Why Lillian Greene’s lawsuit to stop reform will fail

Lillian Greene’s suing to stop Issue 6. The county recorder who joined the reform discussions just to try to wreck them is trying again. Not because she’s selfish, she insists: “I’m not bringing this to keep my job,” she says. “There’s a principle there regarding the law.”

Now we get to buzz and wring our hands: Will we really get a new county government in 2011? Or will Greene’s suit – based on high principle, remember! – keep her and other lame ducks in office for two more years, against the voters’ will?

Don’t worry. Her lawsuit is dead on arrival.

The last graf of today’s cleveland.com story tells why. Her lawyer says an appeals court case out of Norton, in Summit County, strengthens her case. He’s wrong.

Voters in Norton chose a weird way to cut the size of their city council. They passed a charter amendment that got rid of two at-large councilmen — but kept the one who’d gotten the most votes in the previous election. The appeals court said that was unconstitutional because it changed the old election's rules two years afterward.

But the court disagreed with the idea that public officials have a “vested right to office.” In other words, voters can decide a politician’s job is unnecessary and get rid of it mid-term. So bye-bye, Lillian!

Retired reporter still gets tips: Wagner's digging at the county building

Joe Wagner retired from the Plain Dealer late last year, but he still gets reporting tips. Sources who didn’t know he'd left the paper called him recently to tell him they’d heard county auditor Frank Russo and recorder Lillian Greene might extend civil service protection to some of their employees.

So Wagner, now a spokesman for county executive candidate Ken Lanci, took the news to his new boss. Lanci mentioned it in his Jan. 13 campaign announcement (see video here).

“I’m troubled by comments that there are efforts to reclassify many county employees as civil service workers,” Lanci said. “That’s not reform, that’s political patronage again. And it’s not what we voted for.” Lanci said he’d sent the county a public records request to find out if the tips were true. “I urge the transition team to make sure no actions are taken that limit our opportunities to remake government in this new era,” he said.

Usually, creating a civil service is meant to prevent patronage. Giving government employees job security protects them from depending on their boss’s re-election. But reclassifying a patronage-laden workforce as civil service just before leaving office would have the opposite effect -- it’d make it hard for the new county executive to cut spending and fire the least-qualified employees. Wagner, author of the Plain Dealer’s 2008 “Payroll and Politics” exposés of the auditor’s and recorder’s offices, was naturally interested in the warnings. So was Lanci.

“It happened by happenstance,” Wagner says. “My sources over at the county who still thought I was there, they called me on my cell phone: ‘Did you hear that?’ ‘Well, I hadn’t, but I guess I just did!’ ”

Will any county officials try this move before the new government takes over? Or is it a false alarm? Calls I placed to the recorder’s and auditor’s offices yesterday were not returned.

{Update, 7 p.m.: Russo staffer Destin Ramsey confirms that Russo considered giving all his employees civil-service protection, but decided against it. See this new post.}

Lanci and Wagner say they’re starting to receive documents from some county agencies, but they’re still reviewing them; other county offices haven’t responded yet. “The Plain Dealer’s made a big records request over there too, on the same subject,” Wagner says. So watch for more news on this soon.

PD's inside story on dueling reforms: Who looks good, who looks bad

Dan Moulthrop of WCPN posted this on Facebook today: "Just finished reading Amanda Garrett's Sunday piece on the politics behind the dueling county reform measures. I've gotta say, if what she writes is true, some of our local leaders look pretty unimpressive. Others look pretty great. Your thoughts?"

I agree. That's one reason Garrett's story is a must-read: her intimate narrative of the politics behind the two ballot measures reveals a lot about how Cleveland's politicians think and act.

Lillian Greene, the county recorder, looks the worst. She comes off as an obstructionist who only joined Martin Zanotti's reform meetings to disrupt them. She walked out of one meeting after giving an angry speech.

Greene's office is the most obvious one to eliminate if you're trying to make county government more efficient -- do we really need to elect someone just to record deeds? But even though the Issue 6 group painstakingly gerrymandered the county council map to create four black-majority districts, Greene thinks she owes it to black voters to hang onto her job:

"Why would the black community go backward when never before in the more than 200-year history of the county have we had two countywide elected officials!" Greene recounted in an e-mail to The Plain Dealer, referring to herself and Peter Lawson Jones. ...

Greene said she told the reform group a story about an older black woman who had recently approached her. The woman asked Greene who she was and when Greene told her, the woman told Greene how proud she was of her being in office.

"That was the final piece that solidified my position on this 'reform,' " Greene said.

State Sen. Nina Turner looks put-upon and courageous in the story. The 2nd graf describes the reaction when Turner signed on to the Issue 6 effort to create a county executive and council:

Several operatives for Cleveland's most powerful black Democrats -- many of whom Turner had looked up to -- telephoned the young black Democrat with this dire warning: They would ruin her if she didn't reconsider, Turner said.

How dare she break ranks with black leaders, they admonished, according to Turner.

Harriet Applegate, the local AFL-CIO head, looks indecisive and defensive of the status quo -- or undercut by her union's rank and file. She surprises Zanotti by e-mailing him a draft of a (never-issued) press release that tenatively praises the Issue 6 group's efforts:

The county reform proposal being released today represents good progress in the hammering out of a consensus document. ... The result is a proposal that addresses the concerns raised by critics over the years as well as the current need for better facilitation of economic development.

But five days later, Applegate's union votes against the reform plan. Here's her explanation:

Applegate said recently that it took some distance from the group to realize that the reform plan was wrong. "We met people so involved, so committed, so passionate about their project that it was hard to say no to them," she said.

Zanotti claims she told him something different:

Applegate later called to explain, Zanotti said. "She basically said the unions were concerned about protecting their friends -- Jimmy [Commissioner Dimora] and Frank [Auditor Russo] -- and the other elected officials."

