Was it improper for a city Council staffer to download 2000 public records from a system he has legal access to, counsel, leadership in the mayor's administration, or clashing over that question?

Three Cuyahoga County Council members walked out of a meeting to protest a moment of silence for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk and a judge sentenced a lead organizer of last fall's street takeovers across Cleveland.

Ideas is next.

Hello and welcome to ideas.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thank you for joining us.

Tensions are running high at Cleveland City Hall, where Mayor Justin Bibbs administration accused a city council staffer of improperly downloading more than 2000 public records, including personnel files that he has legal access to.

Council president Blaine Griffin accused the mayor of strong arming council by requesting the staffer be fired, and said nothing Council's policy analyst did violated the law or current city policies.

Three black members of Cuyahoga County Council walked out of a meeting this week after a moment of silence was called to honor Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist assassinated this month.

They said they could not honor someone they consider racist.

The main organizer of street takeovers that plagued Cleveland last year has been sentenced to prison.

23 people have been convicted, associated with the takeovers and a new report from a leading school funding expert and a former state budget director says we're at a property tax tipping point and the state isn't spending enough on schools.

Joining me to discuss these stories and more from industry and public media.

Local government reporter Abby Marshall and criminal justice reporter Matt Richmond.

And in Columbus, Statehouse News Bureau chief Karen Kasler, let's get ready to round table.

It got pretty heated this week when Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin called a press conference to defend a council staffer accused by Mayor Justin Bibbs administration of improperly downloading more than 2000 unredacted public records from the city's database.

Griffin said the staffer did nothing wrong and said the administration sought to strong arm council into firing him.

Griffin said he wasn't heeding an ultimatum from the mayor's quote message boy.

and this is what I knew, okay, gloves are off.

Oh yeah, I was saying to Matt before the show started Tuesday kind of felt like a Parks and Rec episode because you had these competing press conferences back and forth, bouncing around city Hall, and.

Yeah, so let rest.

Stephen Riss, who's the aide in question here, has legal access to the public records in question.

And he downloaded a number of documents.

Unusual because others don't do that.

There isn't any indication that these were used in nefarious way.

I mean, I guess that's what an investigation might find out.

They they say no, but.

So what is the accusation specifically, then?

Well, the concern comes with the fact that these had been downloaded before they had been redacted.

So basically he has access to this gov QA database that in records in City Hall.

This is basically how it works.

The public media, lawyers, whoever puts in a public records request, then the department who is in charge of whatever record, they upload a file to this database and then the law department will go through and redact any information that they perceive as sensitive or confidential or don't.

Maybe not even relevant to a public records or responsive to a public records request.

And he was downloading some of those documents, according to the administration, before the law department had the chance to redact that information.

So that might have included Social Security numbers, things like that.

Now, the administration says that that is improper and it violates, you know, potentially violates some federal or state laws.

So that was the concern there and why they're launching this investigation.

But the council says you know, he had access to this.

You granted him access to this in 2017.

It was not revoked at that time.

So what's the big deal?

That's basically where the tension lies.

What was interesting, to hear from Griffin was that he said, really, it's on you guys.

If you don't have the guardrails in place.

This is you gave him access.

He's allowed to have access.

Didn't, by the way, have any training about it.

But here are documents.

You can access these documents.

If they're not redacted, that's your fault.

Find a way to redact the things you don't want people to download legally who have access to it.

Right.

And he said that that was kind of a failure, policy wise.

And just as you said, there had been no training and he had had access for years.

So they first noted that, Chris was doing this in May 2024.

They were doing a routine check, saw that this was happening, and they started implementing some guardrails, like marking some things as confidential, which would then lock the records.

But they were saying that in some cases he was getting to it before the lawyers could or before they could mark something as confidential.

So he was getting around those safeguards that they had in place.

But again, he still had access at that time.

So they did an audit last year, this month, that found that he had downloaded about 2200 files, in the last few years.

And they noted that it had been a lot of volume in recent years while Bid has been mayor, because prior to 2021, when he took office, there were only about 13 files downloaded.

Do we know then what the purpose of the downloads was?

Because we're hearing this is legitimate business, it's nothing nefarious.

I mean, part of his job as a policy analyst and and he's been in campaigns before, you would think that there's research that's done in those types of things.

