Editorial

In the outpouring of reporting and opinion writing about today’s unprecedented campaigns for unconstitutional book banning and suppression of free speech, on the one hand, and locally-rooted, one shop at a time, unionization drives, on the other hand, a fundamental common element is not acknowledged. Resistance to book bans and censorship of curriculum and reading materials in classrooms and libraries, and efforts to unionize are most often locally-based among groups and individuals whose interests often align.

Their connections on multiple levels are seldom recognized. Despite the continuing lack of communication and coordination, the terrain of single institutions includes campaigns to organize graduate students, undergraduate student workers, faculty, staff, and librarians, and also local bookstore employees. They strikingly overlap. They cry for connections and commonality: genuine coalitions crossing vertical and horizontal spaces. Local and state activists tell me about much more inter-union and intra-institutional cooperation than the media report. (Thanks to Matt Ides and Thomas Johnson for comments on their relevant experiences over many years.)

As I continue my search for Columbus’ history and identity, I regularly rediscover the City’s and the city’s willful lack of the foundational elements for a modern city. I return to its absence of typical city reforms toward representative city government in the second half of the nineteenth century and its missing Progressive Era of the early 20th century: that’s capital P, unlike our present-day search for a 21st century progressivism. These are historical anomalies, unlike other cities of its age and size in Ohio and across the nation.

A central element in Columbus’ absent core is the combined extent of mismanagement and lack of management, and both real and likely corruption. As Ohio increasingly takes center stage nationally for corruption permeating its state government, 21st century Columbus takes center stage as its corruption capital.

My struggles to gain democratic legal rights and respect for residents in the “city” of Columbus continue. The three documents reprinted here below elaborate the themes of my recent essays. To expand the discussion to a larger public, I include them here.

First, I wrote to the City Council legislative aides, department heads, and City Attorneys with who I am in communication. They were silent for some weeks after I tripped on (illegal) broken pavement and fractured my right leg, and commented that the City’s failure to inspect and enforce its zoning codes makes the city as well as the large corporate property owner legally liable.

June 10, 2022

To my correspondents,

Today for the second time in two weeks that we lost electric power from AEP for multiple hours on a weekday morning. Never an explanation. [This is the week before AEP’s massive and unexplained failures. The City refuses to hold AEP accountable, leaving that to the state’s corruption-ridden PUCO]

This parallels Rumpke's sporadic performances without consequences and City Council’s insulting public clean-up by volunteers—who also pay taxes for public services--days.

I call for 19th-century urban reforms and an early 20th-century Progressive Era for Columbus, Ohio in 2022.

Columbus clamors for an unimaginable future alternatively as the Columbus Way or Opportunity City. But it has no sense of its past or even its present. If I turn to allegory for the city’s failing infrastructure, this is like building a 32-story skyscraper beside the historic North Market (once the home of city offices) or the ludicrously named Junto Hotel on the banks of the Scioto River without a foundation. Or, to turn to another relevant ecological metaphor, the City engages in slash-and-burn agriculture with no replanting.

We may combine these threads into a plea for sustained attention to the missing contexts of the city’s human and natural ecologies. We may then follow their intersections into the makings and breakings of the lives and the life chances of differently-situated Columbus residents.

Part Four (of Four)

Residents’ lack of basic rights (cont’d.)

Public safety

The right to public health and a clean environment for healthy living, which I explored in Part Three, is inseparable from freedom from dangerous sidewalks and streets, and especially residents’ and visitors’ rights to public safety. Columbus is the state king and queen of homicides by guns, and (perversely) a national leader. The mayor and Columbus Public Health respond with little more than an unhelpful, inaccurate slogan: It is “a public health crisis.” Among a multitude of distractions and misunderstandings is the fundamental misconstrual of public health itself. They say little to nothing about broader social reforms including education, training, jobs, social supports, and accessible and affordable health care itself.

Part Three (of Four)

Residents’ lack of basic rights (cont’d.)

Adequate city services

I can call attention to only a selection of the principal lost or stolen rights. These include the right to maintain on a legal and customary basis well-established, recognized, and historic neighborhoods. This right embraces the maintenance of the legal residential status of each property as well as the compacts that govern property transfers and illegal amassing of collections of hundreds of rental properties in an area that is zoned as residential. It also includes upkeep and repair of the properties. This includes contracts, public health, and public safety.

NorthSteppe’s, HomeTeam’s, and others’ houses all too often feature broken front doors, windows, and doorbells; insufficient trash containers irregularly put out or returned according to code; and broken sidewalks. Broken water and gas pipes are common, as well as appliances. Many yards are strewn with trash; upholstered furniture; drinking game paraphernalia; portable toilets, tents, shelters, and other structures; open fires; and large quantities of alcohol provided free—all without required permits.

Part Two (of Four)

In the shadows of democracy (cont’d.)

City Council appointments and elections

The process of filling public offices, especially City Council, is a key element in the reproduction of undemocracy from one iteration of office-holders to their successors. The city boosters in the media never comment on this.

Until the election of Elizabeth Brown in 2015 (reelected in 2019), no Council member had been elected without first being appointed to office since Mary Ellen O’Shaunassey in 1995. In 2019, Brown did not even complete nonpartisan Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey.

More recently, Shayla Favor and Rob Dorans gained their seats by submitting 500-word essays and resumes. They were not elected to office

These appointees, including mayors, typically rise from their “holding pens” (to quote one long-time civic activist) or school practice yards in the Franklin County Board of Elections, Columbus Board of Education, or minor City positions. They do not join the ranks of the rulers first by popular election.

Part One (of Four)

Unlike those of any other U.S. city of its size, and certainly its slogan-dominated, boosterish aspirations, residents of Columbus have few legal rights and fewer ethical democratic rights. I write as a privileged member of the community, a homeowner, retired professional, taxpayer, and voter. Many others lack my privileges. They have even fewer rights. The City of Columbus has no inclusive urban vision, no focus on the public, especially those in need, other than private interests and developers.

The contradictions of Columbus past and present require a long book. I can only highlight some of the major ones here. Refer to my continuing series of Columbus Free Press columns (listed at end of this essay and available on the website) as well as Kevin Cox’s Boomtown Columbus (2021), the only documented, book-length study of the 220-year-old city. I ask rhetorically: Does the 14th largest city in the nation deserve to have a thoroughly researched, fact-based history—not the fictitious and trivial version expressed always without context in Columbus Dispatch and on WOSU?

A long view

Dear Kenny McDonald:

I write to you in your capacity as the new CEO of the self-proclaimed since 2002, Columbus Partnership.

Columbus Dispatch business reporter Mark Williams belatedly announced your ascension in January on June 10 with an interview. (See also, Carrie Ghose, “Alex Fischer to hand over Columbus Partnership reins to Kenny McDonald.”) Compare the Dispatch article with the more guarded and questioning comments by Dave Ghose in Columbus Monthly in January, “The Titans Are Gone. Power Is Shifting. Who Will Lead Columbus into the Future?”

Unknown to many residents of Columbus is the curious one-sided relationship between a small revenue-generating, non-academic element of the prestigious Harvard Business School, and certain elements of Columbus’ aspirational self-appointed, private “leadership class.”

Columbus CEO reminds us of this revealing connection in its announcement “Harvard Business School calls on Columbus execs for leadership program.” (Jess Deyo, May 24, 2022) Note the curious phrasing “calls on.”