Cleveland now ranks as the poorest big city in the United States

By Ohio Capital Journal Staff

Tommy Greer, 34, fishes in the Cuyahoga River with a background of downtown Cleveland in this
2014 photo. (Photo by Jeff Swenson/Getty Images)

Cleveland had the highest poverty rate among large U.S. cities in 2019, overtaking Detroit, according to data released by the U.S. Census bureau last week. The data for the ranking is from 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated problems related to poverty in Ohio and around the country.

The Cleveland-based Center for Community Solutions reported in a post Monday that although Cleveland’s overall poverty rate fell from 33.1% to 30.8% from 2018 to 2019, Detroit’s rate fell faster and is now just barely below Cleveland’s at 30.6%.

“These estimates are close enough to be within the margin of error — but no matter the rankings, it is clear that Cleveland is a high-poverty city,” the Community Solutions center noted in the post.

In 2019, more than 114,000 people lived in poverty in Cleveland, including 37,700 children and nearly 12,000 older adults, the statistics show.

Cleveland remained dead last among large cities in child poverty, with 46.1% of children in the city living in poverty in 2019.

“More than 6,500 of those adults in poverty in Cleveland worked full-time for the full year, but did not earn enough to propel them above the poverty threshold,” the post noted.

The post said the 2019 data shows a continuation of another concerning trend: an increase in poor seniors. The number and share of people over age 65 who live in poverty grew in Cleveland to 22.7%. Meanwhile, Detroit’s senior poverty rate fell to 18.8%. Cleveland rose one spot from being third-worst in older adult poverty to second, tied with Boston, Massachusetts,  and Tampa, Florida. Only Miami, Florida is worse.

As shown below, poverty estimates fell for all other age groups between 2018 and 2019.

“These changes are not statistically significant, and the data was collected in 2019, well before the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting economic downturn,” the post noted.

Ohio is the only state with more than one city with a population of more than 300,000 in ranking in the top 10 poorest big cities with Cincinnati maintaining its ranking at sixth.

“Even before COVID-19, this data shows that thousands of our neighbors struggled last year during a time of record unemployment,” the post said. “Today, there are more than twice as many unemployed people in Cuyahoga County as there were a year ago when this data was collected.”

About 40% of Ohioans report either they, someone in their households or both have lost a job since March 13.

“Early information suggests that federal assistance, such as stimulus payments and extra unemployment benefits, kept many of those people from falling into poverty during the first months of the pandemic,” the post concluded. “But as that extra help expired over the summer and thousands of Ohioans are still unable to find work, we suspect that poverty may rise quickly. Similar data for 2020 will not be available until next fall.”

• • •• • •

This story is provided by Ohio Capital Journal, a part of States Newsroom, a national 501 (c)(3) nonprofit. See the original story here.

CPT | Cuyahoga Politics Today:

The Cleveland Way

Yet another study has identified Cleveland as being at the bottom of the pit when it comes to quality of life. Or as the mayor might say, the b***hole of the nation. WalletHub, a financial services website, announced this week that Cleveland residents are the most stressed in the nation. We rank first — i.e., worst — when it comes to "financial stress". We have the highest divorce rate, the second highest poverty rate, and are third worst when it comes to "health and safety stress".

Had the surveyors factored in police misconduct, we'd have been a runaway winner.

Let’s cut to the chase. Making our condition worse is that the three public issues roiling the nation right now — the economy, the pandemic, and systemic inequality/police misconduct — all weigh most heavily on black people, and Cleveland is a majority black town. So black people are out of work and without financial resources, going untested and getting sick, hospitalized, and dying from coronavirus, and soon to be evicted, on the street and subject to the whims of hostile “safety” forces organized to contain the unruly and the unwanted from invading or disrupting the peace and comfort of the mostly white enclaves that circle the urban core and its first ring suburbs.

Rank these issues — we listed them alphabetically — however you want in terms of salience. They all cry out for being addressed systemically, which means elected officials need to be part of the solution.

Cuyahoga’s most prominent public officials are county executive Armond Budish and Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson. While these gentlemen have enjoyed near-unanimous establishment support, it's hard to envision two more pedestrian and disconnected chief executives. 

Budish has never embraced the idea of holding Ohio’s second-most powerful elected office — as the position was touted during debate over county reorganization in 2009. And his stature has shriveled since he so badly mismanaged the county jail in ways that contributed to a string of inmate deaths under conditions decried as “inhumane” by federal monitors. He has been effectively a lame duck for the past two year, a status unlikely to change over the next two years.

