This is the FCB Podcast Network. This is The l Laws Extra. Welcome to the Outlaws Extra. This is Darvey out to Kempennmorrow. Don't forget too Like us on Facebook and Facebook dot com, slash the Outlaws Radio, follow us on Twitter and Instagram at the Outlaws or Radio. We have a very special interview with Cleveland Council President Blaine Griffin talking about a very important issue with literally and figuratively Issue thirty eight, which is on the ballad here in Cleveland. Those of you who have listened to this show before, you've heard us talk about this with my interview with Cleveland Councilman Chris Harsh a few weeks back. It is a so called participatory budgeting plan that has been pushed in different cities all across the country. It starts from It originated in Brazil, and they're trying to make a catch wind here. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. We're gonna talk a little bit about the issues surrounding that and just you know, the damage that it could potentially do to the community should it pass. So you know how this goes. If you're familiar with our Outlaws Extra, we're going to take a break now and then we'll go to the interview in its entirety. So stay tuned. You're listening to the Outlaws extra a sir out, play out, Welcome back, Welcome back. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you listen to this show on Apple, make sure you leave us a five star review and a comment is very important for the algorithm and for those of you who have done so, thank you, oh so very much. And now let's get to our interview with Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin. All Right, we have a very special guest on the show today's been on this show before as a friend of the show. Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin. Welcome back. How you doing sir, Hey Darth, How you doing today, man, I'm doing good. I'm doing good. So the elections coming up there is there's been a huge debate that's been going on here in the city of Cleveland during this election season over something called Issue thirty eight. First, tell people, for people who may not know, tell people what Issue thirty eight is, and then we'll talk about what the potential problems are with it. Well, you thirty eight is a charter amendment, and in this charter amendment, if you know what a charter amendment is, and please bear with me, because I want to make sure that I'm explicit as possible so that i can educate your audience on what this truly with me. Charter amendment is a permanent change to the constitution of the City of Cleveland. So this would be a charter amendment to take two percent of the city's budget and ratchet it up. That would be in the equivalent of eventually fourteen million dollars that will go to a appointed and an appointed group of people, a group of people appointed by the mayor and city council, six people by well, five people by the mayor, five people by city Council, and one person by the you know, that will work in the Mayor's office, which I'm going to bring up a point on that later today too. And what it does is is this group will convene and be paid approximately five hundred and fifty to six hundred thousand dollars to facilitate a process that will pretty much be like a sharette or pretty much be a process where they will put projects throughout the city that they believe people would like to vote on. And it's open ended. It's nothing like any specific projects. It's pretty open ended. And I'm going to tell you why, you know, you know, it's so many problems with what they're presenting, and quite frankly, might be legal, but at the end of the day, that's what they're trying to do. And this charter amendment really really could affect city services, right So, and we're gonna we're gonna dig into that in a little bit as well. But the first thing that stood out to me with what you just said, and it's one of one of the first things that caught me that caught my eye when I heard this issue. So it's like, okay, five, so it's gonna be a ten people, five appointed by a city council, five appointed by the mayor, and then another person that works in the mayor's office. Now, what I learned in school was that the budget, budget issue, the power of the purse, if you will, is put in the hands of the legislature. That like sounds because it's essentially six from the mayor when you count the five appointees and then the sixth person that works in the mayor's office versus five from the council. That alone sounds like it's unconstitutional. That's and that's the reason why I said that, And I'm glad that you articulated that, because that's where I'm going with this. Inadvertently or advertently, because there's some questions about who actually wrote this and how did it actually come about, But it advertently or inadvertently gives the mayor control over fourteen percent of I mean over two percent of the budget because basically six to five the last time I was able to count, will you know, and I know everybody said over there independent and they can vote there, but let's be honest, it still gives the mere influence over two percent of the budget, and that in itself creates a gray area in the separation of powers. And you know, once again, those are the kind of things that are the subtleties of this that in addition to this being a charter change, which you don't want to run an experiment and make it permanent in your charter because now what do you have to do. You would have to go back to the voters to overturn it. And we just got finished dealing with a statewide issue that neither Republicans nor Democrats wanted to do because they knew they would mess with the constitution, the state constitution. So those are the subtleties of government, of good government that you understand that the broader public may not