Will unlimited donations flood county exec race?

How much money should a single wealthy person be allowed to give candidates for Cuyahoga County executive?

$1,000? $5,000? $12,000? $25,000?

How about $100,000? $300,000? Or $400,000?

Guess what? Due to a huge gap in the law, there’s no limit to what one person can donate to a candidate for county office.

This hole is big enough to buy a government through. It should’ve been plugged when we got a new county government. But proposals to fix it have gone nowhere.

Now, there’s finally some hope for change. Cuyahoga County’s charter review commission is considering two proposals to cut off the unlimited flow of money starting in 2014. It’s set to debate both ideas at its meeting Saturday morning, the 15th.*

It’s time for someone to act. Candidates are already running to succeed Ed FitzGerald next year – and right now, millionaires are free to invest five-figure or six-figure donations in them, in hopes of getting VIP access once they’re in office.

Races for federal, state, and Cleveland offices have sensible limits on one person’s ability to influence a candidate with donations. You can only give a candidate for president or Congress $2,600 a year. In Cleveland’s mayor and city council races, it’s $1,000. Ohio has much higher limits on donations to candidates for state office -- $12,300 this year – but that’s better than nothing.

The framers of the new county charter should have established limits on donations in 2009. But they didn’t. They unwisely punted the decision to the very elected leaders who stand to benefit from big donations.

During the transition to the new government, an advisory group suggested limits of $750 per election cycle to county council candidates and $1,000 to candidates for executive and prosecutor.

But the new county council failed to act. It debated whether to adopt the statewide limits of $12,300 as its own, or lower limits, but did neither.

Now, the charter review commission -- which has until July 1 to propose amendments to the county charter -- is considering two campaign finance reform ideas.

One proposed amendment would explicitly give the county council the power or duty to enact campaign finance laws, including limits on donations. That would prod the council to act.

The other comes from charter commission member William Tarter. He proposes amending the county charter to establish the same limit per donor in county races as in state races, $12,300.

Tarter says limits on huge contributions help empower smaller donors. “This is an opportunity for people to feel their contribution has a greater impact on the candidates,” he says.

Bruce Akers, chairman of the charter review commission, says the panel is “very divided” on the subject of campaign finance. Some members support Tarter’s idea. Others support new charter language that would nudge the council to act. One member is opposed to taking any action about campaign finance at all.

Citizens who want to limit big money’s influence on our local politics ought to get involved in this debate right away. But they face a dilemma. Should they back Tarter’s more specific proposal to link county donor limits to the state’s high limits? Or back an amendment that would put the issue back before the county council -- which might enact lower limits, but might enact none at all?

Tarter’s proposal would, at least, stop the biggest checks from flowing. And the last race for county executive proves it’s time to make a change.

In 2010, candidate Matt Dolan got contributions of $400,000 from his uncle, Charles Dolan of Cablevision, and $300,000 from his father, Indians owner Larry Dolan. The next six-figure donations may not be a family affair.

Big checks flowed to the old county government too. Before the late developer Dick Jacobs sold the Ameritrust complex to Cuyahoga County in 2005, he had a five-figure donor relationship with commissioners Jimmy Dimora and Peter Lawson Jones. Jacobs seeded their first campaigns for commission seats, giving Dimora $36,000 in 1998 and Jones in 2002.

Maybe Jacobs’ donations had nothing to do with the county’s unwise purchase of the Ameritrust complex, which led to an $18 million loss for taxpayers. But it’s a spectacular example of why no single donor should dominate an elected leader’s campaign fund -- and why campaign finance limits are the Cuyahoga County reform effort's biggest unfinished business.

*Update, 6/10: I originally wrote that the charter commission would discuss campaign finance "this Saturday," meaning the 8th. The commission ended up not tackling it on the 8th.  It'll take up the question on the 15th.

Renovations for new government come in at $1.3 million

Used furniture helped keep down the $300,000 cost of renovated offices for the Cuyahoga County executive and council, while high costs for electrical installations helped drive up the cost of the new council chambers to almost $1 million.

This winter, a tipster suggested I look at the cost of county executive Ed FitzGerald’s new office, to see if he was being frugal in the face of the county's budget shortage. It took about two months to get a full accounting of the renovations (some of which were ongoing) from FitzGerald’s staff, but they seem proud of the end result.

