“Our job is to find truth, based on evidence, and publish it,” Ohio Auditor of State Dave Yost posted to his Facebook page Wednesday morning. “There are many things I believe to be true that I cannot prove. Without proof it doesn’t go into an audit report.”
Yost was likely responding to comments by the City of Beachwood’s Law Director Brian Reali suggesting that Yost could not prove the facts in his 2013 audit of Beachwood, released yesterday.
That audit found that Mayor Merle Gorden collected $900 in illegal wedding fees and received illegal travel reimbursements in 2013. (The only surprise here is that it took so long for an auditor to actually label Gorden’s activities illegal, which they’ve long been).
Beachwood officials pouted and cried foul, and Reali kicked the beehive when he said the audit wouldn’t withstand a legal challenge.
Yost disagreed: “When we publish a report, it means that we have the facts — and we’re ready to defend it in court if we need to,” he wrote.
Sensing which way the wind was blowing perhaps, Gorden decided to pay back the city $2,800 earlier this month, to cover portions of 2013’s illegal activity. Reali hinted that Gorden was saving the city big money by not engaging in a costly legal battle with the state.
But the NEOMG’s Mark Naymik says Gorden ought to pay back a lot more. Both Naymik and WKYC’s Tom Meyer reported that Gorden’s been collecting wedding fees totaling more than $9,000 since 2007. And in 2014, while Yost was working on the 2013 audit report, Gorden collected $1,725. (Trivia tidbit: The city charged a $125 fee for weddings, but enforced a kind of surge pricing model: on weekends, the fee was doubled to $250).
Beachwood City Council is meanwhile stressing the fact that the audit team has never brought up these issues before, so why should we believe them now?!! As recently as July, 2014, they point out, a team reviewed the facts and determined that there were no matters that required reporting.
“Suddenly, they retracted that position,” Council President Fred Goodman wrote to the NEOMG in response to the wedding fee issue.
County Prosecutor Tim McGinty’s office confirmed to Scene that they were reviewing the auditor’s report but said nothing more regarding next steps. They wouldn’t tell Naymik, either, if the public-corruption team was on the case. (We certainly hope so).
Beachwood Law Director Brian Reali didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment either, but it doesn’t sound like he’ll be eager to enforce Yost’s ruling retroactively.
All this comes only days after the NEOMG published a salary survey of suburban mayors, highlighting once again the absurd decadence of Merle Gorden’s tenure. Gorden’s $240,000 in total compensation last year makes him far away the highest-paid public official in the state of Ohio.
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2015.
Now that the Auditor’s investigation is complete and they concluded that the Mayor broke the law, it is now in Prosecutor McGinty’s hands. We will see whether McGinty acts or whether the old rule from the Dimora era is still in place where powerful people in the County Democratic Party look the other way when other powerful people in the party break the law.
McGinty has gone after unconnected judges in bedford and rank and file police and fire man aggressively. The question is whether he will show that same attitude when it is Merle Gorden, one of his long time friends and biggest supporters? We will see!
The Mayor’s meetings in Columbus were finished before 230pm on two separate trips. Instead of driving home, he stayed the next day and half and put all the charges on the city. The auditor’s office asked for him to provide him with a list of all city business commitments he had after his meetings ended at 230 and he wasn’t able to come up with any.
How can the Mayor say it was legal to extend a trip for non city business and put the costs of this extension on the City credit card? I imagine he and the law director will say it was legal because council approved it. This will fail because no one on council was aware of this until more than a year later when the media exposed it. When it was exposed, Councilman wachter said it was legal because he had other meetings but it turned out that was a lie too.
I don’t care how tight Merle is with McGinty or Budish, I don’t see how they can convince McGinty to look the other way.
A thorough investigation is important to put Merle Gorden in jail for fraud, but it shouldn’t be necessary for the end of his reputation. He’s been openly stealing for years.
If the city and city council of beachwood want to pay him that salary thats their business
Its flat out greed. The guy made 240000 last year and he still keeps 900 dollars from weddings. Unbelievable.
The city is safe. The services run smoothly. The business community is happy and the schools add value to the homes. I couldn’t care less about sour people’s vindictive, self serving approach to the mayor. At the end of the day, ultimately, none of this has anything to do with me. Sounds like a bunch of whiny losers.
How dim do you have to be to look at Merle Gorden’s brazen lawbreaking and have your first reaction be “well who cares about his salary?”