Last July, a coterie of the city’s most formidable power brokers gathered for a topping-off ceremony for the new Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center. It was, in terms of notable moments in the region, a reason for joy.
Here, the Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Bedrock were building a state-of-the-art practice facility, erecting a gleaming new building downtown on the shores of the Cuyahoga River as another member of the city elite was plotting his escape down I-71 to the scenic enclave of Brook Park in a Brinks truck packed with taxpayer cash.
Mayor Justin Bibb rhetorically rose to the meet the moment.
“Cleveland is back,” he proclaimed to applause, smiles, and a shared sense of excitement.
Setting aside the hyperbole, the mayor had every reason to wax enthusiastic about the state of Cleveland. Plans were coming together to finally remake the lakefront. Public safety stats have steadily improved. Investment continued to pour into the east side. Most people seemed to be working together on a better future.
But we’re not here to talk about any of that. We are instead here to recognize those who worked to thwart that progress across Northeast Ohio over the past year. The ones who left us saying, “Cleveland is going backwards.” The nefarious actors, bumbling idiots, self-absorbed morons, inept institutions, depraved ideas, and thieving bastards intent on charting a course toward regression.
This is the Worst of Cleveland. The envelopes please…
Bernie Moreno
It would be apt and easy to simply describe Moreno as a broken gray crayon or a rusted 1995 AC Delco car battery and move along with our day. All three, after all, share identical levels of empathy and intellectual honesty. But, unfortunately for Ohio, the former car dealer with no prior political experience rode the Trump sycophancy wave to become a United States Senator and can now do real damage to the country instead of merely casting about with idle Blockland schemes in between assorted local board meetings.
It wasn’t always this way, you’ll remember. Before Covid, the tech evangelist and entrepreneur was viewed with respect or affection by most and curiosity even by his detractors. He was politically hard to pin down. He was passionate. He was charming. Fast forward four years and he’s now simply a Trumpian clone intent on attacking immigrants, rewriting history, spreading lies, and vilifying the nation’s most vulnerable. Amid the escalating ICE tensions, it’s worth remembering Moreno’s allegiances are clear – “Deport more, much more.” He’s introduced bills to make English the national language and to ban dual citizenships (to make one’s loyalties clear, he claimed). Moreno, in his own words and in his full-throttled support of Trump, advocates for a fundamentally undemocratic country, one governed only by grudges, whims and retribution against enemies where the rule of law, if it exists, only applies to those without power, money, and access.
With that being said, were there a yearbook for the current crop of Senators, he’d be voted Most Likely to Always Have Been Against This some years down the line. Which makes his current views all the more abhorrent.
The City Club
Speaking of Moreno, he was at the center of one of two recent instances in which the venerated City Club of Cleveland once again showed itself to be an organization most chiefly concerned with civility above truth and proximity to power.
By last August, Moreno hadn’t done a town hall since taking office, so the public’s first chance to hear from the Senator first-hand and to lob their own questions came at the City Club. His appearance was met with protests outside and guffaws, chortles, and jeers inside as Moreno spent an hour breathlessly defending Trump on the Big Beautiful Bill, tariffs and other topics that ran contrary to both facts and public sentiment. The crowd reaction so stunned City Club leadership that CEO Dan Moulthrop that he interrupted the affair to say, “I just want to invite everybody to take a couple of deep breaths and recognize that we all came here to hear answers, and we may not be satisfied with those answers, but we’re here to respect civic discourse.” City Club board president Mark Ross doubled down afterward, saying: “I would just off script remind everyone that if we’re going to continue to get speakers like Bernie, like Senator Moreno here tonight, we have to be a little bit more thoughtful in the way we’re acting in the audience.” It was a plea not for civility but for docility. They conveyed that reaction inside the hallowed halls must be curtailed as to limit disagreement. This is a venue for polite nods, even in the face of lies. With the threat that anything else might endanger the chances of having someone else show up and fear something approaching – god forbid – pushback on their views. Which the City Club would frame as a loss for the public but in reality, would just be a loss for them.
It wasn’t long before the City Club stepped in it again. In January, it hosted Aaron Bear, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a virulently ant-LGBTQ group. The City Club had invited Baer because of the growing and outsized role CCV is playing in state politics. It did so, it said, in line with its mission to convene open dialogue on the topics that matter most, to go beyond the headlines and video clips and quotes to better understand the world we live in, especially when it comes to some topics with which some people disagree. Here, as it did in 2017 when it hosted fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the City Club acted as though it had to host Baer. That in order to defend the first amendment and continue to be the citadel of free speech, it absolutely was under an obligation to invite someone to tell an audience that transgender people don’t exist. The first amendment exists to protect people from the government infringing on their rights. The City Club, meanwhile, doesn’t exist as a stress test on that amendment — its own policy, in fact, prohibits bigotry, and it has vague, undetermined limits on who they haul out to Cleveland for a marquee moment. It chooses to feature and platform who it wants. And it chose to do so here, even as myriad advocacy groups warned of the harm it would cause with no upside. CCV isn’t hurting for access, after all. It is, however, hunting for legitimacy for its brand of hate on a broader scale. Kudos, City Club. You gave it to them.
