Fox Guarding Henhouse?

So how’s that fresh, new, uncorrupted Cuyahoga County government-of-the-future coming along? Oy vey, you don’t want to know.

Following the dustup about the closed transition-committee meetings, which forced transition team heads Jim McCafferty (current county administrator) and Marty Zanotti (freelance mystery agent) to recant after some bad press and a challenge by the ACLU, things seem to have gone from bad to worse, as outlined by Scene writer Damian Guevara in this piece:

http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/what-condition-your-transition-is-in...

There are lots of things in there to make you shake your head that anyone thought Issue 6’s radical county government restructuring was a good idea.

But one of the clearest markers of how corrupt this new government is practically destined to be is this:

”Zanotti also says that county prosecutor Bill Mason — the only current elected official who keeps his job in the new government — has put himself at the helm of a crucial issue, campaign-finance reform. Zanotti says this is because of ‘legal ramifications.’”

“Put himself”? Bill Mason? The guy who’s got all kinds of questions swirling around him about his possible misuse of his power and his office in the service of his campaigns? Who was shamed into returning campaign donations to employees he never should have taken in the first place? Who made sure that he and he alone retained not just his office but his political power base? Seriously?

Campaign finance is perhaps the root of political corruption. If you lock up the money, you can lock up the office — and the power. A major source of increasing frustration and cynicism among the electorate is the sense that offices, favors and legislation are for sale to the highest bidder. The failure to include any form of campaign-finance regulation in the new charter looks more deliberate and less like an oversight as time goes on. Zanotti’s response when the subject is brought up has been almost flippant: He’s projected a sort of “Yeah, yeah, someone will get to that some time” attitude. It isn’t among the lengthy list of projects that transition committees are dealing with. Yet in terms of creating a government people can trust, it’s probably 100 times more important than “economic development.” And it’s a virtual guarantee that without it, “economic development” money will be bartered for campaign donations. Hey — isn’t that pretty much why we’re all supposed to be mad at Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo? Yup, it is.

That, just in passing, Zanotti drops that Mason “put himself” in charge of campaign-finance reform shows the contempt that the people who have seized the reins of shaping the new government have of actually making sure that government is fair, open, clean and trustworthy. There’s probably nothing more important than this issue — and nothing that more clearly cries out to be done in the open by people who don’t have a vested interest in it — as does someone who is currently in office and will continue to be. Even if Bill Mason were the most irreproachable elected official on the face of the Earth, it still looks bad. And you would think, after the recent scandals, that the transition team would want to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest.

This transition team has made a big deal of not involving any of the sitting elected county officials — some of whose input is essential to doing it right — in the process. They will all be out of jobs at the beginning of next year, so there is no conflict of interest there. The only sitting official who should be excluded from the entire process because he DOES have a conflict is Bill Mason — and he has been allowed to grab the most important piece when it comes to avoiding future corruption. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like the transition team is openly mocking the citizens of Cuyahoga County.