Last week Cleveland City Council wrapped up the fourth in a quartet of hearings on Mayor Justin Bibb’s push to close Burke Lakefront Airport.
These were information sessions. Council had nothing to vote on — yet. The hearings focused on possible barriers to development, the impact on Cleveland’s budget, the strategies for closing the airport and possible uses for the land.
One takeaway was that City Hall believes it’s possible to build parks and one- or two-story buildings on the Burke landfill. That’s what the city has floated as an initial idea for a post-airport Burke.
Charles Slife, the chair of council’s Transportation Committee, said discussions about closing Burke can be too idealistic. These hearings offered a dose of reality.
“What I found to be a productive meeting I understand that others could find maybe sobering,” he said. “It’s not to say that nothing can be accomplished there. It’s but maybe a little more limited in scale than people would presume right off the bat.”
There will be no high-rise tower offering views of Canada. “That’s not practical here,” Slife said.
He said he is planning more committee meetings, possibly in the summer, to hear from proponents of keeping Burke open.
Slife said he doesn’t see Burke as a cash cow for the city’s General Fund. He also wasn’t convinced that the airport could be redeveloped only with private financing. So is he for closing Burke or against it?
“Like a good politician, I’m going to firmly sit on the fence,” he said.
Much ado about Cleveland’s ‘boom’
Last week the Wall Street Journal’s real estate pages gave Cleveland boosters cause to celebrate downtown’s redevelopment.
In a piece headlined “Empty Department Stores Are Housing Cleveland’s Booming Population,” the paper flashed a spotlight on the many historic office and retail buildings that have found second lives as apartments for Gen Z and empty nesters. (With the help of tax breaks, WSJ noted.)
It falls to Weekly Chatter to rain on the parade, or at least to rain on an overzealous headline.
Cleveland’s population is not booming.
But the city’s long numerical decline appears to have bottomed out in 2022, according to point-in-time census estimates. Over the following two years, Cleveland’s population ticked up 1% to 365,391. Perhaps 1% feels like a boom after decades in demographic free-fall.
Downtown Cleveland is by far the city’s boomiest neighborhood. Between 2010 and 2020, the downtown population leaped almost 41% and the number of housing units jumped 80%, an analysis by the Cleveland City Planning Commission shows.
University Circle, Ohio City and a few other parts of the West Side have grown, too. On the other hand, Glenville lost 22% of its population between 2010 and 2020. Mount Pleasant lost 19% and Clark-Fulton lost 10%, to pick a few examples.
Cleveland’s boom, such as it is, can be seen from some corners of the city but not others.
Let the judicial endorsements begin
Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Jeff Johnson is making quick use of his newly recognized right to endorse political candidates.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled this month that the state’s prohibition on endorsements by judges violated the First Amendment. (The case stemmed from a Clinton County judge who had supported his son, a judicial candidate, on Facebook.)
Less than two weeks after the decision, Johnson publicly threw his support behind Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge William Vodrey. In the May 5 Democratic primary, Vodrey faces a challenge from James Sean Gallagher, an assistant county prosecutor.
“I believe that I can both support not only other judges, but other candidates, elected officials, without losing my neutrality,” Johnson told Weekly Chatter. “If there is a situation where I need to recuse myself, I will.”
The state supreme court’s only Democrat did not take part in the case, meaning it was an all-Republican bench that struck down the endorsement ban. Johnson, a Democratic former state lawmaker and Cleveland City Council member, said he agreed with the decision.
Johnson recognized that other colleagues on the bench might not be comfortable backing candidates. The decision has also opened the question of whether judicial groups can weigh in on candidates. Johnson said the Ohio Black Judges Association has discussed the issue.
While Johnson plans more endorsements in the future, he said he draws the line at backing a candidate for county prosecutor.
“They’d be in charge of, obviously, prosecutors coming into my courtroom,” he said, “and I don’t want the public thinking that … he or she owes me something, or is angry with me.”