The county commissioners budgeted about $200,000 for fourth floor renovations before they left office, FitzGerald spokesman John Kohlstrand told me. FitzGerald’s administration added about $89,000 in spending in January, including $16,000 for carpeting to cover 60-year-old floor tile and $18,000 to improve a new meeting room that will be used for press conferences and some council committee hearings.

“We have attempted to be very modest in our overall approach to creating our office space on the 4th Floor,” wrote Kohlstrand in an e-mail. “The layout does not really lend itself to the requirements identified for the new government, but we have tried to make the most of it on a shoestring budget.”

Nearly all the new offices were furnished with all used furniture, including FitzGerald’s office, according to Kohlstrand. (FitzGerald is reportedly using Jim Rokakis’ old desk.) “At this point, the only new furniture expense was $5,572 to purchase 63 portable chairs for the multipurpose room," Kohlstrand wrote. The administration also spent about $50,000 for office equipment and fixtures.

To judge the renovations’ cost, I ran the expenses past Martin Zanotti, one of the main leaders of the movement to create the new government. Zanotti has overseen construction budgets as the former mayor of Parma Heights and CEO of Republic Alternative Technologies.

“With their critical eye on the juvenile justice center, they held themselves to the same threshold,” Zanotti says of FitzGerald and his staff. “It’s a very proper tone to set,” Zanotti says.

Shrewd, too: Re-using old county furniture highlights the contrast between FitzGerald and the juvenile court judges’ infamous $23,000 conference table.

The charter created an 11-member council but left the old government and the transition team with the task of figuring out where the council would meet. Last summer, the transition group chose to renovate the old Justice Center auditorium. The less expensive alternative, renovating the commissioners’ old chambers, would have created only half as many seats for the public. And it might not have lasted as long, since the county administration building may be torn down in the future, if the new Medical Mart and convention center project succeeds and needs to expand. The Justice Center isn’t going anywhere.

Preliminary estimates priced the cost of the new chamber at $888,000. The commissioners budgeted $680,000 in August. Instead, the final cost of the council chambers came in at $980,000, including $272,000 for electrical work.

The electrical expense “struck me as being a high price, though God knows what they ran into,” Zanotti says. “Nothing else seemed grossly out of line to me. It was a reasonable amount.”

Still, to the layman, nearly a million dollars may sound like a lot of money to spend on a single room. It makes somewhat more sense if you saw the auditorium before and after. When I visited last year for a sheriff’s auction, it looked looked exactly like what it was: the end-of-the-line room where a hard-luck county’s tax-foreclosed properties were sold for cheap. It was ugly and cramped, with low ceilings and an awkward layout facing a more awkward stage. Now it’s bright, spacious, equipped with modern communications, a place for a new start, not a space people want to flee. I don’t think the council had anything to do with outfitting the council chamber; it was ready for them when they were sworn in Jan. 3.

The cost of both renovations was paid out of a $7 million transition fund the commissioners authorized. About half of the fund went to the cost of holding the Sept. and Nov. 2010 elections to choose the executive and council. Kohlstrand says about $1.37 million is left for other priorities, including the potential cost of ethics training for county employees.

Revised thinking on boards of revision

The county council is bracing itself for its first major disagreement with Ed FitzGerald -- and trying to prevent an all-out war with the Plain Dealer. It’s poised to reappoint two people who joined the boards of revision late last year – after the exposés that called the integrity of local property valuations into question.

The county executive and the daily paper insist that no one on the boards of revision should be reappointed. They want a “clean sweep,” they say. But the council will choose most of the new board members -- and it sees a clear distinction between the longtime board members who served during the scandal years and people named to the board to cope with the scandals’ fallout.

“Someone who came on board after all the problems, and someone who stepped up to help the county out as those taxpayers’ cases were backing up … I think they’re in a different category,” says Jack Schron (pictured), a Republican councilman. He and council president C. Ellen Connally are meeting with the Plain Dealer editorial board today to try to get the paper to give the recent appointees a chance.