But what did we hear from either him or Council about why so many documents were downloaded?

Yeah, well, that's the question.

And that's what the investigation is going to aim to find, Griffin said.

You know, this guy helps with policy.

He helps answer questions.

So if we know that there's questions that are going around City Hall, we can get those answered as we're drafting legislation and getting things passed.

The administration says they don't have evidence at this time that anything or they don't know what evidence might exist, that he was using it for anything beyond council business.

Now, I spoke to a public records lawyer, earlier this week down in Cincinnati because I wanted someone with no skin in the game, that Matt recommended to me, Jack Greiner.

And he basically said, you know, it seems to him from the outside looking in that if this was used for legitimate counsel business, he's struggling to see what would be illegal or what would be improper, and that an investigation, it might be kind of difficult to prove that it was being used for anything beyond council business.

So Griffin's argument is basically the administration is not transparent, which the administration has obviously said we are transparent.

We have this open database, this portal online that residents can look at, but he said it takes too long to get public records sometimes and they're trying to get legislation passed.

So that's that argument.

Matt.

I was just going to bring up to the administration is a pretty tortured relationship with, the public records.

They, you know, they in the consent decree, they shut down the federal monitors access to records, based on, like, an interpretation of a state law.

They closed down the the Office of Professional Standards for a couple of weeks out of concerns about the administrative.

There's use of public records.

The Community Police Commission has asked for the intervention, and there's an ongoing intervention by the by the federal court overseeing the consent decree for, you know, the to make sure that public records make their way from the city to the CPC.

So I just bring up the, you know, we very often are hearing from the city about how they feel like public records are being misused by others.

And you hear from the city administration, though, Abby, that, hey, we're doing great, especially compared to previous administrations.

And there was one particular, point that was brought up by the current administration that I think really incensed Blaine Griffin.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, the argument from the administration, by the way, the mayor was not in this meeting with reporters, a bunch of reporters, you know, we talked to him about this.

Right.

And, this was a meeting with the members of administration on background, and then we had a city spokesperson that went on the record so we could get, you know, those bites for air, TV, that sort of thing.

That kind of briefed us on this and they said, you know, we actually have worked really hard to be transparent with the media.

And, you know, we created this open data portal that residents can go and download raw data.

We've formalized people to their positions to deal with public records.

And, Tyler Sinclair, the spokesperson for the city, made a comment about, past criminal family affiliations with the previous administration, Frank Jackson, seemingly, discussing, Frank Jackson's great grandson, who was recently sentenced to prison, for, well, a few years ago for murdering a man who was connected to the murder of his uncle, and his late great grandson.

Yeah, right.

Well, great grandson.

Great grandson sitting in jail.

Yes.

In Blaine Griffin.

That really that really set him off.

And in the press conference that he had right after, Sinclair's press conference, he basically said, like this message.

Boy, for the mayor should be ashamed of himself.

Like, how dare you?

You know, kind of take that as a he took that as a very low blow.

One other point.

And this, I love the phrase that he, coined.

He said he counter the idea that there's going to be an outside investigation of that.

These accusations are being made and what he called strong arming by saying there would be legislative constipation.

Yeah.

What does that mean?

As well, someone on Reddit, when I posted this story said I heard legislative constipation is playing at the organ next Friday.

Basically, you know, the mayor's office works where they talk about their policy objectives and things that they want to get passed through council.

But obviously council has to hear the legislation, change it, amend it, pass it.

And he said, you know, we will and council, we don't ever want to do anything that's going to harm residents.

But we might hold up legislation that Mayor Bibb wants to get passed because he feels like the Bib administration is being really adversarial to council and disrespecting them and trying to, fracture them.

And this was evident in his accusations that he said that he basically felt that staff was threatened.

Council staff was threatened in this meeting that happened last week where they said either fire risks or we are going to go to the media.

We are going to, you know, look at federal prosecution.

And those are both accusations that the administration has denied.

Three members of Cuyahoga County Council walked out of a meeting this week to protest a moment of silence for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated earlier this month in Utah.

in a moment of silence.

One of the things that Dale Miller said was we had a moment of silence when the legislator in, in Minnesota was killed, Democrat.

We have moments of silence.

