Who Wants to be Mayor of East Cleveland? -- my profile of Gary Norton

"Who Wants to be Mayor of East Cleveland?" -- my profile of mayor-elect Gary Norton -- appears in the December issue of Cleveland Magazine and is online now.

It's the first in-depth profile of Norton, 37, a diplomat with a soothingly upbeat temperament and a protégé of county commissioner Peter Lawson Jones and the late U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

Norton, who takes charge of troubled East Cleveland on Jan. 1, hopes to lead his city past his predecessors' scandals and take advantage of its prime location near University Circle to attract businesses and residents. “I need people to start thinking about East Cleveland,” he says.

“This is going to be the test of his lifetime,” says fellow city councilman Nathaniel Martin. “East Cleveland is going to be his challenge. It could be his victory or his Waterloo.”

My profile tells Norton's life story, from early struggles to political influences to his September election victory over controversial incumbent Eric Brewer. It follows Norton through East Cleveland as he explains his plans to tackle his city's challenges. In a ground-breaking comment, he says he's open-minded about a once-taboo subject: the idea that Cleveland should annex East Cleveland.

“If remaining its own city is best for East Cleveland, that’s what we do,” Norton says. “If a merger is best for East Cleveland, that’s what we do.”

(If you'd like to link to my story, you can use this shortcut: tinyurl.com/CMNorton.)

Art McKoy: 'I'm responsible' for Brewer photo scandal

Political activist Art McKoy says he distributed the infamous cross-dressing photos of East Cleveland mayor Eric Brewer this fall.

“I’m responsible for those photographs,” McKoy told me recently.

McKoy spoke to me during my reporting for my new article, "Who Wants to Be Mayor of East Cleveland?," a profile of mayor-elect Gary Norton in the December issue of Cleveland Magazine.

Brewer has tried to blame Norton for the photos getting out -- but McKoy says he, not Norton, was behind their appearance. He proudly told me he made "quite a few copies" of the Brewer photos and "showed everyone I could."

The photos, which appeared on East Cleveland's streets during the September mayoral campaign, caused an international scandal. After WKYC TV-3 broadcasted them on Sept. 23, they went viral on the Internet and became fuel for late-night talk show jokes. Brewer went on Inside Edition in October to confirm the photos were of him.

McKoy was arrested by East Cleveland police last Christmas Eve and is awaiting trial on a charge of permitting drug abuse at his former barbershop in the city. He maintains his innocence and says Brewer attacked his work in East Cleveland, from the barbershop to a street festival and memorial to crime victims.

For more, see "Photo Finished," the sidebar accompanying my Norton profile.

(If you'd like to link to my story, you can use this shortcut: tinyurl.com/CMNorton.)

Brewer: "That is me in those pictures"

"That is me in those pictures," Eric Brewer said on Inside Edition yesterday.

A week after losing his re-election bid, the East Cleveland mayor says the infamous boudoir photos of him in women's lingerie "were taken by a female friend of mine."

The pictures, a subject of rumors in East Cleveland for some time, were broadcast on WKYC TV-3 six days before the mayoral election. Brewer again blamed them for his defeat (a question I considered in this post last week).

"I myself heard someone say that they were voting for the mayor who wore pants, and one lady said that she did not want to vote for a mayor who would compete with her for wearing her panties," Brewer says.

Inside Edition also interviewed mayor-elect Gary Norton. "No one in my campaign had anything to do with the release of those photos," Norton said.

Brewer said his 23-year-old son Chase has "been relentless in teasing me. I'm dad, I'm mom. He hasn't called me Tootsie yet."

"I love my father regardless. And whatever he does...that's his business, I'm going to support him," says Chase.

The Plain Dealer reports that East Cleveland city council member Mildred Brewer (no relation) is calling for Brewer's resignation: "We have been disgraced nationally," she said. "I think a man should be a man, and a woman should be a woman."

Another councilman, Nathaniel Martin, says the mayor should not resign. "If it is him, it is his private life, and it doesn't take away from his abilities to do his job," Martin told the PD.

