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It’s 10:30 a.m. on a dreary Tuesday morning, but you can hear the anticipatory cheers of “Hooray!” and “Whoopee!” as far as the southern reaches of, oh, say, Medina County and beyond. Commuters of all walks of life are celebrating what may just be the happiest day of their lives: the end of the Linndale Mayor’s Court’s I-71 wrath.

WKSU is featuring a really terrific look at what’s going to change (and what’s not going to change [hint: bullish attitudes]) now that soon-to-be-enacted legislation eliminates mayor’s courts for towns with populations of less than 200. Note that speeding tickets can (and will) still be issued, but the cases will head to Parma Municipal Court.

Eight other tiny communities across Ohio fall into the bill’s sights, but Linndale is the only one with such a demonized reputation.

And rightfully so.

Officers have spent decades siphoning money off drivers heading into or out of Cleveland and lining the public coffers. The town, which boasts a minute 179 residents, issued more than 4,000 speeding tickets in 2011 alone. Zooming in, the epicenter of this blood-sucking is a 422-yard stretch of I-71. (And like a many-noduled tumor, this thing’s got a second epicenter that catches drivers daring to top out at 26 mph along Memphis Avenue.)

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, WKSU web editor M.L. Schultze stopped by the dreary council chambers, which serves as the town’s courtroom. Magistrate George Sadd swells with irony as he addresses the several dozen poor souls before him: “I’ve never seen so many unhappy looking faces. Come on guys, smile. This is traffic court; this is not felonious murder court.”

The truth, however, is that this isn’t going to be a traffic court for much longer. The death knell to small-time mayor’s courts comes down at the end of this week.

And that measure is due to State Sen. Tom Patton successfully attaching a rider to an unrelated bill last fall after trying to get this concept approved for years. The senator sums his concern up nicely: “This is all about someone taking advantage of a small part of the freeway that they own and turning it into a cash register.”

He went on to tell WKSU: “In the 50 years or so that I’ve driven through Linndale, I’ve never seen somebody helping stranded motorists. I’ve never seen one of their guys writing an accident report. They hide in the shadows under a bridge and it’s a trap.”

This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2013.

Eric Sandy is an award-winning Cleveland-based journalist. For a while, he was the managing editor of Scene. He now contributes jam band features every now and then.

17 replies on “Linndale Mayor’s Court: And Into The History Books We Go”

  2. About freaken time…They don’t help stranded motorists, they generate revenue for a 4 block village…We call that being a cashier….Now watch them stack the cars on Memphis…

  3. Yeah, for only 179 residents, I don’t think they need all that revenue from tickets. Let the residents pay for what they need, instead of the victims of their trap. In other news though, how does every Clevelander not know about Linndale? I have never sped through there, even when I know there isn’t a cop. It’s common sense when a place has a reputation like that.

  7. wwot woot! this court which I had the privilege of going to is extremely racist and if you are able to fight the charges and get them dismissed, they still sock you with $95 court costs. Absolute worst “court” system ever.

  8. Be really, really careful going through Linndale until this law passes. They are going to try and milk as much money out of people as they can before the golden goose gets taken away.

  9. It’s about time that these parasites get their just due. A town should not exist at all if it must depend entirely upon traffic ticket revenue for its very existence. Good riddance. They never had any business placing police cruisers on I-71, as the ingress and egress to I-71 actually exists outside of Linndale’s city limits (city of Cleveland). Linndale’s appetite for money demonstrates the levels of corruption to which a government is willing to stoop in the name of “public safety.” This is a clear example that shows you should never trust any government to be responsible with our money.

  10. I hope you all realize that shutting down Linndales Mayors Court will not stop the ticket writing. They will continue to write tickets but they will be heard in Parma Municipal Court, Parma will get the court fees, and Linndale will still get the fine money. Its a cash grab by the muni court. Linndale will simply write more tickets to make up for their losses.

  11. Linndale Police are the worst, they do not care about people, just how they can stop people for any reason and give out tickets!

  14. The final paragraph says it all. And all those wannabe cops probably helped themselves to – boxes of donuts to slam into their faces while waiting to reach their monthly ticket quotas.

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