Today, every Cleveland Heights resident votes for every councilor. A ward-based proposal would end that.
Here's their plan: take our seven, chop five of them into wards, leave two for everybody. Call it local. Call it reform. Call it whatever you want. Most of your council stops being yours.
7 seats. All yours.
All seven councilors answer to every resident.
5 wards + 2 at-large.
Five councilors answer to just a slice. Only two still cover everyone.
Last January, Cleveland's ward council drew a new map. Here's what they did.
Slavic Village? Cut into three wards.
Shaker Square? Split in half.
A councilor who criticized leadership? Drawn out of her own district.
Vote: 14 to 2. No committee hearing. The League of Women Voters objected. Didn't matter.
One neighborhood. Three wards. Drawn to punish a dissenting councilor.
Every neighborhood connected to every councilor. No lines to gerrymander.
"I don't think this map did right by our neighborhoods."— Cleveland Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer
When the people running for ward seats get to draw the ward lines, this is what happens. No reason to think we'd do it any prettier.
When cities swap at-large for wards, they build less. Every study says so. We can't afford less.
After cities switched from at-large to ward-based councils. Evan Mast, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
Ward councilors catch all the flak for every new building — and get none of the citywide upside. So they say no. Every time.
We have a lot of yes left to do. Severance. Noble Road. Cedar-Lee-Meadowbrook. Top-of-the-Hill. If we mean All Are Welcome, somebody's gotta build the houses.
The case for wards usually starts with someone feeling unheard. That's real. That matters. But wards are the wrong medicine.
Today, every one of our seven councilors needs your vote. All of them. If they don't show up for you, they don't come back.
Under their plan? Four of them stop needing you at all.
The fewer councilors who need your vote, the fewer who have to listen.
Feel unheard today? Going from seven councilors who need you down to three doesn't fix that. It makes it permanent.
Wards don't grow representation. They ration it.
We just rebuilt the whole city government. It's a few months old. Give it a minute.
Voters move Cleveland Heights from council-manager to mayor-council government.
Nine residents meet 35+ times over 16 months to draft the updates completing the transition.
Voters approve the new charter. Our form of government is officially, fully in place.
Our newly restructured government is a few months old. It deserves a chance to work.
Back-to-back overhauls aren't reform. They're churn.
Cleveland Heights is rare. One of the most integrated cities in America — not by luck. By choice. Generations of it.
All seven of our councilors are elected by all of us. Every one has to answer to every neighbor — Forest Hill or Noble, Coventry or Cedar-Fairmount. That's not an accident. That's the system we built on purpose.
We built this. It works. Let's not break it.