Party officials get to choose next council member

Residents of Canton’s Ward 8 lost its council representative this week with the resignation of attorney Edmond Mack. He is moving to the Ridgewood neighborhood in Ward 7. Residents of Ward 8 will get a new council representative, but not of their choosing.

The laws of the state of Ohio are often written to benefit the two dominant political parties. The selection of a successor for Ward 8 council member is an example of how. Leaders of the Democratic Party will choose Mack’s successor because he is a Democrat. It is as if the party owned the office.

If the laws existed to serve the citizens rather than the political parties, it would not be hard to hold a town hall meeting where any interested resident of Ward 8 could come together to elect a temporary successor.

This is not a criticism of the successor the Democrats will announce. It is a criticism of party over people.

Airbnb may go back to Canton Planning Commission

A conditional-use permit is the obvious way, and the easiest way, that the city of Canton could allow Airbnb rentals to operate in single-family neighborhoods. But it may not be the only way.

Some members of Canton City Council want an accomodation for Aribnb and other Internet-booked rentals in single-family neighborhoods. Expect council to vote at its next meeting in early June to send the issue back to the Planning Commission.

The Planning Commission in March sent council a recommendation to clarify the existing prohibition  of room rental in single-family homes. Council in April paused and gave itself two months to further consider the issue.

At City Council’s meeting on Monday, one alternative seemed to be conditional use. A single-family homeowner who wanted to rent a room through Airbnb could apply for a conditional-use permit, which the Board of Zoning Appeals could grant after an application and a fee and a public hearing that would allow neighbors to comment.

The Plannning Commission may consider conditional use, but also may consider other alternatives or study legislation created by other cities to manage the terrain between individual property rights and neighborhood zoning. The commission’s next scheduled meeting should be June 12. It no longer meets in the City Council chamber because it now has a conference room on the sixth floor of City Hall.

Thank you, Member Babcock

Canton City Council Member At Large James Babcock made an unusual request at Monday's meeting. He asked for a summary of an amended ordinance on unbid contracts before council voted to make it law. Law Director Kristen Bates Aylward provided an oral summary.

This meant citizens in the audience could understand what council was voting to approve.

Frequently when council votes on an amended ordinance, members are told that they have a copy of the amended ordinance at their desks. Good for them. What about everybody else? Thanks to Babcock, everybody else was well served on Monday night.

Maybe council has never thought about the need to explain what it is doing at moments like this. Let's hope members felt good about what happened last night and will adopt this practice going forward.

The new law allows the administration of Mayor Thomas Bernabei to purchase up to $50,000 in goods or services without competitive bidding, which is allowed under state law and which will allow the city to fulfill needs without the weeks-long process of seeking competitive bids. At the same time, City Council reserved the power to approve the spending on an unbid contract by resolution when its cost will run between $25,000 and $50,000. This was the result of a compromise between City Council's insistence on monitoring spending and the administration's desire to be more efficient in fulfilling needs.

Watch city spending better than before

Canton Mayor Thomas Bernabei's administration wants to buy goods and services valued up to $50,000 without competitive bidding. The level is now $20,000, but under state law it can be as high as $50,000. One reason the administration wants the spending level raised is the time it takes for the bidding process to be completed, particularly when the city has a need to fulfill quickly. Another is the expense involved in advertising for bids.

Canton City Council understands the request to buy more without competitive bidding. But it still wants to approve the spending. A likely compromise over the coming few days may be to give the administration the $50,000 threshold but retain the right to approve purchases and contracts at a lower level, $20,000 or $25,000.

This issue produced lively discussion at the City Council committees meeting Monday night. Leading the way was Councilman Frank Morris of Ward 9, Finance Committee chairman. He complimented the present administration for its financial management, compared with the previous one, that of Mayor William J. Healy II.

Indeed. The problem with the past administration was, in part, that the City Council in office then didn’t control the administraion’s spending. As a result, the city rolled into 2016 with a $5.1 million budget deficit to overcome. This occurred just as Tom Bernabei was taking up his duties as the new mayor.

Council should be diligent in watching city spending, and should have been more diligent in the past.

Here is an early-2016 story from The Canton Repository that explains the loss of revenue, the overspending, and the surprise need to refund nearly $1 million to taxpayers going into 2016:

http://www.cantonrep.com/article/20160203/NEWS/160209783?template=ampart

Aultman cancer center coming to Canton

Expect Aultman Health Foundation to announce soon that it will build a  $20 million cancer center at its southwest Canton campus. It previously was thought to be planned for the Aultman North area in North Canton. The Aultman plan was mentioned at a Canton Planning Commission meeting Tuesday afternoon in City Hall by Planning Director Donn Angus, though Aultman’s desire to build in Canton has been the subject of several conversations in recent weeks.

