Frank Jackson, Four Years an Asshole
Frank Jackson, Four Years an Asshole
The political machine of Cleveland reaps what it sows.
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Cleveland has the best downtown of any of the three big cities in Ohio. Cincinnati is a respectable second while Columbus is a laughable third. (Maybe you disagree with Cleveland over Cincinnati, which is at least somewhat defensible. If you think Columbus is anything but third, you are wrong.)
One big reason Downtown Cleveland rocks is Public Square, 10 acres of green space in the heart of everything. Part of the original plat developed by Moses Cleaveland, the city redeveloped it to new glory in 2016.
This is the kind of forward-thinking design we do not often see from leaders of either political stripe in Ohio. We should be encouraging fewer cars in our downtown areas in a quest to make them as walkable as possible, especially in a downtown as plagued with flat-surface parking lots as Cleveland.
But it’s of no surprise Mayor Frank Jackson had to mar this beautiful public space like the petty, vindictive asshole he is.
One reason the Ohio Democratic Party’s statewide bench is virtually nonexistent is that none of the three mayors of the major metropolitan areas would make viable statewide candidates.
Frank Jackson would probably make the worst among them, in no small part because he doesn’t realize politics outside of Cleveland exist in the first place.
When the revamped Public Square opened, Jackson didn’t want buses going down Superior Avenue through the area. That’s absurd considering Jackson should want to make bussing in his city as convenient and scenic as possible. Busses move more people, are easily seen by pedestrians and piloted by professional, unionized drivers.
But no, for reasons only known to Jackson and to God himself (Jackson often deludes himself into thinking those two entities are one in the same) he decided to take on local and federal transit organizations and local transit activists on the issue.
Thankfully, he lost the fight. Unthankfully, he was still the petty, vindictive man he had always been. And he was still the mayor.
From Sam Allard of clevelandscene.com in 2017:
Superior is now the site of some very ugly new features, added ostensibly for the purposes of safety. Concrete jersey barriers (the same sort that you see on highway construction projects) now funnel pedestrians from the two original crosswalks to a new brightly striped crosswalk. Yellow ramps have been added to help those with disabilities or limited mobility get from the curb to the crosswalk.
The striping was completed by RTA. The barriers were installed by the city. And though they're thought to be temporary — the hope, according to one RTA staff member working at the Square on Monday, is that the city will install bollards eventually — some observers are convinced Mayor Jackson wanted to make the Square unsightly on purpose, as an act of revenge.
"These do nothing," said Ken Prendergast, Executive Director of the transit advocacy group All Aboard Ohio, when asked about the barricades. "They're there for the city to prove that they were right all along, and that any kind of solution to bring buses to the Square will be completely ugly. It's ugly by design, so that people will say let's go back to how it was."
Well, “some observers” who were convinced Jackson was acting in revenge have been proven right. Yesterday marked the four-year anniversary of the unseemly downtown barriers, via a Cleveland city planner:
Think about the type of grudge that would be required for you to harbor for four years. For me, it’s not that hard. Like that Eleven Warriors commenter who once called me Great Lakes Clay Travis? I’ll see that guy in the deepest pits of Hell.
I am, however, not the mayor of a major city like Cleveland. I would not win the lottery and attempt a hostile takeover of Eleven Warriors to ruin something that asshole enjoyed at the expense of the tens of thousands of other Buckeye fans that congregate there on a daily basis.
But Jackson is the kind of person that comes to overlord over a political machine like the one that operates in Cleveland. You do not rise through the cogs of the machine by being a genial person who forgets any slight. You go eye for an eye, and if any motherfucker throws a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them.
Eventually that mentality gets hardwired into your persona. You can’t turn it off. So when you lose a bureaucratic war — to people who aren’t even the mayor! — you instinctually put your thumb in their eye, collateral damage be damned.
This November, Cleveland will have a chance to elect a new mayor. It will be a hotly contested race, even if Mayor Jackson decides to run for re-election.
I’ll wait to talk to some boots on the ground in Cleveland after the filing deadline has passed before I handout the coveted Columbus Communist Endorsement, but it sure as hell won’t be going to the current bum in power. Cleveland can do so much better, and I hope its voters agree. The only thing they have to lose is the shackles of their corrupt and incompetent political machine.
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