Update, 11:30 a.m.: What will Brewer do after politics? Mansfield Frazier at coolcleveland.com has some ideas. In a funny yet fairly sympathetic column, he advises:

Likely, ... he will go back to what he knows and start up another newsmagazine that he can use to blast everyone he can think of, [which] might be temporarily satisfying, but is exactly the wrong thing to do. ... Besides writing a book and erecting a website, as one experienced TV producer recently said to me, Brewer needs to develop a cable TV show where he debates with himself.

East Cleveland voters unseat Brewer: Was it the pictures?

Did the racy pictures take him down?

East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer was thrown out of office Tuesday, six days after WKYC TV 3 broadcasted photos purported to be of the mayor in women's lingerie.

Last Wednesday must've been the worst day of Brewer's life: the TV report came out only hours after his father, Harold Pride Brewer, died. At a press conference the next day, Brewer wouldn't confirm or deny the photos were of him. But in his classic combative style, he tried to turn the scandal into a jujitsu counterattack. He accused city cops and his election opponent, city council president Gary Norton, of passing the photos around. Norton has repeatedly denied this; the head of the police union denied it too.

Once WKYC ran the cross-dressing boudoir photos, the other local TV stations got a hold of their own copies and ran 'em too. Now they've gone viral, inspiring a snarky post from celebrity blogger Perez Hilton and jokes on the Late Late Show (which inspired this blog post about transgendered rights).

Tuesday night, Brewer lost, attracting only 36 percent of the vote. He blamed the photo scandal. "The reality is the only thing that got [Norton] over was the media broadcasting the information, pictures that had not been authenticated," Brewer told Fox 8 reporter Kevin Freeman.

Phillip Morris will have none of that. East Cleveland voters "did themselves a tremendous public service," he writes in his Plain Dealer column today. He quotes Norton as saying: "By electing me, voters have said they want a mayor who operates from a different set of values and tactics. They want a consensus builder -- not a destroyer."

I heard that line -- destroyer -- while reporting for my May 2006 profile of Brewer, "Ready to Rumble." The mayor, a longtime muckraking journalist, has a knack for tearing his enemies apart. That's actually one reason voters elected him mayor in 2005: I think they agreed with his judgments of former mayor Saratha Goggins, whom he unseated after writing about her manslaughter conviction, and his archenemy, previous mayor Emmanuel Onunwor, who ended up in federal prison for taking bribes from Nate Gray. Norton gave Brewer less to work with: The mayor's newspaper-style campaign literature tried to make the challenger sound dangerous by reporting on his bad grades in college.

Still, even the Plain Dealer editorial page, which endorsed Norton, had to admit Brewer delivered on some key issues. He added cops to the police force, the crime rate has fallen under his leadership, and he kept his biggest campaign promise: he lowered water rates, thanks to a new deal with Cleveland's water department.

So how would the election have gone without the photos? I don't think anyone polled East Cleveland during the race, so I drove through the city last week, conducting my own Extremely Scientific Lawn Sign Poll.

By my count, Norton's red signs outnumbered Brewer's green, but not by a lot. Brewer seemed to have almost as many supporters as Norton in some neighborhoods just north and south of Euclid Avenue. But Norton's slim sign advantage got stronger when I drove up the hill to the middle-class neighborhood next to Cleveland Heights that includes some Rockefeller homes.

{My guess is, without the photo scandal, Norton would've have won, but the race would've been pretty close.} Update, 10/29: A closer look at the election results proves this wrong.

Brewer got 37% at the polls on Election Day, and only 34% in early voting. The vast majority of early votes in East Cleveland -- 836 of 971 -- were already cast by Sept. 24, the day Brewer held his press conference about the photos.

The results before and after were almost the same: 2 to 1 against the mayor.

Why did the Lawn Sign Poll fail me? Take a look at the anonymous comment below for a possible reason: The foreclosure epidemic may throw it off.

A county executive, or not?: the City Club debate

“A single county executive will provide us with leadership and direction that we so sorely need,” Parma Heights Mayor Martin Zanotti said at today’s City Club forum about the opposing paths to county reform.

Zanotti has a plan: he helped draft a proposed charter for Cuyahoga County, on the November ballot, that would replace the three commissioners with a county executive and council and make several elected officials appointed. “To suggest there are checks and balances in the current system — they’re just not there,” he said. “The county is the only form of government with no separation between the executive and legislature.”

