CLEVELAND, Ohio – With Mayor Frank Jackson’s announcement Tuesday that he will be seeking an unprecedented fourth four-year term, cleveland.com takes a look back at his record and policy decisions – his strengths and vulnerabilities — that likely will take center stage as more challengers enter the race.
From police violence to economic development, the airport to the city’s schools, these are some of the issues upon which the next mayor of Cleveland will be chosen.
This analysis originally appeared Tuesday as a slideshow on cleveland.com.
Keeping the city solvent
To Jackson’s credit: On the heels of Jackson’s inauguration came one of the deepest recessions the city had ever seen, spurred by the foreclosure crisis that infected every neighborhood.
Increased unemployment and layoffs at companies citywide meant income tax and property tax collections plummeted.
To make matters worse, the state slashed funding for local governments, redirecting the money to a state surplus. Add to that the loss of tangible personal property tax, commercial activity tax and estate tax – all of which have begun evaporating in recent years under state fiscal policy.
All told, the city has lost more than $160 million in state funding since 2008.
Despite those hardships, Jackson and his financial managers maintained a balanced budget and kept the city solvent through its worst days, while minimizing layoffs.
And Jackson believes that the hard-fought passage of a city income tax last November will mitigate those losses of money from the state and make a world of difference in the city’s bottom line.
The tax is expected to bring in an additional $80 million a year to be spent on enhanced city services. Those include: A beefed up building and housing department, a coordinated effort to deal with lead-contaminated homes, a comprehensive anti-violence and social service program, and costly reforms to the police department mandated by a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Jackson’s vulnerability: Through the years, many have criticized the administration for failing to fill key positions lost to attrition – such as housing inspectors, firefighters, trash collectors, maintenance crews and recreation center workers – leading to a slow degradation of city services overall.
City vehicles and equipment also were stretched beyond their useful lifespans, a factor that contributed to a complete meltdown of snowplowing services during back-to-back snowstorms in 2015.
Culture of unconstitutional policing
Jackson’s vulnerability: As a city councilman in the 1990s, Jackson pushed for legislation to curb police use of excessive force after a young black man died in the custody of two white police officers.
When Jackson became mayor in 2006, he entered office on the heels of five police shootings, four of them fatal. He pledged more stringent policies governing the use of force and said that officers would be retrained on firearms, tactics and cultural sensitivity.
But the problem got a whole lot worse before it got better. And over the course of Jackson’s tenure, the city has paid out millions in settlements to people who claimed they were unduly injured at the hands of Cleveland police.
And then came a spate of high-profile use-of-force cases, including a high-speed police chase and fatal shootings of two unarmed suspects, the death of a schizophrenic woman in police custody – and the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.
Jackson has called the day of Tamir’s death the “worst time I’ve experienced as mayor.”
Months later, the city entered into a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, based on the agency’s findings after an 18-month investigation into police use of force. The agreement creates layers of independent review, improves reporting practices and training, and engages citizens in an unprecedented way.
But Jackson’s critics say that the wholesale reform effort came too late in his career for him to take credit — and it doesn’t erase the fact that policing had reached a new nadir on his watch.
To Jackson’s credit: Jackson says he not only welcomed the Justice Department’s review, but he wished the findings had gone much further with remedies for problems with the criminal justice system as a whole, not just for police.
And, the consent decree negotiated by the Jackson administration offers the best chance the city has ever had to bring constitutional policing to Cleveland – to transform the police department into a standard-bearer for law enforcement nationwide.
If it comes to pass, Jackson’s role as an architect of a plan to bring enduring change to the police department, more than any other initiative of his mayoral tenure, could define his legacy.
And the passage of the income tax increase in November, after campaigning by off-duty members of Jackson’s administration and other city workers, means the city can afford to buy more equipment and vehicles, hire more officers and train them properly.
A plan to transform Cleveland’s schools
To Jackson’s credit: Jackson once said there was nothing he wouldn’t give for good schools in Cleveland. And indeed, the issue has ranked highest among the mayor’s priorities for the past decade.
In 2012, Jackson put forth a plan that aimed to triple the number of students attending good schools by throwing out union rules governing teacher pay and layoffs, partnering more with high-performing charter schools and giving successful district schools more flexibility in how they do their jobs.
