Cleveland councilwoman Rebecca Maurer is a unicorn in local politics, a city legislator equally committed to, and adept at, the daily grind of constituent service and the bold, expansive thinking required to change intractable systems.
She is hyper-intelligent. She is hard-working to a borderline psychotic degree. Above all, she is kind. She is a public interest lawyer who rose to prominence through her work with Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing (CLASH) and remains driven by the scourge of lead poisoning. She articulates core values of social and economic justice with a precision and generosity of spirit that often make her seem, next to her colleagues at 601 Lakeside, like she’s speaking a different language.
She is a heroic figure — in Cleveland, a rare and precious figure: a leader who subordinates her own power by working to expand the power of those she serves. Her entire program over an industrious four-year term has been to arm her constituents with the tools and resources to make their lives better. She has pursued this program with boundless energy and optimism, to say nothing of documentation, that has earned her trust, respect and admiration in the neighborhoods she represents.
Less so at City Hall.
Among her colleagues on council she is regarded as a thorn if not a pariah, a curiosity if not a Karen. And it’s natural that she triggers some insecurity. This is not because she’s so smart or so prepared for meetings, which she is, but because she has a worldview and convictions that flow from it. It is these convictions, rather than self-interest or political expediency, that guide her decision-making. She’s the real deal, in other words. And this recognition exposes as a byproduct the shallowness of the grievance politics and self-aggrandizement that dominate council chambers.
The most outspoken of Maurer’s colleagues talk endlessly of “standing on business,” a macho credo that evolved, in one recent example, into the chauvinistic battle cry, “I stand up when I use the bathroom.” Maurer stands up, on the contrary, for things like integrity, transparency and democracy, even when it’s difficult or disadvantageous to do so. Even when she stands alone. In short, she stands on principle.
For the defense of these principles, she has been met with abuse and ostracization.
Nevertheless, she returns to the trenches each day to suffer her treatment, to work with her antagonizers, to deliver on the promise of her 2021 campaign. She has done so with an inexhaustible supply of decency that has shifted the tenor and ideological direction of city governance.
Her work — and it’s tedious, tireless work — should not just be celebrated by Cleveland voters but preserved at all costs. Leaders like Rebecca Maurer can change the destiny of a city, and they do not come along often.
But this is Cleveland, which means powerful forces are conspiring to run her out of town. A pivotal municipal election looms on Nov. 4, and two fewer council seats are up for grabs. The city’s old boys and new boys alike have circled the wagons to prevent the most brilliant and overqualified councilperson we’ve ever seen from securing one of them.
Step one was easy enough: Draw a new ward map that shattered Maurer’s electoral base. Step two is playing out before our eyes: Unite behind her opponent in the reconfigured Ward 5, Richard A. Starr.
Many of us are implicated in this travesty — not just Council President Blaine Griffin, who stage-managed the public map-making process while catering to the political interests of his allies behind the scenes; not just Kerry McCormack, an out LGBTQ+ representative who coasted through the final 18 months of his abortive term and then betrayed the body’s first-ever LGBTQ+ woman (Maurer) by endorsing Starr as a favor to Griffin on his way out the door; not just Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who in an abdication of personal and political priorities claims he endorsed Starr over Maurer because “he got to me first”; not just the Plain Dealer editorial board, which endorsed Starr in nine of the most intellectually derelict paragraphs ever set to print. Additional blame falls upon others, including myself, who have watched this horror-show unfold and not condemned it on the platforms available to us.
Allow me to disclose that my wife and I are friends with Maurer and others on her campaign team. My associations with them, and with the local progressive community writ large, have precluded me from covering the Ward 5 race beyond the most basic drum beats.
But I’m writing here both personally and professionally, because recent developments have jolted me into distress that demands a response. The powerful players who are content to let Maurer’s generational leadership slip away, or who have actively worked for her ouster, are doing so at residents’ expense. They must be held to account.
A STARR IS BORN
Richard Starr approached the microphone during the miscellaneous portion of last Monday’s council meeting, shot his cuffs and delivered a four-minute tirade against Maurer, the impropriety and vulgarity of which have passed entirely without comment.
