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.

Miesha Headen sees potential of a model Richmond Heights

 [Disclosure: I’ve known Miesha Headen for about 20 years. We have worked together on a couple of professional and civic endeavors but we’ve never socialized. I have known her husband Raymond even longer, pretty much on the same basis. I consider them friends.]

NOTE: we had hoped to offer a short video of Headen similar to the opportunity provided David Ali, but were thwarted by technical issues.

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Miesha Headen is both a policy wonk and a serious politician. She is an auditor, trained to follow and account for the money. She likes to analyze an issue or problem, formulate a plan to deal with it, implement the solution, and then reassess. This is a process she follows so invariably that it's become part of her character. Who she is is what she does. What she does is who she is. WYSIWYG. [1]

So my first questions to her when we sat down over coffee recently were put simultaneously: when did she decide to run for mayor of Richmond Heights, and why. The first question gave her more pause, because she could not pinpoint a defining moment. In struggling to answer the "when", out tumbled all the "whys".

The Headens moved to Richmond Heights in 2002. They both had grown up locally in stable households, gone away to school [Columbia for her; Williams College, Penn Law, and London School of Economics for him] before returning home to northeast Ohio and planting new roots.

Like many professional couples, they were impressed by the city’s solid housing stock, and an apparent safe, open and tranquil character that augured well for starting and raising a family that now includes two boys, ages 9 and 6.

Over time, as she was acquiring a master’s degree in finance from Ursuline College [with a concentration in socially responsible leadership], Headen’s auditing eye began to detect some red flags in her sleepy suburban community. These included a succession of failed school levies [the number would grow to seven before one finally passed]; a good old-boy network of long-term residents [albeit one with a few women members, perhaps grand-mothered in]; questionable public finance decisions, and changing city demographics to which elected officials and others of influence seemed ignorant or indifferent, if not hostile. And all of this seemed strangely blanketed in the community that comforted itself as being “The City with the Forward Look”.

Off the sidelines and into the fray

Headen decided in 2009 to become part of the solution. In straightforward fashion, she ran for an at large seat on city council. She won [for how, see here] and pretty quickly began to make waves that afflicted the comfort of the city’s entrenched and shadowy governing circle. She started a blog, aptly named Absolutely At-Large, began digging into the city’s finances and uncovering its loose and extravagant financial practices.

Her auditing skills paid off: she discovered that the city had not completed a bank reconciliation of the city’s books in at least ten years. This led to the state’s auditors coming in to examine the city’s books, and to the startling discovery that the city’s finance director had made a double-booking error in excess of a quarter-million dollars. [She later resigned under pressure.]

At Headen’s insistence, the city now acknowledges on its website the nearly forty land parcels the city has acquired under the Ursu administration. She is especially upset with what she sees as Ursu’s pet project, the purchase and maintenance of Greenwood Farms.

Headen’s energy seems to have inspired a number of other Richmond Heights residents to become more engaged in the civic process. A school board that housed a viper’s nest of socially and financially irresponsible members has been largely swept clean and replaced with a more thoughtful and less hysterical majority. And city council itself is flexing, in both in membership and style, towards a new openness. At a League of Women Voters candidate forum earlier this month, all four council candidates, including the incumbent Donald O’Toole, affirmatively responded to the idea of “streaming video of all public meetings so residents could be better informed”.

Tension surfaces as allegations fly

Headen's insistence on financial responsibility and accountability, and transparency, while producing results, have understandably not endeared her to all of her colleagues in city government or her rivals in this year’s mayoral contest. It is probably fair to say that she is the least favorite opponent of each of the other three candidates. The mayor, whom she regularly challenges on policy matters, has accused Headen of “smearing other candidates.”

Another candidate, Dave Ali, grows almost apoplectic when discussing Headen, calling her “racist” and saying, in reference to a June powwow of some black elected officials, that she formed a group to “intimidate” him into dropping out of the mayor’s race.

Headen and others say that the meeting Ali cites was an exploratory meeting designed to get to know Ali and assess his viability as a potential challenger to the six-term incumbent.[2] When it became apparent in their view in the first ten minutes of the meeting that the scope of the job was not a fit for Ali’s skill set [i.e., he was in their view, grossly unqualified to be mayor], they encouraged him to run for city council. He refused and filed his mayoral petitions as soon as the law allowed.

Speaking of law, what really frosted Ali were Headen’s allegations that he and Ursu are in cahoots over a potentially lucrative deal involving public land and public grants. [You can read about this here, here, and here.] Headen may have the last word on this however, as she posted this response from the Ohio Ethics Commission on Monday. As of yesterday, the State Auditor’s Special Audit Task Force had forwarded Headen’s complaint about the land deal to both the State Auditor’s Northeast audit region and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for further consideration.

Headen looks ahead 

Personal questions and conflict of interest allegations tend to overshadow the question of what Headen would do as mayor, and the questions posed at the beginning of our conversation. She says that she’s running to continue to “change the culture” of city government, to make it more accountable, transparent, efficient and open. She wants to modernize the city’s commercial districts, which she says are “crumbling”, and beef up enforcement of the city’s occupancy codes to deal with absentee landlords of both commercial and residential properties. She staunchly supports the reinstitution of various city services, including such recreational facilities as the city swimming pool and ball fields, which she notes are important to attracting home buying families.

Headen said there is an “urgency for new leadership” to accomplish these goals and others. It was only in mid-summer, after the meeting with Ali and her assessment of the other candidates, that she decided, in consultation with many constituents, that she was best equipped to address that urgency.

Headen sees herself as qualified by profession, study, and strength of character to help “lead Richmond Heights into the 21^st century”. She promises to recruit an “expert team” that includes many current Richmond Heights residents and reflects more closely the diversity that already exists.

She notes that in a city that is 57% female and that has become home to thousands of new residents since 2000, all fifteen of Ursu’s appointments to the vital governing boards — Planning, Civil Service, and Zoning and Appeals — are males who have lived in Richmond Heights for decades.

Headen sees bright possibilities for her city. Ursu, she says, “no longer sees a better world. … I want to make Richmond Heights a model community. I would love to be the community that shows how to get it right!”

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[1] What You See Is What You Get [“Wizzy-Wig”]

[2] This meeting included four members of the Board of Education and councilman Russell Johnson, in addition to Headen. Councilwoman Eloise Henry, who had already declared that she was running against Ursu, was not invited and did not attend. Although four school board members were in attendance, no sunshine laws were violated because school business was not discussed, according to those board members with whom we have spoken.

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!