get. But we have to do a better job of helping them understand that so that people could quit taking advantage of our lack of civic engagement. Right, So putting aside, and we're talking talking with Clinton City Council President Black Griffin, So putting aside the fact that I personally believe and it sounds like you might as well, that this this thing may be unconstitutional to begin with. Putting that aside, should this pass, what do you think the ramifications would be for city services? You hear people on the other side saying, oh, well, this won't have an impact on city services. That's just fear mongering. Tell people, as the council president, you see the budget, you know what the city's dealing with, you know where the money is, you know where the pockets of money go. Tell people what you think the outcome would be for the city should this thing pass. Okay, let me just start out from here. When we increase and I want to put it in perspective, we increase the and I noticed because I actually ran the levee campaign for this. When we increased the income tax in the City of Cleveland about point five percent. We did it because people wanted more services. And ironically, the biggest service that people wanted was EMS because people want to say when they call an ambulance for their loved one or for themselves, that the ambulance will loved one will come in on time. So think about this. Fourteen million has the potential that's potential one hundred and forty officers or maybe you know, between one hundred and twenty one hundred and forty officers that we could hire. You know, we're down approximately were hundreds of officers now. And then that's more money than all of the money that we spend on road repair for side roads. So we have about twelve million dollars that we spend on road resurfacing. This money won't go a long way to even address those kind of things. The other thing that I would tell you is that it will cut at least half of the Health Department, food inspections and all those kind of things. So whenever you cut the city budget, you have to to make cuts somewhere with personnel. So those potholes that you want feeled, that grass that you want cut, that police service that you want, the garbage you want to be picked up, the MS truck that you want to have there, the fire truck that you want to come if there's a firing emergency, all of those things will have to get cut because you would have to find a way to make up for that fourteen million. And quite frankly, with the way that inflation and the cost of living and the prices of goods and services, that could even be more detrimental because you have people that don't really understand how budgets work. Yeah, yeah, And I think that's what we've been hearing, you know, a couple of a couple of times from some of the people who have been involved in pushing for this, that they really don't understand, you know, how the budget works, like they think you guys have a have a capital budget like the state, and it doesn't necessarily work that way. Also, you guys are not like the federal government who can defest spend. You all have to have a balanced budget every year. By law. So you know, the people who are saying this won't have an impact in city services, they can find the money elsewhere. How do you find the money elsewhere? You're talking about fourteen million dollars a year eventually, right, hence why you would have the impact on city services. And this is what really bothers me about all of this. They're saying that the reason that they want to do this is because they want to increase citizens voting participation. And by the way, they also want people, you know, young people as young as thirteen year old to be able to vote on this. And I'll get to some of the things that I have concerns about about the transparency of the election process. But all of these things have people that don't understand that we sell bonds in order to make capital improvements and make repairs the buildings and roads and all those kinds of things like that general fund. They actually evolved as they went through this campaign once they understood how the general fund works and how the capital budget works and all those different things. And the proposal is just not written well. It is an overreach from a group of people that quite frankly want to have a whole entire new economics system, not based on capitalism, but based on other dynamics from other countries. Right, And you know, this thing has not been well thought out. We've seen you know, they say that the whole purpose is to increase voting, but everywhere this is tried, that hasn't worked. That it has not increased voting at the level that they said it would. And Europe you had a two percent increase in the cities that you've had. In the United States you have had a most not even quite one percent increase. And that's not even in the areas that you know have been distressed. In the areas that have been distressed, the percentages even decrease. And with people that I talked to DARBYO want to see, they want to see more services. They want to see better services, better police response times, better ems response time, better grass cutting, better snow removal, better pot old feeling, et cetera. And this does none of that. That means a matter of fact, this takes away money from that and puts it to other things. Now, you mentioned the voting part of this, which I want to touch on, and I touched on this before with a counselman Chris Harsh, who came on the show a few weeks back. I've talked to people connected to the Board of Elections, as has Chris Harsh. Now, the people who wrote this expected that the Board of Elections were going to run their elections. The Board of Elections told me we ain't gonna do that because they want to have people as young as