Bolstered by material from his recent endorsement in the region’s largest and most influential news outlet, Starr maligned Maurer’s character, belittled her credentials and denied the legitimacy of her campaign.
“You’re not qualified to speak on nothing from the neighborhood I grew up in…” Starr raged. “You have never understood Ward 5, and you won’t understand this new Ward 5.”
We’ve seen incendiary remarks on the council floor before. In 2013, then-president Martin Sweeney lambasted his colleagues who’d derailed his scheming in that year’s redistricting effort and said councilman Mike Polensek was destined to be remembered as “irrelevant and pathetic.” (He promptly retreated through a back door to avoid the fallout). In 2021, then-councilman Basheer Jones accused his colleagues of having “bad hearts” for not voting on a piece of legislation he’d championed. (He promptly faced federal indictment and was sentenced to 28 months in prison for corruption-related charges).
But those were rhetorical flourishes in the context of farewell addresses. Starr’s was a campaign speech. It was targeted. It was vindictive. It was personalized.
Just as shocking as the substance of the attack was its duration. Blaine Griffin did nothing to stop it. This is a council president who has been so scrupulous about the conduct of meetings that he twice cut the mics of public commenters in 2023 whom he felt were speaking out of turn — i.e. naming councilpeople who had accepted donations from the Council Leadership Fund, the political action committee Griffin controls.
“We will be cutting mics for anyone who insults or impugns the character of any official in this body,” Griffin said at the time.
Griffin does, in fact, have discretion under the city charter to preserve decorum, and to prevent “impolite, discourteous or disrespectful” behavior toward members of council, including by other members.
Maurer was accorded no such compliance as Starr blasted her with increasing animus, notwithstanding the fact that he refrained from using her name — a trace of self-discipline so uncharacteristic that one wonders if he’d been coached. (On that point: If Griffin’s defense is that Starr’s language was acceptable because it did not include the words “Rebecca Maurer,” public commenters should by all means heed the precedent.)
The three main lines of attack in both Starr’s remarks and the PD/Cleveland.com endorsement are the ones I’ll touch on here:
1) Maurer’s culpability in the redistricting process;
2) Maurer’s track record, in particular her alleged failures on lead poisoning; and
3) Maurer’s identity, and its alleged incompatibility with representation in Ward 5.
These attacks are so transparently cynical and dishonest, by the way, that the very act of refutation feels insane. But then again, no member of council publicly stood up for Maurer after Starr’s outburst. And the endorsement in question was penned not by harebrained comments-section warriors but by three of the most influential voices at the PD/Cleveland.com: its editor and top decision-maker (Chris Quinn); its veteran director of the editorial board (Betsy Sullivan); and its public interest and advocacy editor, who has long been the publication’s strongest individual writer (Leila Atassi).
That these newsroom leaders sat through the 68-minute interview and produced the endorsement they did, advancing arguments that only the most clueless and tasteless of Starr’s Facebook surrogates would dare verbalize, is journalistic malpractice of a high order.
TALKING TURKEY
Let’s briefly recap: The precipitating context for the incumbent-on-incumbent action in Ward 5 is council’s recent redistricting. The body is shrinking from 17 to 15 members due to population loss. In two wards, sitting council members are facing each other as a result of the crunch.
In the new Ward 10, (Collinwood), Mike Polensek — the “Dean” of council, who’s been serving on the body since 1978 — decided to seek yet another term, pitting him against incumbent Anthony Hairston.
In the new Ward 5 (Central, Kinsman, Downtown, Slavic Village), it’s Maurer v. Starr.
This was not by design.
You may recall that Blaine Griffin labored to portray the mapmaking process as transparent and public-spirited, even hosting a series of community meetings at which residents were invited to submit maps of their own — a farcical public relations ploy that predictably had no bearing whatsoever on the outcome. The real plans were hashed out in private, literally in “behind-the-scenes deals.” And just like in the past, the preferences of incumbents were accommodated above all else.
