Pictured are Cleveland activist Art McKoy (wearing turban), Attorney Marc Dann, the lead attorney for the Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing (CLASH) and a former Democratic Ohio attorney general, Cleveland City Law Director Barbara Langhenry (wearing eyeglasses), Cleveland City Council Clerk Patricia Britt (wearing matron suit), CLASH member and Cleveland activist Yvonka Hall (wearing lime-green suit), who is executive director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition, and Cleveland activist Donna Walker- Brown (wearing Black and White blouse, a member of Black on Black Crime Inc. who leads the Inner City Republican Movement of Cleveland
By Kathy Wray Coleman, investigative and legal reporter, editor-in-chief
Clevelandurbannews.com-CLEVELAND, Ohio-Cleveland activists, led by seasoned activist Art McKoy of Black on Black Crime Inc, will protest lead poisoning in Cleveland housing at Cleveland City Hall on Sunday, June 2, 2019 beginning with a sleepover in front of Cleveland City Hall at 8 pm that will be followed by a 9 pm press conference, the event concluding at noon on Monday, organizers said.
Past exposure to lead may be to blame for over 400,000 deaths in the United States every year, according to a new study published in "The Lancet Public Health."
Some 4 million U.S. households have children exposed to lead, which is usually not fatal but leads to all kinds of heath problems and learning disabilities, data show.
The Facebook Event Page for the sleepover says several other community activists groups will participate, including Refusefacism.org, Inner City Republican Movement of Cleveland, Carl Stokes Brigade, Brick House Wellness Group, and Fathers Lives Matter. For more information call Alfred Porter Jr. at (216) 804-7462 and Donna Walker-Brown at (216) 702-1207.
"We are holding a protest and a sleepover on this issue and anybody who cares about lead poisoning imposed on our children is invited to join us," said McKoy, likely Cleveland's most well-known community activist and also a talk show host for WERE AM 1490 radio in Cleveland, a community program dubbed 'The Art McKoy University Show of Common Sense' that airs from 5 pm-7 pm on Sunday's.
The upcoming sleepover event is an effort largely by Black activists to secure a forum on the lead housing issue as another coalition of activists, largely White suburbanites, but with some Black Cleveland residents in the group, fights Cleveland officials over a failed attempt to get the lead-safe initiative on the November ballot.
McKoy and his group say Black activists and others need to know about the initiative and that Black and other landlords must also be afforded protections in crafting any legislative proposal as to the lead poisoning controversy, McKoy saying also that suburbanites often come into impoverished majority Black cities like Cleveland to push for legislation they will not promote in their own largely White middle class communities.
But those activists at issue, members of a group called CLASH, are determined, and some of them will attend the sleepover, organizers said, and McKoy said he welcomes them.
Attorneys for the Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing (CLASH), led by Attorney Marc Dann, a former Democratic Ohio attorney general, demanded via a letter dated May 8 that Cleveland Law Director Barbara Langhenry order city council clerk Patricia Britt to accept the 6,350 signatures that CLASH submitted in April in an effort to get a lead-safe initiative on the November ballot and to send the matter to city council for review and possible adoption of the proposed city legislation.
As law director Langhenry represents the city and city council but has no direct authority over Britt, who is appointed by city council.
In short, the proposed city ordinance, which becomes law in this instance only if it gets on the ballot as a ballot initiative and voters approve it, or if city council, independently, or by court order, brings the issue before it and adopts it into law, is aimed at lead-free housing and would require that landlords certify that their properties are lead-safe.
Homeowners are exempt from the proposed legislation, which is applicable only for older homes in Cleveland with lead poisoning.
Britt rejected the petitions from CLASH for a ballot initiative saying they are legally flawed because they lack the caps disclaimer on the back of the petitions, language required under state law that is designed to warn those who circulate petitions that election petition falsification is a felony under state law.
And for the same reason she refuses to submit the proposed ordinance by CLASH to city council for review and possible adoption into law, though every single city council member is against the measure as proposed by CLASH.
In a quandary over the controversy, city council plans to introduce its own legislation.
While Britt and Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley argue that the flawed petitions, valid signatures or not, prevent the clerk of council from submitting the proposed legislation to the 17-member Cleveland City Council for review, attorneys for CLASH argue that even if a defect in the petitions precludes the measure from getting on the November ballot, the city charter mandates that getting the valid signatures forces Britt to submit the proposed ordinance to city council for review, and regardless of whether CLASH has met specifications for a ballot initiative.
Lawyers for CLASH, specifically Marc Dann of the Dann law firm, say in the five-page letter to Langhenry, that if she ignores their demand, and if Britt refuses to cooperate and bring the issue before city council, they will ask a court of law, either the 8th District Court of Appeals or the Ohio Supreme Court, to issue a writ of mandamus compelling or ordering Britt to accept the petition signatures and submit the proposed legislation to city council.
If the court at issue decides it has authority to hear the writ and that the city charter supersedes the state election law at issue, it might likely decide thereafter whether valid signatures on flawed petitions that violate state law are required to be accepted per the city charter.
The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections certified the signatures as valid but said also in a letter to CLASH members that the petitions were flawed and violate state elections laws by excluding mandated election falsification language.
The mistake, says the county board of elections, is a fatal flaw that prevents the ballot initiative from reaching the ballot.
But the board of elections did not say, one way or another, whether Britt is required to submit the measure to city council by virtue of the language in the city charter that says that if the signatures are valid the clerk of council must submit the proposed ordinance to city council, the language also saying, without ambiguity, that the clerk of city council determines if the petitions are adequate.
Dann says it was not the purview of the board of elections to decide if the proposed ordinance is put before city council and argues in his letter that a plethora of case law, or more specifically rulings from appeals courts that may or may not set a precedent, reveal the city charter supersedes state law, such state laws of which are embodied in the Ohio Revised Code.
CLASH member Yvonka Hall, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition, said by phone that CLASH is circulating more petitions to get the measure on the ballot
Hall and Steve Holecko, community activists who both ran unsuccessfully for state representative last year, lead both CLASH and the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, a grassroots activist group of greater Clevelanders derived behind Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential run, Sanders now among some 22 people seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.
City officials, and some Cleveland community activists like Donna Walker-Brown, say CLASH's legislation lacks the safeguards to protect landlords where necessary and that the Black community needs more input on the matter.
"They will be entering properties to violate our privacy with their inspections, the fines for lead poisoning could be excessive, and we need Black activist groups and the Black community at the table," said Walker Brown, a Cleveland landlord who is a member of Black on Black Crime Inc. and leads the Cleveland Inner City Republican Movement.
She says the proposed initiative could ultimately benefit the establishment and hurt struggling landlords like herself if safeguards are not put in place relative to fines for not ridding properties of so-called poisonous lead and that it could be another way to steal homes via illegal foreclosures for not paying fines that may or may not be warranted.
Cuyahoga County officials and common pleas judges, big banks and mortgage companies like JP Morgan Chase Bank, and the office of the county sheriff, among others, are already under scrutiny because of the gross theft of homes of residents of the county via illegal foreclosure activity
Cleveland is a largely Black major American city with a population of some 375,000 people.
CLASH says its group is diverse, and includes activists, Clevelanders, suburbanites., philanthropists and a host of other community members.
Anybody can join CLASH, its leaders say, though some activists, such as Walker-Brown, say not enough was done by CLASH's leaders to include key community members and Black activist groups who have not been asked to participate in the past .
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog with some 5 million views on Google Plus alone.Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, and who trained for 17 years at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview, CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.
