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By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor in chief. Coleman trained for 17 years as a reporter with the Call and Post Newspaper and is an investigative and political reporter with a background in legal and scientific reporting. She is also a former 15-year public school biology teacher.
CLEVELAND, Ohio-Two Blacks will lead the 11-member, bipartisan Cuyahoga County Council as president and vice president respectively, County Councilman Pernel Jones chosen at council's meeting on Monday as president and Cheryl Stephens as vice president.
They are both Democrats in a 29 percent Black county that includes the majority Black major American city of Cleveland and is a Democratic stronghold.
All 11 county council seats are paid part time positions.
Jones, who owns and operates Pernel Jones and Sons Funeral Home on Cleveland's largely Black east side, replaces former president Dan Brady, who retired last year.
He was nominated by County Councilwoman Shontel Brown and was selected unanimously for the post which pays $56,000 annually compared to the $53,000 that all other county council members are paid.
Jones, Stephens and Brown, along with County Councilwoman Yvonne Conwell of Cleveland and the wife of Cleveland Ward 9 city councilman Kevin Conwell, are the only Blacks on the largely Democratic county council.
Brown also chairs the county Democratic party.
Jones represents Council District 8, which includes portions of the city of Cleveland, along with Garfield Heights, Maple Heights, Cuyahoga Heights and Newburgh Heights and Stephens represents Council District 10, which includes portions of Cleveland, along with East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, University Heights and Bratenahl.
Stephens is a former Cleveland Heights mayor and city council member.
That extensive public corruption probe has seen two former common pleas judges, former county commissioner Jimmy Dimora , and former county auditor Frank Russo imprisoned, among others, Russo and Dimora among more than 100 county affiliates, mainly Democratic businessmen, who have either been convicted, or have pleaded guilty to public corruption related crimes in the last decade
A controversial change in county governance replaced three county commissioners and the county elected offices, all but the still-elected common please judges and county prosecutor, with a county executive and 11-member county council.
Those appointed county offices include the sheriff, county auditor, clerk of courts, fiscal officer, and county treasurer
Black leaders and the Cleveland NAACP, led by former county commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, Congresswoman Marcia L Fudge and then Cleveland NAACP president George Forbes, a former Cleveland City Council president, opposed the change in county governance before it was approved by voters in 2009 by a two-to-one margin. At the time they worried that the current county governance set up disenfranchises voters and Black people, and puts too much power in the hands of one official, a county executive, now Budish, whose office was raided by the FBI twice last year following questionable deaths of inmates in the troubled county jail.
