The Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities hasn’t asked voters for a levy since 2005. But Friends of Developmental Disabilities — the political action committee paying for the levy campaign — has been raising money for at least 15 years.
The PAC reported almost $559,000 on hand at the end of last year in a filing with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
That’s a decent-sized nest egg for a countywide tax increase campaign. With mailers and broadcast ads, the effort will likely run into the six figures. (The Metroparks’ PAC spent about $733,000 the year of its 2022 levy campaign, for instance.)
Friends of Developmental Disabilities has roughly doubled its money since 2010, the earliest year for which reports are available online. Part of that growth has come from donations.
The PAC also appears to have invested well. It reported almost $29,500 in investment income last year from Fifth Third Bank.
Cuyahoga County Council is expected to vote later this month to place the levy on the November ballot.
Friends of Developmental Disabilities isn’t waiting around. Late last year, the PAC hired campaign consultant Burges & Burges Strategists and fundraising consultant Balodis Group, disclosures show. A campaign website is live.
Levy fundraising runners-up: By comparison, Cuyahoga County’s health and human services levy campaign has some financial catching up to do.
The County Action Committee, which pays for HHS tax campaigns, ended the year with a little more than $168,000 on hand. (County Council hasn’t yet decided whether to grant County Executive Chris Ronayne’s wish by placing the measure on the November ballot.)
The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority — which is going out for a sales tax increase in May — doesn’t have a PAC yet. It does have a new tagline that could double as a campaign slogan: Moving Greater Cleveland Forward.
Page-turner on industrial land turnover
Cleveland’s Site Readiness Fund for Good Jobs is using a comic book to promote its industrial cleanup efforts.
The nonprofit fund assembles old industrial land, prepares it for redevelopment and tries to woo new companies to move in. City Hall seeded the fund with $50 million from Cleveland’s federal pandemic stimulus dollars. Since then, it has landed philanthropic donors, too.
The fund enlisted local artist Bryn Adams to create a 16-page graphic novel telling the story of Cleveland’s industrial decline and, perhaps, rebirth. Titled “From Ground to Growth,” the book follows a Cleveland worker who is thinking of moving to the South when he learns of city officials’ plans to bring new jobs to town.
“By putting people at the center of the story, it turns economic development into something everyone can understand and connect with,” Nancy Lesic, who is doing media relations for the fund, told Weekly Chatter in an email.
It’s an advertisement for the city’s industrial redevelopment dreams. But as our own managing editor, Rachel Dissell, noted, the graphic novel does capture Clevelanders’ healthy skepticism about big promises.
After the worker learns about the city’s development plans, he says to himself, “I don’t want to get my hopes up, but…”
Prosecutor floats Flock stats
After years of flubbing opportunities to address residents’ privacy concerns about the city’s use of Flock Safety’s license plate readers, Cleveland officials called in the cavalry this week to push forward a contract with the controversial company.
Leading the charge was Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, who came armed with a list of 140 criminal cases in which his office said Flock’s technology helped with identifying a suspect or solving a crime.
O’Malley may have been a little overeager to win over the jury of council members and critics of Flock. The examples collected from prosecutors in his office included at least one case that didn’t involve automated license plate reader technology at all and several others that were erroneously labeled as benefiting from Flock when, in reality, the technology used in those cases came from competitors.
In a call with Signal Cleveland, O’Malley reiterated what he wrote in a memo to council members: that he wasn’t shilling for any vendor or particular contract, but that he believes the tool — alongside a panoply of other surveillance technologies — is essential, especially in light of the city’s depleted police force.
O’Malley seemed a little peeved that Cleveland hadn’t buckled down earlier to address residents’ concerns and communicate what he has seen in case after case: that a city crime analyst can use the technology to track down a car or suspect in about 20 minutes to help solve a violent crime or locate a missing person. The most recent Flock contract is for $250,000, roughly the equivalent of the salary and benefits for two police officers (not including overtime).
O’Malley also argued the technology provides corroborating evidence, such as a license plate hit or video footage, to help identify, prosecute or rule out a suspect, relying less on eyewitnesses, whose accounts are less reliable.
“It helps us get the right suspect,” he said.
— Rachel Dissell
One more note on Flock
Cleveland City Council isn’t the only one debating license plate readers. The City Club of Cleveland hosted a panel Friday on AI-powered surveillance featuring Joshua Thomas, Flock’s communications director, and Jen Golbek, a professor at the University of Maryland. Signal Cleveland moderated.
Thomas argued that surveillance technology is here to stay.
“Every city in America will eventually be using some of this technology. The question I have is not, ‘Will it be used?’ The question is, ‘How do we have it be used in accordance with our values?’”
Golbeck, on the other hand, said that company safeguards on license plate reader data don’t address the underlying civil liberties issue.
“I should be allowed to move freely and not be surveilled and not have police in all these different places tracking my movements,” she said. “I should have the freedom to do that. I think that’s fundamental to our democracy.”
You can watch the whole discussion above or by following this link.
This story was updated to correct the amount the developmental disabilities levy campaign had on hand at the end of 2025. It is $559,000, not the mid-2025 total of almost $575,000.
