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.

County transition team will open up all its meetings

If you act like a government, you've got to open up like a government should. That's the lesson Martin Zanotti and Jim McCafferty learned this week.

Cleveland.com just reported that Cuyahoga County's transition advisory group will hold all its committee meetings in public. The decision comes three days after Zanotti and McCafferty, who are shepherding the switch to charter government, went on WCPN on Tuesday and got an earful.

Host Dan Moulthrop and his listeners asked: Why aren't the transition team's meetings open to the public? The Plain Dealer amplified the questions with a story. County executive candidate Ed FitzGerald joined the chorus. {Update, 2/13: So did Scene and candidate Matt Dolan.} Yesterday, the ACLU threatened to sue.

At first, McCafferty, the county administrator, and Zanotti, a leader of the charter reform effort, argued that holding some public forums would be enough. The transition committees didn't have to open all their meetings, they argued, because they aren't government bodies, just advisers. The volunteers on the committees ought to be able to talk about layoffs and other sensitive issues without fear of upsetting anyone, they argued.

Problem was, closed meetings were one reason voters turned against McCafferty's bosses, the county commissioners, and voted for Issue 6. At the same time, the most piercing criticism of Zanotti and the other Issue 6 reformers was that they'd written the charter in private. So a fight to keep the meeting doors closed threatened to revive all that distrust and hurt the new government's credibility.

Besides, the transition group has expanded way beyond what the charter calls for, from a little committee of three county employees into an ambitious partnership including the current government, Issue 6's framers, and top public officials and business executives. And it's not just making little recommendations, like a place for the new county council to meet. It's proposing huge changes in county government's priorities. Last month, Zanotti and McCafferty declared that the new government should cut spending 15 percent and start a $50 million economic development fund -- changes much bigger than the current, lame-duck government ever contemplated.

The transition group is acting like a government, even though it wasn't elected. The public needs some way to hold it accountable. Watching it work is the best solution.

Today's decision doesn't resolve county executive candidates Ken Lanci and Ed FitzGerald's complaints that they should be included in the transition effort. But Zanotti and others decided to exclude candidates to keep the transition free of politics. Now, Lanci, FitzGerald, and any other interested candidates can attend the committee meetings, learn what's going on, and talk about it if they want. That's better than taking a risk that some candidates would turn the committees into stages for their campaigns.

County transition team promises big spending cuts, job growth fund

Cuyahoga County's transition team just announced an ambitious goal: It wants to cut county spending 15 percent and use $50 million of the savings for economic development programs. It's also set up several advisory committees, full of influential names, to give the county some guidance until the new government gets elected and settles in.

The news shows that power at the county is already shifting toward the reformers, 11 months before the new charter takes full effect. Today's announcement comes from Martin Zanotti, the Issue 6 reform leader, and the commissioners' top employee, county administrator Jim McCafferty. They're co-chairs of the transition group.

That $50 million goal for new jobs programs goes way beyond what the county's doing now: it would quadruple $16 million for economic development in the county's 2010 recommended budget. The spending-cut goals are also ambitious: The county has already cut its staffing from 9,500 employees in 2008 to 8,000 this year, and it already planned to cut general fund spending to $310 million this year, down from $330 million in 2009 and $360 million in 2008.

The list of advisory committees is an interesting mix of prominent names from politics and business and from last year's pro-Issue 6 and anti-6 camps. The transition executive committee includes seven people:
-co-chairs Zanotti and McCafferty
-Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson
-Eaton Corp. CEO Sandy Cutler (a top fundraiser for Issue 6)
-Tri-C president Jerry Sue Thornton
-University Hospitals CEO Tom Zenty
-Randell McShepard, head of the Policy Bridge think tank.

(Incidentally, Jackson, Thornton, Zenty and Cutler all made the top 25 in Inside Business' Power 100.)

The three picks for the all-important economic development committee are:
-Sandra Pianalto, the powerful president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
-Judy Rawson, former Shaker Heights mayor and Issue 6 co-framer
-Lee Trotter, recently retired deputy county administrator.

A public engagement committee includes both Harriet Applegate, who helped lead the campaign against the new charter, and Robyn Minter Smyers, a Thompson Hine attorney and Issue 6 co-chair.

“We are not fighting battles from yesterday or last year," McCafferty said in the press release. "We are looking toward tomorrow and next year."

The transition team also announced that Tim Hagan and KeyCorp CEO Henry Meyer III will co-chair the campaign to pass the county health and human services levy on May 4. It'll be interesting to see what Meyer and other business leaders do to support the levy campaign. Hagan is known as a champion of social services on the commission, but this year, with trust in county government at a low point, the commissioners will need people outside the county building to vouch for them and the levy.

What about campaign finance reform? Issue 6 supporters have pledged to come up with proposals for the new government to implement in 2011 -- too late for this year's county election, which won't have limits on individual campaign contributions, as critics have pointed out (see this week's Scene article). Today's press release says New Cuyahoga Now, Zanotti's pro-6 group, will contribute campaign finance reform proposals and a recommended code of ethics to the transition team's final report.

Update, 2/3: Scene, which opposed Issue 6, criticizes the transition team as wielding too much unaccountable power. The most interesting part of its story: it draws connections between the list of committee members and the Issue 6 campaign's donor list.