Some politicians might draw strength from being effectively immune to the voters and find courage in seizing moral high ground. Alas, Budish was characteristically timid and indecisive last Friday as he practically begged county residents to wear masks. It’s understandable that his mask edict was devoid of teeth: the county has few resources to even throw a scare into the selfish unmasked. But odds are he could have assembled several dozen area mayors to line up behind a bolder plea.

Which brings us to Frank Jackson. Frank calls me every couple of weeks, usually just before six o’clock dinnertime. His recorded voice informs me that he is about to speak to Cleveland citizens and that I should stay on the line. His tone is both intrusive and flat, so devoid of warmth and energy it’s like a declaration that he hates the imminent engagement with the people who have repeatedly voted him into office.

Frank has been either mayor or council president since the 20^th century. Whatever ambition or drive or fire he might have had in 1999 has long since dissipated. He is the Decider-in-Chief at City Hall who acts on the premise that if voters don’t like what he’s doing, they can vote him out. Short of that, don’t call or petition him with concerns about a living minimum wage, or lead abatement or budgetary concerns that money should be allocated to basic human needs instead of plush digs for corporate elites [Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, Sherwin-Williams tax breaks].

Catering to the wishes of the political donor class might be acceptable if Clevelanders didn’t have to live with these realities: a water department that mis-bills city residents, shuts off their water, puts liens on their property, and then forecloses and kicks them out; a health department that supports a resolution declaring racism a public health crisis but is itself thoroughly indifferent to its own longstanding hospitality to that very virus; a top Jackson administration official, James McGrath, who first as police chief and then as safety director [he retired last month], tolerated and condoned, and perhaps encouraged, all manner of felonious behavior from police officers sworn to protect and serve the people.

Or, failing that, in pandemic times, say maybe every hundred years or so, calling upon those fat cat friends to say, hey, we have a problem here, can you help us out by testing a few hundred thousand people so we can try and keep as many of them alive as possible?

Cleveland is justly celebrated for being home to three of the nation’s top medical systems. The quasi-public one, MetroHealth, got millions from in COVID money from the state but has yet to figure out how to test the masses.

The other two — Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals — are huge behemoths, owners of acres and acres of tax-exempt properties, and possess such great wealth that one might think their status as nonprofit entities meant they would step forward in times of great crisis to at least test the black and brown people who live all around them.

We don’t know if the mayor has called upon these friends in times like these. We do know they have yet to step up in any meaningful way to help those most in need. And we know that no one in City Hall — not the mayor, or any of his wannabe successors on city council — have called them out for their indifference.

As we reported this past week, a few entities — some black churches, Greater Cleveland Congregations, Neighborhood Family Practice — are trying heroically to stand in the gap. Their efforts are heroic but are dwarfed by the need.

Is there one elected official willing to call out the mighty Clinic? To be sure, they would be swiftly reminded, “that’s not the Cleveland way”.

Perhaps “the Cleveland way” is why we sit atop virtually every index of misery.

• • •• • •

Lead tests for children plummet in Cleveland

Advocates worry about long-term fallout 

This story is provided by ideastream as part of special community coverage of COVID-19 and funded by Third Federal Foundation and University Settlement.

By Rachel Dissell

CLEVELAND, Ohio — State shutdown orders meant to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus have created a double-whammy of lead poisoning risk for young children in Cleveland. 

Many of these children are spending more time in homes with potential lead hazards, and fewer are getting tested to see if they’ve been exposed to the toxin. 

Tests for lead have plummeted by almost half compared with previous years in Cleveland and across Ohio, driven mostly by a dip in March, when most pediatricians’ offices and labs were closed to non-emergency visits because of the pandemic. 

State health data shows a slight uptick in the percentage of Cleveland children tested who have elevated levels of lead in their blood.

The setback couldn’t have come at a worse time, local lead-safety advocates say. For the past year, they have been working to prevent children from being poisoned in their homes, rolling out a new strategy that includes city-mandated lead inspections in rentals and new grants and loans for hazard cleanup. 

Testing children for lead is the main way to identify lead hazards that can continue to do damage. The tests also allow parents to get help recognizing developmental delays or behavioral issues linked to exposure to the toxin, which can cause irreversible damage to a child’s brain. 