This is, one to to honor, Charlie Kirk, but also to call for an end to this kind of political violence.

What was his aim there?

And how how is it that that intersected with these members who walked out?

Yeah, I think, you know, I think he said that it was about being balanced, that it's not just, you know, we shouldn't just have moments of silence when it's a democratic lawmaker.

And I think that, you know, his intention was for it to be fairly neutral, sort of modern science against violence.

He did not take into account the kind of, you know, the the deep concern about some of Kirk's comments, particularly, I think the one that was referenced was, you know, he talked about Michelle Obama and said that, you know, she got where she got in life because of affirmative action, basically.

And now because of merit, you'll hear in the national discussion people saying, that's not what he said.

What he's saying is that it's a broader discussion, etc.

but certainly people are interpreting his comments in a number of ways.

And you hear people are saying, listen, that's flat out racist.

And that's what we're hearing from these council members, that we're not going to sit and honor a person who we consider to be racist.

Yeah.

And it was a very brief thing.

I mean, you know, the moment moments had started, the three council members walked out.

And then basically when they got out of the room, it was over and they came back in.

It didn't derail the whole meeting or anything.

And Karen and Columbus lawmakers are working toward establishing October 14th, Kirk's birthday as Charlie Kirk Memorial Day in the state.

So while we have, you know, people walking out of a moment of silence, there's at the state level, certainly, enthusiasm for honoring Charlie Kirk.

Yeah.

And that's not a big surprise.

I mean, Republicans are in the super majority in the House and Senate.

And there was a big vigil in Dublin, one of the Columbus suburbs, a week or so ago, right after his death, that was attended by Republican candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy.

US Senator John Hughes did other prominent Republican figures.

So it seems likely that we're going to have some sort of tribute to the Charlie Kirk.

Not exactly sure.

There's two bills right now.

One that would, do October 14th as Charlie Kirk Memorial Day, which is similar to something that passed in Congress.

There's also just a resolution honoring him.

So we're likely to see something when they do come back.

And there was a memorial also in Medina, one scheduled in, Strongsville.

There really cities all across the state.

Private school expansion continues in Ohio, where vouchers have pumped money into private schools.

And now the U.S.

Department of Education has announced it will give $105 million to Ohio over the next five years to expand charter school education.

U.S.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the funding at an event in Columbus on Wednesday.

Karen, what's the objective for giving more money to Ohio for charter schools?

Well, it's part of the whole school choice argument.

Republicans say very clearly that they believe that school choice is the answer to low academic performance, low graduation rates, really anything that relates to K-12 education.

And so Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, who said a couple times that she's trying to work herself out of a job because the Department of Education is being dismantled.

She said that the federal government is putting $500 million into a charter school grant program this fiscal year.

And over the next five years, Ohio will get $105 million, approximately for charter schools, not only to launch new charter schools, but also to improve charter schools that are considered high quality as evaluated by state officials.

And we're seeing this as we see a surge of of, voucher programs, a number of students leaving public schools for private schools.

This will continue that trend in Ohio.

Yeah.

And I mean, there's been no sign of any sort of pullback on vouchers in Ohio at all.

In fact, there was an expansion of voucher program in the last budget where basically any family in Ohio who wants a voucher can get one.

The higher your income, maybe the less that you get in a voucher.

And it turned out a lot of the people who were getting these vouchers were not people who were trying to escape failing public schools, which had been the argument for many years, but they were already sending their kids to private schools.

And so they just took the money that the state was offering in terms of a voucher and used that to help pay for their kids private school they were already attending.

So this is and we've also seen like a doubling in the budget of the money that goes to voucher programs.

And of course, critics who largely support public schools, traditional public schools have been saying this is money that really belongs at the public school, because there's a constitutional requirement to make sure that there is a a thorough and efficient system of common schools.

And that's the basis of a lawsuit that's been going on for a while over the whole voucher program.

Ohioans paid nearly $17 billion in property taxes last year, according to a report from a school funding expert and the state's former budget director.

They say the taxes flow to schools, but it doesn't mean budgets are flush.

Instead, it plugged holes caused by low state spending on k-through-12 education.

Karen, this was Doctor Howard Pfleger, who knows school funding, and Greg Browning, who is the budget director under George Voinovich.

So they have some credibility.