Two of council’s eight leading candidates for the boards of revision are post-scandal appointees who joined the boards in August 2010 or later, Schron tells me. (He wouldn’t name them because they haven’t passed pre-employment checks yet, but he said they weren’t Frank Russo appointees.)

“Some of these people, they were asked to take on a yeoman’s task of coming forward and helping our the county in a backlog situation and help work through it,” Schron says. “It’s hard for me to find fault with people who stepped up and made a civic commitment.”

Schron says council is unlikely to reappoint any longtime board of revision incumbents.

“Whether or not they did anything improper, they were in that era where the public is looking for a fresh start,” he says. “Unfortunately, some of them might get caught up in that. … It doesn’t mean they couldn’t be a candidate, but it’s going to be a lot harder to get past all the concerns people have.” That’s not just his opinion: “I do believe that’s the general consensus [on council].”

Four of the 28 candidates council recently interviewed are longtime incumbent board members. That means they arguably share responsibility for the shoddy or questionable work the Plain Dealer exposed: half-days of work, bad record-keeping, board members lowering the tax values of each others’ properties. One has dropped out since.

Seven other candidates joined the boards between August and November 2010, after the exposés. They’re the candidates that the council and the executive disagree over. County chief of staff Matt Carroll confirms that FitzGerald wants even the post-scandal hires cleared off the boards.

“Even those people were not selected in an open way,” Carroll told me Friday. “It was a closed process. People were not given the opportunity to apply. Some people were selected, possibly [people] of quality, but the fact that it was not an open process, that is a reason they could not be reappointed. That is a continuing taint to the process. That’s the difference. [There’s] a different level of quality and culpability, but that [they were] not part of an open process continues to concern.”

This seems pretty weak to me. Someone who joined the boards in the fall isn’t the least bit “culpable” for bad practices exposed earlier. And anyone who gets reappointed will have answered an open posting this time and made it through a four-step screening process.

That’s unlikely to satisfy the Plain Dealer. Like an overzealous watchdog that tries to bite everyone who startles it, it’s made the county council its favorite new chew toy. (It bit the council six times in five days last week: Monday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday, Friday.)

That’s why Schron and Connally are trying to get the editorial board to reconsider its opposition to the recent appointees. “Sorry, draining the swamp halfway cannot be an option,” an editorial snarled unpersuasively last week.

If the PD starts howling again about the board of revision, casting council as the old guard, politics as usual, etc. etc., it can probably do a lot of further damage to the council’s reputation. Or it could change its mind and draw a basic distinction: Between those who share responsibility for the board of revision’s past failures and those who don’t.

Update, 1/21: Today's editorial signals a welcome truce, or at least some détente -- ruining my plans to create a drinking game out of the PD's county council coverage. (If the paper uses the phrase "secret meeting," slam your drink!)

Council chooses Connally as president, tackles board of revisions mess

A really tiny girl belted out the national anthem with a huge, blistering voice. An honor guard marched the U.S. and Ohio flags to their posts. Rev. Marvin McMickle prayed the new council would “resist cliques, schisms, and partisan divides.” And one by one, the 11 new Cuyahoga County council members took their oaths of office with something close to 11 different Bibles, swearers-in, and pronunciations of “Cuyahoga.”

Then they got to work, choosing C. Ellen Connally as president and setting up interviews to fill the troubled boards of revisions.

A month ago, Connally’s bid for the council presidency looked like it was in trouble. The Plain Dealer, supporters of rival Chuck Germana, and a good number of regular citizens were denouncing her for lining up support in a private meeting. But the coalition behind Connally held firm tonight. All seven Democrats other than Germana voted for her.

Despite McMickle’s prayer, the vote for vice-president split exactly along party lines. Sunny Simon got all eight Democrats’ votes, while the Republicans voted as a bloc for Jack Schron. It’s a reminder that, though the Plain Dealer cast the leadership contest as a matter of secrecy versus openness, it was really more about Democrats versus Republicans.

“In this past month and a half,” Connally said, “we’ve come to work together and respect each other's views. ... I recognize the missteps along the way, but I hope in this new year and this new government, we can put all that behind us and move forward.”

