Thanks a lot, Jimmy

Jimmy Dimora breathes deep as he steps into the hallway outside
Cleveland council chambers. He wipes some sweat from the sideburns that
flank his thick beard and clicks the giant timeworn door closed, his
fat lineman’s build dwarfed by the old architecture of City Hall. He
and commissioner Tim Hagan just got done telling council members all
the reasons they’d be crazy to buck the Medical Mart deal now, just
hours before its predestined approval.

On this clear day in May, it’s been almost a year since a few
hundred feds raided dozens of offices and homes connected to an alleged
web of county corruption. He’s had little to say to reporters since
then, but today, after maneuvering through a small succession of back
slaps in the hallway, Dimora agrees to stop and talk about something
that’s really bothering him — this “county-reform crap” he’s
unwittingly ushered in.

He starts by correcting the record, though. In February,
Scene published a cover story about Cleveland council president
Marty Sweeney that noted his membership in “the Group” — an
exclusive klatch of old-establishment party insiders that Dimora and
friend/county auditor Frank Russo are alleged to have cultivated. The
story quoted an unnamed source, who said the Group sometimes met in the
Erie Islands to celebrate their reign. “I haven’t been to the islands
in years,” insists Dimora.

But, like Sweeney, he doesn’t deny the Group’s existence.

“And Sheriff McFaul?” adds Dimora. “I’m not hanging out with Sheriff
McFaul. These are all friends.”

Many of these “friends” — in equal measure politicians and
moneyed interests — are named in search warrants and, in some
cases, indictments filed by prosecutors, alleging that Dimora and his
Group underlings used even the party hall to wash money exchanged with
them for government contracts worth millions.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks, looking around to see if
anybody else is listening. “That’s politics, whether you’re a Democrat
or a Republican. I don’t think the Democratic Party has anything to do
with any of this. That’s been The Plain Dealer‘s spin on
things. ‘We’ll make the perception that the Democratic Party has ruined
county government,’ which is totally ridiculous. Just because I’m party
chairman and a county commissioner?”

Well, yeah.

“It’s just a shame now that if you have a relationship with
somebody, and if your government is doing business with that person or
that person’s business, that there’s automatically supposed to be
suspicion or cynicism about that now, like there was automatically
underhandedness. But you’re always going to have relationships, and
people are always going to be doing business with the county. It’s not
any different in Cuyahoga County than it is anywhere else. All we can
do is report contributions and gifts and move on, until the public
financing of elections can take place. What other way is there? There
is no other way.”

Dimora, likely in line for an indictment fight of his own, says
something more is at play than the usual “business as usual” excuse.
Why did the PD — a champion of the plan to reform away the
three county commissioners and most other elected positions in favor of
a county executive and an 11-member county council — just
complete an analysis of county government’s effectiveness and leave out
any comparisons to neighboring Summit County, the only place in Ohio
where this new form of government is in use?

“I’ll tell you why,” he says, now in a booming voice meant for an
audience. “Because the PD is only reporting what it thinks will be
effective in getting the county-reform thing through. No matter what
the topic is, that’s always the main theme. Listen, there’s 88 counties
that have always had the authority to go to that [form of government],
and just one did. Now why is that?”

Maybe it’s because Summit’s form of government hasn’t proven to be
any cheaper or resistant to cronyism and corruption. But it is known to
help Republicans find more chairs in county government.

JAMES MCCARTHY IS almost 70 now, kicking back with the wife at the
beach house in Ft. Lauderdale after seven years as Summit County’s
chief executive officer. He retired two summers ago after 34 years of
government service, and he sounds like he misses the job dearly
and wishes he could have retired even sooner. He thinks Cuyahoga
County is a much better candidate for party reform and a shift to solid
regional cooperation than it is for a switch to Summit County’s form of
doling out the dough — no matter how corrupt things are revealed
to be.

“You don’t change the government for the hell of it,” he says.
“People are resistant to change, so if they” — reform-minded
planners and their PD cheerleaders — “can say all this is
happening because of the structure, then therefore the structure must
be more corrupt. But I don’t think that’s true at all. A lot of it is
content. Who the hell’s there? We’ve had our own issues, problems in
Summit County with corruption, before the charter and after. And it’s
not going to lower taxes or be cheaper to run.”