It was a straightforward game of musical chairs, in Griffin’s eyes: Polensek would retire, and Hairston would take over the new Ward 10. Additionally, Kerry McCormack, who had long since communicated his desire to vacate, would free up a ward in downtown and the near west side. Maurer was meant to be slotted there, in a newly created district that included the sliver of Slavic Village where she lives.
But Maurer didn’t play ball. Not only did she reject this proposal, she exposed it on the council floor in headline-grabbing comments.
“Ward 12 was carved up like the Thanksgiving turkeys we’re all about to be enjoying,” she memorably said on Nov. 25 of last year, after seeing a draft of the proposed map.
Griffin descended from the president’s chair to defend his honor. He said that while other council members encouraged him to “get rid of Ward 12” because they didn’t trust Maurer, he had chosen the path of mercy and drawn a map that gave her a realistic avenue to re-election. But then the gloves came off. At the end of his remarks, Griffin said he would put Maurer “exactly where [she needed] to be.”
“Your wish is my command,” he said.
Starr has criticized Maurer for the Thanksgiving turkey episode. It was an example of her unwillingness to be a “team player,” and it proved that her fate — never mind the destruction of Slavic Village as a political entity — was her own doing. She was “faking,” “lying” and “fronting” because she was obscuring “the facts”: that a beneficent Griffin had handed her a ward on a silver platter and she turned it down.
These are facts, as it happens, but Starr misapprehends what they signify. What both he and the PD endorsement ignore is that Maurer’s intervention was an act of extraordinary courage.
It is exceedingly rare for a council member to defy a council president, and even rarer for them to do so in public. This was not the sort of performative grandstanding that’s common at council meetings. What Maurer did took guts and conviction — a belief that what’s best for Cleveland is more important than what’s best for any single council person; moreover, that if something is bad when your enemies do it, it is also bad when your friends do it.
That being gerrymandering.
“We serve a city that voted overwhelmingly for fair maps at the state level,” Maurer reminded her colleagues that night. “All of us on city council unanimously supported Issue 1, to take map-drawing out of the hands of politicians.”
If gerrymandering was an existential threat to democracy in Columbus, she asked, why should it be acceptable in Cleveland? Why was it okay for the desires and home addresses of council members to be elevated over natural boundaries and neighborhood unity? She called for a charter amendment to remove mapmaking powers from city council and place it in the hands of an independent body. She reiterated that proposal in the PD endorsement interview.
Many of Maurer’s colleagues were bewildered by her public stance. To this day, Starr professes to be shocked by it. (He said so twice during the endorsement interview.) McCormack and others were dumbfounded as it all played out. Their minds simply could not perceive why Maurer would deny herself a frictionless path to a new term.
So alien to them is the idea of personal sacrifice for a greater good that Maurer’s colleagues have interpreted her actions as an attack on the council president; as an affront to the institution of council itself; at best, as a self-centered play for media attention. It should be obvious that they were none of these things.
That’s why the PD endorsement was so jarringly off the mark from the outset. Not only did it gloss over the political drama attending the redistricting, it cast Starr as the victim.
“Starr also thinks for himself,” it reads, “one reason, perhaps, that Council leadership made his ward one where he’d have to duke it out with another incumbent.”
Excuse me? The council member being punished for independence of thought is *squints* Richard Starr?
Nonsense. Maurer was specifically and exclusively targeted. Her ward was split into six pieces, double the number of any other existing ward. After the Thanksgiving turkey tête-à-tête, Griffin appended her home address to an expanded Ward 5. And by doing so, he gave her an impossible choice: She could physically move, uproot her life and seek a smoother path to electoral success elsewhere, even as progressive candidates were emerging across town. Or she could fight and lose as a martyr, running for re-election in her new home ward — one that included a paltry 4% of the former constituents Griffin knew would re-elect her in a heartbeat if given the chance.
TOXIC NEGLECT
How about a sports metaphor?
It is October, 2008. LeBron James is ascendant. He is becoming before our eyes the most dominant and galvanizing figure on a professional basketball court in a generation. He has already won rookie of the year, has led the Cavaliers out of darkness and into the playoff picture and is poised to elevate his game to dizzying new heights, electrifying Cleveland as he unifies it.
