Signal Cleveland’s Power Rankings is a weekly roundup of the people, places and things wielding their power, for better or worse, in Greater Cleveland. Last week, City Council, Guardians and a young entrepreneur made the cut.
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1. Mayor Justin Bibb
Signing day: The mayor held a presidential-style signing ceremony for an executive order regarding construction permitting. Is that silly? Pretentious? Or actually a clever way to call attention to the often mundane but important work of government?
2. Wren Collective
Friends and family plan with free surveillance: The criminal justice policy reform group called attention to the problems with Cuyahoga County Jail’s virtual-only visiting policy. For example: some virtual visits aren’t free and none are private. (County prosecutors can access phone calls, video visits and mail sent to the jail.) So far the county’s concern seems virtual too?
3. The Buckeye Flame
Deserved: The LGBTQ+ news and culture web site has much to celebrate. Cleveland-based staff writer H.L. Comeriato just won the prestigious Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for the LGBTQ+ Journalist of the Year, presented by the National Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists; the team recently welcomed reporter Ben Jodway, who will cover rural LGBTQ+ communities across the state (the first such beat in the nation); and editor Ken Schneck (a previous LGBTQ+ Journalist of the Year) is about to open the staff’s first brick-and-mortar office. Signal Cleveland is proud to be partners with Schneck’s “scrappy little queer newsroom.”
4. Family of Vincent Belmonte
“Life doesn’t stop”: Three years after he was fatally shot by an East Cleveland police officer, siblings shared their stories as they healed while grieving and celebrating him. His sister Diamond’s quote at the end is the most heartbreaking yet uplifting thing you will read today.
5. Maltz Museum
Looking so long at these pictures of you: The Jewish-American heritage museum is hosting the exhibit “Love Makes a Family: Portraits of LGBTQ+ People and Their Families,” a well-timed dose of joy and love in a tumultuous summer.
6. Ohio Supreme Court
Bone shrugs and priorities: The court rules that boneless chicken wings can legally contain bones. The decision’s reasoning goes something like this:
- everyone knows that chickens have bones;
- everyone knows that “wings” aren’t really wings;
- therefore, everyone should know that a boneless “wing” might have a bone.
Got that? Oh, and because this bone was more than an inch long (!), the plaintiff “as matter of law … reasonably could have guarded against it.” And thus the Know Fowl, No Harm doctrine was born.