Akron Voters Decide Mayor’s Fate in Tuesday’s Recall Election

Sunday, June 21, 2009
Topics: Politics
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Voters in Akron head to the polls tomorrow to decide whether the city's mayor should be recalled after 23 years in office. Don Plusquellic's critics say he has an abusive personality and it out of touch with the people, but the mayor’s supporters say the charges are flimsy at best and that it is the recall process that is being abused. ideastream®'s Dan Bobkoff reports.

Supporters of the recall don’t have one dominating reason for throwing the mayor out of office. There’s no scandal, no charges of corruption or fiscal emergency…the issues that usually prompt a recall.

Instead, recall advocates here have a list of ...complaints: they say Mayor Don Plusquellic is loading up the city with debt, and that he’s a bully who has poor relations with the police, and some don’t like the way he spends money traveling out of the country seeking new businesses for Akron. And one more thing, recall supporters say the mayor is responsible for a drop in the city’s population.

Akron lawyer Warner Mendenhall is leading the recall effort, though he likes to say he’s just part of a movement. Asked whether any of these rise to the level of recall, Mendenhall says these issues are serious.

MENDENHALL: Let’s be very clear. We’re in crisis. 30,000 people have left the city in 15 years. The mayor has no relationship with the police department. Our neighborhoods are deteriorating and the mayor is bankrupting the city. That’s a crisis if I’ve ever heard of a crisis, that’s a crisis.

But supporters of Plusquellic say this is a personal vendetta. Mendenhall has been sparring with the mayor for most of his years in office. State Senator Tom Sawyer, a former Akron mayor himself, is Plusquellic’s campaign spokesperson.

SAWYER: It is a reckless undertaking that runs the risk of damaging a city that has shown continuous progress in the last 25 years or so when other cities have seen great difficulty.

Plusquellic’s supporters point to successes improving downtown, increasing revenue from businesses, and to a project building market-rate homes in the city center.

It is true that Akron police have faught for years with Plusquellic, mainly over wages and work rules.  The police union narrowly voted to back the recall effort.  Paul Hylinski is president of Akron’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

HYLINSKI: We’ve had a lot of passionate issues. The mayor in my opinion tried to break the union a few years ago by trying to install part-timers which would have caused a lot of problems for us and the safety of the citizens of Akron I may add.

The union and the mayor have also fought over requirements that police live within the city-a requirement the state Supreme Court recently struck down.

But Senator Sawyer says the issues brought up by the police union and Mendenhall’s group, Change Akron Now, are not appropriate for a recall.

SAWYER: his campaign has been built around maybe the kind of issues you might raise in a Mayoral campaign, but there are no charges against him. People ask me all the time: what has he done wrong? And the answer is there are no charges against him; he has done nothing wrong.

Akron’s charter says that in order for there to be a recall, supporters need petition signatures from 20% of the number of people who voted for mayor in the last general election. Akron is heavily-Democratic though, and winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to winning the election. So, after winning the Democratic nomination in 2007, fewer than 10,000 people voted for Plusquellic in November. He was unopposed. But that victory has the effect of setting a very low threshold for forcing the recall election. Only 2000 signatures were required in a city of 200,000.

Mayor Plusquellic has made few public comments about the recall effort, deferring most requests to Sawyer. But he tells 90.3 that he thinks a small number of critics are exploiting that low number of signatures needed for the special election.

PLUSQUELLIC: Having to live through the lengthy number of misleading statements, comments and criticisms, 90% of which are just untrue has been difficult for a lot of folks who work at city hall, care about city hall, myself included, my family.

That’s not to say Plusquellic isn’t taking this recall seriously. His supporters have raised over $200,000. That’s 50 times what the recall group has garnered.  Stephen Brooks, co-director of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, says a vocal, active minority can still win in a recall.

BROOKS: And, the anti-Mayor people have a real advantage because if you’re upset with the mayor, if you don’t like the way the things are going in the city, you have some incentive to show up. If you think things are fine, he’s a good mayor, or even a good enough mayor, do I really want to quit weeding the garden and vote?

Polls in Akron open tomorrow at 6:30am, close at 7:30pm and early voting has already been under way since late May. The results should tell us how much support Akron’s long-time Mayor still has…and it may raise questions about the recall process and whether it should be rethought in the future.