The pandemic-related drop in testing means that fewer lead-exposed children will receive help from state-supported early intervention programs, which are now offered automatically when a child’s blood test shows exposure.

It also means that public health authorities won’t receive as many referrals to investigate potential lead hazards in homes, which are triggered by a high lead test. That could result in prolonged exposure for children to lead dust or paint chips. 

“I worry about children who are at home, playing on porches full of lead paint or in the dirt nearby,” said Patricia Barnes, executive director of the Ohio Healthy Homes Network and co-chair of the Ohio Lead Free Kids Coalition, which advocates statewide for policies to eliminate childhood lead poisoning. 

An Ohio Department of Health spokeswoman said that while test rates have dipped across Ohio during the pandemic, other “lead belt” states fared even worse. 

Tests in Ohio have picked up in recent weeks as more parents schedule routine well-child visits, said state lead poisoning prevention advocates. 

“There is nothing we are doing to make up on the missed testing,” ODH spokeswoman Rachel Feeley wrote in an email.

“This is something the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is tracking, as it is a national occurrence,” she wrote. “We will continue to monitor the situation and follow CDC guidance on the matter.”

Testing setback

“I feel like we’re almost starting over again,” Kathy Schoch, nurse case manager for Cuyahoga County’s lead-poisoning prevention program, said about the interruption in testing. 

Schoch and others have wrestled with improving lead testing for years. 

Only one in five Medicaid-eligible children entering kindergarten in Cleveland public schools from 2011 to 2016 had federally recommended tests for lead poisoning at both ages 1 and 2, according to research released last year by Case Western Reserve University and Invest in Children, a county early childhood initiative. 

The study also showed that even a “high dose” of 18 months or more of high-quality preschool education failed to help most lead-poisoned children catch up with their peers. 

As lead testing stalled in the spring, so did new referrals to Ohio’s Early Intervention program, said Karen Mintzer, director of Bright Beginnings, formerly known as Help Me Grow. 

The Early Intervention program, run through the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities, can assess children for developmental delays linked to lead exposure.

Referrals to the program from Cuyahoga County also dropped to zero at one point, but have since rebounded, Mintzer said. 

Any child younger than 3 with lead in their blood at levels of five micrograms per deciliter or higher is automatically referred.

Safer than the grocery store

When the MetroHealth System resumed well-child visits in late April, many parents were reluctant to bring their children to the doctor’s office or a lab because of fears about the virus, said Dr. Abdulla Ghori, vice chair of Pediatrics at MetroHealth Medical Center.

There has been a slight uptick in visits in the past few weeks, he said. 

In terms of risk, “coming to the hospital is better than going to the grocery store,” Ghori said. “And certainly much safer than [attending] a birthday party.”

Ghori, also a professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University, said it is difficult to increase the rate of lead testing in part because testing practices vary by location and even by facility within a single health system. 

Sometimes blood can be drawn in the doctor’s office. Other times, parents have to wait at a lab at a different location, which can be impractical for families with limited time and resources. 

At MetroHealth, Ghori said, about a quarter of lab orders for lead tests aren’t ever completed. 

While long-term solutions continue to be debated, Ghori said MetroHealth took the step of “bulk ordering” lead tests for any children who need them, rather than having doctors order the test individually during visits.

The orders will automatically show up in the mail or on electronic medical records for parents, he said. 

Ghori said that’s good, but even better would be free, accessible blood-drawing locations in the city. 

Ghori said he understands the focus on catching up on immunizations for children under 2, especially immunizations against highly contagious and dangerous diseases such as measles. Immunizations are often needed to enroll in day care or school. 

That doesn’t mean lead testing should be an afterthought, though.

Both are important, Ghori said, but he worries people will de-emphasize lead testing. That, he said, would have dangerous long-term consequences. 

“People should not be forgetting this silent disease, which could be getting worse during this lockdown, and the consequences that it could have,” he said.

• • •• • •

Ways to limit exposure to lead dust in your home

·    Much of the lead dust that enters homes comes in from outside via the dirt on shoes and feet and on pets’ paws. Remove shoes when entering the home and clean your pets’ paws if they spend time in bare dirt outside.

·    Put a stiff, outdoor door mat outside the door to trap dust and dirt before it gets in the house.

·    If you have any bare patches of dirt around the edges of your home or driveway, cover it with at least six inches of mulch.

