not quite Progressive enough. We can't recall state officials either.

The Professor blames Dimora: "Using technology from MMPI, and flush with cash from Dick Jacobs, Sam Miller and the Ratner Family, Jimmy Dimora traveled back in time in a large time machine and bribed the drafters of Ohio Constitution..."

To fix this, the Professor's hatched a plan worthy of a Hollywood sci-fi caper flick. It involves him, me, blogger Tim Ferris and Plain Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes (surely included in the mission for his vast knowledge of Ohio political arcana: which Ohio counties voted for FDR, which were founded by Connecticut settlers, etc.) traveling back in time like in Quantum Leap to foil Dimora's dastardly plot.

Well, I never knew blogging could be this fun. If anyone's got a time machine, I'll jump in.

But like I said, I've got another idea. It involves 2011, not 1912. I'll post about it tomorrow.

(photo by Adam Lautenbach, from Flickr)

County chooses downtown mall as Medical Mart, convention center site

This is a surprise! The county commissioners have decided to build the Medical Mart and convention center on the downtown mall, not at Tower City.

MMPI, the developer, says it's figured out a way to build the project on the site of the current convention center for $108 million less than on Forest City's property on the river.

This'll stun everyone who thinks Sam Miller of Forest City controls Cleveland politics. But it's happening for a simple reason: Sam Miller does not control MMPI, and MMPI had an incentive to save money.

This summer, I was worried that the project would go to Tower City simply because Forest City was (naturally) lobbying for its proposal, while the mall site, which was publicly owned, didn't have an advocate. So when the Greater Cleveland Partnership's site committee declared that building the project at Tower City would save $60 million, who was going to argue?

But the county commissioners put a really important clause in their agreement with MMPI: the developer is responsible for all cost overruns. They did that because they knew critics would try to attack the convention center as "another Gateway." Lots of people opposed to big public downtown projects still point to the flaws in the 1991 Gateway deal, which left the public paying for lots of unexpected debt and expenses.

So MMPI threw out the Partnership's recommendation and started over. (See my earlier post about a Plain Dealer story that explained this, but not clearly.) The Chicago-based developer came up with a cheaper way to build the convention center: by using the existing center's foundation.

Yesterday's talks were held in private, a lot of details about the project haven't come out yet, and the county's deal with MMPI is still not finalized. Still, the debate about where to put a convention center has gone on for more than ten years. So this is really big news.