By Mansfield Frazier
Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming, way back when the voters of the City of Cleveland changed the Charter, tying the number of city councilpersons to population figures … but without spelling out an exact way to accomplish the task. The reason no such exact method was included in the language is … because it’s impossible to devise such wording, and everyone at the time knew it — so why all of the hue and cry now?
Even back then rumors (and fears) abounded. Whichever ward you went into someone was saying they’d heard that it was “their” ward which would be eliminated when (not “if” but when) the population shrank. It didn’t take being in possession of a crystal ball to figure that one out.
I had a very tough time explaining to a couple of suspicious neighbors that it would be totally impossible to “eliminate” Ward 7 where we reside. “Look,” I said, striving mightily to not sound didactic, “they can’t draw a map that goes from Ward 6 to Ward 8, skipping right over the ward number 7. Now,” I said to them, “I’m not saying where the lines for a new Ward 7 will be, but I’m willing to give 1,000 to 1 odds there will be a ‘7’ somewhere on the new map.” They both looked at me blankly, thoroughly unconvinced of the logic of my argument. I quite simply gave up.
Even someone with the wisdom of Solomon could not have cut Cleveland into 17 new ward pieces that would have satisfied everyone, and while Marty Sweeney has been attempting to cultivate that scraggily grey beard of his for a number of years now, he is nowhere near approaching Old Testament partitioning skills … simply because he was attempting the impossible. There was just no way under the sun that he, or anyone else, was going to redraw ward lines in the City of Cleveland without howls of indignation emanating from some quarters and constituencies.
But now I understand why Sweeney started growing the beard a few years ago: He knew back then that he was going to have to take it on the chin when he released the new ward lines. Smart move, Marty, very smart.
Members of City Council are akin to members of Congress, inasmuch as if they’re taken as a body some folks are not too fond of the entire lot of them. However, ask anyone how they feel in regards to their own representative, and the answer is they are happy, or in some cases extremely happy; it’s always someone else’s representative they don’t like. I think it’s called human nature.
I guess one way Sweeney could have dodged a bullet on this brouhaha was to allow each member of council to draw their own ward lines. Now, with only Jay Westbrook not running for reelection this could have proven problematical since that would have reduced the number only to 18, not the required 17. And no member of the body was going to willing draw themselves out of business, do you think?
Every year in a city in Spain (or it might be in Italy, and I think it has spread to the U.S.) the residents engage in what euphemistically is called a “sporting event” where most of them gather in the town square and have a huge pillow fight. That’s what it would look like in Cleveland if members of Council attempted to draw their own ward boundaries.
But if I were the president of that august body here’s what my own ward would look like. Sure, it resembles a barbell, but how else could I get all the best parts of downtown on the left end of the bell (leaving out that pesky area around the men’s homeless shelter on Lakeside Avenue … who in their right mind would want that in their ward?) plus having all of University Circle, which would include all of the cultural amenities in the bell end on the right? The longitudinal lines would include the main east-west thoroughfares of Carnegie, Euclid and Chester Avenues, so as not to leave out magnificent Playhouse Square and include the newly developing high-tech corridor; hey, I’m nobody’s fool.
That little bump in the center of the bar is how I would include my own home on Hough in my rich and powerful ward. Just in case you’re wondering … I wouldn’t give a tinker’s dam what anyone might think … I personally would like it. And oh, it could be assigned any number from 1 to 17 — wouldn’t matter the least bit to me. As ‘ol Willie Shakespeare wrote: “A rose would be just as sweet by any other name.”
George Forbes, who, years ago virtually single-handedly set up how City Council would operate for decades to come, was once accused by a reporter of doing something to benefit his friends on City Council. His classic response was, “Who the hell do you think I’m going to benefit, my enemies?” Not for nothing is it called by its true name: Politics.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.