·    Check window sills and doorways for chipped and peeling paint, especially at the level where your child’s hands reach, and in areas of high friction. Wipe or vacuum out window sills and doorways. If you can’t repaint chipped areas, cover with contact paper or duct tape.

·    Mop hard-surface floors frequently using the two-bucket method, if possible. Fill bucket #1 with warm water and a household cleaner. Fill bucket #2 with clean water. Dip the mop into bucket #1 and clean the floor. Then dip the mop into bucket #2 to rinse and squeeze before returning it to the cleaning solution. Dispose of the dirty water by pouring it down the toilet.

·    Vacuum carpeted surfaces at least once a week. Use a HEPA-filter vacuum followed by a steam cleaner, if possible.

·    Wear gloves when cleaning to avoid getting lead dust or paint under fingernails and transferring it to children.

·    Wash your children’s hands frequently with soap and water, especially before meals. Hand sanitizer will not remove lead from hands.

• • •• • •

Black women celebrate, network around electoral successes

Just about fifty years ago, Nina Simone released To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a powerful, majestic ode to joy written in memory of her friend, Lorraine Hansberry, author of the Broadway smash, Raisin in the Sun, who died prematurely in 1965 at the tender age of 34.

The song was aimed at young people but it quickly electrified generations of black people of every age who were in the midst of discovering, internalizing and then proclaiming that Black was beautiful. It quickly became kind of a new national anthem for black Americans, one that lifted every voice that sung it, echoing the fervent joy and fierce determination of people who had nearly exhausted themselves in the Sixties bursting holes in America’s Berlin Wall of segregation, discrimination, and humiliation.

South Euclid councilwoman Ruth Gray, president of
National Congress of Black Women Cleveland chapter,
welcomes attendees, flanked by Kim Brown of  the
Black Women's Commission of Cuyahoga County
and county councilwoman Yvonne Conwell.

That sort of energy was in the house last night as more than 150 people assembled on the first floor of an old mansion in University Circle to celebrate a wave of electoral victories by black women candidates in local municipalities this past November.

Maple Hts. Mayor Annette Blackwell and
Essence Doucet of Shaker Hts. were on
hand to congratulate new public officials

Celebrated last night for their recent successful election campaigns were new city council members Davida Russell of Cleveland Hts., Shayla Davis  of Garfield Hts., Dana Anderson of Maple Hts., Cassandra Nelson & Kim Thomas of Richmond Hts., and Juanita Gowdy of East Cleveland, along with Ashley Thomas and Nichelle Daniels, each elected to the Garfield Hts. Board of Education. 

The event was initially planned as a post-election celebration for National Congress of Black Women members. However, a second group, the Black Women’s Commission of Cuyahoga County, signed up as co-sponsor, expanding the list of honorees. Other newly elected officials celebrated were Carmella Williams of Shaker Hts. City Council, village council members Cynthia Beard and Geavona Greene of Highland Hills, and Nakeshia Nickerson and Vivian Walker of Woodmere, and Stephanie Stedmire-Walls, East Cleveland school board.

Newly elected officials honored by Cleveland chapter of National Congress of Black Women [L to R]: Front row, Cassandra Nelson (white jacket)), Cynthia Beard, and Nichelle Daniels. Back Row: Aiyana Hamilton [representing Ashley Thomas], Kim Thomas, Carmella Williams, Juanita Gowdy, Shayla Davis, Dana Henderson, Davida Russell.

Two black women — June Taylor of Beachwood and Gigi Traore of Newburgh Hts. — were elected to their respective seats for the first time, although each had been serving by appointment to this year.

Members of Cleveland chapter, National Congress of Black Women

Many of the women in attendance had never met, a reflection of the county's byzantine political subdivisions. They were coming together from several of the many suburbs that ring Cleveland from north to east to south. This seemed to contribute to the sense of excitement the gathering held. The typical barriers that work against cooperation — differences in community, occupation, generation, social status, appearance, etc. — were minimized in the evening's enthusiasm. 

Leslie White-Wilson and Ray Freeman
share networking moment. White-Wilson
was elected 11th Congressional Delegate
to Democratic National Convention earlier
this month. Freeman is a member of the
Warrnesville Hts. school board, and the
National School Boards Association.

