From Henry Gomez’s PD article:
Council consultants favor a plan that would combine a tiny piece of the West Side ward that Brian Cummins now lives in and represents with a much larger portion of the ward now led by Joe Santiago. That would set up a potential showdown between the two in this year’s elections.
Councilman Joe Santiago could find himself in a race this year against colleague Brian Cummins.
Ward lines are being redrawn to eliminate two of 21 council seats, meaning wards like Cummins’ and Santiago’s will be sliced, diced and merged with others. Cleveland voters approved the population-based downsizing last November by passing a city charter amendment.
The plan that consultants shared with Cummins this week would strip the Ward 15 councilman of most of his political base. The charter does not require him to live in the ward he represents, but Cummins’ only other logical option would be to run against another neighboring incumbent.
“They’re only leaving me with a quarter of my ward, the area where I live,” Cummins said Friday afternoon, a day after being shown a map of what his new ward would look like. “Three-quarters of the ward is now in Ward 14.”
Strangely, Henry doesn’t mention that back in July, during the Charter Review process, Brian was Council’s most outspoken advocate of fewer ward Councilmen and bigger wards. My Councilman came to the Commission and asked us to recommend the elimination of at least six of the city’s 21 wards… instead of tying the number of wards to a number of residents, as Council President Sweeney had proposed. Brian got lots of ink from Henry for his effort, and even a PD editorial in his honor.
When we were at the Charter Review table, I asked Brian to explain how he thought a bigger ward would improve his ability to serve our neighborhood. I didn’t really get an answer. But what I really wanted to ask — and should have asked — was why he was so hot to get Ward 15 and his job eliminated, because that was the obvious inevitable consequence of his proposal.
Well, what we got — courtesy of City Council, the Plain Dealer and 60% of Cleveland voters — is a reduction to nineteen wards. (I’m not saying “courtesy of the Charter Review Commission”, because we didn’t recommend making it happen this year. And it probably should be seventeen, but since there’s no real data to base either figure on, who the hell knows?) So the absolutely predictable deal is now going down: Lose one ward on each side of town, ward lines pushed toward the west and south, Council Members scrambling for some rationale to keep “their” voters and stay in their current homes, activists and neighborhood groups starting to jump up and down for vague and contradictory reasons.
And my Councilman is shocked — shocked — that he might lose three-quarters of “his” ward and have to run against the Councilman whose existing (”Hispanic”) ward ends six blocks to the north of my Councilman’s house.
Be careful what you wish for. You’ll probably get it.
P.S. I guess I should say one obvious thing for the record:
Council President Sweeney, Councilman Kelley and Council in general are doing neither themselves nor the city a favor by keeping the Triad proposal, and the CSU population estimates behind it, under wraps. Council is required to act on new ward lines by April 1. That’s three and a half weeks from today.
Whatever work product Triad and its consulting partners have submitted to City Council needs to be put on public display and made available to the media right now.
By “right now”, I mean no later than 9 am this Monday morning.
I don’t think it should be necessary — in a democracy where the government’s business is the public’s business — to explain why.
Update 3/8:In a comment at RealNEO, Councilman Cummins points out that he ended up voting “No” on the final legislation to put the ward reduction charter amendment on the November ballot, and that his proposals to the Charter Commission included more than just reducing the city’s wards — e.g. he advocated adding at-large Council members. Fair enough.