Harriet Applegate, the local AFL-CIO head, is against Zanotti’s idea. “It gives too much power to one person,” she said. The county council would be weak compared to the executive, she argued: “They, at best, could serve as an adviser to this very powerful executive who hires, fires, and decides rates of pay.”

Applegate’s running for a proposed charter commission that would draft a second proposal and put it before voters next year. But she won’t take a position on how to change the government, leaving Zanotti shadowboxing an invisible idea.

“We don’t have a proposal — We have a process,” Applegate said. Her slate promises to write a charter that will create “real, substantive change” and “facilitate economic development,” then put it before the voters in 2010. It’ll base its work on public input, while the proposal Zanotti backs was written by a small group, she argues.

“The worst time to come up with a new form of government is in the heat of a crisis,” Applegate said. “If you feel betrayed by your office holders, you don’t just throw out the entire system and pick up the first alternative that comes along.”

Rob Frost, county Republican chair, argued for action, not process. Cuyahoga County has seen failed efforts to create a charter in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1969, 1970, and 1980, he said, and none resulted in change.

Eric Brewer, who sounded like he didn’t want a charter at all, was the forum’s wild card. He debated in his usual style, throwing out a flurry of facts and figures faster than his opponents could respond. He, like Applegate, spent more time addressing the county corruption investigation than Zanotti or Frost did.

“As mayor of East Cleveland, a city that’s had 18 elected and appointed officials go to jail between 1995 and 2005, I think that we are well aware of what corruption does to a community,” Brewer says. Creating a county executive form of government is no guarantee against corruption, he argued, naming several counties nationwide with county executives and corruption scandals, including Summit County a decade ago.

Supporters of the county executive plan seemed to outnumber the charter commission supporters at the City Club — or, at least, they were louder. Applause broke out twice, once when Frost defended the county executive plan. “What we have here is a plan that calls for greater efficiency and a more accountable and transparent government,” he said. “I would say that the signatures of 80,000 people of this county to put this on the ballot speaks more loudly than the votes of two commissioners to put the alternative proposal on the ballot.”

The other big crowd reaction came when Joe Amschlinger, head of the Cuyahoga County Young Republicans, challenged Applegate’s assertion that the current government has checks and balances.

“The FBI is not listed in anywhere in the county charter,” Amschlinger said, “and far as I can see, they’re the only checks and balances we’ve seen in years!” The crowd laughed and clapped.

“One check and balance you have is three commissioners,” Applegate replied. “I don’t want to defend the status quo necessarily, but three people is a check and balance. I think it’s superior to one, under the two proposals, if you compare that. That’s a check and balance right there. Even some of the independence of the row officers — which, there’s lots of things to say for, and many more to say against — but they’re independent.”

By row officers, Applegate means the other elected officials: recorder, auditor, treasurer, sheriff, clerk of courts, et cetera. Her quote is somewhat confusing, but it gives us some sense of what we'll get if voters reject the charter proposed by Zanotti's group and elect Applegate's slate to a charter commission instead.

If you want a county executive and council, vote for the charter Zanotti’s group has put on the ballot.

If you like having the three commissioners in charge, but want some elected officials to become appointed, you might get that from the county commission process Applegate supports.

County reform debate today at City Club

Pistols at 50 paces: The dueling reformers are taking their battle over how to change county government to a showdown at the City Club today. I'll post a report this afternoon.

Fighting for a county executive and council: Parma Heights Mayor Martin Zanotti, part of the group that wrote the proposed charter on the November ballot, and county Republican chair Rob Frost.

Firing back against it: Harriet Applegate, local AFL-CIO head, and East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer. If we're lucky, Brewer will repeat his accusation that the county executive plan would leave us defenseless against "political thuggery."

I profiled Frost in 2007 ("Pork Roast") and Brewer in 2006 ("Ready To Rumble"). I got to question Applegate on WCPN last week -- and discovered that although she's running for charter commission, she is not taking a position on what county government should look like.

Dan Moulthrop of WCPN will referee the fight. No kidney punches, no rabbit punches...