Civic Commons holds an East Cleveland merger forum -- and it doesn't go well

Photos by Anthony Price

There are some problems that “thought leaders,” “facilitators,” and whiteboards filled with talking points can’t fix.

That became obvious really fast last night at a Civic Commons forum in East Cleveland about the idea of the town merging with Cleveland.

About 60 people came to the event at the East Cleveland Public Library, including East Clevelanders, Clevelanders, and people from suburbs from Euclid to Pepper Pike. Despite the serious financial problems that beset the town of 17,000, no one spoke in favor of a merger, and more than a dozen East Cleveland residents spoke out against it.

Civic Commons moderator Andrew Samtoy asked people to list negatives about a merger, and residents responded with such force that Samtoy never dared to ask for positives.

East Clevelanders said they’d lose their own mayor and council, City Hall and police, autonomy, political power, home demolition program, and direct grants from the federal government. Many questioned whether Cleveland’s poor neighborhoods are any better off than East Cleveland.

“I see Cleveland has a lot of big developments,” said M. LaVora Perry of the East Cleveland Narrator, but “those don’t trickle back to the core community. Certain neighborhoods seem to be thriving,” she added, but in others, “I don’t see anything being done.”

Several East Clevelanders said, to applause, that the Nov. 2012 Cleveland police chase and fatal shooting, which ended in East Cleveland, made them not want to join Cleveland. The East Cleveland police, one man said, have a good relationship with the community and are more likely to defuse a crisis without force.

Many in the room asked why the forum was held at all. Almost all of the merger talk of the last several months is coming from Cleveland leaders and commentators. Public opinion among East Clevelanders is strongly against a merger. So the Civic Commons’ attempt to get them to talk about merging backfired, setting off fears of a condescending and hostile takeover.

“They’re trying to build a narrative to convince East Cleveland residents to support the idea,” said Michael Smedley, chief of staff for East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton. “They want to have a series of community forums to get you beyond your fears.”

More likely, the Civic Commons simply had no idea what it was getting into.

The event was a lesson in how not to introduce oneself to a community. The Civic Commons had no East Clevelanders scheduled to speak when it announced its event. It held the forum on the same night as East Cleveland school board meeting and city council committee meetings. It promoted the event heavily on Twitter, Facebook and public radio, but those outlets don’t reach a lot of East Clevelanders, who still promote civic events with flyers and announcements at other town meetings. Despite a weeklong social-media barrage, many East Clevelanders expressed surprise that the forum was so lightly promoted. By the event’s end, Civic Commons director Mike Shafarenko was promising they’d do better next time.

Exchanges between East Clevelanders and Cleveland city councilman Zack Reed got testy. Reed introduced himself with a joke — “I’m a little late, because [when] we do take over, we’re going to get rid of those red light cameras” — that angered many in the takeover-wary crowd. Reed sharply challenged East Cleveland councilman Nathaniel Martin’s claim that East Cleveland’s mayor is more accessible than Cleveland’s.

The event became a lesson in East Cleveland’s distrust of outsiders. Some residents talked angrily about the flight of businesses and capital from their city, including the Cleveland Clinic’s 2011 closing of Huron Hospital. Some cast the merger idea as a land grab by University Circle interests.

Finally, Cleveland councilman Mike Polensek salved the tensions with a mix of diplomacy and expressions of solidarity. “We came here as guests,” he said. “We’re not trying to take over.”

Most Cleveland city councilpeople are not in favor of annexing East Cleveland, Polensek said. “We’re here as neighbors, to assist,” he said. Cleveland has already taken over East Cleveland’s water department, he said, and he raised the possibility of more shared services and mutual aid agreements.

But Polensek warned three times, in a polite and neighborly way, that East Cleveland needs to deal with its serious fiscal problems if it wants to stay independent.

“The elite cannot push any agenda if your city is solvent,” he said. “If you get your act together, and have a balanced budget, you can make the city what you want it to be.”