It is opening night. A matchup with the Boston Celtics awaits. You are the head coach and have a decision to make. Do you start LeBron, far and away the team’s most impactful player? Or do you start Jawad Williams, a rookie from UNC with promising physical tools and a fun local connection? He was born in Cleveland and went to St. Edward High School!
If you are anyone on planet Earth other than the PD/Cleveland.com editorial board, you start LeBron James without a second thought. This is not a legitimate question.
If you are the PD/Cleveland.com editorial board, however, you start Jawad Williams, a man who “lives and labors where his heart is.” LeBron James may have done more to elevate the Cavs than any single player in franchise history, but he has not done enough, you solemnly declare. He has not won MVP, for example — it is 2008 — nor has he led Cleveland to a championship. Better to let him take his talents elsewhere and try out Williams at small forward.
This is absurd, of course. But the editorial board’s endorsement of Starr over Maurer is of an identical character. Just look at how they handled the lead issue:
Digitally seated before Quinn, Sullivan and Atassi was Cleveland City Council’s pre-eminent expert on lead poisoning (Maurer), the woman who wrote the CLASH lead-safe ordinance in 2019 and who serves as council’s representative on the city’s Lead Safe Advisory Board (also Maurer), the person who understands the crisis with more depth and nuance, and who has therefore pursued solutions more aggressively and creatively, than any elected leader in the annals of Cleveland City Hall (Maurer again). This is not hyperbole. The editorial board nevertheless looked upon this resume and found it wanting.
Here’s what they said:
“Given the urgent challenge of lead-poisoned children in Ward 5, and throughout the city where housing stock is pre-1978, why has Maurer not been more assertive on City Council on this life-and-death issue? … Why hasn’t she more forcefully challenged the status quo, the drift in policy, the inaction and the unspent funds that could turn the situation around?”
What’s most insulting is not that Maurer has done these things, and done them far more assertively, more forcefully and more productively than any of her colleagues; it’s that she explained it all in detail to the editorial board, and they simply paid no attention to it, beyond using her own words to frame their critique.
It was Chris Quinn himself who interjected during the interview to press the candidates on lead.
“You’ve both been on council now for almost four years, and we’re nowhere,” he said. “What does it take to do this? What is your commitment, if you get re-elected, to finally start saving the kids?”
Maurer laid out the state of the crisis, acknowledging areas of progress, and then dove into solutions, as outlined in a detailed report she authored and published this summer — evidence in its own right of her singular commitment.
“The thing we need to do now, the thing I am laser focused on,” she said, “is spending the millions of dollars of dedicated funding we have from foundations, philanthropy, nonprofits and the government into actually fixing our homes. It is an embarrassment to me that millions of dollars are sitting in a bank account rather than being spent as quickly as possible to fix the issues and properties that poison kids.”
While the Bibb administration has undertaken a “whole-house approach,” Maurer’s strategy is more targeted, which she believes will get money out the door faster.
“We need to get very good and very fast at tackling the highest risk components,” she said. “We already know 41% of windows in homes built before 1940 have lead-based paint. That should be the first thing we’re doing. For every pre-1940 wood window in the city, you should be able to get a voucher right now and get it replaced immediately.”
Maurer is animated as she speaks on the issue, brimming with expertise and urgency. She articulates specific, actionable goals that she has already produced in written form. Evident in those goals are both the humility required to admit when plans haven’t worked and the nimbleness required to pivot, to more effectively chip away at the problem.
“My politics has really evolved on this since I worked with CLASH in 2019,” she said. “I’m no longer as interested in the paper victories, in getting a law passed that says X, Y and Z. Until it is implemented, and actually saving and helping our families and our kids, it’s not worth anything to have the paper certificate to me. And that is why I’m really focused on how we spend the dollars.”
This section of the interview is a microcosm of Maurer in her wheelhouse, a woman on a mission, a leader with both the wisdom and the wherewithal to achieve something significant in the face of historical and administrative burdens. She demonstrated the same acumen when she grilled CMHA executives at the council committee table last year, securing the agency’s commitment to perform lead-risk assessments for every pre-1978 unit in their portfolio. It was her knowledge and persistence in that setting that led to this positive outcome for the residents of public housing in Ward 5 and across the city — in other words, forcefully challenging the status quo, the drift in policy, the inaction, etc.
