Cleveland City Council members routinely tee off on how mayoral administrations run city services and spend money. But only once a year do they get the chance to swing their golf clubs at the mayor himself.
That day is Tuesday, when Mayor Justin Bibb will formally present his budget to council. The mayor will face questions about how he is allocating city money. He’ll also have to listen politely when members use him as a foil for their stemwinder speeches.
Here are some issues that have grabbed council’s attention in the past:
Vacancies in the city workforce are a favorite sand trap at budget hearings. The vacant jobs on the police force and in the Building and Housing Department have especially attracted council’s attention.
Another well-worn divot on the political fairway is the West Side Market. Although Cleveland has turned the historic Ohio City market over to a nonprofit operator, it’s not off City Hall’s dime yet.
Bibb is proposing a $769,572 subsidy to the market from the city’s General Fund, which pays for basic city services. The money is not much of a surprise. City Hall expected it would keep paying $700,000 annually for market operations as the building undergoes millions in publicly funded repairs and improvements.
But in recent years, council members have vented their frustration about balancing the city-owned market’s financial needs with those of their neighborhoods. Even so, council helped Bibb deliver on his 2021 campaign promise to bring in a nonprofit to run the venue.
One more item to watch in the mayor’s budget: EMS staffing. Tim Sommerfelt, a Cleveland EMS union official, asked City Council this week to add 11 more jobs to the division’s 304-person head count.
“We can’t do it alone,” he said during the public comment session at Monday night’s meeting. “We need the help of this body.”
As Sommerfelt spoke, Bibb opened a folder at his desk in council chambers and wrote a note.
Discovered by Documenters: Into the Ethics-Verse
Cleveland Chief Ethics Officer Delanté Spencer Thomas responded to 223 ethics inquiries and prevented 83 “acts of misconduct” in 2023.
That’s the word from a presentation the Law Department gave to City Council earlier this month, as recorded by Documenter Anna Truax. The issues Thomas reviewed included gifts, conflicts of interest and political activity.
What does it mean to prevent an act of misconduct? The presentation did not say whether Thomas simply advised 83 employees against doing something – or whether, Spiderman-like, he arrived like a streak of light just in time to stop the misuse of city resources.