The Black Keys
Akron’s hometown boys had a rough go of it in 2024. After announcing a tour backing the duo’s International Players album, the band quickly canceled the entirety of the run due to lackluster ticket sales. The band’s management team in Irving Azoff and Steve Moir made some grave mistakes in booking venues far larger than demand existed at the time, and the Nashville-based group quickly parted ways with them in the aftermath of the debacle. Not Dan and Pat’s fault. Still churning out halfway decent fare most of the time. How would they rebound? By playing a hometown concert? Great plan. By playing a hometown concert sponsored by a shady crypto PAC intent on unseating Democrats across the state in favor of Republicans happy to rubberstamp loose crypto regulations alongside whatever other hellish policies they campaigned on? Not great.
The Urban Agenda
Remember when a who’s who of Cleveland leaders gathered to sign a ceremonial memorandum of understanding promising to bring collective action from 16 non-profits and public entities to address economic mobility and the related racial disparities that have mired many Clevelanders in systemic poverty? You’d be forgiven for forgetting, as it happened nine months ago and the “unprecedented” and possibly “Nobel Peace Prize-winning” collaboration had achieved nothing at that point to merit a ceremonial anything (unless you count saying “poverty is bad” as an accomplishment) and has apparently done nothing in the interim except create a dashboard of widely available stats on those topics. Cleveland loves a summit. Cleveland is also eagerly awaiting the next one where the Urban Agenda group shares any concrete updates, including if it has in fact solved poverty. Fingers crossed, guys!
The Greater Cleveland Partnership
GCP’s relationship to Cleveland, and specifically working Clevelanders, has been tenuous at best for some time now. The chamber of commerce has long since set its eyes and priorities on the suburbs and the businessmen and women who prefer those enclaves to what they see as the perilous streets of the city. Two years ago, as just one example, it vigorously opposed codified community benefits agreements for developers working in Cleveland that receive taxpayer benefits. Just your basic, run-of-the-mill, widely derided horseshit that brought disparate groups together to shake their heads (you know things are seriously fucked when even Scene and Dave Wondolowski agree on something).
Things came to a head this year, however, thanks to the Browns. In May, GCP’s executive committee voted to endorse the Haslams’ plan to move the team to a new dome in Brook Park after purportedly “studying” the issue for months and coming to the conclusion it would draw two or three times more events as a downtown stadium. It was, according to Mayor Justin Bibb and Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who both severed all ties with GCP following the news, a clear abdication of GCP’s relationship with the city.
But it was former councilman Kerry McCormack who put it most honestly and succinctly, saying, ““It is the worst-kept secret in town that GCP’s leadership is disinterested in the work of revitalizing our region’s core. There should be a change of leadership at this increasingly irrelevant organization or an acknowledgment that they are here to represent the interests of only the ultra-wealthy. Clevelanders deserve a chamber of commerce with a backbone that champions the urban core.” Hear, hear, Kerry. It almost makes us forgive you for going to work for Flock.
Ideastream & Cleveland State University
Anytime you have a chance to take beloved college radio station and turn it into a 24/7 jazz platform while pissing off students, the community, donors and people who rarely pay attention to the news, you simply have to do it. That’s apparently what Ideastream and Cleveland State University believe as they worked in secret for months to kill WCSB in exchange for… checks notes… a board seat for CSU president Laura Bloomberg and some on-air promo spots. Good stuff. Totally worth it. Beyond the obvious, it’s galling that neither side seemed prepared for the backlash or compassionate enough to give the station’s talent a runway to say goodbye. In a world of corporate overlords and algorithms, DJs – real honest to god human beings – sharing what they love and why across a diverse spectrum of music is something to be treasured, protected, and preserved. For Ideastream and CSU, WCSB was instead something to thoughtlessly cast off and cut the cord on, another significant cut to culture and history in Cleveland made possible by some of the least curious and interesting people around.
John Williams, the Billboard Guy
Few have brought the entire city together in recent memory like John Williams, the ubiquitous and tone-deaf real estate dude who erected crass, offensive and racist billboards across the city last summer. “I Buy Crack Houses” was the worst of the bunch, though references to trash houses, divorce and more littered the city from east to west. Obstinately defiant against claims that he was a predatory investor, Williams nevertheless seems to have abandoned his billboard campaign shortly after widespread community backlash. In a city still attempting to claw out a housing crisis still plagued by out-of-state investors and absentee landlords, Williams was the last thing anyone wanted or needed.
Joe Jones
The councilman isn’t in jail, so compared to the likes of Ken Johnson and Basheer Jones, he’s not the worst we’ve seen in recent eras. But Jones did become the first Cleveland City Councilperson censured by his colleagues in the body in 50 years after string of allegations, found credible by outside investigations, that included Jones threatening to kill a council employee, touching the breast of another, making uncomfortable remarks to a female artist, and using angry, abusive language. Council President Blaine Griffin said Jones, through those actions, violated Council policies on sexual harassment and workplace violence. His “sustained pattern of inappropriate and unprofessional behavior “necessitated the escalating punishments, including stepping down from his committee assignments. This being City Council, none of it really mattered and Jones went on to easily win reelection in the new Ward 1. The “dignity and integrity” of Council remains intact as ever.
Honorable mentions: Cleveland Cliffs. Power-hungry suburban mayors not named Kahlil Seren. Cleveland Public Power. Chris Quinn’s AI columns. Ridge Road. Self-checkout kiosks. Max Miller. Concertgoers who, after all these years of complaints, still won’t shut their mouths at shows. Local influencers “discovering” hidden gems like the West Side Market, Velvet Tango Room, etc.
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