Hanging over the forum, but never quite spoken, was the awful math of abandonment. East Cleveland is about to borrow almost $7 million to pay off its many debts and deficits. It’ll borrow against future local government funding from the state, which likely means even more layoffs and service cuts to come. The city’s tax base has shrunk dramatically in the last few years, shrinking its budget from $17 million in 2010 to about $11.5 million this year.

The price of independence is rising. Will a time come when even proud and independent East Clevelanders are no longer willing to pay it?

As the meeting wound down and the crowd thinned, Smedley, the mayor’s chief of staff, who had earlier declared, “there is no benefit at all to a merger,” acknowledged that it could be the fallback plan if the city can’t claw its way out of fiscal crisis.

First, Smedley said, East Cleveland needs to see if neighbors such as Cleveland and Cleveland Heights can help “give us a real shot at saving this community.”

“What we’re trying to do is to position ourselves to give us the best shot at it, and if we fail, we know that we tried our best,” Smedley said.

“And then, if merger is where we need to be at that point, I guarantee you, the government… as well as the residents, who’ve been pouring their hearts and souls into trying to save this community, will be ready to sit at the table.”

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.

Kevin Kelley talks vacant housing, council discipline, East Cleveland merger

My Q-and-A with Kevin Kelley, Cleveland’s new city council president, is out now in the March issue of Cleveland Magazine.

Kelley’s election may lead to a more assertive city council than we’ve seen in eight years. His predecessor, Martin Sweeney, valued cooperation with Mayor Frank Jackson and let the mayor's office set civic priorities. Kelley’s agenda for 2014 includes initiatives on vacant housing and gun violence, both still in the study stage.

The 45-year-old councilman from Old Brooklyn talked with me about his insistence on better discipline and decorum in council, his plans to step up home demolitions, and his thoughts on whether Cleveland should annex East Cleveland. Here’s an extended version of his answers. You can read his comments about why he supports extending Cuyahoga County’s alcohol and cigarette tax for stadium repairs in this blog post.


CM: What are your plans for vacant housing?

KK: The council has commissioned a study to look at the effect of demolition and how it affects property values. We need to aggressively attack these houses. Some homes are candidates for restoration, but what’s really causing the devaluing of real estate is the 5,000 we can all agree need to come down. The biggest challenge is not identifying the houses to come down, but identifying the money.

CM: Councilman Jeff Johnson will often make the case: I don’t just want demolition, I represent a historic neighborhood, I want some of these properties preserved, and I want to find money for that too.

KK: Certainly there are some [houses] that are candidates for restoration. But the biggest part of the problem is those that must come down. Even councilman Johnson or those who are active in the historic preservation community would agree that there are homes that are beyond saving. It’s bringing all of our property values down.

CM: At a retreat just after New Year’s, you told councilpeople to show up to meetings, show up on time, understand what they’re voting on, and pay attention to testimony. But only 10 out of 17 councilpeople attended your retreat. Does that prove your point?

KK: No. That was something I wanted to do before we started the session. I knew it was during the holidays, some people told me they were out of town visiting family. If it were held while we were in session, I’m confident we’d have 100 percent participation.

Look at attendance and punctuality since that retreat. Every meeting has started within 3 minutes of its starting time. We’re acting in a more professional manner. I think we’re taking things more seriously. I’m trying to make people more cognizant of the fact that when you sign your signature or cast a vote, millions of dollars are appropriated. When you consider the enterprise funds and the general fund, we appropriate over $1 billion a year. That’s something we need to be aware of, and that’s why I insist everybody be at their seats when the roll is called.

There was not a lot of chatter during the legislative portion of the meeting. There was not a lot of roaming around. The directors have agreed to come to meetings 10 minutes early to discuss any issues councilmembers might have so that please don’t have to roam around during the meetings. Overall, these changes are being accepted by my colleagues.

CM: What do you think about talk of Cleveland and East Cleveland merging?

