Running mate for FitzGerald; Julian Rogers resigning from County Council; Headen victory confirmed

FitzGerald selects Kearney as running mate; Rogers to resign County council seat; mayor-elect Headen’s victory confirmed in Richmond Hts.

Two big announcements today have given additional heft to what was going to be an important day politically on the local political scene in any event.

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee to take on Gov. John Kasich next year, has announced that

State Senator Eric Kearney of Cincinnati

state Sen. Eric Kearney of Cincinnati will be his running mate. Kearney, who is the Senate Minority Leader, is term-limited and would be ineligible to run for another Senate term.

Today’s second announcement is the report that Cuyahoga County councilman Julian Rogers of Cleveland Heights will be resigning his seat at the end of January to comply with the terms of a new job he just started at Cleveland State University. Rogers is CSU’s new director of community partnerships, a job that will pay him nearly double his $45,000 part-time council salary.

County Councilman Julian Rogers of Cleveland Heights,
attending a meeting in East Cleveland earlier this year

Rogers won in a crowded field in 2010. He was unopposed in 2012 when he ran for a full four-year term. Under terms of the county charter, his successor will be chosen by Democratic central committee members from his district, which includes Under the county charter, precinct members from Rogers' District 10, will have 30 days to pick a replacement after his resignation becomes effective. County District 10 includes Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland, University Heights, Bratenahl, Cleveland Ward 8, and part of Cleveland Ward 10.

The County Board of Elections met this afternoon at 3PM to certify the Nov. 5 election results, which may trigger either some automatic recounts by statute, or encourage some diehards to pay for a recount.

Miesha Headen, Richmond
Heights mayor-elect

The official election results will likely be posted on the elections board website later today. But we can with pleasure and assurance that the reign of Richmond Heights mayor Dan Ursu is at an end. His 55 vote Election Day deficit grew to a 71-vote margin once all qualified provisional and absentee ballots were counted. The final tally was 1021 for Ursu and 1092 for mayor-elect Miesha Headen. Her 2.5% margin of victory is well beyond the .5% margin requirement that would have triggered an automatic recount.

Headen will be sworn in December 1 and assume office the same day.

Endorsements for Cleveland and Richmond Heights mayoral races, East Cleveland City Council

The juxtaposition of East Cleveland and Richmond Heights may seem odd to many — and distressing, perhaps, to some.  We know some eyebrows were raised, including ours, when Richmond Heights mayoral candidate David Ali said last May his city was “slowly turning into a ghetto” like East Cleveland.

Ali’s comments were of course an insult to the good people of East Cleveland. While there are more $200,000 houses on any given block of Richmond Heights than in the entire city of East Cleveland, this should not obscure the fact many East Cleveland residents possess the civility, savvy and sophistication, and the resources, that would make them welcome additions to any community.

Ali’s remarks were the kind that unwittingly reveal more about the speaker than the subject. To begin with, much of the City of East Cleveland is indistinguishable from the neighborhoods on the eastside of Cleveland where Ali was born and raised as David Johnson. The family gas station on St. Clair Ave. at 117 St. he inherited and ran for forty years is but a few scant blocks from East Cleveland. That family enterprise made him a millionaire and enabled him to drive up the hill every night to his ranch house in a tidy, almost bucolic bedroom community.

Miesha Headen for Mayor of Richmond Heights

The clear choice to lead Richmond Heights for the next four years is Miesha Headen. She has the fiscal expertise to manage the city’s treasury, an understanding of the challenges the city faces, concrete plans to address those challenges, and the courage to lead the way.

Our conversations with Mr. Ali gave us the impression that he would not be running for mayor if the major intersection near his home were not so run down. He seems to conceive of the mayor’s role as that of development director. The fact that he could campaign for the job for five months and yet be wholly ignorant of the city’s budget or how many employees he would be responsible for speaks volumes about his interest and capacity to run a municipal government.

Dave Ali may be an excellent businessman and model neighbor, but he is wholly unprepared to be mayor of Richmond Heights. He has little concept of the job he has been pursuing for the last several months. He shows no comprehension of the difference between running a family neighborhood retail business and governing a diverse city full of economic and social challenges that have been unaddressed for more than a decade.

Finally, there are legitimate questions as to Ali’s motivation to be a candidate. Who would run for an office he knows so little about? And what is one to make of the fact that the discredited Josh Kaye, whose tenure as Board of Education president was inept, vindictive and abusive [see here, here, and here for examples.], has boasted that he is Ali’s campaign manager.

