If deal gets through city council,
it will likely face referendum in an election year
The most intriguing year in
local politics in a generation got even more interesting last night when
Cleveland City Council president Kevin Kelley held up final passage of a bill
that he and the Jackson administration want to pass as emergency legislation.
Last night Council meeting was
to have been the third and final reading on the legislation to expand Quicken
Loans Arena for a total public cost of $282 million. But Kelley postponed the vote
with the thoroughly implausible explanation that some council members wanted
more time to study the issue.
The controversial bill has
already had more hearings than most city hall legislation gets. On April 4,
Council’s six-member Development, Planning & Sustainability Committee,
chaired by Ward 12’s Tony Brancatelli, found all but two of Council’s 17
members spending large parts of the day at the six-hour session.
The bill’s proponents
assert that upgrading the publicly owned arena — they like to call it
“Transforming the Q” — will enable Cleveland to keep pace in the escalating
race among municipalities to retain or attract professional sports teams and
various entertainment events. They claim that without the upgrades, the
Cavaliers are likely to leave and bookings will wither, leaving the city with
an expensive white elephant. The proposed deal extends the Cavs lease with the
Q an additional seven years until 2034.
Six council members have
announced opposition to the legislation: Zack Reed [Ward 2], T. J. Dow [7], Mike
Polensek [8], Kevin Conwell [9], Jeff Johnson [10], and Brian Cummins [14].
Their “no” stance is supported by more organized civic outrage than any issue
in recent memory, centered principally on two arguments: [1] the city has much greater needs than improving the arena, and [2] the deal is an inequitable transfer
of wealth from poor, neglected neighborhoods and residents to downtown
interests that are not only wealthy but already heavily subsidized.
Kelley’s delay in moving
the bill final passage to final passage was not totally a surprise. Speculation
was rife over the weekend that council leadership was seeking to inoculate the
bill from a referendum challenge by securing twelve votes in its favor, meaning
it would pass as “emergency legislation” by a 2/3 majority. While some doubt
whether a 12-5 vote would achieve that aim — a court challenge by opponents
would be all but certain — another reason for the delay may be closer to the
truth: the measure may be more in danger of losing support than in gaining that
crucial extra vote.
Indeed, the unpopularity of
the measure among the electorate is widely acknowledged: the bill stinks to
high heaven of privilege, greed, and disdain for neighborhood development.
Arguments that speak to the Q’s value as an economic driver fall have little
currency to an electorate that has been repeatedly sold the same trickle-down
bill of goods even before the Gateway development that built the Indians a new
ballpark and brought the Cavs downtown was first proposed in the early ‘90s.
While the Cavaliers and
their emissaries have worked diligently behind the scenes to court wary members
of both Cuyahoga County Council and Cleveland City Council, they have consistently
refused even to acknowledge the concerns of the citizens groups that will
likely drive the coming referendum effort. Instead, the team left it to county
executive Armond Budish and the respective council presidents to carry their
water.
Budish was almost over the top in championing this deal, while county
council president Dan Brady seemed to have his patience taxed by the organized
opposition. Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson appeared at the December press
conference announcing the deal and lent it his typical stylistically tepid
support. Since then, however, he has been conspicuously absent from waving the
flag publicly for the deal.
With good reason, no doubt.
Jackson is running for an unprecedented fourth term this fall, and he will
encounter the most intense opposition of his long political career. He’s been
mayor for twelve years, long enough to have accumulated a long list of wounds
and a resume with several major shortcomings that stand alongside a litany of
accomplishments.
Budish and Brady managed to
get the legislation past County Council by an 8-3 vote but Cleveland was always
going to be a harder play. Its full time council people are collectively far
more seasoned as a political body and they play a much harder brand of ball than their county counterparts. City council members are structurally much closer to the people — city wards average about
23,000 citizens, while county districts are each about four times that size.
Moreover, city residents tend to be poorer and would be paying for this
deal twice, as both city and county taxpayers].
Most importantly, however,
getting this deal through city council would be a supreme challenge because
every one of its members is on the ballot this year. Only two of them have not
declared or signaled intent to run for re-election — Jeff Johnson is
challenging Jackson’s reelection bid for mayor, and Zack Reed is widely expected
to join that race as well.
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