In this year’s Cleveland Housing Court race, first-term Judge W. Moná Scott faces a challenge from Cheryl Wiltshire, an Old Brooklyn attorney who has been lining up endorsements and criticizing her opponent’s time in office.
The contest will be one to watch as results come in on Election Night. The housing judge plays a crucial role on the city’s municipal bench. The judge handles Cleveland and Bratenahl evictions, landlord-tenant disputes and building code violations.
Whoever wins will be at the center of Cleveland City Hall’s effort to hold out-of-town landlords responsible for their rentals. Voters will decide between the two candidates Nov. 4.
A former prosecutor, Scott defeated Judge Ronald O’Leary in 2019 to win a six-year term. O’Leary had been appointed to the seat after the death of longtime Judge Raymond Pianka.
Wiltshire worked as a legal clerk for Pianka in the early 2000s and served eight months as a magistrate under Scott in 2022. She has her own law practice focusing on divorce, custody and child support.
In an interview with Signal Cleveland, she criticized Scott over turnover among court staff, the treatment of prosecutors and a dispute with the police union over representing bailiffs. She has garnered the endorsements of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, the building trades, the Plain Dealer and former state Sen. Nina Turner.
“I’ve been trying to get people to understand that there’s a lot happening with housing court that has not been disclosed for one reason or the other,” she said. “As a judicial candidate, you know, I am limited in what I can say.”
Ohio’s judicial code of conduct prevents candidates for the bench from saying things that could influence cases or making promises about issues that may come before the court.
Scott did not respond to interview requests for this story. She did complete Signal Cleveland’s judicial candidate survey, however.
In campaign materials, Scott highlighted her work opening kiosks at public libraries to make it easier for people to attend virtual court hearings. She wrote that she had housing specialists certified as mediators to help landlords and tenants resolve disputes.
She also wrote that she requires landlords who own their properties through limited liability companies — a common practice for investor owners — to show up for court rather than sending a property manager.
In her questionnaire responses, Scott summed up her work this way: “My lifelong commitment to public service continues as I reshape the Court’s community and landlord engagement, making it non-partisan and intentional in explaining the laws, navigating the Court, and introducing and connecting everyone to growing community partners and their resources and opportunities for assistance.”
Enforcing Cleveland’s housing codes
The housing court judge oversees criminal cases that center on neglected maintenance and safety problems in Cleveland’s housing. But the judge doesn’t bring those charges. That job belongs to the city’s housing code prosecutors.
In her questionnaire answers, Scott argued that the prosecutors should be doing more.
“The tools that are lacking are more aggressive and competent code enforcement prosecutors who desire to enforce laws created by their law department and hold violators accountable for the criminal complaints they filed,” she wrote.
Asked about Scott’s answer, Wiltshire said that a judge can’t also be the prosecutor.
“I’m not going to criticize the prosecutor’s office,” she said. “What I would say, though, is that the prosecutor’s office are the ones bringing the cases. They’re in a better position to make a decision as to whether a case, a situation is warranted to be brought into housing court.”
Wiltshire pointed to a letter that Scott wrote to a prosecutor apologizing for speaking to him harshly during a hearing in May.
“It was never my intention to demean you, question your professionalism or intelligence, or make the hearing personal,” Scott wrote in the letter, which Signal Cleveland obtained from the city via a public records request.
An ongoing appeals court case is now testing the differences in viewpoint between the judge and the prosecutors. In May, city prosecutors tried to drop charges against a landlord because she hadn’t been properly served with a code violation notice.
Scott denied the motion to dismiss, keeping the case alive. The city is appealing Scott’s decision, arguing that the defendant otherwise would “have to appear before the Court in a case which should never have been filed.”
Managing turnover and negotiating with the police union
As she campaigns, Wiltshire has raised the issues of staff turnover on the court and union representation among housing court bailiffs.
“She didn’t take advantage of what she had in terms of institutional knowledge in the court,” Wiltshire said in reference to her opponent. “That’s one of the things that I want, I’ve been trying to get people to understand and listen to.”
In the candidates’ interview with the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com editorial board, Scott pointed out that she took the bench just before COVID-19 struck in 2020. The problem of turnover was not unique to housing court, she said.
“Every last government entity has experienced high turnover, has experienced people leaving due to retirement, due to better positions, better pay,” she said.
The bailiffs used to be represented by the same union as rank-and-file Cleveland police officers. That contract expired at the end of 2019, just before Scott took the bench, and Scott did not renew it, according to CPPA President Andrew Gasiewski and records provided by Wiltshire’s campaign.
Ohio collective bargaining law gives judges discretion in deciding whether to negotiate a union contract with their employees.
Scott argued in the editorial board interview that the union agreement had effectively fallen by the wayside. The collective bargaining agreement didn’t offer the bailiffs very much, and several of them no longer wanted to be part of the union, she said.
Judge Jeff Johnson, who was Scott’s court administrator at the time, told Signal Cleveland that the decision came after court leaders talked with bailiffs about whether they were satisfied with their contract.
Wiltshire told Signal Cleveland that the idea that bailiffs didn’t want a union was not “realistic.”
Sentencing property owners
In her Signal Cleveland questionnaire, Scott highlighted her community control orders — also known as probation — as key tools for holding out-of-town landlords accountable.
Those orders require landlords to stay up to date on property taxes, obtain lead-safe certifications and maintain their properties. Her probation terms have also included prohibitions on selling a property without the court’s approval.
The landlord of a set of Shaker Boulevard apartment buildings recently challenged one of Scott’s community control orders in court, calling it “unwarranted” and “indiscriminate.” The city defended Scott’s probation powers. The appeal is still pending.
In a Facebook post, Scott credited her no-sale probation order for a legal settlement in the city’s cases against that landlord. As part of that settlement, the landlord will sell its apartment buildings, which have been a problem for tenants and the city.
“Product of my ‘NO FLIPPING HOUSES’ policy,” she wrote.
Wiltshire said that the court could act faster, issuing orders to fix problems at a property while a case is ongoing.
“Instead of finding someone guilty two or three years down the road and then putting them on community control for two years saying, ‘Get the ramp fixed, get the elevator fixed, get this or that fixed,’ they’re already doing it while the case is pending,” she said.
Another housing court case that has caught Cleveland’s attention is that of Jeffrey Ivey, a Glenville homeowner who was jailed in 2023 on the grounds that he didn’t comply with the court’s order to fix up his property. Ivey’s supporters protested the move and have been helping him raise money for repairs. Ivey was released from jail, but his case is ongoing.
At a candidate forum hosted by the Cleveland branch of the NAACP, Scott said that jail sentences are rare, although she didn’t address the Ivey case specifically.
“I had over — for the 5 and a half years that I’ve been on the bench —10,000 cases,” she said. “And [of] those 10,000 cases, I have sentenced 10 people to jail time. Ten.”