The private meeting held recently by newly elected Cuyahoga County Council Democrats sounded alarm bells to fans of trustworthy government. It also earned the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which served up one of its patented glowering press releases last week.
“It is deeply disappointing that County Council has opted to begin their term with more secrecy,” ACLU Ohio director James Hardiman says in the release. “The passage of county reform was supposed to herald in a new era of government different from ‘politics as usual,’ but nearly every facet of the transition process continues to be compromised by the same problems that plagued previous administrations.”
If there’s concern over charting a fresh new course of corruption, a swell time to speak up might have been when the new charter was penned in secrecy. To this day, nobody knows — or nobody’s talking about — who laid the groundwork of Cuyahoga’s reform, where or when it all went down, and who paid for the hookers.
“Maybe we should be looking into that,” says Hardiman. “It’s definitely a concern."