But he does believe Summit has taken a short step closer to making
everyone work a little better as a team, like it or not. By
centralizing decision-making under a single executive, who then must
curry favor with the council and implement operations with a staff of
loyal appointed department heads, McCarthy says some wheels can
roll on slightly smoother paths. For instance, over time, Summit was
able to choose a single IT provider and a single communications device
for several of its operations, eliminating duplication and spurring
regional cooperation.

So businesses have just one boss to woo come contract time? Not
necessarily, he says.

In Summit, voters still elect a prosecutor, a sheriff, an engineer,
a clerk of courts and a fiscal officer, so it’s a long way from letting
the executive run almost everything, as the current petition to change
Cuyahoga’s structure would clearly do.

Every place is different, says McCarthy. He thinks Summit’s model
would actually work best for counties like Medina, where a starker
division exists between rural and urban communities, affluent and poor
citizens, zoned and unzoned land.

McCarthy envisions a blend of the two systems working pretty well,
though. He would have preferred to hire an engineer to keep him closer,
and thinks it’d be a good idea for Cuyahoga officials not to get their
legal advice and criminal watchdogging from the same elected
county prosecutor. And the whole council thing gets pretty tricky too,
he admits. At the beginning of his time as CEO, says McCarthy, the pace
of every project seemed to drip. “I had a council I couldn’t work with
after a while,” he says, “just to show that they could fuck with me.”
The council was set up to review every contract involving more than
$500; a standard wait for any purchase was six weeks. “So if you put
too much check on executive authority, you could have a worse situation
than what you have in Cuyahoga County right now.”

If we go the route of reform, he says, we should go all the way, and
risk a mighty power grab away from the central city — or go
halfway and risk a bleaker reality: “You’re going to have people
running around saying that power corrupts, but if you don’t
[concentrate power somewhere], the government will be at a
standstill.”

And of course, there’s politics.

In Summit, Republicans are represented countywide by a slew of
judges, a sheriff, an engineer and a county councilwoman. In Cuyahoga,
Republicans are lucky if they can even speak at the dais during public
meetings. Anywhere you go, says McCarthy, echoing Dimora, politicians
are going to be oriented toward home communities — whether that’s
out in Pepper Pike or downtown in St. Clair-Superior — out of
fear that regionalism is just a ploy to dilute their votes.

“I always laugh when people say government should be run like a
business,” says McCarthy. “A lot of businesses fail. A lot of
companies. And right now, it seems like there’s very little incentive
to invest in the future.”

DIMORA HAS HIS PEOPLE call his people, and a few weeks after his
appearance at City Hall, a coterie of the county’s top underdogs are
anxious to meet with Scene. We use the boardroom where all those
executive sessions of the county commissioners take place. Sadly, the
walls can’t talk, and Big Jimmy is nowhere to be seen. At least the
blinds are open.

Five of the top county administrators take turns shedding light,
almost recreationally, on how they read the whole county-reform radar.
They’re not here to bash Summit County, they say, but to show how the
PD ain’t plain-dealing all the time. A recent article compared
Cuyahoga’s efficiency to several counties, but inexplicably left Summit
out. No one at the table sees the need to explain why.

They all hit on something similar to what budget director Sandy
Turk, a 23-year vet of county number-crunching, says: Summit County’s
structure has been in place since the reform effort that followed a
string of scandals in 1981, and in all that time, no other county in
Ohio has emulated the model.

The per capita income in both counties is virtually the same —
a non-living wage of $22,000 — but Turk says Cuyahoga County
spends more money on a lot more citizens ($1140 per person in Cuyahoga
County, $1,063 in Summit). Cuyahoga has Cleveland, one of the nation’s
hardest-hit regions in the history of military-industrial capitalism
gone global.

She rattles off details, like how Cleveland is close to leading the
nation in home-value loss; how only half of Cleveland’s kids finish
high school, compared to Akron’s 84 percent; how Cuyahoga spends $40
million a year on MetroHealth Medical Center and Summit doesn’t even
have such a facility; how Cuyahoga has a 24/7/365 hotline with paid
social workers to field calls. And don’t even get them started on all
the people who come from around the state to tap into Cuyahoga’s
rumored wealth of hobo hospitality. Despite all this, they say, the
county maintains the second-highest bond rating, the same as Summit
County’s.