thirteen years old voting, and the Board of Elections isn't even set up to allow something like that. So who's going to be running if this thing passes? Who's going to be running these elections? The Panel of eleven will run the elections and facilitate them. They do not have to have any ethics, They do not have any guardrails. They don't have. This thing could be right for corruption. Who can say that somebody doesn't stuff the box in order to do this. Who's to say that they're going to be able to make you be done done equitably? Because I'm here to tell you, if you got areas of the city that already have low voter turn out, doesn't have people coming to the polls, then who you think is going to show up? The people from the affluent communities, they have more time and more expendable time and other things that they can come and participate in these kind of things. It can't be done equitably. There's a tremendous amount of potential for corruption, and it pretty much creates a shadow government that has no checks and balances and it's on its own. And we got to stop creating, you know, committees that don't have any checks and balances. There's guardrails and government and transparency and government so that we could have a strong democracy. When we start to erode those things is when we are going to start to have problems and people are going to even be more disenchanted. Right, you're talking about yet another you know, unelected, unaccountable board that would be in charge of stuff that has real impact over people's lives, right, which is very very concerning. And you know there was one thing too on the on the voting issue that I talked about with Countmen Harsh, you know Counceman Harsh's ward, as you know, borders a suburb and there's nothing in place. Have a second balance to make sure that the people who are voting in this election should Issue thirty eight pass. Are the people who are actually supposed to be voting in the election. If you're a city resident, you're supposed to be a city resident voting an election. How do you prove how do you prove that when there's no verification, there's no potential for verification to be able to prove that. How does this logistically? How does this work? How does it work for councilmen and councilwomen who have wards that border suburbs, How does that work? I mean, that's another good point. I mean, how do you how do you challenge someone if they come in and say, I live in the neighborhood yourself, will show me an ID and they show you some you know, an idea that they can't verify or something like that. It's all kinds of ways that this could actually fall through the cracks and there's no way to verify. And then I mean, no shade to the young people. I love the young people, but what form of ID would they have to show their school or another form of ID. A lot of young people don't have identification, So how do you actually make sure that you verify that if you bring in twenty or thirty or four year one hundred children that they are actually all from the community in the neighborhood voting on these ideas, and let's face it, they're making it seem like everybody is going to get something out of this. Let me give you facts, DARVYO. It costs me approximately three hundred thousand dollars to repave a road. So let's say if everybody comes into a room and everybody from East ninety third all the way over to Little Italy to discuss how we're going to spend approximately three hundred to five hundred thousand dollars, there's not going to be enough money to cover everybody's hopes, wishes and wants, and you're not going to get to a consensus. And then you're also going to have, once again, probably the people from the more affluent communities that know how to make their voice heard and know how to take advantage of their processes and the opportunities that they might have to actually go in and put their finger on the vote. There are so many things that can go wrong with this that we just can ill afford right now. I just hope everybody understands this, and I really don't feel that I'm doing it the justice that it needs to be, because people need to understand how serious this is these folks want to continue to erode your government and redirect the dollars to what they want to see, not you, not through your representative government. But they're using the bait and switch to try to say, hey, this is for you. No it's not. You know us, do you trust? All of the unions, all every elected official from the mayor to all seventeen members of council are against this. All of the unions are against this, and several other interest groups are against this. And they're against it because it is a flawed document, not because these folks may not mean well, but it is a flawed document, and I quite frankly think they know it as well. You know, a friend of mine, a friend of mine said this on social media. When you have the mayor, the city council, unions, the plain Dealer, the Democrats, the Republicans, everybody's saying that your idea is bat bleak crazy, it might be bat beat crazy. This may not be a good idea. If everybody agrees except for the people who are pushing this. If everyone agrees that this is a bad idea, it's probably a bad idea. Right. That's my thought, and that's why I really hope that you know, our community. You know, what's really frustrating about this is when people take advantage of our lack of significant engagement, or people take advantage of our status as you know, being in poverty. You know, I tell people this oftentimes, that there's total order amongst chaos and confusion. So a lot of times when people, you know, see people struggling and they see communities that are disinterested, they come in with a savior complex. But what you got to be careful about with a savior complex is that oftentimes that