Several of the women in attendance appeared to draw inspiration from the reception's vibe. An attorney in the room was overheard saying that she would continue to run until she was elected judge. A Shaker Hts. data analyst said that while she has always paid close attention to state and national elections, she now realized the importance of local elections, vowing to become more involved.

The NCBW was founded in 1984 by Shirley Chisholm and C. Delores Tucker and has grown to more than 100 chapters. A local NCBW officer said that the Cleveland chapter, in only its fourth year, has already become the nation’s largest chapter with 63 members. South Euclid councilwoman Ruth Gray is chapter president, and county councilwoman Yvonne Conwell of Cleveland is first vice president.

The organization has an IRS 501c(3) tax exemption that requires it to be nonpartisan, a fact Gray acknowledged even as she gave a shout out to Shontel Brown, chairwoman of the local Democratic Party.  A spokeswoman said the group’s emphasis is on empowering black women in their respective communities, voter registration and education, and scholarship aid.

Following the introduction of each newly minted public official and the scrimmage of enthusiastic picture takers as they stood a front room of what is now part of Hawken School’s urban campus, attendees continued in cordial celebration, not just of the recent ballot successes, but in their newly discovered sorority of strength.

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CPT | Desperate Times: Dark Money, Gatekeepers and the Public Square, Part I

Cuyahoga Politics Today

Cleveland's Crumbling Political Order

The emergence of "dark money" in this year's mayoral campaign is a harsh but illuminating case study on how the intersection of race, power and privilege in Cleveland retards the region's redevelopment into a first class twenty-first century metropolis.

Ironically, this object lesson of primitive politics is on display front and center this week as Cleveland hosts not one but two national conferences focused on smart cities and intelligent planning for urban communities.

We will have more to say about our national visitors in a companion post, but suffice it to say here that they are some of the brightest minds currently operating on the cutting edge of technology, urban planning and intelligent design. Stepping outside their conference headquarters to experience our downtown vibrancy, the more attuned can hear disturbing echoes from the local corridors of power emanating from our airwaves, unlike the soothing welcomes they are receiving from official local representatives.

Like most big cities, a status Cleveland now holds more in memory, longing and pretense, our direction and pace are largely set by the interplay between our business and civic leaders. In healthy communities, these forces are complementary competitors. Like Howard and Hampton, two of the nation’s best historically black universities, they battle fiercely but enjoy both a mutual respect with the understanding that beyond the struggle on the playing field, they each share a common interest in the other's prosperity and well-being.

More than a century ago, Cleveland was at the national forefront of municipal leadership. We had nearly one million residents within our borders. We had a progressive mayor, Tom Johnson, who left a successful business career to run for public office in service to his community — not just to his class. While Johnson is justly celebrated today for his bold, visionary and courageous leadership — his statue adorns our Public Square — his former business associates at the time vilified him for daring to represent the public interest at the expense of their immediate profits.

Mostly since then, it seems that our business community has made it a cardinal principle to ensure that organic leadership in the public interest would never reemerge. The dominance of that first principle has coincided with Cleveland's steady decline ever since 1930.

Cleveland's population growth was fueled first by middle and Eastern European immigrants who came to toil in the filthy factories, foundries and refineries that forged the area's wealth. The unhealthiness of those sweatshops and the griminess of the teeming masses in their ethnic central city enclaves led people with means to seek greener pastures. Even Millionaires Row did not escape the exodus as wealthy Clevelanders moved outward to create some of the world's first and finest modern suburbs: Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland.

In so doing, they had to abandon direct control of city politics. By and large, good government forces refocused on emerging suburban city halls, replaced in Cleveland City Hall by waves of competing ethnic politicians sent downtown from their respective enclaves — Little Italy, Slavic Village, Collinwood, Clark-Fulton, and so forth — to gain public power to improve their neighborhood's and living conditions.

A tacit bargain was struck between the business community and the ethnics. The latter could run the city politically but would not interfere with the city's powerful money making apparatus, which was slowly becoming more corporate, with the attendant development of powerful legal and financial service muscle centers.

Cleveland ethnics developed a unique and powerful "Cosmopolitan" political machine, best exemplified by Frank Lausche, who blazed a trail to stunning success as judge, mayor, governor, and ultimately US Senator. (George Voinovich would follow Lausche's Cosmo path a generation later, but even though he took some of his rough and tumble homies along to ride shotgun, his saddlebags always carried a corporate agenda.)