The cancer center would be included in a larger Aultman development inspired by Canton’s comprehensive plan. Aultman Hospital is one of the targeted investment areas. Recent Planning Commission discussions have touched on this Aultman commitment.

I am a member of the Planning Commission, but all of these conversations took place in public at meetings that anyone can attend.

Update 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, May 8:

The project may be in excess of $22 million. The cancer center will be built on Bedford Avenue SW, across the street from the new entrance to the hospital that was completed a little more than a decade ago.

Update 5:51 p.m. Tuesday, May 8:

The new cancer center will comprise 58,000 square feet. The project will include renovation of about 19,000 square feet in the existing hospital, not including equipment.

Bocce and bleachers in downtown Canton

The Canton Parks and Recreation Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to supply two sets of bleachers for the Italian-American Festival at downtown Market Square, known sometimes by its old name, the Kresge Lot. The festival will be June 21-23.

The festival’s decision to build two permanent bocce courts on Market Square persuaded the board to grant the request. City government, and not the Parks and Recreation Commission, gave permission for the construction.

Commission leadership followed a similar line of reasoning — that is to say, help those who help parks and recreation —  when it voted unanimously in March to once again allow the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival to use park bleachers for ticketed seating at the festival’s Grand Parade. The previous parks commission indicated that it would not allow free use of the bleachers in 2018. It had two concerns: liability for injury to patrons while the chamber was selling tickets to use the bleachers, and appropriateness of lending public property for a revenue-generating event.

There is no indication that the Italian-American Festival will charge people to sit in the bleachers at its festival.

The previous commission is no longer in office. Member Sam Sliman resigned. Mayor Tom Bernabei declined to reappoint member Andy Black. Subsequently, member Mike Hanke resigned. The mayor appointed John Rinaldi, Maureen Austin and Joseph Gerzina to new terms earlier this year.

The Canton Repository reported in March that Commission President Rinaldi supported use of the bleachers for the parade because the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce had supported the joint parks and recreation levy in 2016.

Though that may be Rinaldi’s view, and the chamber no doubt is grateful for the commission’s decision, it does not reflect any public discussion leading up to the chamber’s 2016 endorsement and $5,000 donation to that levy campaign. At that time, I worked at the chamber and did staff work on such issues. In my time there, I can say that the chamber’s board of directors never discussed a quid-pro-quo approach to a levy endorsement. It would endorse a tax levy because it thought the request was reasonable and in the best interests of the community.

A couple of postscripts: 

1.) The commission never voted on bleachers for the Italian-American Festival in 2017, and so the festival received none. There were only two members of the commission at the May 2017 meeting prior to the festival, and it probably would have been a 1-1 vote, so no vote was taken. One member said he would have voted to lend the bleachers for free because the festival was not going to charge people to sit on them. 

2.) That same member, if the old commission would have survived into this year, would have considered offering the bleachers to the chamber for a small rental fee, thinking that would be more fair to the taxpayers who owned them.

A guide to attending Canton City Council meetings

Canton City Council’s meeting lasted 13 minutes Monday night. In that time, members paused to remember a prominent attorney who had died, prayed, pledged allegiance, and passed seven ordinances, unanimously, without debate or comment. There is seldom debate or comment.

Public Speaks can lengthen a meeting by 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the number of speakers who sign up to address council. But two people who said they wanted to speak were not in the council chamber Monday night when their names were called.

There are maybe a dozen of us who regularly attend Canton City Council meetings, and we know that you have to go to the committee meetings prior to City Council to understand any issue coming before council, or hear any council member ask a question or express an opinion.

The committee meetings usually begin between 6 and 6:30 p.m., depending on the work that comes before the committees on any given meeting night.

At the committee meetings, all members of council sit at a table in the rear of the council chamber. Various committee leaders call their committees to order, and, more often than not, they call upon a member of Mayor Tom Bernabei’s administration to explain legislation they are considering. That’s because most of the legislation comes from the mayor’s administration.

Here is how to find out when the committees meet. Go to: https://cantonohio.gov/council/?pg=agendas

Click on the date of the next meeting. Go to the last page of that agenda. There you will find the time for the committee meetings to start.

If you go to City Council only in time for the 7 p.m. start of the City Council meeting, you will see and hear little, and miss much.