JUST IN CASE

With Black Friday starting out with a blast of cold and snow, drove out to the Factory Outlet in Aurora, there the area was getting hit with an inch maybe of snow,made it fun to drive.

So I thought we could use some pictures of warmer climates!

Sunset on the Hualapi Reservation

Hoover Dam

2500 feet over the Grand Canyon

Speaking of warmth looks like the City Council meetings will be come even more interesting during budget time. Sources indicate deficit maybe larger than first perceived for FY08, time will tell.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

As we all soon gather around a table full of food and take a moment to ask for the blessings of life, I would like to share with you all of you a little of what I am thankful for:

First, am I thankful for the men and women who are serving and protecting both here and abroad and I am thankful for those men and women who have given their lives to to make this country great:



I have been lucky to grow up in a place where another country was just a short boat trip across a river, even though we shared the same language, they too had different customs:





I have been blessed at seeing some of the great beauty that this country has to offer:

Nevada

Hawaii

As well as other beautiful places around the world:

Brazil

Budapest

Dominican Republic

Prague

I have had a wonderful opportunity to be a part of the political system and try to make my home a better place to live:



Someday, I may do it again!

But, most of all I am thankful for my family, as we are all still in good health and considering the events of the past few months! Both sides of my family will be joining around the table at various parts of the Northeast United States:


This is only a small part of my family!

I am also thankful for our little four legged friends who keep us company!



I am most thankful for this wonderful lady, she is truly my best friend!





What are you thankful for?

May God bless you all on this wonderful day!

Let's have a little Fun

The fun I say is by totally reconstituting the City Council:

We know that Bullock and Summers were elected to a first term for Wards 2 and 3 respectively.

Well, with Ed FitzGerald as the new mayor that certainly provides a little fun in deciding who gets his seat. Which I have already talked about previously.

Now, lets talk about how FitzGerald can really stack the council in his favor.

Lets take Ward 1 - Kevin Butler, Kevin is a lawyer with some trial experience and has public law experience, he would make a good Law Director, whoops that opens Ward 1 seat to someone.

(Kevin: I know you are denying this rumor, but, stick your tongue in the side of your cheek for the rest of this diatribe)

Ward 2 & 3 are off limits

Ward 4 - Mary Louise Madigan is a keeper at that spot, the only movement I would see is to an at-Large spot.

The at-Large spots with Niki Antonio and Mike Dever really could shake things up.

Let's really have fun:

Let's move Niki Antonio over to Director of Humans Services and Mike Dever into the Streets Department.

Now that opens two more at-Large seats.

With this little scenario, you'd be filling up to four seats, if FitzGerald could do that then he have no problem it pushing through his agenda in the first year. I think the smart play there would be to push in 3 Democrats and a very moderate Republican that is well known and liked in the community. The Republican would be be able to settle a little bit of what be considered of political payback for some of his supporters.

The drawbacks:
1) People would still think FitzGerald is stacking the deck for his own cronies;
2) Kevin Butler has repeatedly denied this rumor of him being Law Director;
3) Who would be the Republican that would be selected and perhaps be willing to run in 2009;
4) Not much in the leadership on council that would have the institutional knowledge of what has transpired on council;
5) Would Mike Dever leave the county for what could be a very thankless job that may have a shrinking budget. Not likely.
6) Having to let Dottie Buckon go, probably the best member in Tom George's cabinet, the case should be made for her to stay on at her post in the FitzGerald administration.

This was fun to think up and try to figure how it would all take place and would it work. Some folks that I mentioned this scenario have helped add to the evolution and the hilarity of it.

Is Ed FitzGerald Listening?

One of the big knocks against Ed FitzGerald is his ability to follow through, the story goes he offers up a product but tends to leave it to others to finish up.

Well, he is now Mayor. This certainly works to his advantage as being the idea guy and the underlings will have to deliver and then he will come back to take the credit.

In looking at his transition team, he is trying to break his habits.

When you look at the transition leader Lou McMahon, if you saw his house on the 4th of July, you would know he was a FitzGerald supporter,but also he is a quality Lakewood resident.
Now,since he is a lawyer with Thompson Hine mainly practicing in Environmental Law I do not expect him to become the Law Director, for him that would be a major pay cut and two, we need a lawyer familiar with the Public Law. Although, he may be civic minded enough to want to take on the job.

Based on the two other appointments FitzGerald is really taking the crime problem seriously, he has appointed Rich Neff who is a County Prosecutor and Dan Flannery, a Professor of Criminal Justice and is the Director of the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence at Kent State.

Professor Flannery is one guy I would really love to talk with, since yours truly has a Criminal Justice degree with an emphasis on police administration and crime & punishment.