“[Summit has] excellent people and we have excellent people,” notes
county administrator Jim McCafferty. “Cuyahoga County may be a
Democratic stronghold, but it wears that as a badge of honor.”

Switching to a single executive, with a council majority to control
or despise, won’t change the mission of stretching out the safety net
and building a better Greater Cleveland, says development
director Paul Oyaski (Editor’s Note: This is a correction. These quotes had been attributed, erroneously, to Paul Alsenas, the director the county planning commission.) “The county exists to do things that cities
don’t want to do or cannot do themselves,” says Oyaski, who used to be
a Euclid mayor and councilman. He is among those who dream of a
regional approach, regardless of how many public officials will oversee
its implementation: “Eaton is moving from Cleveland to Beachwood. Is
that a good thing or a bad thing? Eaton wins. Beachwood wins. Cleveland
loses. How much intra-county competition is there in Summit County?
That matters just as much as if you have one executive or three
commissioners.”

And the “one executive instead of three commissioners” claim is
misleading. Current reform proposals call for 11 county districts,
whose reps would make up the council. “You’re overlaying 11 district
council members,” says Oyaski. “And they’re going to want more control
and more structured decision-making with all these parochial interests
piled up on top of more parochial interests.”

“Instead of three politicians in that realm,” notes Turks, “we’re
going to be dealing with 12.”

Maybe even a few Republicans. Jim Corrigan, the commissioners’
government-relations officer, claims not to care. He does care that
this reform plan is being pushed here and nowhere else.

“There’s 23 counties with one-party rule, and 19 of 23 are
Republican,” he says. “But the largest county is Cuyahoga County, so
they say, ‘Let’s target them to do this government reform.’ But
changing just for the sake of change, that’s what led to term limits in
the statehouse, which is universally seen as a mistake. None of these
proposals, whether at the statehouse or one of these that some
officials are proposing now have been well thought-out or
considerate.”

“I would ask,” adds deputy county administrator Lee Trotter, “what
specific programs or services have the suburbs pushed for or asked for
that have not been acquiesced to by the county?” And then, he adds
pointedly, “And what’s in it for people who are supposed to approve
this?”

All these directors think the county already does a good job of
balancing all these spheres of interest. “It’s our agenda,” says
Trotter. What’s unspoken: Jimmy’s been performing a fat chunk of that
task jovially for as long as some can remember. It’s been a long and
difficult intervention. His professions of ignorance of any corruption
started sounding especially disingenuous on June 12, when the latest
indictments revealed the sad depth and complex dimensions of the
county’s old ways.

County-reform proponents recently held a forum at Cleveland State’s
Levin College of Urban Affairs. Anti-reformers met at Antioch Baptist
Church, along the tired desperation of Cleveland’s Cedar Avenue. Both
events were attended sparsely.

Over the last 80 years, instances of the exposure of corruption have
led to several efforts by parochial interests to cash in, noted Harriet
Applegate, leader of the Northcoast Federation of Labor, at Antioch.
She and East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer told attendees that they and
most other Democrats were brought in very late to the planning for the
most recent reform missile. They admit to deep fears that the plan will
further tip the region’s meticulous racial balance long cultivated by
Dimora.

“This is not a black thing or a white thing,” said Brewer, ticking
off a list of the mob-like activity making news and suggesting that the
reform plan would create still more. “This is a people thing. This is
an organized crime takeover of Cleveland. If successful, it would usher
in a level of political thuggery the likes of which you’ve never
seen.”

The reform plan making its way to the ballot now, noted Brewer, is
“a reconstructed version of a 13-year-old plan that didn’t work then
and won’t work now.”

In 1996, after the investment scandal du jour scathed the county’s
top officials, John Carroll University political science professor
Kathleen Barber was appointed chairwoman of a “bipartisan” commission
tasked by then-commissioners Tim Hagan, Jim Petro and Mary Boyle to
recommend ways to reform county government. They went with an
executive/council form, with six of the currently elected posts to be
appointed by the executive. It didn’t fly then, so here Barber is
again, as the moderator of the CSU forum, stacked four-to-one in favor
of the new reform plan that’s almost identical to the old. (“We’re very
lucky we have the scandal,” Barber told the PD a year ago.)