The incumbent mayor, Dan Ursu, is rightly criticized for his public aloofness, but Ursu’s public reticence is purposeful. He intentionally governs almost in secret, as if he were trying to lull city residents into apathy. Unfortunately, Richmond Heights requires leadership that is far more dynamic, imaginative, and sensitive than Ursu has provided over at least the past dozen years. It was telling that he had to be introduced to the principal of the Richmond Heights High School at the League of Women Voters Oct. 16 forum. City Hall is less than 200 yards from the high school, but the only interest Ursu has shown in his challenged school district in the past two years was in doing a photo opp with the boys basketball team after their record-breaking season.

If Richmond Heights wants to reverse its recent decline and begin to take advantage of its tremendous potential, it needs a both a pragmatic mayor and a visionary one. Miesha Headen best represents that combination in this year’s race.

Thomas Wheeler, Brandon King, and Gloria Smith Morgan for East Cleveland City Council

We were stunned the first time we covered an East Cleveland City Council meeting. It was about six years ago. Eric Brewer was mayor and Gary Norton was council’s president. The hostility between the executive and legislative branches was palpable. Norton subsequently challenged Brewer for mayor, defeated him in 2009. While his administration has begun to address some of the city’s key challenges — vacant and abandoned properties, ending the city’s political isolation, crafting a viable development strategy — one of his principal missteps has been his failure to foster any sort of collegiality with council.

Norton’s landslide victory over Council President Joy Jordan in last month’s Democratic primary means that he will embark upon a second term. The only chance for that term to be successful for the city is for a cleansing of the poisonous attitude that has too long infected City Hall. That is why we believe electing the slate of Wheeler, King and Morgan offers East Cleveland residents the best opportunity to move their city forward. The trio should not be expected to provide automatic support for the mayor’s agenda, but such a wholesale transformation of council is the best bet for moving the city out of its fiscal emergency and towards restoring residents’ confidence in their municipal government.

Mayor of Cleveland

Frank Jackson merits a third term as Cleveland mayor. His fiscal leadership has kept the city on an even keel and permitted him to initiate important developments throughout the city. His no-frills, unromantic leadership style turns a lot of people off but it has on balance produced good results for the city. He has made his share of mistakes and on occasion been too tolerant of mismanagement in key departments. The reality is that running the major city in our region is an enormous task.

Watching Ken Lanci try to make a case to be Cleveland’s next mayor has been an occasion for sadness. Like the energetic David Ali, Lanci’s campaign proves that business success counts for little in politics if you have no real appreciation for how to run a municipal government. Lanci has embraced and apparently taken considerable advice from an assortment of political malcontents and blowhards whose collective influence couldn’t carry a precinct. It gives one pause when trying to imagine what sort of cabinet he would have if the sky fell and he became mayor. It would likely make even diehard Republicans long for the return of the Grdina sisters from the Kucinich adminstration.

Conversations with a candid candidate: RIchmond Heights mayor's race

David Ali, following LWV forum

Dave Ali would make a great neighbor and friend. He cares about his community, whether that is defined as his Richmond Heights neighborhood around Chardon Road, or the Glenville area where he grew up, worked for nearly half a century, and became a successful business owner and financially secure private citizen. He starts most every morning by walking his neighborhood and picking up the litter he attributes to those who hell-bent on turning his town into a ghetto. If you were sick, he would probably come over and cut your grass. If you were broke, he’d probably lend you some money and help you get back on your feet. And his loquacity makes him a fascinating conversational companion. Martin Luther King Jr. stopped by his family store in 1963, and after he sold his business two years ago for several million dollars, he traveled to Saudi Arabia for 23 days in 2012. At age 62, he appears healthy, and radiates physical energy, great pride and a strong work ethic.

Ali announced his candidacy this past spring with no political experience beyond photo opportunities with Cleveland public officials. On the basis of a few random phone calls before the mayoral field was fully formed, he has pronounced himself the frontrunner with a buoyant naïveté that exceeds that of even the most optimistic political novice. With absentee voting already begun, and after several months on the campaign trail, Mr. Ali told us he has no idea of the size of the city budget and no idea how many municipal employees he would be responsible for managing.[1]

Ali sought us out for an interview on October 20, 2013. We spoke on the phone for about an hour and met that afternoon and talked for another two hours or so. He was forthright in all of his assertions, often speaking with intensity, never more so than when disparaging councilwoman at large Miesha Headen, one of his opponents in the race. Headen has called for an investigation [see here and here] into a land deal that Ali has been negotiating with Richmond Heights and county officials to acquire valuable commercial property at Chardon and Richmond roads.

