Gloria Ferris

I was not for the reduction of our city council.  Many city residents have grown accustomed, over the years,  to using their councilperson as an ombudsman or as the liaison to city departments; economically challenging times are not times in which to change the rules without having an alternative in place.  Having said that, I realize that a majority of our city’s voters did not agree with me, and now here we find ourselves with the task of reducing council.

Why not take a page from  corporate playbooks and begin the reduction with attrition?  Why not suggest that the two longest serving councilpeople "take one for the team" and offer to retire?  With a cursory inspection I found that Jay Westbrook in Ward 18 and Ken Johnson in Ward 4 would be the elder statesmen asked to start the process.  With the elimination of these two wards, one from the east and one from the west,  the magic number of 19 wards is achieved.

Then, starting with the outside edges of the city,  the block-by- block census figures could be used to reach the magic number of 22,500 per ward.  A free-flowing parabolic construct could be used so that topography, historic municipalities and neighborhoods could be considered.  In fact, the "scorpion’s tail" of Ward 19 could be eliminated; Ohio City could be nestled in one ward, and no ward would need to straddle the river.  The Asian and Hispanic communities would remain intact as well.

Contiguous neighborhoods could remain strategic partners.  Streets would no longer be ward boundaries.  Neighborhoods would no longer be fragmented. Cohesiveness, economies of scale, efficiency, and transparency, all combined, would be the order of the day.  In fact, to avoid having to do this again  in another two years, two more elder statesmen could be asked to step down, Mike Polensek, Ward 11, and Roosevelt Coats, Ward 10.  Asking this, and obtaining compliance with our wishes,  would probably put us at a more realistic population number than the 427,500 presently postulated in the proposed ward-reduction plan.

The true beauty of this plan is that the team players who voluntarily stepped down could decide to retire, repurpose their lives, or run for one of the remaining ward slots. Given their status as elder statesmen, they would already have name recognition, their legislative record would stand behind them, and their campaign expertise would serve them well.  Redrawing the precincts and wards will also give newcomers the opportunity to run for office, allowing the expansion of the dialogue.  For the first time in years, the voters in Cleveland  could elect effective leadership from a wealth of well-qualified candidates.

(This map is not my work product–I got it at the city meeting at the Jones Home last Wednesday.)