Black people, eventually to become the area's largest and most indigestible ethnic group, were initially barely a blip on Cleveland's municipal radar. Restricted initially to the city's Central neighborhood, they were only a minor irritant in the civic arena until a modest immigrant from Alabama, John O. Holly, began agitating for equity in 1935. Seemingly overnight he organized 10,000 working class black to support his contention that black lives mattered. Under the banner of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”, his Future Outlook League forced dozens of businesses in the central area and then downtown, to begin desegregating their workforces by hiring Negroes.

Holly's intrusion into how the city did business had political overtones and fostered the business community's resort to gatekeepers, respectable black people whose primary chore was to keep their unwashed and rebellious kinfolk under control.

This quasi-colonial system has been in place ever since, with continuous refinements that extend until the present day. Its use was instrumental in the undermining of the opposition to the Q deal, and can now be seen in the ferocious effort to derail the populist challenge to City Hall that threatens to put neighborhood native son Zack Reed from sitting in the mayor's seat.

What Cleveland’s civic leaders continually fail to understand its that its adherence to a post-colonial reliance upon a gatekeeper mentality retards our entire community, keeps us in a defensive stance, limits our attractiveness to immigration from anywhere, makes us wholly ill-equipped to compete for Amazon HQ2, and ultimately undermines our most earnest efforts to enter world class competition even at the middleweight level, notwithstanding our enormous public assets.

We approach today the 50th anniversary of the election of Carl Stokes as mayor. We are right to celebrate that achievement: Cleveland was the FIRST big city in America to elect a black man as mayor.

(Richard Hatcher was elected mayor in Gary, Indiana the same night in November 1967; however, Gary barely registered on the roster of the city’s larger cities, Its 178,000 citizens ranked it #70 in 1960, while Cleveland came in as the nation’s 8th largest city, with a population of 876,000. 

Today, Cleveland has shrunk to a ranking outside the top fifty cities, with a population of about 385,000, placing it below such lustrous venues as Tulsa OK, Arlington TX, Colorado Springs CO, and Mesa AZ.)

The Stokes era at City Hall, 1967-1971, busted open the old order. Black people, confined almost exclusively to the overcrowded neighborhoods of Cedar-Central, Hough, Glenville, and Mt. Pleasant, used their concentrated mass to break down decades of exclusion, and to bring a measure of meritocracy to the public space. The establishment, which had long resisted such a development, embraced it in the wake of Stokes’ near-election in 1965, and in fear of the tumultuous conditions erupting nationwide in places like Newark, Watts, and Detroit.

Those were exhilarating years for black people in Cleveland. Doors were kicked open on every front as black people found new opportunities in employment, housing, and the civic space. There was opposition all along the way, but led by Carl and his brother Lou, who became Ohio’s first black Congressman in 1968, the black community stuck together and persevered.

While the Stokes years at City Hall led to unquestioned improvement in the quality of civic life for all Clevelanders, certain problems, most notably in the justice and public education systems, proved intractable even as significant progress was made in other arenas. Hardcore resistance to public school integration was tolerated and even supported by key elements of the business community, and the promise of the Stokes years quickly waned. And when an ambitious, audacious inner city ethnic westside kid named Dennis Kucinich rode the unrest into City Hall, all hell broke loose.

Kucinich was mayor for only two years, every day of which seemed as tumultuous as what we currently observe in the White House. The business community found George Voinovich, a Cosmo Republican, retook control of City Hall and community politics, and found complicit partners it could control with a multifaceted system of financial controls in the form of salaries, grants, contracts, and other more nefarious fiscal tools.

Today, Frank Jackson sits in City Hall as the embodiment of that system. A good man, conscientious, diligent, he is the virtual embodiment of a political metronome. Super dependable, predictable to a fault, he can be counted upon to support almost every business community initiative, irrespective of its merit or the disproportionate aspects of its benefits and burdens.

Jackson has done a lot of good during his unsurpassed twelve years as mayor, but almost everybody knows and believes the baton should be passed.

And therein lies the problem: the natural stream of selection has been corrupted, choked with pesticides, and clogged, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless primarily as a direct consequence of the gatekeeper system that restricts access, development and advancement of talent, ambition, and potential in the civic, commercial and cultural spaces that matter in Greater Cleveland.

In tomorrow’s post, we will talk more about the gatekeepers. We’re likely even to name at least a couple of the most obvious ones.

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