The plan set up a system by which charter schools are evaluated by a public-private board known as the “Cleveland Transformation Alliance,” empowered to ensure high performance or to banish poor performing charter schools from the city.
The plan also called for the state legislature to change laws – only for Cleveland – pertaining to teacher pay and hiring rules.
And most critically, voters were asked to approve a tax increase to avoid a $55 million deficit and massive budget and staff cuts.
Jackson managed to bring all parties to the table. The Cleveland Teachers Union agreed to negotiated terms. State lawmakers approved the necessary legislation, with Gov. John Kasich’s backing. And voters gave Jackson the 15-mill property tax increase the district desperately needed.
Voters also saw enough merit in the work of the past four years to renew that tax in November.
Jackson’s vulnerability: The improvement of Cleveland schools has been incremental.
The Transformation Alliance reports a strong uptick in graduation rates and in the number of students prepared for college. But the panel concedes that progress is slow, and too many schools aren’t meeting the grade.
Test scores have improved somewhat, but those improvements are unremarkable. At its worst, the district had the second-lowest test scores in Ohio in the two years just before and after creation of the Cleveland Plan. It now has the fourth-lowest and ranks last out of the state’s eight urban districts.
Although the district managed to stem the exodus of students and boosted enrollment, it made virtually no progress toward its goal of placing more students in higher-performing schools, according to a Plain Dealer analysis in November.
And the district still lags in fulfilling many of its other goals, including enrolling all 4-year-olds in strong preschool and opening more year-round schools.
Housing and the hazards of lead
Jackson’s vulnerability: On Jackson’s watch, thousands of children were exposed to toxic levels of lead paint in their homes, while city health officials failed to investigate and a backlog of unresolved cases grew.
In November of 2015, the Ohio Department of Health threatened to revoke Cleveland’s authority to conduct lead investigations. Shortly after, the state identified 3,078 Cleveland lead poisoning cases that, according to its records, had never been resolved between 2003 and 2013.
A Plain Dealer analysis of five years of recent city data disclosed that the city had failed to inspect at least half of the homes for the source of the child’s poisoning. When the city did inspect and locate a dangerous source of lead, the problem was fixed less than half of the time.
Until recently, the city’s public health staff has had only one full-time lead investigator and one contractor to handle its annual caseload of roughly 350 poisonings.
To Jackson’s credit: Jackson has pledged that, beginning this year, the city will conduct routine interior inspections of most city rental properties to make sure they’re safe and don’t pose threats to residents.
The effort will aim to improve overall health and wellbeing for all Cleveland tenants, with an eye toward mitigating the glut of homes contaminated by lead paint.
Routine interior inspections would be a big change for the city, which currently uses a complaint-based system to inspect the inside of homes. Jackson has taken heat for leaving the building department too short-staffed to conduct even routine exterior inspections.
But with the passage of the city income tax hike, city officials say all of that is about to change. The city now can afford to hire and train about a dozen new inspectors for a unit devoted to rental inspections.
A comprehensive anti-violence plan
To Jackson’s credit: After the passage of the city’s income tax increase in November, Jackson has said he will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a comprehensive anti-violence initiative that draws together violence intervention, street outreach, social programming, workforce development and community policing.
To oversee it all, he named longtime federal and county prosecutor Duane Deskins as the city’s new chief of Prevention, Intervention and Opportunity for Youth.
In addition to Deskins’ appointment, the city will partner with an outside agency to analyze crime and hire a small team of intervention specialists to work under the auspices of the Community Relations Board, headed by Director Blaine Griffin. Also the city’s Health Department will take on two new health services administrators, who will analyze youth violence as a public health crisis.
Jackson’s vulnerability: Critics have hammered Jackson for what, until recently, appeared to be the lack of a meaningful plan to address the city’s violence epidemic. The city’s homicide rate has topped 100 for the past three years. And many of the victims have been children.
In 2015, three children – Ramon Burnett, 5, Major Howard, 3, and 5-month-old Aavielle Wakefield — died from errant gunfire within a month of each other.
Water department’s customer service falls apart
Jackson’s vulnerability: For most of Jackson’s first two terms in office, . Thousands of pending bills backlogged the system. Customers complained of incorrectly estimated bills and waited an hour or more to speak with call center representatives.
