Cleveland City Council hopefuls are getting out to meet voters on the city’s newly remixed political map. The new ward lines mean that incumbents must run in new territory, meeting unfamiliar voters while fending off their challengers.
Candidates and residents in Slavic Village took stock of their new political playing field at a forum at the Polish American Cultural Center last week. Moderating the event was Kurt Black, the head of the East 63rd Street block club.
Part of the neighborhood is now in the dumbbell-shaped Ward 3, which runs east to Shaker Square. There, incumbent Deborah Gray faces two challengers, Erich Stubbs and Sharon Spruill.
The southern chunk of the neighborhood is in Ward 2, where Council Member Kevin Bishop is unopposed. And a slice of the neighborhood is in Ward 5, where incumbents Richard Starr and Rebecca Maurer are facing off, along with candidate Beverly Owens-Jackson.
Catch our recap of the forum here. It wasn’t the only one last week. Najee Hall filed this dispatch from the Ward 1 candidate forum.
Cleveland will be flush with forums this election season, and we are trying to get out to as many as we can. Let us know of any upcoming candidate events in your neighborhood.
Rebecca Maurer, Ward 5
Maurer introduced herself as a lawyer with experience at Legal Aid who cares about combatting lead poisoning. She said she has been proud to handle the daily grind of constituent calls about illegal dumping and garbage bin replacements.
She also pointed to her support for improvements to city parks and the Stella Walsh recreation center. Maurer said every park and rec center in the city should be a “crown jewel.”
“They are not right now,” she said. “Every single one of them requires investments. We’ve got this parks and recreation master plan, and frankly it is a really, really long list of stuff that we don’t have money for yet.”
Maurer reminded the audience that she opposed the new ward maps that rearranged Slavic Village’s representation. Asked how to get more young people to vote, Maurer said that the Democratic Party in particular needs to show that it can make a difference in people’s daily lives.
“I will say this about my own party: We have failed at this,” she said. “And local government is the place where we can make it better.”
Beverly Owens-Jackson, Ward 5
Owens-Jackson works at Cuyahoga Community College and has helped her union, the Service Employees International Union Local 1199, negotiate contracts for workers. Earlier in her life, she dealt with addiction and spent time without a home, she said. Now she’s a 20-year homeowner in Central.
This campaign has been “a little bit heartbreaking,” Owens-Jackson said. She described the ward as worse off than it used to be, with more dilapidated houses and fewer neighborhood connections.
“When I walked through Ward 5 and knocked on the doors, my heart was broken,” she said. “I cried with the residents. I had no idea that we were so bad off.”
The ward needs more affordable housing and more places to buy food, Owens-Jackson said. Neighbors may not be able to solve all the ward’s problems, but they can work together on them, she said.
“Something is broken, and it’s going to take all of us to try to figure it out and say, ‘Hey, enough is enough,’” she said, “and hold not only our leaders accountable, but holding everyone accountable.”
Richard Starr, Ward 5
Starr grew up in Central and earned degrees from Baldwin Wallace University. It has always taken a struggle to improve Ward 5, he said. He nodded to his hometown ward’s past council members, including Mayor Frank Jackson and Lonnie Burten.
He described himself as a sleeves-rolled-up kind of council member who welcomes constituent complaints. For a sign of his record, look to the number of streets resurfaced and nuisance properties demolished, he said.
“I’m not the one to tell residents that you’re calling my office too much,” he said. “I’m actually the one that picks up the phone and pulls up to your house and helps you get that city service taken care of.”
Starr was asked how he would deal with property owners who let commercial buildings sit vacant. He said he would keep on top of the Building and Housing Department and community development corporations to deliver a solution.
“You can’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re just writing a policy,’” he said. “You’ve got to get from out of City Hall at times and you’ve got to get in the neighborhood.”
Deborah Gray, Ward 3
A longtime homeowner on the Southeast Side, Gray was elected to council in 2021. She won election after the area’s longtime council member, Ken Johnson, was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to prison time.
When she took office, Gray worked with Cleveland State University to survey residents and map her ward’s strengths and needs, she said.
“After we analyzed that and broke everything down, that’s when the investment started,” she said.
Gray cited a few examples of investments in Southeast Side neighborhoods, including new homes built by CHN Housing Partners.
Asked about building more single-family homes in Slavic Village, Gray said she was new to the neighborhood and wanted to hear what kind of housing residents wanted. Slavic Village hasn’t been part of her ward before.
“First we have to have a conversation,” she said. “We have to build a relationship. We got to find the funding and the contractors and the developers that are going to build the right homes in the neighborhood of Slavic Village.”
Sharon Spruill, Ward 3
Spruill, a Buckeye resident, has worked at local community development corporations. In that work, she saw how seniors struggled to afford repairs on their aging homes, she said.
Residents have told her that one of their big concerns is the glut of abandoned buildings, Spruill said. The owners of those buildings need to be brought to the table, and the city’s new local agent law can help in finding them, she said.
“Because it costs so much to demolish abandoned buildings, we have to try and reimagine what we can do with some of those abandoned buildings and abandoned houses so that we’re not tearing them all down,” she said.
Asked about crime, Spruill said police staffing numbers are uncertain. She said she would convene residents to meet with police and draw up a safety plan.
“We cannot solely depend on the police department in order to do public safety in our area,” she said. “So the one thing that I would want to do is form a coalition, a grassroots coalition, with the residents and concerned citizens in all the neighborhoods that are merged together.”
Erich Stubbs, Ward 3
Stubbs worked for more than a decade at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where he maintained relationships with local mayors and other elected officials, he said. He lives in the Shaker Square area and said he wants to listen to Slavic Village residents.
The two neighborhoods sit at either end of Ward 3. They may be different, but representing both would be like “having two children with different needs,” he said. Slavic Village was part of his territory when he worked for the BOE, he said.
“The Slavic Village area has a lot of opportunity to grow,” he said, while “the Shaker Square area has a lot to learn from the Slavic Village area.”
Stubbs emphasized his experience working with local elected leaders, including Cleveland’s member of Congress. He said that he would also draw on the work of grassroots groups in the ward — particularly if federal federal aid tightens.
“We need folks on the ground to really find out what the needs are, to support their needs,” he said.