The council also started to tackle the fallout from the old government’s scandals. It voted to interview candidates for the troubled boards of revisions starting tomorrow morning. “The board of revisions is one of the most severe problems facing Cuyahoga County,” said Dale Miller. They’re moving fast, Miller explained, because county executive Ed FitzGerald has said he’ll fire any board of revision members who don’t resign, so that the new government can choose its own appointees. The council will choose two members of each revision board, FitzGerald one.

FitzGerald has said he won’t appoint anyone who served on the boards in the past and has asked the council not to either. But council has agreed to interview past board members who’ve reapplied and passed a test and a screening by the county human resources department.

The council also approved the rules it’ll follow. It’ll allow for public comment at the beginning and end of every meeting. It’ll set up ten committees to work on legislation, including one on economic development and one on ethics and oversight. Non-voting members of the public can be added to subcommittees. The idea, Miller said, was to provide for lots of transparency and public input.

When I asked Miller about the rules at a recess, he said he’d e-mail them to me. He sent them about an hour after the meeting ended. (You can read them here.) They include a public procedure for choosing the next council president and vice-president. Yeah, I’d say the council is trying to move beyond the “secret meeting” flap.

To read my profile of Ellen Connally from the November issue of Cleveland Magazine, 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.

County council majority starts to take shape

The county executive race is heading into November, but tonight we can already start to see the county council majority take shape.

Four longtime public officials, all Democrats, are off to big leads. State Sen. Dale Miller and Parma council president Chuck Germana seem to have their districts out west locked up, based on the vote-by-mail results. So do former Cleveland judge C. Ellen Connally and South Euclid councilwoman Sunny Simon out east. (Here's a map of the districts.)

They'll all be huge favorites in the general election and likely among the most politically experienced members of the new council. My bet is one of the four will be the council president.

A fifth political veteran may join them. Former state Sen. Dan Brady leads Chris Ronayne, 49% to 40%, in early results. If Brady holds that lead and beats the University Circle president, it'll be a huge victory for old-time populism and name recognition (Brady's been on the ballot on Cleveland's West Side many times) over youth, New-Democrat charm and campaign cash.

On Cleveland's East Side, Yvonne Conwell, wife of Cleveland councilman Kevin Conwell, and Pernel Jones, Jr., who's run twice for the city council, hold leads. The race in District 10 (Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland, Bratenahl, Collinwood) is neck-and-neck between newcomers Sharon Cole and Julian Rogers.

In all four of those districts, the Democratic winner tonight will probably win the November election too. (Way more Democrats than Republicans voted in the primaries there.)

That leaves three districts in the outer-ring suburbs where the two parties look pretty evenly matched in November -- three chances for Republicans to put an end to one-party government.

Me on WCPN tomorrow: county races, latest Russo scandal, and more

I'll be a guest tomorrow morning on WCPN's Reporter's Roundtable.

We'll be talking about Tuesday's county primary, especially the county council elections; Frank Russo appointing his housemate's sister to oversee property assessment appeals; the bilingual ballots deal and a bunch of other stuff.

I'll be on with host M.L. Schultze, Plain Dealer metro editor Chris Quinn, and Jay Miller of Crain’s Cleveland Business. The show lasts from 9:06 a.m. to 10 a.m. on 90.3 FM and wcpn.org. Call in!

Ronayne vs. Brady race tops county council races so far

Chris Ronayne isn't running for county executive -- he's taking a shot at joining the county council instead. The former City Hall chief of staff has decided to run for the part-time council, as I suggested he would a couple of weeks ago, so he can remain president of University Circle, Inc.

But Ronayne will hardly have an easy path to the new council. He's running against Dan Brady, the former state senator, in the most dramatic matchup so far in the 11 new county council districts.

It'll be a generational battle of sorts: the new guy with new ideas versus the old-school veteran. You could call both men "progressives," but with two different meanings of the word: Ronayne, a favorite of the young, professional, believe-in-Cleveland crowd, and Brady, a classic pro-labor liberal.

Brady moved up from Cleveland city council to the state house to the state senate in the 1990s, then aimed at Mike White in 2001, running for mayor when most people thought the embattled White would run for a fourth term. I remember the Free Times running a cover story on him and his candidacy, a hopeful profile by Roldo Bartimole. Once White left and the mayoral race got crowded, Brady tried to stand out with a left-of-everyone pitch that he'd lead a "labor government" at City Hall. The pitch fizzled: he finished with 2 percent of the vote.