Panelist Eugene Kramer, for five decades a local government
attorney, quoted a book put out in 1917 by the Citizens League that
called for a “time to change the county structure before the problems
of the urban city engulf us.” He said he supported the reform for its
streamlined economic development and operations. Panelist Kevin
O’Brien, director of Cleveland State’s Center for Public Management,
told the audience how his early testing grounds of New York City taught
him what efficiency was all about. Run it like a business, urged Parma
Heights mayor Martin Zanotti, who says he won’t run for re-election
this year in order to serve as the voice of the reform movement. The
fact that Dimora booted him from the Democratic party’s executive
committee for supporting Republican Deborah Sutherland last year in her
campaign against sitting commissioner Peter Lawson Jones had nothing to
do with it, he claims.

“These reforms are key to achieving a competitive advantage,”
insisted Zanotti, until recently the leader of the county’s Mayors and
City Managers Association.

But an advantage for whom? A nine-member bipartisan panel
commissioned by the state more than a year ago was stymied when retired
Congressman Louis Stokes called the executive/council plan —
crafted mostly by suburban white people — a power grab at the
expense of pretty much everyone else.

Retired county judge Lillian Greene, who stepped in to clean up the
county recorder’s office when Pat O’Malley was taken to prison, waited
her turn as the only voice chosen by the college against changing the
county structure. Greene, one of only two black non-judicial officials
holding countywide elected office, pointed to a map of the proposed
council districts and shook her head. Would Cuyahoga elect a black
person to be its only executive? No, she said.

WITH AN EASY SMILE and some blue-eyed charisma, Lakewood councilman
Tom Bullock carries himself like he knows he’s on the way up. He’s only
been in Greater Cleveland for about five years, a transplant from South
Bend, Indiana, but already he’s running a ward, serving on the party’s
executive committee and aiming this year to represent District 13 in
Columbus.

He likes to get a little poetic about the area’s problems. After
attending American University, he spent a year at the University of
London, where he studied classics and continued his support of
environmentalist causes. (Check out his story this month on excessive
animal antibiotics in EcoWatch Ohio!) His literature highlights
his push for a new political establishment in Cuyahoga County, one that
transcends the factions surrounding Boss Dimora, prosecutor Bill Mason
and mayor Frank Jackson: “The change begins with us.” What he means:
green jobs, party reform and cleaner consciences all around. You’d
think he’d be keeping his mouth shut about Dimora — the necessary
fundraising and all — but no.

“The realm is ill when the king is ill,” he says over coffee. “How
do you renew the realm? You need a new king.”

Just days before, Dimora had announced his intention to step aside
(not down) as party chairman to focus on the probe. But he’ll stay on
as county commissioner, approving millions monthly in contracts and
payments — some to companies also mentioned in the indictments.
On this day, the PD’s front page claims that party insiders are
allegedly picking Tom Day — a friend of Dimora’s from Bedford,
whistling distance from Dimora’s Bedford Heights stronghold — to
replace the distracted boss. Bullock says it’s time to rethink where
the party’s center should be.

The region is moving past the worn-out model of a white ethnically
quarantined West Side and a black East Side, beyond the idea that
industrial waste is a natural byproduct of progress, above the
once-stark divisions between pro-war crew cuts and hippie long hairs.
“That economy’s gone, and that civilization is gone,” he attests. “We
need to think of a new thing.”

Young black leaders are just as critical of their old establishment
leaders, and many are getting together with Bullock in Democrats for
Reform. In early July, Bullock is pulling together supporters across
the region in an effort to itemize the party policies that need
changing. By August, Bullock hopes to have a list of bylaw reforms to
present for a formal vote.

“Where we are in this county as Democrats is fresh off many years of
clogging our arteries, of having very little open discussion about
anything,” says Bullock. “It’s healthy for the party to have primaries
and work things out. But we’ve had too many people who don’t even have
to run. It sets up this mechanics of favors, where people don’t
question the authority of those above them. The point is that Democrats
are not that. That’s a tiny circle. That’s the tail wagging the
dog.”

AT LAST WEEK’S commissioners meeting, Dimora was ready to take a
stand — at least against his arch-nemesis, county Republican
leader Rob Frost. But he let his colleague Hagan browbeat a kid
first.

