The Real Deal Press

Southeast Coalition of Cleveland City Council sounds off on withdrawn ballot issues

By Vince Robinson

Special to The Real Deal Press

Editor’s Note: This article appeared originally as a post on Facebook. With the writer’s permission, we are republishing a lightly edited version of it here because of its community significance.

A community meeting was held at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cleveland presenting a group of Cleveland City Councilpersons called the Southeast Coalition. The subject of the meeting was a recent effort to reduce Cleveland City Council from the present 17 wards to nine. Hosted by Pastor Reverend Jimmy L. Gates, Councilmen Joe Jones, Kevin Bishop, Kenneth Johnson, Blaine Griffin and Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland were introduced to the audience. Also in attendance and given an opportunity to speak was Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley.

Kelley was given credit for ending the failed campaign which he disapproved of, along with the group of councilpersons present.

Rev. Gates opened the event by describing the threat to representation. Petitions calling for a vote by Clevelanders were withdrawn earlier this month. As a result, the initiative won’t appear on the March 17th ballot. Councilman Johnson followed by acknowledging his impact on the issue.

“Now, Reverend Gates touched on this council reduction issue and the poster boy for the Council reduction was me, simply because I’m the senior minority. And I think they did, what’d they do, 20 articles? They did twenty articles (on me). Eighty percent of that was false, by the way. Now you’re hearing that from me.”

According to Johnson, council reduction would result in five councilmen on the West side and three on the East with one downtown. He says it’s all about the money. ”It’s about taking the services, the representation that you have and moving it somewhere else. It’s a lot easier to deal with nine councilmen than it is to deal with seventeen.”

Cleveland pointed out the present council had been downsized from 21. Having been through that experience has given her perspective on the prospect of a further reduction. “Every time the ward gets bigger and what was on the table was cutting council nearly in half from 17 to 9, which means double the workload and then cutting your salary. So they want you to work twice as hard for half as much money. Where do they do that?”Councilwoman Cleveland added, “Although the petitions were withdrawn, we don’t feel that this issue is dead, so we want everyone to remain on orange alert. Our representation, our power, our status in the city, our well-being are all at stake. Make no mistake about that.”

Cleveland became emotional and confessed to feeling anger about the issue. “It wasn’t a fair fight. It wasn’t borne out of fairness. It wasn’t a citizen borne referendum. It wasn’t the residents of the city sitting down saying, ‘let’s get together and figure out what we need to do’. This was somebody from the outside paying people to go collect the signatures…whatever you have to do to get them.” She encouraged the audience to read petitions and understand them before signing.

The gathering had other political implications. There were a number of elected officials in the assembly and others who were campaigning for new offices passing out their literature. Support for Issue 33, the Health and Human Services levy, was encouraged, as was participation in the upcoming census.

Councilman Blaine Griffin wrapped up by thanking the audience. “Had it not been for you, we would not have been able to stop a millionaire, one millionaire, one millionaire to be able to come into a city and be able to turn it up on top of itself. One person should never be able to have that kind of power. Nobody should be able to come in and mortgage our democracy."

* A video of part of the meeting, showing Council members Bishop, Johnson, and Cleveland, can be found here. It runs about 15 minutes.

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