Yeah.

And it's an interesting pairing here because they do have a lot of credibility.

And, their whole argument has been that the state is simply not invested enough in public education and the way that property taxes have worked over the last 30 years or so, it's really put pressure on homeowners and farmers and less pressure on businesses.

So you've got when you start looking at the graph of where the property tax money comes from, it used to be about even like, you know, 30 years ago or so, businesses and homeowners and farmers.

Now it's significantly tilted in terms of homeowners and farmers paying like 62% of the burden of property taxes, while businesses pay a lot less than that.

And so they said that's really putting the pressure on homeowners especially.

And basically the people who are the least able to pay are really feeling the squeeze.

And we were hearing that from state lawmakers, from people who, you know, weigh in with us and everything.

You've got this property tax reform group that governor Mike DeWine convened after he vetoed some property tax items in the budget.

They're supposed to come out with recommendations on property tax law changes next week.

All of this is is not news to a lot of people who are paying soaring property tax bills.

So we have that budget committee, that commission on property taxes.

We also have a grassroots effort to eliminate property taxes statewide from this report.

What do Flitter and Browning suggest?

What are their recommendations for solutions?

Well, basically there's three options that they put at the top.

There's several different options, but they put in three options that would involve the state actually stepping in and really holding schools and local governments harmless.

In other words, the state would have to put up some money for property tax relief to happen.

And they talk about things like a property tax circuit breaker for people with incomes over under $70,000.

If it gets to a certain point and that lowers the property tax, the state would have to make up about a half $1 billion for that to work, according to Fleer and Browning.

They also talked about a property tax freeze for senior citizens, which could cost the state about $211 million, and then an expansion of the homestead tax exemption for senior citizens and people with disabilities.

They don't have a cost estimate on that.

But that's been kind of the sticking point here.

Is, is the state going to jump in and really put some money toward property tax relief to help schools and local governments with the money that they would lose if property tax laws are changed because you change a property tax law, you do something with that.

It has an effect on something else.

Property taxes fund schools, law enforcement, libraries, zoos, all that stuff.

And so to change those or eliminate those, you really need to find another way to make up that funding or you lose those services potentially.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I moderated a forum last night in Gates Mills for their council race in the village there, and that question came up about taxes.

And each one of them said, listen, this is not just let's get rid of taxes.

What what are all the ramifications?

You hear that in little villages like that and in big cities like Cleveland and on our TV show, The State of Ohio this weekend, I sat down with three school superintendents to talk about the pressures that are on individual school districts to try to deal with all of us.

They're hearing from their own property tax payers, but they also know that they've got this mission to educate kids.

Most of their budget is teachers who are educating kids.

What do you do when you've got that pressure in there?

And so there's some interesting ideas there, but they want to make sure that they're being heard.

As lawmakers start to talk about what kind of changes they want to make.

There are some bills that are in the legislature that school districts say would be devastating to their budgets if they went through in the name of providing property tax relief.

The main organizer of street takeovers that plagued and in some cases terrorized Cleveland last year, was sentenced to nine months in prison.

This week.

Tyrique Lowery of Garfield Heights, received a nine month sentence for orchestrating the takeovers.

It's speeding and stunt driving cars closing down intersections, Matt.

Prosecutors say Lowery scouted all the locations in advance, that he was basically the the organizer of these.

Yeah, I guess he was giving out instructions to some of the parties, to participants about where to go and what to do.

And I guess they also played a video of him kind of doing circles, doing donuts around a police car, one of the police cars that responded, yeah, this was one of those things where I guess, you know, okay, a bunch of people out having fun, but it's not.

It was dangerous.

There are a lot of people that were, you know, in fear over this.

And the city got serious because I know what these people say is when they're doing this, they can't do anything to us.

We'll get away there.

Nothing's going to happen.

23 people.

In addition, I think in addition to Lowery, were convicted or associated with these.

Yeah.

And he got the nine month sentence.

Prosecutors wanted five years for him because he was the ringleader.

And another participant who at the time was described as the ringleader.

But they found later that actually, Lowery was got I believe it was three years.

So so they went for some pretty serious sentences.

And so what does the city's chase policy have to do?

This?

Because there is a policy about not chasing, from city police and I think maybe that's why some of these actors thought tha Yeah, that that's what the prosecutors are arguing.

