This archive article is selected from The Cleveland Pages, the city's only weekly independent journal of politics and opinion on the Internet. Find out all about the Cleveland Pages here, or check out the current issue.
The Free Times, in an article no longer online, called Cleveland Pages "Spicily independent... in the best tradition of citizen-journalist."
The Cleveland Pages is a somewhat-weekly commentary on what's new and why it's all happening in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. If what you read here is upsetting, you might prefer this simple-minded happy-talk instead.
Bookmark the Cleveland Pages at http://re.cleveland.oh.us. Bookmark this issue at http://re.cleveland.oh.us/archives/19990122.html.
A Cleveland Pages archive search will be available soon... Meanwhile, skip to the flat-file archive list! And read an overview of who's putting this thing out and what it's about.
The Plain Dealer of 7 January 1999 carried a story indicating that Ward 16 Council member Larry Moran has resigned because of time commitments. Moran has been criticized frequently for missing committee meetings and generally being unavailable for Council business. Besides his Council position, Moran has a full-time job at the Chevy plant in Parma and has recently acquired a tavern in Parma. Roldo's Point of View newsletter even headlined Moran as the "Invisible Councilman."
Obviously it's nearly impossible to hold down a 40-hour-a-week job, run a small business, and represent your ward effectively in the Council as we know it. Some people say a guy like Moran should stay out of politics if he wants to keep his day job. I say the problem is that Council membership has become a job in itself. The job of being a Cleveland City Council member should revert to a two-year, part-time commitment, while the executive branch should handle services as it's supposed to.
In 1981, Cleveland's Mayor and Council members were elected to two-year terms; there were 33 wards; and Council members were paid $18,000 a year. A special election in June of 1981 amended the city's charter to reduce the size of the Council and lengthen its members' term to four years. Now, after substantial pay increases especially in the immediate post- reduction years, 21 Council members are paid a bit over $40,000 a year.
The reduction move change, first proposed in 1962, died in a special charter review committee. By 1981, it had been rejected twice by the voters, who appeared to like things just the way they were with a relatively large Council for cities of Cleveland's size.
"Yes, we're large," said George Forbes before the charter amendment was approved, "but we also perform a unique service. I don't think for the services we give that we are an expensive operation." Westbrook (this would be Jay81) agreed: "A response to the crisis of the cities is to demand more access to government. In Cleveland, we have almost a unique system where people have access to City Hall."
Forbes, Council President at the time, also campaigned against the reduction issue by going to majority-white neighborhoods to tell voters, correctly in fact, that the smaller Council would have a near-majority of black members. (Forbes is black, which makes the racial scare tactic not only unseemly but a bit bizarre.)
Typically for him, Tim Hagan supported the reduction move for the same reasons that excited the Citizens' League and the League of Women voters: the supposed lower expense of supporting fewer members and less frequent elections. Have you ever noticed that "good government" types get all mushy about changes that trade off democracy for surface efficiency?
In fact, only five of the thirty-three Council members elected in 1977, not long before the reduction, had law degrees. Just as many had never been to college at all. Now a Juris Doctor is almost a prerequisite to serving on Council.
The results of the 1981 general election, the first for a four-year term, were instructive. Occupations of all the members elected were:
The thing about a four-year term and having to give up one's day job is that it's hard to lose that kind of political position. Under two-year terms and compact wards, Council office was something an amateur might consider doing to help the neighborhood or to pursue a particularly noteworthy cause. With the jumbo wards and four-year terms, re-election has become just a career imperative, or at worst a treadmill. We've lost the "citizen-legislator" model.
The change to a full-time, four-year term for Council members has been a negative for people who actually live in the city. Here's why.
Since there are about 505,000 residents of Cleveland, there are now about 24,000 people in each of the 21 wards, making each ward a bit larger than Parma Heights or South Euclid. Cleveland Council members currently act less as legislators than as customer-service reps for City Hall. I think this is bad for democracy and one of two things needs to happen:
In other words, we should either quit sticking members with service management of impossibly large wards (much bigger than many fully-funded suburbs), or allow them the tools to do the job right. Let's look at both alternatives.
