Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cuyahoga County Commissioner Tim Hagan complained again today about a Plain Dealer story that reported on how commissioners spend more than twice as much time behind closed doors as in open session.
“This board is trying to conduct the business of the public in an honorable way,” Hagan said during the commissioners’ weekly meeting. “When you write stories that have no substance except for the point, I guess, to undermine the credibility of the board, you ought to be held accountable for it.”
Then, minutes later, Hagan and fellow Commissioners Peter Lawson Jones and Jimmy Dimora voted to go into another executive session, this time to talk in secret about the long-proposed sale of the downtown Ameritrust complex, personnel matters and pending litigation. Read More
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
CINCINNATI — Cincinnatians won’t know until the last minute Thursday whether they’ll have more than two choices for mayor. Two candidates have filed with the Hamilton County Board of Elections — incumbent Mayor Mark Mallory and Brad Wenstrup, a podiatrist and Iraq war veteran. If more than those two men file, a September primary will be necessary to narrow the options to two for November. Read More
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
DAYTON — Tuesday was the deadline for quarterly filing for the candidates for U.S. Senate, and while Democrats Jennifer Brunner and Lee Fisher aren’t revealing what they’ve raised - some of the checks are still coming in - Republican Rob Portman expects to raise more than $1.5 million, according to sources close to the campaign.
Portman raised $1.7 million last quarter, and the source said he would not be surprised if Portman, a former Cincinnati-area congressman and budget director for the Bush administration, raised that much again.
Jessica Wehrman, Dayton Daily News, Blog, Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 02:54 PM.
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Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
CLEVELAND — The news that in recent months the Cuyahoga County commissioners spent twice as much time doing the public’s business behind closed doors as they did in public fuels the imperative for a sensible change in how the county’s leadership operates.
The Board of Commissioners suffers from overlapping and sometimes conflicting roles: It makes policy and allocates money like a legislative body, and also functions as an administrative body, handling things like personnel and legal matters, or real estate transactions. One result of that duality is a habit of long executive sessions and relatively perfunctory public meetings. Read More
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
CLEVELAND — The federal prosecutor who began the Cuyahoga County corruption investigation said Tuesday that politics had nothing to do with its direction, and he cited his office’s record of going after Democrats and Republicans alike. Former U.S. Attorney Greg White said neither the Republican White House nor the top levels of the U.S. Justice Department tried to influence him about allegations of contract steering in county offices.
“Political considerations were never an issue,” said White, now a federal magistrate judge. “No one ever tried to steer an investigation to any individual. The history of the U.S. attorney’s office is well documented for its public-corruption cases.” Read More
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