Still, Brady was easily re-elected to his senate seat in 2002. His biggest strengths are his experience and knowledge of the district he's running in (the light green one on this map): it's Cleveland's middle-west side, neighborhoods he represented in the senate. (His wife, Dona Brady, represents part of the area on city council.)

Brady is about to launch a campaign website: I'll link to it once I get the address. He spoke with me for my October profile of Jimmy Dimora: click here to read it.

Nelson Cintron, the controversial former city councilman, also plans to run in the same district. He finished fourth in his attempt to rejoin council last year, so it's hard to imagine him beating Ronayne or Brady. But that makes three interesting personalities in one race.

The other races look less exciting so far. Well-known names include state Sen. Dale Miller, who's running for the Lakewood/Brook Park/West Park district, and Parma's former mayor, Gerald Boldt, and city council president, Chuck Germana, running in district 4.

To me, the most interesting candidate in the other races is C. Ellen Connally, the former Cleveland Municipal Court judge. (She's running in a district that sweeps from Shaker Heights and Cleveland's far-southeast wards to Orange and Bedford.) She wrote a feisty op-ed piece in August calling George Forbes an "out-of-touch, salty-mouthed curmudgeon" who overplays the race card (and that was before the Call & Post's Jemima-gate!). It's one of several entertaining missives Connally has sent to the Plain Dealer opinions page. (See my August blog post, full of links to her writing.) Weird trivia about Connally: She figures prominently (through no fault of her own) in a bizarre left-wing conspiracy theory about the 2004 election in Ohio.

Backgrounding all the county council candidates is too big a task for my little blog, but the Plain Dealer's county politics reporters are on the case: Henry Gomez surveys the field in this post at the Cuyahoga County Insider blog. Ohio Daily Blog has also been reporting on some new candidacies. To see the board of elections' list of early petition-pullers, click here. (Here's the district map again.) But it's a long way to the June filing deadline -- lots more people will probably take a shot.

Ronayne: county executive or council?

Right after Issue 6 passed, buzz gathered around Chris Ronayne as a potential county executive candidate. The gregarious, energetic president of University Circle, Inc. got behind county reform in a big way this fall, pitching Issue 6 on the debate circuit. That fit his reputation for innovative ideas, dating back to his time in the Campbell Administration. He told reporters in November he was exploring a run for the county's new top job.

Then, last week, Ronayne told Henry Gomez he's still looking at the county executive race, but he's also considering a run for county council. That seemed significant, so I put in my own call.

"I'd like to be involved," Ronayne told me. He's assessing "which level, if any, I should go at."

Running for the 11-member council would be a less daunting leap for Ronayne. He's never run for office before, so it's unknown how voters would react to him -- or how he'd react to the pressures of a high-stakes county-wide campaign. He lives in Cleveland's Edgewater neighborhood, and campaigning in the council district there (the light green one on this map) might be a more manageable challenge. (Former state Sen. Dan Brady and former city councilman Nelson Cintron may also run in that district, Gomez reports today.)

Also, right now, much of Ronayne's appeal is in his potential. Four years at University Circle have given him executive experience. But Ronayne might be able to add to his list of accomplishments by remaining UCI's president while serving on the part-time council.

"I need to evaluate what we're doing out at UCI," Ronayne tells me. "If we have an agenda that's robust [over the next] three or four years, [joining the council is] another option to stay substantially involved."

The county executive job still appeals to Ronayne's instincts as a former city and county planner. "We have the opportunity to turn Cuyahoga County around," he says. "This job is an organizational turnaround, but it’s also a place turnaround. What interests me is turning around places."

But the council's tasks look good to him too. By overseeing budget and personnel, it can push for greater efficiency and more economic development, he says.

"Either [job] is important," Ronayne says. "You can’t have the new county system without a good county council."

He says he, like other possible candidates, will likely make his decision by March.

It looks like Ronayne will run for something. (Check out his new Facebook page, where you can "become a fan" of his.) I won't write off the possibility that he'll run for executive if the Democratic primary field looks weak or unexciting by March. But it sounds like he's tempering his ambitions a notch and aiming for the county council race.