At 15,300 per ward, returning to a 33-ward system would give each Council member a jurisdiction just slightly bigger than University Heights. Does anyone seriously believe that University Heights would be best served by a single-member Council? Even Brooklyn has only 11,000 residents, but has a five-member Council.
I used to live in an apartment a block or two away from Jim Rokakis, who was the Ward 15 rep at that time. It was nice to spot him around Archwood and Pearl from time to time, ask a question or two, or just find out what others were complaining about. But in the post-reduction era, he had (and his successor, Merle Gordon, now has) something like 50% more ground to cover than before, making it that much tougher to deal with what I call "barking dog detail," the ongoing stream of petty annoyances and critical government needs that constituents bring to the door every day. With forty-plus hours a week dedicated to the mundane, Council members can find it difficult to act effectively as legislators too.
Re-augmentation will make the mundane tasks a bit easier to handle; fewer constituents tend to make fewer demands, ceteris paribus. Less time and political capital spent struggling with these demands means more for effective legislation and advocacy in the committee and Council chambers--all good for democracy, which is the economic ingredient we're really lacking here. Professional politicians and caretakers are not what Cleveland needs!
The flip side of augmentation is devolution. What if we kept the long four-year term, kept the largish 21 wards, and handed real budgetary and decision-making authority to the Council members? Now Callahan's outline describes this better and in more detail than I can do right now without blatantly ripping him off, and in any case he directs you to yet another offline source (so make sure to follow that link to find out how to get it!) with even more exposition.
But here's the idea briefly: what if instead of a mere Council member, your ward had its own Little Mayor and Little Council with control of its equal share of perhaps 90% of city revenue (coming to about $20 million per year), with the remainder going to run important citywide centralized functions such as courts and jails? As Callahan puts it, "this would be a virtual paradigm shift for most Cleveland citizens who are accustomed to government by strangers." Police, fire, and planning services, for example, would be run by this little-city-within-a-city, whose Little Mayor might live no more than half a mile from your home.
Supposing that a Little City (okay, Callahan calls each one a sub-city) had a five-member Little Council, you'd find that each group of roughly 5,000 people in the city would have its own Little Council member. Imagine not having to pick up the phone to gripe about trash collection, because your kids and her kids wait at the same bus stop every morning. Imagine the way road repairs will get done when someone who actually lives on your street is the person who calls out the crews.
The ombudsperson role of our existing Council members will necessarily vanish, as it's taken over in many smaller ways by the Little Council of your own Little City. This concept doesn't really make any new resources, but it brings what we do have a lot closer to home. And it brings the legislators closer still.
I started out as a fan of re-augmentation. The city has not gotten so much smaller that you can't still justify 33 wards. I would really like to separate the roles of service managers and legislators--just as we don't expect our US Senators to follow up personally on EPA complaints, we shouldn't expect our City Council members to chase trash trucks around. But if that can't be done, we need to take a good look at even more drastic changes. The problems of services and inadequate representation are not going to go away with any minor bit of tinkering. Let's think ahead for the next charter review!
This document's template was last modified on Wednesday, 09-Nov-2005 18:51:58 EST. There is a new Cleveland Pages more or less every weekend. The entire Cleveland Pages website is © 1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003 by Mark W. Schumann, all rights reserved. Copyrights belonging to others on individual items are noted. Nobody else would take the credit or blame for these opinions anyway.
Go to the front page
Last validated 22 January 1999:
![[ Valid HTML 4.0! ]](/images/vh40.gif){kind=small}
![[ Valid CSS! ]](/images/vcss.gif){kind=small}
![[ Bobby Approved! ]](/images/approved.gif){kind=small}
![[ Made with Cascading Style Sheets]](/images/mwcts.gif)
The W3C validator verifies that documents on this site conform to the Strict HTML 4.01 specification, which is a step towards consistency, accessibility, and interoperability.
Bobby checks for opportunities to improve access for users regardless of disabilities or special needs.