The department employed more than 1,200 workers using outdated, manual or labor-intensive procedures with high error rates. The collections rate hovered around 88 percent, with $73 million in delinquent payments, and the department identified more than 13,000 accounts that never received consistent bills. Thousands more were traced to vacant lots and empty homes.customer service at the Cleveland Water Department was a disaster
To Jackson’s credit: But just when things seemed to hit rock bottom, Jackson had the wisdom to hire a turnaround firm and a consultant to overhaul the operation. The 18-month restructuring proved to be even more successful than city officials expected.
About $20 million were generated on account of discovering the thousands of customers who had never been consistently billed, following through on service disconnection threats and installing an automated meter reading system that has all but ended the practice of estimating bills.
The resulting cost savings led to an unprecedented three-year stretch through 2018 without a water rate increase. After that, customers can expect two years of rate hikes that city officials characterize as “moderate” — between $1.30 and $2.60 per month, depending on how far the customer lives from Lake Erie, the source of the city’s water.
Keeping an open mind on innovative technology
To Jackson’s credit: They began as seemingly good ideas with noble goals.
The first, at the start of Jackson’s second term in 2010, was a deal that would have brought Chinese firm Sunpu Opto Semiconductor Co.’s North American headquarters to Cleveland, including an assembly and manufacturing operation and research-and-development facilities to create as many as 350 “green” jobs.
In exchange, Sunpu Opto also planned to create an LED streetlight design for the city and a citywide energy conservation program for homes and businesses. The deal would have given the company the exclusive right to sell the city millions of dollars’ worth of LEDs for 10 years.
The second innovative idea, born that same year, called for compressing trash into pellets, which could be sold as an alternative to coal or burned on site to generate electricity for city-owned Cleveland Public Power — a process known as gasification.
The so-called waste-to-energy plant would have cost a projected $180 million to build. But city officials heralded it as a sustainable alternative to dispatching 230,000 tons of trash to Ohio landfills each year.
Jackson’s vulnerability: Both of these ideas turned out to be a bust, exposing Jackson as a mayor who, perhaps, blindly trusts too much in his directors and commissioners.
Critics assailed the SunPu Opto deal because it lacked competitive bidding and because none of the company’s products had been tested in the United States.
Jackson pulled the plug on the proposal just before a council vote in May of 2010. He said he had tainted the process because he announced the deal while CPP officials were seeking proposals for LED lights from other companies.
A week later, the administration announced that it would seek bids for essentially the same deal, one that tied the purchase of lights to the creation of jobs. But only two companies submitted bids, and both were rejected because they did not meet the city’s requirements.
After three years of debate and money spent exploring the waste-to-energy plant proposal, the idea was canned when an appellate court ruled in an unrelated case that a project such as Cleveland’s would have to be classified as a major source of pollution. It was a designation the city had hoped to avoid.
That came after a city-hired consultant determined that the cost of such a facility would far exceed that of other methods of trash management.
But perhaps the poorest show of judgment on the part of the Jackson administration came in the form of a contract with consultant Peter Tien – who had sold city officials on both the SunPu Opto and gasification plans.
The city hired Tien for $1.5 million to work on the air-emission permit application for the trash-to-electricity plant. But the city fired him in 2012 after receiving several drafts of reports laden with errors and ambiguous calculations.
Dumping Tien wasn’t so easy, though. His contract required the city to show a “good faith effort” to obtain the permit or pay him half of his contracted fee.
In the end, both parties agreed to a $250,000 settlement, in light of the news that the project Tien proposed would be designated as a major source of pollution.
The failed LED and gasification proposals were backed by CPP Commissioner Ivan Henderson and then-Utilities Director Barry Withers – both of whom remain members of Jackson’s administration.
Terrible roads
Jackson’s vulnerability: The condition of city roads has been a sore spot for residents, City Council members and downtown motorists alike throughout Jackson’s time in office, as craterous potholes have abounded at the end of every snowy season.
The issue was exacerbated during the throes of the recession, when Jackson decided not to resurface any roads in 2008 and to patch potholes as needed. Critics say that neglecting roads for an entire year cost the city handsomely in the long run, by expediting the decay of streets and compounding the burden for repair crews in subsequent years.