Compare her answers to Starr’s.
In response to the same question from Quinn, he told the story of a maintenance man coming to his home — a complete stranger — who alerted him to the existence of the Lead Safe Advisory Board. Starr then described doing some research, the goal of which was to ascertain when the Lead Safe Advisory Board met.
He attended a single meeting and asked a single question, which was as follows: “What do we have as far as enforcement of our policies in the city of Cleveland?”
He described attending a council committee hearing in the subsequent weeks, and meeting at various points with officials from CMHA and HUD, primarily to educate himself on the issue vis-a-vis CMHA.
“I’m starting to put together, within the last two years, some of the things that should be actually taking place to help do the abatement and get lead testing done in all these properties,” he said.
I draw attention to these answers not to mock Starr but to expose a very sharp distinction. If, as the editorial board insists, lead poisoning is one of the most enduring and pernicious problems in the city, it is an act of willful self-sabotage not to full-throatedly back the leader most capable of doing something about it, especially when the alternative is an incumbent who after four years has not yet familiarized himself with the city’s landmark lead legislation or the mechanisms by which it’s enforced.
Quinn and co. need look no further than their own newspaper for evidence. As recently as last week, the PD published a report on the city’s declining lead poisoning rates: The percentage of children with elevated blood lead levels dropped from 18.1% in 2023 to 15.8% today — an all-time low for Cleveland.
As in virtually all of their stories about lead, they sought out Maurer’s perspective and noted her recent efforts to reform the system.
“If you had 15.8% lead positive rates in almost any other city in the country, it would be a city-wide emergency,” she said. “In Cleveland, where lead levels have been much higher for so long, we should celebrate the decreases that we see.”
THE RACE IN QUESTION
Richard Starr is a fun guy, by the way. He’s a gregarious personality with a brash, theatrical streak that can make for very effective advocacy. He is an alum of CMSD, CMHA and the Boys and Girls Clubs and remains an inspirational figure to the youth of Central — the same neighborhood that produced Cleveland grassroots political titans Lonnie Burten and Frank Jackson.
Starr’s council commentary can be reckless and rough-hewn, but even when he misses the mark (which is often), it generally stems from a desire to do good. Like all of his colleagues, he wants the best for his constituents.
It was that desire that led him to support the idea of bringing the National Guard to Cleveland, the publicity of which appeared to be one of the motivating factors for his tirade last week.
This was a very bad take — a dangerous take, even, that Maurer, Cleveland.com and many constituents in Ward 5 vocally disagree with. But Starr was frustrated, I think, that his position was being divorced from what inspired it: a sense of desperation and anguish over gun violence in his community. He has lost friends and loved ones to senseless gun deaths, and he feels like he’s banging his head against a wall. Who wouldn’t?
Incidentally, people are allowed to have bad takes. People are allowed — and should be encouraged — to develop their views and stumble into their commitments through trial and error and disagreement with others. This is the process of political education. It’s an arduous but ultimately nourishing process that’s too often short-circuited in today’s climate of purity and polarization.
The problem for voters in Ward 5 is that all available evidence suggests Richard Starr is still very early in that process. And unfortunately, Cleveland City Council is a rotten campus for education of this sort to flourish. There, tribalism and self-importance can beget a distorted view of one’s allies and enemies. It has reinforced Starr’s most destructive tendencies.
As it stands, Starr has absolutely no idea who his enemies are. His politics are impulsive, reactive, schizophrenic — vectored toward scoring cheap points against the Bibb administration or lashing out against perceived slights.
He is a former football player, and he clearly does not shy away from the scrum. He loves to fight. But the side effect of his constant petty pugilism is that it severely restricts bigger-picture governing. It is why Starr has almost zero legislative achievements to his name. And it’s why he now has no recourse but to attack Maurer with the only blade available to him, a blade Blaine Griffin sharpened by shoehorning her into Ward 5.
Maurer cannot represent this new ward, Starr says, because she is a privileged white woman.
