More than 300 members of Greater Cleveland Congregations gathered at Elizabeth Baptist Church for a political action Tuesday evening, and strategy team member Rev. James Crews set the tone early.
“Tonight is big, it’s big, it’s a big night!” he declared, and encouraged the crowd to applaud. He was referring in part to GCC’s political successes over the past two years, and Mayor Justin Bibb’s role in them. But he also was warming the congregation up for the focus of the event, organizing for the 2024 election cycle.
“Tonight is big,”’ he repeated. “It’s about recognition. Challenges. And a push for what’s needed … This action is about our city, our county, and our state and the fight for our democracy.”
The fight against Ohio gerrymandering
Few speakers even mentioned the upcoming primary or general elections. The first goal is more immediate. Scott Lafferty of Forest Hill Presbyterian Church challenged the crowd to participate in gathering at least 20,000 signatures to help get the Citizens Not Politicians constitutional amendment on the ballot in November. The amendment is intended to stop gerrymandering by removing politicians and lobbyists from the process of drawing new district boundaries.
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing boundaries in ways that benefit one party over another. You can read more about it here.
Getting the amendment on the ballot will require thousands of signatures from registered voters in at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties. (The Citizens Not Politicians campaign will need 110,000 signatures from Cuyahoga County alone, according to GCC senior organizer Khalilah Worley Billy.)
To accomplish the goal, GCC hired Molly Martin, who recently helped lead the unsuccessful effort to bring participatory budgeting to Cleveland. Martin will train volunteers for signature gathering.
“Let’s go GCC!” Lafferty called out as he closed his remarks. “We have work to do!”
‘The essence of trickeration’
Greater Cleveland Congregations has experience engaging voters around issues like school levies and criminal justice reform. The coalition’s Battle for Democracy, a 10-year voter engagement campaign that GCC launched in 2021, combines relational organizing — one-on-one relationship building — with sophisticated data collection and analysis. The effort is supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit organization that supports efforts “to solve our planet’s most pressing problems.”
At Tuesday’s event, several speakers explained why gerrymandering deserves so much of the group’s attention.
Mimi Plevin Foust of Kol HaLev: Cleveland’s Reconstructionist Jewish Community recalled testifying for stricter gun laws in Columbus a few years ago. Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, she said, never once looked up at the speakers during a six-hour hearing.
“Why didn’t they even pretend to care? Because Ohio is gerrymandered,” she said. She added that Huffman later told a reporter that thanks to Republicans’ supermajorities in the state Senate and House of Representatives, “We can kind of do what we want.”
Sharnell Woods of Antioch Baptist Church said that “gerrymandering is so dangerous because it’s the essence of what a friend calls ‘trickeration.’ It’s a backdoor threat to democracy. Because on the surface, everything looks OK. You can still vote. But what gerrymandering does is scary. It sets the stage for people to continually be in power to the point where they rule with no accountability.”
Thanking Mayor Bibb and asking for more
Other parts of the event were devoted to highlighting Greater Cleveland Congregations” accomplishment during Mayor Bibb’s first two years in office, and setting the agenda for the next two years. Leaders of GCC’s Cleveland Neighbors Now program — representing Central, Fairfax, Lee-Harvard, Mt. Pleasant and Slavic Village — met with Bibb quarterly.
Accomplishments included re-opening Gassaway Pool in Fairfax; community-led conversations on future use of Gracemount lot in Lee-Harvard; and Bibb following through on a campaign promise to join the National Gun Safety Consortium.
GCC’s new asks for Bibb included meeting with the organization’s youth leaders within 90 days to brainstorm solutions to the lack of career-track opportunities for young Clevelanders; meeting with Central community leaders to discuss development there; and briefing GCC’s leadership on the plan to earmark property tax revenue for downtown waterfront development in the “Shore to Core to Shore” Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district.
Bibb agreed to all three requests. He also made a pitch for the TIF district.
“For far too long, we have had a conversation about downtown vs. the neighborhoods,” Bibb said. “I believe we are one city. The core of our city, our central business district, is responsible for nearly 70% of the general revenue fund dollars that fund all city services. If we continue to have a conversation about managing decline, we will continue to lose population and lose jobs.”
He added that Pittsburgh, Nashville and Detroit “made big bets to turn their economies around” through waterfront development. “Now is the time [for Cleveland] to make that big bold bet.”
The signature campaign gets under way
People who want to help collect signatures for the Citizens Not Politicians amendment can join one of Martin’s training sessions on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 6-7 p.m., or Saturday, Feb. 10, 10-11 a.m., at GCC’s office in The Dealership, 3558 Lee Rd., Shaker Heights.
To sign the petition, see this list of dates and locations.