KK: We need to commission a study that will look at whether this makes sense for both communities. It’s an intriguing opportunity, but we need to look at the cost of providing services to East Cleveland. There’s a lot of risk, but a lot of opportunity. It’s too early to say whether it’s definitely something we should or should not do. We need to take a very sober, thoughtful approach to this.

CM: What are the risks for Cleveland?

KK: The risks are that our budget is very tight. There’s not a lot of extra money. Our biggest challenges are providing safety forces. They take up 55 percent of our budget. Are we able to extend that level of service to what would be a new part of the municipality? Are we able to deal with the infrastructure challenges that East Cleveland poses? We have our own infrastructure challenges, in terms of the conditions of our roadways.

CM: What are the opportunities for the city?

KK: The opportunities are, there’s a lot of gems in East Cleveland. There’s a lot of nice old houses, parks, industry — [GE’s] Nela Park is still there. They have big city problems on a small city budget. If we come together, and that helps our ability to bond projects, can we be better together because of our now increased population, income tax and property tax values?

When we look at the big-city problems some of our inner-ring suburbs are facing, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate to other communities that by coming together, we can solve these problems together. We can make this work, we can do a merger and keep the local character, but get the benefit of working together.

CM: Could this pave the way for other mergers in the future?

KK: If it’s determined that it’s in Cleveland’s interest, and it is done well, and it can demonstrate that because of its merger, East Cleveland is in a much better position and Cleveland is in a better position — then yes, it can be seen as a transformative step that other communities can take and [a way] we can build a better Greater Cleveland.

CM: What was it like to be Kevin J. Kelley when a J. Kevin Kelley in the town next door was indicted on corruption charges?

KK: That was an interesting time! When it first happened, there was quite a bit of confusion. A couple of callers to my office were “so disappointed” in me. It was a tough time. With each subsequent headline, the effect on me lessened a little bit. But every now and then, one of my friends’ moms would say, “Oh, I know Kevin’s going to be OK. I know he didn’t do anything.”

FitzGerald delivers State of the County, with glances statewide

I counted only two rips into Gov. John Kasich in Ed FitzGerald's State of the County address today. Though statewide media came to cover his speech, and a new poll today says FitzGerald is only 5 points behind Kasich in the governor's race, never did the Cuyahoga County executive mention his November opponent by name. He merely criticized the state for cutting the local government fund and not spending more on early childhood education.

Instead, FitzGerald offered a progress report on his agenda, from his early reforms to a lightning-round list of initiatives at the speech's end. He portrayed himself as impatient to create change, not just change jobs.

"Our priority in year one was to restore public trust," said FitzGerald, recounting his role in dismantling the old county government's patronage regime. "The pursuit of excellence replaced politics," he claimed -- true on one level, but funny coming from a candidate for higher office.

Movement, progress, optimism -- FitzGerald aimed to project all three. As usual, he announced new initiatives during the annual address. He wants to wants to issue $50 million in bonds to tear down abandoned houses. "Our economic recovery is still hobbled by thousands of properties which, unfortunately, are beyond salvaging through renovation." It's an issue he hasn't taken on in a big way until now.  

"County government in the last few years has been a battleground between those who have given up on Cleveland and those who will never give up on Cleveland," FitzGerald asserted -- which left me wondering who represents the give-up caucus. 

But the rhetorical move helps him as a local leader and a candidate for governor. Locally, it's the pol's rhetorical version of slipping on a CLE Clothing Co. T-shirt, an embrace of town pride. Statewide, holding his address in the new convention center and declaring that "the list of downtown projects is unlike anything that any of us have seen happen here in a generation" heads off Republican attempts to use Cleveland's struggles against him downstate.

FitzGerald also announced the county will take over operations of the Cleveland and Euclid jails. That gave him a chance to praise Mayor Frank Jackson (whom Kasich has also courted). It also helped him talk about regionalism, an area where he's had to temper expectations.  

Three years ago, FitzGerald helped Orange, Pepper Pike, Moreland Hills and Woodmere launch merger talks.  That idea has faded.  Buzz about a Cleveland-East Cleveland merger arose late last year. FitzGerald implied he doesn't see that happening either. 

