The coming departure of term-limited state Rep. Terrence Upchurch leaves an empty seat to fill in Ohio House District 20. It covers Downtown Cleveland, part of Tremont, Slavic Village, a chunk of Collinwood and many places in between.
Four Democrats are running for the seat in the May 5 primary: Eugene Miller, Charlotte Perkins, Mike Seals and Lauren R. Welch.
The primary winner would face Donna Walker-Brown, a Republican, in November. The Democratic nominee will have a significant leg up. The district leans 88% Democratic, according to data compiled by the website Dave’s Redistricting.
Signal Cleveland spoke with the four Democrats about what they bring to the race.
Eugene Miller
Miller is seeking a return to elected office after serving in the state legislature and Cleveland City Council more than a decade ago.
He said that he is running as a moderate Democrat who can work with the Republicans who dominate the Ohio General Assembly. As a state representative, Miller said he would work to bring money back home to the district.
“I was not going to run for this seat just on the fact I’m a former elected official, blah blah blah,” he said. “No, I decided to run because I know in Columbus, it takes collaborations and a supermajority to get things done.”
Miller has heard voters’ concerns about high property taxes and described the issue as a balancing act. He said he wants to find a way to offer tax relief for seniors, perhaps in the form of a reverse mortgage. On the other hand, he pointed out that property taxes are what fund the schools.
Another issue he’s heard while campaigning: concerns about infrastructure and erosion in Bratenahl, he said.
Miller has donned many hats since leaving office. He’s a substitute teacher. He grows and sells produce. He runs a robocall business and counts Cleveland City Council among his clients.
He said that he has matured politically since his City Council days, when his salty 911 calls about a crowd of young people on his street became an issue in his unsuccessful 2013 reelection bid. In this race, he won the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party’s endorsement.
“You can’t just throw stones at people and expect people to help you,” he said.
Charlotte Perkins
A retired Cleveland police officer, Perkins runs the private security company R-CAP. She said she is running on better wages and affordable healthcare and housing.
The juvenile justice system is also on her mind. When minors are accused of crime, their circumstances should be taken into account, she said.
“Every child that commits a crime should not have to go in the system,” she said. “Every person’s life, trauma, whatever, is different, and that’s how we need to judge them.”
Perkins ran for Cleveland City Council last year, coming up short against Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones. She said she is making another bid for elected office because she has seen how people in Cleveland struggle — citing food deserts and seniors who have trouble getting in and out of homes in poor condition.
She wants to see more vocational programs in schools and said that the Cleveland Metropolitan School District is losing out on tax dollars that have gone to charter and private schools. That’s something she’d like to address in office, although she said it can’t change overnight.
Guns are too easy to come by, she said. Perkins said she wants to see “better gun laws” — perhaps a tough sell in a strongly Republican legislature. Asked how she would work as a Democrat with the GOP, she pointed to her business experience.
“I’ve been in business for 28 years,” she said. “When I negotiate different things, I’m not in the room with people that look like me, okay?”
Mike Seals
Seals is a retired union organizer with the Service Employees International Union 1199. He helped unionized nursing home staff negotiate contracts and took part in the 2011 push to repeal SB5, a state law that restricted public employee collective bargaining.
He said he is running against “politics as usual.” Seals has seen people enter elected office with good intentions only to go astray, he said.
“But once they get to the state houses or the city halls, the corporate forces are so powerful that sometimes if they don’t remain strong and true to their highest ideas, then the corporate forces quickly become a corruptive influence on our elected officials,” he said.
Seals lives in the Hough neighborhood and would like to see nonprofits that generally do not have to pay property taxes — such as the nearby Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals — pay something into the school system.
He is also running on raising Ohio’s minimum wage, which currently stands at $11 for non-tipped employees and $5.50 for those who get tips.
Seals is involved in the county Democratic Party as a member of the precinct and executive committees, the party’s two decision-making bodies. If people want to raise Cleveland’s turnout, they need to give people in low-income neighborhoods something to vote for, he said.
“If we do not start advocating for those who can’t see anything that benefits them on the ballot, then we’re never going to get to the next level,” he said.
Lauren R. Welch
Welch briefly served on Cleveland City Council last year, replacing Kerry McCormack after he left for a new job.
She was also one of Mayor Justin Bibb’s appointees to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, serving as the board’s vice president. In her day job, she leads communications for the education nonprofit Say Yes Cleveland.
The statehouse job is an open seat, but Welch is running on a change message nonetheless. She said that she holds herself to a high standard.
“I think we have a pattern in this region of elevating leadership that really proves to us time and time again that they can’t effectively lead,” she said.
As a Democrat in the statehouse, she would see her job as trying to shut down Republican legislation she views as harmful. In her view, the state has shortchanged public education and public transit — and now CMSD is closing school buildings while RTA cuts service.
“There’s a lot of leaders that are not proximate to public transportation,” she said, “and so we are suffering because we don’t have representation right now that is actively fighting to make sure dollars get back to public transportation.”
Welch said that she wants to improve maternal health and reduce infant mortality — supporting, in her words, “women’s bodies and their babies.”
She did not win the party endorsement, but she has been collecting support from other organizations such as the Plain Dealer editorial board and the Cuyahoga Democratic Women’s Caucus.