To Jackson’s credit: The Jackson administration has been successful at leveraging millions of dollars in state funding and grants from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency to resurface the city’s main arteries.
And in 2015, Jackson worked with Council President Kevin Kelley on his idea to double the money spent each year on repaving residential streets while also overhauling the way the streets are selected.
Under the new system, the city commits $10 million a year to repave the worst five percent of streets citywide. Previously, the city divided $4.4 million among all council wards, and council members got to choose which streets got done.
The new list is to be based on the results of a pavement management study with yearly updates. The study, commissioned two years ago, is still in the works. But Kelley says, once finished, it will make the city’s street-paving program more equitable and will mean that every city street will be paved at least once every 20 years.
Administration uncovers fire department scandal
To Jackson’s credit: In 2011, Jackson’s internal auditors, probing ever-increasing overtime costs in the fire department, discovered numerous payroll abuses, including the practice among firefighters of paying colleagues to work their shifts. The arrangement let some firefighters work other jobs, even run their own businesses fulltime, while still collecting salaries and benefits from the city.
In one of the most egregious cases, a firefighter worked only one shift in two years, allowing him to work as a substitute teacher in Cleveland and as an assistant Glenville High School football coach, while also operating a child care center.
Twelve firefighters were prosecuted and eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. Another firefighter was sentenced to jail time. Seventeen supervisors were suspended for letting the payroll abuses carry on for years.
The scandal led to the installation of an improved timekeeping system, the creation of an Office of Integrity Control, Compliance and Employee Accountability and the adoption of policies limiting the number of hours that firefighters could trade before they must be repaid.
Jackson’s handling of the scandal was unprecedented and gutsy at a time when officials were often cautious about waging war against beloved rescuers — and the politically powerful unions that represent them.
Jackson’s vulnerability: But Jackson’s fight with the union burned a bridge, so to speak, between the administration and the firefighters.
A long-held goal of merging the city’s fire and emergency medical services to save money, improve efficiency and decrease response times fell to pieces in the aftermath of the shift-trading investigation.
In March 2014, after 18-months of contentious negotiations, the firefighters’ union voted down the city’s proposed terms of the merger. Union officials said at the time that the “no” vote boiled down to a general distrust of the administration and a sense that the terms showed preferential treatment to EMS workers.
By February of the following year, city officials told members of City Council that the merger effort was dead.
Trouble at the airport
Jackson’s vulnerability: Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in recent years has weathered problems from maintaining its air carriers to plowing snow on its runways.
In early 2014, United Airlines announced its decision to drop its hub at Hopkins, leaving the airport with a no longer used Concourse D that the city built in the 1990s at the insistence of United’s predecessor, Continental Airlines.
United’s lease agreement requires the airline to continue paying on the outstanding $110 million debt until 2027. But the lease also grants the airline exclusive use of the 16-gate facility – rendering it a ghost town at an airport struggling to attract new carriers.
Then, in September 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration, investigating a complaint filed by an airfield maintenance worker, slapped Hopkins with a $735,000 proposed civil penalty for violating an agreement to adequately staff snow removal teams and de-ice runways.
The airport eventually paid the FAA $200,000 as part of a settlement agreement, which also brought new guidelines for snow and ice control.
But a recently leaked internal memo written by a field maintenance supervisor suggests that widespread dysfunction persists among snow removal teams.
To Jackson’s credit: Although Concourse D remains home to tumbleweeds, the airport has managed to adapt to the loss of United by attracting some smaller carriers to fill in the gaps. That includes new air service offerings from Spirit Airlines and Southwest Airlines’ recent decision to move its Atlanta flights to Hopkins from the Akron-Canton airport.
And Jackson’s appointment earlier this month of Airport Director Robert Kennedy – a former industry consultant known for prioritizing customer service – inspires hope for the airport’s future.
In a recent interview, Kennedy has pledged a top-to-bottom review of airfield maintenance personnel and procedures. And he said that from now on, he must be consulted on any decision to close the airfield due to weather conditions.
Downtown looks terrific
To Jackson’s credit: Downtown Cleveland has never looked better.
Business is booming. Restaurants, bars and entire entertainment districts have seemed to grow overnight, as streets that were previously depressed and darkened have come alive with the support of Jackson’s economic development team.