And, the policy says that you're not supposed to chase unless there has been a violent crime or a or a DUI.

And, you know, these these at no point was there a violent crime sort of connected to the takeovers of of intersections there.

I think people got hurt kind of in the process.

But the actual takeovers were not violent crime, so they wouldn't have qualified under the Chase policy.

Yeah.

So that's why you figure they can't do anything to us.

All we gotta do is point the car that way and drive.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, it would be interesting to have a discussion about what exactly?

Because there were so many people.

There were so many cars.

It was huge crowds.

So it would be interesting to see what, you know, if they could chase them, who exactly they would chase, how they would pick people out of the group.

You know, would it be safer to start a chase than to just let them do what they're doing and then go home?

I mean, you know, it's, it comes at a time when there have been two this year, fatal, police chases by, Cuyahoga County sheriffs deputies from the Downtown Safety Patrol.

And in both those cases, Chase has got up to extremely high, speeds on resident on surface streets.

And people who were not involved who were in other cars.

The chase ended with those people getting hit and dying in two cases.

And so, you know, this has been going on for a long time, figuring out what the balance is between when do you need to chase and when is it safer to just stay back.

So if they didn't chase these folks to track them down, how did they get two dozen convictions?

Oh, there were so many videos.

In between, the police are taking their own video.

Yeah, they were live streaming it.

I yeah, I think that the only reason why it's even taking this long is because it took so long to go through all the video evidence to find every person, and then the discussions on social media, it was not, very secret operation by any means.

The Greater Cleveland Sports Commission announced that Cleveland will host the 2030 Special Olympics USA games.

David Gilbert, the CEO and president of the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission and the Tourism bureau Destination Cleveland, said in a press release that in addition to the economic impact, the event will bring people together in a profound way, celebrating ability, perseverance and inclusion.

Abby, it's a big deal for Cleveland.

There have been a lot of wins like this.

We've seen, you know, the senior games and we've seen the Gay games and we've seen, Final Fours in, women's, NCAA basketball.

Really a role.

I mean, we have until 2030 for this, but how cool.

Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a really big deal.

They estimate that this will bring in about $70 million to the local economy, as well as 4500 athletes, coaches, things like that, and then thousands of fans as well.

So it'll over a period of about a week, eight days, there will be 16 different sporting events.

But Cleveland really has carved out this niche of not just, you know, we are a big sports city, of course.

And that was one of the comments made, is that whether the sports teams are doing well or not so well, like the Browns?

There are some really big fans here.

But just beyond just sporting events, even looking at this summer, Cleveland had these big national events.

They had the national Association of Black Journalists, that big conference, they had the National Urban League here, the National Conference for the Democratic Mayors, of which Mayor Justin Bibb is the president.

So the city is really pitching itself to have these big events.

And it's really cool to see.

Yeah, we had, hosted a reception here for the NABJ, conference, the National Association of Black Journalists.

It's just great.

And what's really cool is we got a firsthand look at how when you do this, people sort of see Cleveland as what it is, which is pretty cool.

Yeah.

Like you don't you often get that?

I talked to a number of people at NABJ.

I'd never been to Cleveland, and I had heard bad things.

Yeah.

And they came and they were like, wow, it didn't happen.

It didn't hurt that we had Chamber of Commerce weather that week.

But, but, you know, people people are getting a look at that.

I wonder when it comes to the, to the Special Olympics, the venues that are going to be used, I don't know, I mean, there's many options around Northeast Ohio, but it'll be interesting to see how all of that plays out.

Yeah.

And you know what?

I think in future reporting, I'm going to reach out to people in the communities that have, that would participate in games like this or what it means to them.

But I don't actually know.

I, I would be curious to know what goes into building an Olympic village for special Olympics, because, you know, the, I know a lot about, like, the regular Olympic villages.

But I'm curious how, it will impact the region come 2030.

By then, we might have an empty stadium on the lakefront you could use for all these events.

Oh, yeah?

Who knows?

Monday on The Sound of Ideas on 89 seven Wksu.

Stephanie Haney is back in the host chair and leads a conversation about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and how it affects the body and the brain.

I'm Mike McIntyre.

Thanks so much for watching and stay safe.