I am sure Professor Flannery has heard the pros/cons of NACOP's (National Association of Chiefs of Police) beliefs on the use of the FBI Crime Statistics. This is an issue that I would like to tackle in another post.

To check to see if he is really listening, we will have to wait until he announces who will look at the City Finances. Those individuals could and should show us that he means to put the budget in balance.

One of the Disappointments

As the election year began I was really looking forward to see how the Lakewood Observer and the Lakewood Buzz would moderate the discussion on the various races.

In 2005, the Lakewood Observer started publishing and hosting a forum for discussion of topics. The Buzz had been around and was a focal point of most discussions.

This year, I had high hopes that these two forums would serve as the backbone of the political discussion and be the disseminator of fact over hyperbole.

However, when it came to crunch time these forums turned into partisan politics.

The Buzz run by Steve FitzGerald was awash in somewhat anonymous postings attacking issues and candidates. Now I have no real problem with The Buzz, it is what it is. Anonymity provides it with the ability to slam issues and candidates with out attribution. From a legal stand point it’s a no brainer on the libel and slander front.

It is a different game for the Lakewood Observer; now I have high regard for the members of the Board for the Lakewood Observer, such as Ken Warren, Director of the Library, Jim O'Bryan, Stan Austin and all the rest of the Board. However, it is my opinion that the Observer was going to play an integral part of the race as a third party arbiter of issues and positions.

But like I said previously, it failed miserably!

For the Observer, its failure was in the use of the Observation Deck as a debate forum. The original premise as I understood it, was that members of the Board of Trustees and regular members of the Observation Deck would submit questions to the Candidates. Now that part was true, but then they also allowed for questions from the non-mainstream types such as Scene and Cool Cleveland.

When this whole virtual debate was brought forth, I thought it was either going to be a total waste of time or a total mess because it added people and questions way beyond what was original proposed. My fears would become truth. The candidates (Demro, FitzGerald and George) were to submit their responses by a certain date and time so that that the answers could be collated and than published.

Well, the partisan crap started when the candidates (except for George) missed the deadlines, at that point there was chest thumping by the George supporters that their guy was the only one to submit the answers by the required time and Ryan Demro was able to submit his questions shortly thereafter, but because they didn't have Ed Fitzgerald's they canceled it.

I am not sure what caused it but they eventually did provide a side by side comparison of the answers prior to the primary.
At that point, the gloves came off and everyone was either piling on to the Observer and each of the Candidates.

It became pretty clear from the "discussions" that Demro wasn't going to make it through the Primary and that the George supporters were going to try and submarine Ed FitsGerald's victory.

With that tactic, both discussion boards became as useless as the mailers for the absentee voters.

If I run again, I will think long and hard about using the boards as tool of my campaign. If I do use it, I will have to try and sway those who post rather frequently to talk up my campaign, but they will have to come to me with that offer.

More on the Unoffical Results

As the County was able to put out the unofficial numbers on Wednesday, I thought it would be interesting to see how they compared to the Primary numbers. As I said in the previous post Fitzgerald swept through the city taking 63 out of 65 precincts. The other numbers or trends I was looking for was the percentage of voters who cast ballots, number of registered voters and the other number I wanted to see if the negative campaigning had any effect on the Mayor's race.

According to the County there are now 43,714 registered voters which is down from the Primary of 43,819

As the records show we had 10306 voters cast ballots for the Mayor's race in the General which is up from 7005 in the Primary. as expected.

The voter turn out was 23.9% for the general, still less than a quarter of the registered voters cared enough to cast ballots. Of course there are anecdotes about how people didn't get their absentee ballots thereby had to cast provisional, but those numbers should bear out in the final official count.

As to the negative campaign, there was a lot of teeth gnashing and gum flapping about how the negativity of Fitzgerald and George's campaigns was causing some people to sit out the Mayor's race and just vote for the Ward seats. Well, in looking at the numbers it was all just hot air, there were a total of 8,900 votes cast in the all 4 Ward seats combined, so there were 1,406 people who did not vote in the Ward races, but just casted for the Mayor.

Another interesting point is the voting difference from the 2005 at-Large race compared to this years Mayoral. I would have expected to see a much larger turnout for the Mayor's race than the at-Large race, but the opposite is the case, 12,069 voted in the at-Large in 2005 as to compared to the 10,306. As I have been saying, these are unofficial and just maybe there are another 1763 provisional votes still unaccounted for at the county.

Unofficial Results

Looking over the unofficial results, once again Ed Fitzgerald went 63 for 65. Pretty impressive, I did not think he could replicate the Primary numbers. In some way he didn't fully replicate them as he lost two different precincts this time around.