A recent study suggests that the number of jobs nearly doubled along the city’s Euclid Avenue after the thoroughfare was renovated for the rapid transit Healthline project in 2008.
The new convention center and hotel put Cleveland on the map as a destination for large conferences and last year attracted one of the biggest events in the country — the Republican National Convention.
Public Square, once a glorified bus stop, has become the crown jewel of downtown, with its playful water features, cafe, public art and welcoming gardens. The Jack Cleveland Casino, formerly the Horseshoe, opened near the square, as well.
And now, the city has pledged $88 million in admission taxes over 10 years to pay for renovations to the Quicken Loans Arena – the home of the Cavaliers and dozens of other entertainment offerings throughout the year.
Jackson’s vulnerability: But Jackson’s critics say his care and attention to downtown projects demonstrates that he has, at best, lost touch with the needs of residents in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. At worst, critics say, Jackson has forsaken his constituents for the interests of corporate Cleveland and billionaire sports franchise owners.
The city’s contribution to the Q renovation is too great a burden, say detractors. And the 10-year commitment that comes with it restricts future mayors and city councils from deciding to spend that money any other way for the benefit of citizens. The deal also salts a wound still raw from the city’s agreement, under Jackson, to help pay for giant scoreboards and faster escalators at FirstEnergy Stadium, the home of the Browns.
The Public Square makeover brought with it the controversy over whether the square would remain open to public transit. Jackson made the unilateral decision to keep Superior Avenue closed to RTA buses, based on the arguments that a wide-open road could make the square an easy terrorist target and that bus traffic imperils children who use the square’s water feature.
Public transit proponents countered that rerouting buses around the square would disenfranchise riders, incur additional cost for RTA and create safety problems by adding left turns that could put pedestrians in a bus’s blind spot.
The issue is far from resolved. Last month, the Federal Transit Administration notified RTA that it owes the agency $12 million for closing a stretch of road built with a federal grant.
Way to go on bringing the RNC to CLE!
To Jackson’s credit: The Republican National Convention could very well be considered the signature event in the city’s history. Jackson worked with a team of ambassadors from the city to sell the Republican National Committee on Cleveland as a convention-worthy locale. And the announcement that Cleveland had been selected was made during the same glorious week that LeBron James declared he would be “coming home” to play again with the Cavaliers. The stars had aligned for Cleveland, it seemed.
What’s more, the city pulled it off without a hitch – making the week one of the most successful pro-Cleveland campaigns of all time. Delegates reported that they enjoyed their stay, while protests remained relatively peaceful. Law enforcement officers from across the country volunteered to augment the Cleveland police force.
And Police Chief Calvin Williams set the tone for policing the event, emphasizing crowd control methods that de-escalated conflicts and kept groups of protesters from clashing.
Jackson’s vulnerability: Despite all of that, Jackson’s detractors say the event was window-dressing – an illusion that made the city appear to be on the upswing, when in reality, residents in Cleveland neighborhoods remain destitute, plagued by violence, crime and a lack of opportunity.
They point out that one of the deadliest weekends of the year in Cleveland occurred just days before the convention began. Five people were killed, and at least 20 people were shot that weekend.
And they argue that the primping and prepping of downtown, as well as the rush to complete projects like the multimillion-dollar overhaul of Public Square, are just further evidence that Jackson has lost touch with the needs of the neighborhoods.
City Hall gets an ‘F’ for complying with public records law
Jackson’s vulnerability: On this issue, Jackson has no place to hide. His administration’s compliance with public record law has been the worst in the city’s recent history, calling into question City Hall’s transparency on potentially controversial issues of public importance as well as routine matters.
City Hall didn’t provide cleveland.com with a copy of the 2015 city payroll until February of 2016. And a year-old request for the 2016 payroll is still outstanding.
Cleveland.com is still awaiting responses to other record requests dating back to 2015. They include disciplinary and personnel files for specific city directors, chiefs and workers; director reports; records on hiring at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport; and timekeeping records for certain employees.
When cleveland.com requested a breakdown of what goes into a calculation that appears on Cleveland Public Power customers’ bills, the city denied the request on the grounds that the calculation constitutes a “trade secret.”
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