Maurer was not even born in the city of Cleveland. She is an alum of Hawken and the University of Chicago and Stanford Law. How could someone with her background represent the folks of Ward 5, folks who buy groceries at gas stations and deal with gun violence on a daily basis?
As it turns out, Cleveland.com asked her this directly. Maurer admitted that she wrestled with the question of running, but that conversations with residents helped make up her mind.
“I truly believe the questions of Ward 5 are the questions of the city overall,” she said. “I often am leading with the question of race [when knocking] on doors, and what I’m finding is that people are not worried about having a white representative or a Black representative. They want the best representative for them. They want the person who can advocate for them at City Hall. They want the person who can deliver for them. And when I talk about my track record in housing, when I talk about taking CMHA to court, when I talk about the work I’ve done, people are interested. They want to hear that, and they believe in that vision. And I think it transcends race in the way that we’re going to have to as a city if we’re ever going to to succeed and thrive the way that I believe we can.”
In response to this gracious answer, Cleveland.com decreed that Maurer was delusional, that she would be unable to serve as an effective advocate in the ward, given the “racial and socioeconomic divergencies.”
Why, the rational voter might inquire, are these divergencies dispositive in Ward 5, which is 67% Black, but irrelevant in Ward 10, which is 77% Black, where the board nevertheless saw fit to endorse Mike Polensek over Anthony Hairston? Why, for that matter, is the board describing Ward 5 as a poor Black ghetto when it now includes the vast majority of downtown, including the Gateway District and Playhouse Square?
The answer is that the endorsement is not an endorsement at all. It’s a barometric reading. The editorial board stuck their fingers in the wind and decided there was value in siding with a likely winner. That is the only logical explanation. Because on paper, they have supported a candidate to whom they cannot ascribe a single accomplishment or on-record view they don’t expressly or parenthetically denounce.
It’s obvious in this context why the PD would overlook Starr’s history of outrageous faux pas and burgeoning election misconduct. But it might be surprising to some that Maurer has. The opposition research on Starr is both ample and explosive, and yet the furthest she’s gone, attack-wise, is painting herself in general opposition to council’s so-called Old Boys Club.
One explanation is optics. A candidate in Maurer’s position must walk a delicate tight-rope, where even legitimate attacks may appear to have racist undertones. Starr and his team could be counted upon to exploit these to Maurer’s detriment.
Another explanation is readily observable to those who know Maurer. Through this whole agonizing ordeal, she has remained what she has always been: a beautiful and decent person. And going after her opponent for his personal and professional conduct would be a distraction from the issues she has intentionally foregrounded.
The unwillingness to drag Starr through the mud, especially as Starr refuses to return the favor, might be interpreted by some as timidity. But Maurer’s kindness and decency are among her greatest superpowers. They make her fights matter that much more when she rolls up her sleeves. After all, it’s not that she hates to fight. It’s that she knows who to fight, and when. It’s that she doesn’t love to fight more than she loves to win.
A committee hearing on the city’s $100 million deal with the Browns last week was illustrative. For the first two hours or so, council members peppered members of the Bibb administration with redundant gotcha questions about the timeline of negotiations. The entire meeting seemed to have been designed, in fact, to enunciate council’s indignance at having not been in on the action. Starr himself complained that he had received no personal outreach from Jimmy Haslam, nor had he been invited by the administration to negotiate on the city’s behalf.
And then Maurer reframed the conversation. This shouldn’t be a “side to side” dispute, she said, where council and the administration bicker over who gets credit or blame; this is an “up and down” dispute, where the city of Cleveland stands in opposition to the billionaires who have fleeced taxpayers for years.
The moment was a simple one, but it exists for me now within a linked series of moments over the past four years, when I’ve felt a lightness come over me — a joyful spark. These are moments when I recognize what a privilege it is to be represented by Rebecca Maurer. What a gift. She has proven to be a leader of such uncommon mettle and grace, of such imperishable goodness, that in these moments I am rendered speechless. And in these moments, I sit up a little straighter in my chair and dare to hope.
For a better Cleveland? Yes. Always. And for a city that fights for her half as hard as she fights for us.
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