More on the numbers later. Also, in an upcoming post I want to talk about one of the big disappointments for this election season, the use of the the electronic forums.

Transition

Congratulations to Ed Fitzgerald, Kevin Butler, Tom Bullock, Mike Summers and Mary Louise Madigan on their victories last night.

Now comes the hard part, transition to the Fitzgerald Administration.

Mayor-Elect Fitzgerald earlier today announced that Lou McMahon will head up his transition team.

Tom Bullock and Mike Summers are now going to have to catch up to what has been taking place in Council so that they can be ready come January for making decisions and leading this city.

Kevin Butler can now relax for 4 years as he has had to run two Ward 1 campaigns in two years. Although this time around was fairly easy compared to the first one.

Mary Louise Madigan becomes the Senior Ward Council person for Lakewood, Bob Seelie having retired from Council was the senior position.

With At-Large Mike Dever the only other Council member with more than 4 years experience it will be interesting to see if MLM becomes a helmsman to Council or will she continue to be a strong paddler for the Council Boat.

There is one other undercurrent with the Fitzgerald victory, who will take over Fitzgerald's seat come January when he assumes the Mayoral position.

There is talk of perhaps giving to maybe Dan Shields or get Ryan Demro back on council. Although, I am leery of Shields getting that post as I think it would tick off some of the Bullock supporters.

Joe Dangelo who lost to Mike Summers in Ward 3 is the VP of the Lakewood Democrat Club here in Lakewood, a case could be made for him to get it, but I would put that in the same category as giving it to Shields.

There are a couple of ways to handle it:

1) Upgrade one of the Ward Council person (i.e. Madigan or Butler) to the at-Large spot and then pull someone from that Ward as a reward for service to the City/Party.

Let me say this right now, I am working on the presumption that it will be a Registered Democrat or an Independent getting this gig, because I just don't see anyone willing to cross the aisle and pick a moderate Republican. I think it would just annoy too many loyalists.

With that said lets look at the other option and probably more logical:

2) Bringing in someone from the community. Several weeks ago I started contemplating this scenario and trying to come up with a list of names that might be amenable to the people.

Here is my list with notes on each:

1) Lou McMahon - With him being named as Transition Chief it would certainly put him a position to get know a lot of people and vice versa.

2) Jay Foran - Move and shaker with Lakewood Alive and other community groups, the only draw back may be the Cliffs project and its involvement with the City.

3) Gayle Wellman - Fitzgerald's treasurer, possible pay back for service to Ed and Lakewood

4) Mark Stockman - Lawyer and Fitzgerald supporter - Possible long shot

5) Dan Brennan - Longstanding Lakewood business owner, candidate for at-Large seat in 2005

6) Suzanne Horrigan - Lawyer and another 2005 at-Large candidate

7) Stan Austin - Heavily involved with the Lakewood Observer, big supporter of Mayor George, could be the olive branch to Tom George

8) Tom George - Could be interesting, but I am unsure if this would take place.

I am sure there our other names, some that I have thought of but have dismissed for various reasons. I am sure their are names I haven't even thought of, but we shall see.

The one big caveat I have for the Fitzgerald and the people making the decision about a replacement is, Fitzgerald made a big deal in his literature about Tom George's proclivity to hire his cronies, I really hope that everyone thinks about that when they are making the choices. I will say up front that it won't surprise me, but sometimes you have to reward those that are faithful.

THE WINNER IS

LAKEWOOD MAYOR

EDWARD FITZGERALD 6345
THOMAS J. GEORGE 3961


LAKEWOOD COUNCIL WARD 01

KEVIN M. BUTLER 1830
PAUL CONROY 402


LAKEWOOD COUNCIL WARD 02

THOMAS R. BULLOCK 1469
DAN SHIELDS 1365


LAKEWOOD COUNCIL WARD 03

JOSEPH P. DANGELO 629
MICHAEL P. SUMMERS 1850


LAKEWOOD COUNCIL WARD 04

MARY LOUISE MADIGAN 1355



LAKEWOOD BOARD OF EDUCATION MEMBER

LINDA G. BEEBE 6537
DAWN I. DEFREEZE 2564
W CHARLES GEIGER III 6943
MARTIN LOWELL 2957
MATTHEW JOHN MARKLIN 3109

COMPUTER PROBLEMS AT COUNTY

According to Cleveland.com:

Cuyahoga County Board of Elections workers have largely abandoned the computers used to tabulate votes, and top county election officials are huddling with technical support staff.

Many of the computer screens are displaying an error message that reads: "Server is unavailable to upload results."

Looks like trouble for the Board of Election!


This looks like it could be a long night. We will follow up in the morning.