Mayor Justin Bibb won his job on a pitch to bring “bold, dynamic, visionary” leadership to an old-school City Hall. 

Four years later, as he runs for a second term, he has to sell Clevelanders on something less romantic: a compromise with Browns ownership letting the team move to Brook Park in exchange for $100 million. 

Bibb has set big plans in motion. The city created a tax financing district to support development on the riverfront and lakefront. Bibb and City Council set up a $50 million fund to redevelop old industrial sites and slated more than $100 million for new housing. (More big, if difficult, decisions are looming. Cleveland’s school district, which is under mayoral control, is expected to announce school closures soon.)

But the Browns deal showed the limits of what City Hall can do. If Bibb learned a lesson from his negotiations with team owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam, it was this:

“You got to be agile and adapt,” the mayor told Signal Cleveland. “I did not predict all the significant moves that we saw from the state that would undermine our ability to keep the Browns downtown.” 

On Nov. 4, voters will render their judgment on Bibb, who has adapted in other ways during his four years as mayor. He faces challenger Laverne Gore in this year’s election, but with no debates, there hasn’t been much of a showdown. 

Bibb spoke with Signal Cleveland recently about what’s changed between his first run for office in 2021 and his second bid this year. 

Taking another look at police oversight

Bibb has adapted his approach to one of the key issues of his mayoral race four years ago, civilian oversight of police.

As a candidate in 2021, he threw his support behind the Issue 24 charter amendment, which passed. The measure gave new powers to the Community Police Commission and Police Review Board, two police oversight bodies. In subsequent years, the mayor and police commission have butted heads over access to records. 

Now Bibb is getting closer to shaking up the police oversight system that he endorsed four years ago. He said an announcement may be coming “relatively soon” about what those changes could entail. 

“It’s really about how do we make sure all of these regulatory bodies can work more seamlessly,” he said. “I think right now we almost have too many internally at City Hall and externally with the CPC, and sometimes that creates a lot of conflict, a lot of confusion and almost too much red tape, which undermines the core mission of what they were enacted to do.”

Bibb argued that the city has made progress under the consent decree, the 10-year-old settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to overhaul police policy, training and practices. The city and the consent decree monitor have disagreed over the scope and measurement of that progress. 

The former monitor, Karl Racine, resigned this year, citing the city’s “aggressive litigation posture.” The new monitor recently said the city was taking more steps toward fulfilling the decree. 

“There’s still more work to do to give the police department and the safety command staff the autonomy we need — obviously with the right oversight — but the autonomy we need to improve morale, rebuild trust and move the division forward,” Bibb said. 

Bibb’s opponent in 2021, Kevin Kelley, accused him of effectively trying to defund the police by endorsing Issue 24, which tied police commission and review board spending to the overall police budget. 

As mayor, Bibb’s spending on police has ticked up. The city spent $211 million in the mayor’s first year on the job and $231 million last year.

He raised police pay to try to stem the exodus of officers from the city. There are 1,157 officers on the force, plus 78 recruits. At the end of 2024, the number of officers stood at 1,142.

‘To go fast…you got to slow down’

If Bibb could redo any decision from the last four years, what would it be? 

The move to curtail unbagged curbside leaf pickup, he said. In about a third of the city, residents can sweep leaves to their tree lawns for pickup without having to bag them. 

Bibb abruptly ended that service in his first year in office on the grounds that it wasn’t citywide. After immediate blowback, he reversed his decision. 

“The biggest lesson I learned was, No. 1, in order to go fast, you — sometimes you got to slow down,” he said. “You got to listen more to council, listen more to residents, listen more to your team. And you can’t make decisions in a vacuum.”

It was a politically safe answer, but one that still illustrated a willingness in his administration to go out on a limb.

Take the Browns deal. After months of negotiations, litigation and back-and-forth between lawyers, Bibb said he met with Jimmy Haslam to hash out an agreement on his own. 

“I kept it under the wraps,” he told reporters recently. “My team didn’t know. I was the only one who knew.”

When gunfire broke out in the Flats in September, Bibb swiftly ordered the shutdown of Play Bar. “If we get sued, we get sued,” he wrote in text messages with aides obtained by News5 Cleveland. The bar owner is suing. 

Asked about the text at a recent news conference, Bibb said he didn’t regret sending it. 

“When I took my oath of office on Jan. 3 of 2022, I made a vow to do everything I can to protect the residents of this great city in terms of safety and security,” he said. 

Hot and cold with Cleveland City Council

Bibb and Cleveland City Council work together — and they quarrel, typically about informing and including council in decisions. Council members question, at times amend but ultimately pass much of what the mayor’s administration wants to do. At the same time, there’s discontent about Bibb’s absences from council meetings. 

Asked about the mayor’s relationship with council, Council President Blaine Griffin preferred to talk about business. He’s focused on car break-ins and the federal government shutdown’s impact on food aid, he said. 

And don’t forget about council’s role in Bibb’s big-ticket initiatives that won the praise of the Plain Dealer’s editorial board, such as the lakefront tax district and rebuilding of the airport. 

“Other publications, and I’ll leave them nameless for right now, have lauded his developments and improvements and considered certain things that he has done a success,” he said. “And none of that would have happened without Blaine Griffin as council president and Cleveland City Council.”

Griffin talked through what sounded like a to-do list for the mayor and council: dealing with lead paint and nuisance crimes, stabilizing Cleveland Public Power. 

The council president is running unopposed for reelection after deciding not to challenge the mayor this year. Can Bibb count on his vote? Griffin answered with a riddle.

“All I would say to you is that he hasn’t done anything to make me not vote for him,” he said.

Adapting to the Trump era

When Bibb ran four years ago, the political pendulum was swinging to the left. President Joe Biden had just taken office, and candidates debated how to spend Cleveland’s $512 million in federal stimulus money. 

Bibb spent his first few years as mayor as a frequent traveler, building relationships in Biden’s Washington, D.C. Now he is running for reelection in the second administration of President Donald Trump, who improved his electoral performance even in Democratic cities such as Cleveland. 

Initially after Trump won, Bibb emphasized areas where he could work with the new administration. Since then, the mayor has added his voice to the national conversation about how Democrats can push back on Trump. 

He opposes the idea of deploying the National Guard to cities. As president of the Democratic Mayors Association, he urged fellow mayors to adopt a “serious-on-safety” message to counteract Trump’s rhetoric on crime. 

Bibb still travels and talks national politics, although those trips can be difficult to track. (The mayor hasn’t released a public calendar since March.) 

What do voters want in this new political moment? 

“They want more investments in safety, and they want more investments to address our housing affordability crisis,” Bibb said. 

They’re also worried about federal cuts, he added. 

“If we see a destruction of the social safety net because of these cuts in the federal government,” he said, “Clevelanders and myself as mayor, we’re going to see the front lines of those effects.”