“My name is Charles Thomas, and I am going to be a senior at Solon
High School,” said the Sunday-suited boy during a short discussion on
an agenda item involving yet another Dimora-connected contract. “I am
clearly no expert in the Cuyahoga County government or in the ways its
taxpayers’ money is used; however, something that appears very simple
to me clearly doesn’t appear that simple to some of our elected
leaders. If men like [former county IT manager and alleged Dimora
bagman] Kevin Kelly in a roundabout manner force contractors to give
bribes, such as trips to Las Vegas, expensive meals and expensive
gifts, is it even possible for honest businessmen and women to get
those high valued government contracts. It undoubtedly is not …”

Hagan shut him up. This is not the justice system. Does he have a
question? Charles skipped to the end of his spiel and started to ask,
“What procedure has been instituted that ensures government officials
cannot accept bribes such as agenda item 3 … ?”

You’re done, Hagan told him. The boy sat back down. Later, he
claimed not to be a Republican, just “a little conservative.”

“Are you a little more conservative today?” He nodded and raised his
brow.

At the end of the meeting, the main event: Frost asked Dimora yet
again to just go. And Jimmy unleashed, with counsel’s blessing and all.
For 30 minutes. A county judge had just granted Frost’s request for a
bipartisan committee to investigate the records of auditor Russo, but
Dimora wants Frost to remember that a succession of Republican state
auditors have repeatedly audited the county’s books, coming away with
nothing but routine suggestions — or referrals to
Republican-supportive law firms. Frost himself has gained financially
from lucrative, no-bid referrals at the disposal of Ohio’s Republican
officeholders. And Dimora wanted to know: What exactly does Frost do
for his $110,000 salary?

“And I want you to understand something else,” boomed Dimora
theatrically. “Three-to-zero is usually the vote on this board. Maybe
one or two times since I’ve been on the board has it been 2-1. And if
you look at my record, my vote always has been to follow staff and the
director’s recommendation. I’ve never deviated from that in my 11
years.”

Then Dimora turns on Republicans in general. For sucking so bad at
county races. For how GOP members allegedly solicit donations from
businesses who do work for the Board of Elections and even from the
BoE’s employees. For how former county (and state) Republican Party
chairman Bob Bennett, in his role as county BoE chairman, approved the
purchase of $30 million in Diebold elections machines that had to be
replaced after a mere two years.

He rattles off examples of Republicans, as well as reform-supporter
and Democratic pariah Zanotti, reaping the benefits from
contract-seekers, before finally addressing reform itself. And that’s
where his rebuttal/history lesson veered into self-serving tirade.

He recalled seeing Bennett and PD editors lunching early last year,
and that, he insisted, turned into a full-blown conspiracy against the
party.

“You think county reform popped up in conversation?” asked Dimora.
“You think it went something like this? ‘I know, let’s destroy Jimmy
Dimora and the county Democratic Party. Let’s link the Democratic Party
to Cuyahoga Cuyahoga County government. Even if it’s not true, let’s do
it anyway. It’ll be easy. We’ll target Russo and Dimora. Dimora’s easy:
He’s chairman of the party. It’ll be an easy conflict. Dimora’s a
loudmouth. He’s got no college education. He’s overweight. He has
Italian heritage in him. You get my drift. But we gotta get a couple of
Democrats or it’s just going to look like Republicans are once again
trying to change government because none of them can get elected
countywide. I know, we’ll get Marty Zanotti.'”

Note that, while impassioned, none of this can really be called a
denial of the charges against him.

“The facts are the facts, and the truth is the truth,” said Dimora.
“So why doesn’t this ever get out in the media? I try to figure that
out. Look at all these media organizations, these corporate offices.
They’re all Republican-owned; they’re led by Republican CEOs. Now, how
is a Democrat going to get his word out and message out, especially
when he’s down and everybody’s kicking him?”

He keeps going for Frost’s jugular, like he can’t stop stabbing.
“Frankly, nobody knows who you are or what you do,” said Dimora. “You
got your opportunity today, but I thought it only right that I give at
leasta little bit back to you. And if you wanna come each week, I’ll
have a whole new diatribe to go over with you, so that I can educate
you on some of the Republicans in Cuyahoga County.”

Some in the crowd beamed prideful smiles; others grimaced. Both
sides, it seems, have a whole lot of explaining to do.

dharkins@clevescene.com

This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2009.