"Regionalism in the near term is only likely to be expressed through shared services," he said. He touted the services the county offers to towns, and again suggested they could build the trust necessary for a big metropolitan government someday. Working on shared services is "not as exciting as a merger in one fell swoop, but it has the distinct advantage of being real."

The City Club sponsored the event, and in its traditional Q and A, FitzGerald faced only one tough, conservative questioner: David Tryon, an attorney and local Federalist Society leader. Their exchange sounded more like the debate ahead in the governor's race than anything else today. 

"Cuyahoga County has the highest taxes and fees" in Ohio, Tryon said. "They hurt people who can’t afford tickets to events like this. Why not decrease the sales tax and reduce fees?"

FitzGerald portrayed the questioner as a laissez-faire libertarian and argued that his a has justified a government with a larger role. "I suppose we could have cut taxes," he said rhetorically, "and reduced the number of sheriff’s deputies, or not funded universal pre-kindergarten or early childhood education." 

East Cleveland makes a deal over Huron Hospital; Cleveland goes to court

Cleveland’s suing, but East Cleveland’s cutting a deal. That’s the latest news in the fight over the planned closing of Huron Hospital.

East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton (pictured) and Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove announced today that the Clinic will give the city $8 million over five years to cushion the blow of losing its second-largest employer.

The Clinic also agreed to help with one of East Cleveland’s biggest problems: vacant buildings. Not only will the Clinic demolish the hospital and give the land to the city, it’s also going to knock down a few extra buildings it doesn’t own: some apartments and offices on Euclid Avenue.

Now, Norton, 39, will have to convince East Clevelanders that the deal is worth giving up the fight. He’s already making the case.

“While most cities receive nothing when a hospital closes,” Norton said in a statement, “East Cleveland has worked with Cleveland Clinic to secure financial and other support which will ease our city’s financial pressure, prevent the facility from becoming an eyesore and help us aggressively pursue development opportunities.”

Meanwhile, Frank Jackson’s not giving up. Cleveland filed a federal lawsuit today to try to stop the Clinic from closing Huron’s trauma center, where Cleveland EMS takes 3,000 patients a year.

It’ll be worth watching how East Cleveland and Cleveland get along after this. The last time East Cleveland cut a deal in a big legal battle while Cleveland fought on, it hurt relations between the towns for years. In 1998, when East Cleveland’s Emmanuel Onunwor reached a settlement with the railroad CSX to allow increased train traffic, Cleveland’s Mike White lashed out. He killed talks about Cleveland taking over East Cleveland’s water system, delaying the takeover for a decade.

But Jackson is not as vindictive as White. He may also understand Norton’s position. East Cleveland gets $1 million a year in income taxes from Huron Hospital’s 800 employees. The city’s entire budget is only $26 million. Now Norton plugs that financial hole for a while and buys time to try to attract businesses to all that vacant land.

To read my Dec. 2009 profile of Norton, "Who Wants to Be Mayor of East Cleveland?", click here.

Me & Feagler, schools CEO & Huron Hospital

It's been a big news week in Cleveland, and I was lucky to be invited to talk about it on this weekend's episode of WVIZ's Feagler & Friends current-affairs show.

I talked with host Dick Feagler and the rest of the reporters' panel about new Cleveland schools CEO Eric Gordon, whom I met while working on my profile of Peter Raskind, the interim CEO. We discussed the closing of Huron Hospital and its effects on East Cleveland, where I've done a lot of reporting.

We chatted about how Avon will pay for a new I-90 exit -- Julie Wallace, managing editor of the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, took the lead on that. Bill Shiel of Fox 8, the third panelist, told Feagler he thought the unusual jury selection for the Anthony Sowell trial was illegal.

The show airs tonight at 8:30 and Sunday at 12:30 pm on WVIZ.

Update, 6/13: Check out the video. The panel discussion starts around the 9:20 mark.

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.