Shannon Hardin stands on that NWSL to McCoy Park deal

Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin sat down with The Rooster at City Hall to discuss why he voted for a deal he didn't love from the beginning.

It’s been over a week since the Franklin County Commissioners and City Council approved $50 million in public money for a new women’s professional training facility on the soon-to-be ashes of McCoy Park.

The Haslam Group and minority investors like Dr. Pete Edwards and Nationwide paid a record $205 million fee to the National Women’s Soccer League for the rights to its 18th franchise.

The Rooster didn’t break the story until March 23, which means the general public had less than a month to process the deal and organize any opposition. Meanwhile, the Columbus Partnership already had the corporate astroturf campaign ready to roll through its various subsidiaries and network of stooges.

While Mayor Suburbs admitted this week that he began negotiations last summer, and Franklin County Commission President John O’Grady said last week that his body began negotiations roughly “six months ago,” Council President Shannon Hardin told The Rooster on Thursday that he only learned about the deal in late February.

In my opinion, that disrespect should have tanked the deal immediately. But for better or worse, the desire to make a deal—even in a situation where counsel was intentionally dealt the worst hand possible—is ingrained upon him.

That much was evident after our 20-minute conversation, which you can view in full below.

We discussed calling the mayor “incompetent,” his belief that Southwest Columbus residents will land a better park than the plans promised to McCoy, his defense of public-private partnerships, and Columbus City Schools.

I’m proud of this conversation, even if it will undoubtedly disappoint some readers because it didn’t end with me shouting about hobgoblins and flipping Hardin’s desk over before being tased by a private security officer.

That, however, would have been a disservice to the readership at large. These are the types of conversations that interest me most. Especially since local TV stations don’t seem interested in replicating anything close outside of 15-second soundbites sandwiched between breathless reports of property crime.

It’s good for my business, but bad for our society.

Which is why I commend Hardin for having the courage to sit down and talk on camera with a controversial blogger loathed by many influential forces in Ohio politics. He earned enemies he probably doesn’t even know about by inviting me into his office and treating me as an equal.

That simple sign of respect is small thing to me, given the conflicts we’ve had in the not-so-distant past and the ones we’ll assuredly have in the future.

And sure, stuff like that should be the bare minimum for a political leader. But we would not be in this predicament of ours if it were a common trait among Democratic politicians, especially in Ohio.

Hardin realizes that if the Democratic Party is ever going to return to power, its representatives must meet the voters where they are and speak in their terms.

Hardin on why he called himself “fucking pissed,” while calling the mayor “incompetent”

Make no mistake, Hardin voted for the NWSL deal.

But he looks like Moses compared to Mayor Suburbs, who would have gleefully written a $25 million check to MAGA billionaire Jimmy Haslam in exchange for a six-figure donation to his aligned PAC for the upcoming campaign against Hardin.

But I have never seen Hardin as viscerally angry as when he blasted the business community and the mayor for negotiating the original deal in secret. It was about as close as he could have come to declaring for mayor without saying the words explicitly.

He’s right to say that people like to see him angry, even if it’s just me. I don’t understand why more Democratic politicians aren’t angrier, given the circumstances.

But reading between the lines, the current leaders of the Department of Development will be sent to a gulag in Pataskala if Hardin becomes mayor.

Hardin on plans to fix the broken promises to McCoy Park patrons and the disabled community

Hardin contended that his work on the deal means Southwest Columbus residents will land a better park than the one that the mayor had planned for McCoy. And if the administration’s working group doesn’t find a replacement property within 60 days, the deal is off.

Local residents are demanding a new green space in the same census tract as McCoy Park.

Though Hardin didn’t explicitly say so, I got the vibe that city officials have already located a potential property for the replacement park, though it’d have to be much more south than McCoy.

Hardin also said that the $3 million paid directly by Jimmy Haslam will be used to purchase the new property or redevelop the land. Hardin revealed he shook Haslam down for the money in a private conversation.

Still, it’s hard for me to be more than ambivalent. Hardin again looks like Mother Theresa compared to Mayor Suburbs, who would have just taken the park from the city’s poorest residents, knowing they couldn’t have done a damn thing to hurt him at the ballot box.

But it’s like Councilwoman Nancy Day-Achauer said two weeks ago: Even on an ideal timeline, replacing McCoy Park will take years. All the new promises will do nothing for the kids currently living in the neighborhood with the state's lowest life expectancy.

Why Hardin ultimately voted with the Haslam Group

My other big beef with the deal was climbing further into bed with Haslam, an accused fraudster who bought his way out of a federal investigation and someone who just screwed Cuyahoga County and Cleveland by moving the Browns’ new abominable stadium to Brook Park.

He’s not a trustworthy business partner. He’s a sociopath who will only do whatever is in his best interest at all times.

Again, Hardin returned to his work to improve the deal. Because at the end of the day, if bringing women’s professional soccer to Columbus is the goal, there’s only one billionaire with ties to Central Ohio who can materialize that goal.

Well, the only Ohio billionaire whom the FBI didn’t label as an unindicted co-conspirator to Jeffrey Epstein, anwyay.

Shannon goes to bat for public-private partnerships

Another big point of disagreement was the public-private partnership.

On one hand, I see why Hardin vouches for them. It’s the way things have been done in this city, and the Columbus Promise of sending public school students to Columbus State for a free associate’s degree is the type of legislation that’s unfortunately way too rare in the richest country in human history.

And the business community deserves kudos for answering that bell after Mayor Suburbs tried to whack the program as an F-U to Hardin.

But if Columbus is booming, as all our leaders say, the public sector could more than afford to pay for the Columbus Promise itself if these same business interests were properly taxed by federal, state, and even local governments.

And obviously, the federal and state governments are taking the majority of that blame. Which makes the Columbus Partnership's decision to throw a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy even more infuriating.

It allows the Partnership to maintain influence at City Hall while starving the beast and making it rely solely on the types of philanthropy it deems fit. We will never fix our schools as long as the state continues to elect Republicans.

I’ll never apologize for pushing Hardin—or any Democrat—to push for a more equitable world outside the constraints of “the way things are.

Hardin refuses a chance to declare for mayor, while offering a peek into what his future campaign might sound like

That Hardin is running for mayor can’t even be qualified as “the worst-kept secret in Columbus politics” anymore.

He would be a better mayor than the current regime, no matter how much anyone wants to quibble with the degree. Just the threat of the campaign has cost Mayor Suburbs more time on the golf course than he would like; that much I can tell you.

In my opinion, he missed a major chance to differentiate himself from the mayor and the cynicism that has taken hold in federal, state and local politics.

But for all the righteous anger about the deal that Hardin defends, he also knows that it will dissipate. That, when the chips come down, the loss of McCoy Park won’t be a motivating factor for many voters in Nov. 2027.

Yet if he wants to change this city for the better—and I believe that he does—he will need to differentiate himself from the mayor by a lot more than a two percent ticket tax and more promises of an accessible park coming to Columbus in the oh-so-near future.

Chat, is it good if your Democratic candidate has to reaffirm their support of organized labor days before a winner-take-all election?

Upper Arlington mayor Ukeme Awakessian Jeter, a Democratic candidate in the Ohio House District 7, issued two statements in response to The Rooster’s Thursday dispatch that laid out her administration’s years-long union-busting campaign against the Teamsters.