That's a third-hand account -- union members to Applegate to Zanotti to Garrett -- filtered through Zanotti's bias. But it's still damning, if true.

Zanotti is clearly a key source for Garrett's story. The online version says the reporter spoke to two dozen people, but Zanotti, the public face of the Issue 6 effort, emerges as the main character of the narrative. (He also seems to be Garrett's likely source for the Applegate e-mail.)

So Issue 6 opponents will probably dismiss Garrett's story as biased. They think a county executive and council are a bad idea, so surely they're glad that the effort led to "political turmoil"! But they'll probably like a few parts of the story, including the way it describes county prosecutor Bill Mason:

The Parma native is an insider's insider in the county Democratic Party. Why would he want to change a government he helped foster?

Mason has a simple answer -- to save a dying region. Doubters suspect otherwise.

As the FBI snoops through the homes and offices of Cuyahoga County Democrats looking for corruption, the doubters say Mason may want to shed his party insider image and rebrand himself a reformer who crosses party lines.

Issue 6's opponents will likely scoff at Zanotti's failed attempts to get political organizer Arnold Pinkney to round up black support for the proposal:

Zanotti wanted Pinkney to help break through the fear. As Zanotti tells it, he told Pinkney that reform must move forward but that it couldn't if the change was seen as racially divisive. ... He asked Pinkney to act as a sounding board for the black community and as a catalyst to bring its leadership to the table.

Finally, opponents will note that the story includes the names of three wealthy Republican political donors -- Umberto Fedeli, Mal Mixon, and Ed Crawford -- involved in the Issue 6 charter group. This is only the second PD story to mention Fedeli and Mixon's involvement. Opponents love to call Issue 6 the "Zanotti-Mason-Republican effort," to try to discredit it with Democratic voters.

Issue 6 opponents won't like one part of the story at all: the line where Garrett falls back on a biased bad habit the Plain Dealer has picked up. The paper, echoing Issue 6 supporters, keeps saying the charter commission proposed in Issue 5 would only "study" reform:

Instead of putting forward a specific plan, the commissioners asked voters to create a 15-member charter review commission that would study reform -- again.

I've written about this before. Peter Lawson Jones is right, and the Issue 6 supporters wrong: the Ohio Constitution would require the charter commission to write a charter and put it on the ballot next year.

The real question is, what would the charter commission propose -- major changes to county government or minor fixes? Applegate and the slate of charter commission candidates she heads won't say. You can bet they won't create a county executive, though.

At the City Club debate last month, the ever-shifting Applegate sounded like she might be willing to eliminate some of the many elected offices in county government (like coroner, recorder, engineer, etc.). But this spring, Garrett's story says, Applegate sent a memo to AFL-CIO supporters complaining about Mason getting involved in reform:

The memo included a half-dozen points, including Mason involving Republicans in reform and the possible elimination of "elected offices in a county which is the largest and most solidly Democratic Party in Ohio."

Most county reform ideas address three questions: Should we have an executive and council, or keep the three commissioners? Should some elected offices become appointed? And should some of those offices be merged?

Applegate's April memo makes it sound like she's against all three of those possible changes. So does she really want a charter commission to change anything?

O'Malley wasted $1m a year

Pat O'Malley infamously used the Cuyahoga County recorder's office as a patronage machine. Now the state auditor has figured out how much taxpayer money he wasted doing that: $1 million a year.

OK, the words "waste" and "patronage" do not appear in auditor Mary Taylor's press release today. But read her report along with the "Recorded Deeds" section of my October profile of O'Malley, or the Plain Dealer's April exposé of his employees' political connections, and that's the obvious conclusion.

The report says O'Malley personally chose who to hire, what job to give them, and what to pay them. That made his employees totally dependent on him and very likely loyal.

He hired too many people and paid them too much. He larded the staff with more than eight people who simply went to meetings to talk about what the recorder does -- serious overkill for an office that records deeds, but it surely helped his name recognition at election time. In all, $1 million of his $7 million annual budget was unnecessary spending.

Total control made it easy to reward political allies with jobs and get employees to campaign for him. It also made it easy to do what Cathy Luks, former North Royalton mayor and recent Republican candidate for recorder, says he did: Attempt to bribe her with one of those public outreach jobs if she quit running against him.

Taylor's press release and report put it more politely. Highlights:

-Cuyahoga County recorder's employees have a light workload. They process 2,522 documents per employee per year, compared to 3,912 and 4,688 in Franklin and Hamilton counties.

-They're overpaid. Top aides make 48 percent more than their peers in similar counties. The average employee makes more than $43,400, compared to $36,300 among their peers.

-The office should get rid of most or all of its 8.4 public outreach employees, who attend "community libraries, meetings and other events to increase awareness of services provided by the Recorder's Office." Other large Ohio counties have either 2 outreach employees or none. Cutting seven would save $365,000.

-The recorder should cut 17 other employees, saving $700,000.

-The office has no formal hiring process, evaulating process, or job descriptions. "The previous Recorder determined the need for a position, the person selected for the position, and the salary provided to that employee. ... [The office] determines initial salaries without regard to skills required and/or minimum qualifications at the time of hire."

The audit did praise the recorder's office for performing all its required duties and using new technology to make it easier for citizens to file deeds. The new recorder, Lillian Greene, says she's already started reducing the staff. She also claims the comparisons with other counties aren't fair because the others outsource some work.

My favorite tidbits from the Plain Dealer's story this morning:

-"O'Malley could not be reached Monday for comment." Yeah, because he's in federal prison, serving a 15-month sentence for downloading obscenity.

-Yet another argument for reforming county government: "Cuyahoga's elected officials, such as the recorder, have the authority to outspend their budgets and occasionally do so."