It’s easy to understand Ali’s upset with Headen. She is essentially alleging that Ali is pursuing what would be an unlawful interest in a public contract were he to become mayor. She has further suggested that Ali and mayor Dan Ursu — who is running for reelection against both Ali and Headen, along with Councilwoman Eloise Henry — reached a secret agreement for Ali to enter the race in the expectation that he would attract votes that would likely otherwise go to Henry. Henry, Ali, and Headen are all African American; Ursu is the lone white candidate in the race.

Unsurprisingly, Ali views this as preposterous on several counts. He asserts that he was the first candidate to file officially, discounting that both Henry and Ursu had declared months before Ali expressed interest in the race. [See here and here.] In fact, he says Headen is the one playing racial politics, citing her attendance at a meeting in July with most of the city’s black elected officials, including three school board members and councilman Russell Johnson. [Henry was not invited] Ali says the purpose of the meeting was to drum him out of the race, and that his rejection of the idea was emphatic.

While Ali clearly has little respect for either Ursu or Henry as answers to the city’s crying need for leadership, he reserves his deepest contempt for Headen. And he makes it personal. He repeatedly said, “her husband doesn’t have a job” and would not retreat from this position even when it was pointed out that her husband, Raymond C. Headen, is an attorney in private practice, and former counsel to former Ohio Treasurer Kenneth C. Blackwell. He twice asserted that Headen was running for mayor with the intent to fire the city’s law director and replace him with her husband, though he could cite no evidence for this claim.

Ali leveled other charges against Headen, among the kinder of which was that she is “bipolar and power-hungry”.

Ali described himself to us as “a decent guy who wants to give something back” to his community. He would argue that acquiring and developing the property at Chardon and Richmond roads is a manifestation of that desire. In fact, he is hyper-focused on the redevelopment of Chardon Road, citing the deterioration of the thoroughfare [he lives on Chardon Road], as evidenced by its many abandoned storefronts and the trash he picks up daily. He cites the many commercial vacancies as evidence of how the current mayor and council are “destroying the city” and turning it into “a joke” because, he says, “none of them have any business background.”

Ali, who says that he will be “the people’s mayor”, also distanced himself from Ursu and current council members David Roche, Donald O’Toole, Mark Alexander, and Marcia Starkey Morgan, who he said had mutually resolved “we gotta stick together.”

Ali claims not to see race as a factor in his campaign while simultaneously saying, “America’s biggest problem is race.”

Following the League of Women Voters’ candidate forum on October 16, [see here, here, and here], Ali approached us to denounce Headen’s accusations against him. He had said during the forum that he was planning to invest $500,000 of his own money into the Chardon-Richmond project. When I suggested that would likely be a conflict of interest if he won the election, his immediate response was that his 29 year-old son would buy and renovate the property with his own money. It was that statement, coupled with his insistence that he was misrepresented by his critics, that led us to offer him the opportunity to speak directly to the voters. He did so in this video, recorded October 16, 2013 at the Richmond Heights Middle School.

We made the same offer to each of the mayoral candidates after Ali recorded his message, setting a deadline of last Friday at 5PM. Ursu did not respond; neither did Henry. Headen accepted our offer; we expect to publish her video later this week.

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[1] For the record, the current General Fund budget for Richmond Heights is $7.359 million. The current Total Budget, including all dedicated, special, and other funds, is $14,754 million. The city presently has 54 fulltime employees, including 22 in the police department, and 17 [fire], eight [service], four [building] and three [finance]. Additionally, there are 39 part-time employees. Source: telephone conversation this afternoon with city finance director Paul Ellis.

BULLETIN: ALERT for RICHMOND HEIGHTS Voters!!

A report posted online this morning at Cleveland.com and updated at 10:57AM, which may also appear in today’s Plain Dealer, incorrectly states that four candidates are vying for one open seat on Richmond Heights City Council. That report is both INCORRECT AND INCOMPLETE.

There are four candidates — Carl J. Carter, Juanita Lewis, Donald O'Toole, and Edyta Postolowicz — running for two at large seats on the council. O’Toole is the incumbent. The second at large council position is presently held by Miesha Headen, who is running for mayor. Therefore, voters may choose any two of the four candidates in the nonpartisan race for Council.

NOTE: we will be posting a report on mayoral candidate David Ali this afternoon. Make a note to return here after 4PM to read a profile you won’t want to miss!