savior needs to be empowered in order to be able to tell the people who they want to be over what they need in order to make their life better. And that's what's really frustrating to me about a lot of this. They're really pulling the wool over the eyes of a lot of people and making promises, and that's going to make people even more disenchanted because people are going to be even more frustrated because they were promising and propose something that was a panacea. That was that was pretty much folks. That is not going to fix Cleveland's problem. It's not going to increase voter participations. Several articles and the statistics show that well. And then on top of that, you know, once you know, things don't work, and and the people get more disenchanted. You know, the folks who push this, they get to go back to their enclaves and live a good life and live a good life. And it's people like you that are going to have to clean up the mess. And you know, and that's the thing that really bothers me is that you know, people know me. I'm in the neighborhood every day. I bought a home here, my wife and my wife and me, we raised our children, they went to the schools here. We made a commitment, and several other thousands and thousands of family have made commitments to Cleveland throughout the years. And now you've got a group of people that want to come in, that are traveling all stars, that want to come and organize and they want to try to make it about Oh, but we don't need sports teams, and we don't need this, and we don't need stadiums. When these things bring in revenue, they bring us spotlight to Cleveland. They help us push put our city on the map, They make us competitive, they help us attract fortune five hundred companies to bring jobs, which what brings revenue to the bottom line of our city. Where all they're doing is using outside interests. Organizing Ohio Organizing Collaborative is their main funder in the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, which is last I thought, we still have a homeless problem in the city of Cleveland that they were supposed to be focusing on homeless. They paid people to go get signatures for this kind of stuff. So all of this stuff where they're trying to talk about rich millionaires in sports stadiums that actually help generate bottom line revenue and create an environment in the city of Cleveland. They help us be vibrant and successful compared to just trying to get outside organizations and outside groups to come in and try to take money away without trying to contribute. A dog gone thing, I think is the most disingenuous thing I've ever seen. And those are the kind of things that I hope we spend more time educating people and helping them understand how to really listen to what people are trying to push to you. Yeah, I really do think, and you bring up a great point of blank. I think we really do need to have a family conversation, you know, about these outside interests who are trying to capitalize off of the conditions that many people who look like us are living in. I think there are people who are using that to promote, Like former Mayor Jackson said on my show a couple of years ago, there are people who are using the legitimate issue of the oppressed to promote their politics, not to assist the oppressed. And the issue that we have here with something like this is that if we're right, and I believe we are because I'm opposed to this too, and anybody who falls me on social media, you know that if we're right, it's our community, the very community that they argued the most to sell this. It's our community who's going to be hurt the most, exactly, exactly exactly, And that's my concern all for people who don't have it. And basically what their argument is, Darvy O, here's the real argument. The argument is, you guys elected people who you really shouldn't trust, and because we're we won't run for office, you should trust us because we have credibility and we could talk about you know, what you really want, what you need, because these folks that are in office, don't know what you really want, what you really need, and they're just down there selling you out. That's what they're really trying to say. But let me say this to you. I've done more for people than any of those folks combined. I've helped more people in this city and been present and available and been out here in this city more than any of these folks. So the fact that anyone and will try to put out there that they have more credibility and that the people of this city should trust them more than the choice that they made to elect someone at the ballot box, I think is asinine. And that's one of the things that I think is really really frustrating throughout this process is that how dare they say that Joe Jones or Kevin Conwell, you know, Kerry McCormick, Jasmine Santana, Mike Pallinsay, Brian Casey or Charlie Slithe doesn't care deeply about their neighborhoods, that they're doing anything else but trying to represent people the best way that they can. But that's what people do who can't get elected into office. They try to find other ways to try to get the system to bend to their will, and we got to be able to hold the line. So I emerging everybody to vote no on the issue thirty eight. The first thing we got to do is actually go out there and vote and make or do we tell people no, we do not want these experiments. We want better city services. We don't need another shadow government. We want city services. That's what we need to stay focused on through this whole process. You know, you bring up a good point. We're talking with Cleveland Council President Black Griffin, a point that I've noticed that I think it's very disingenuous. Right, It's, you know, the idea of we're doing this for the people. But at the same time, you're saying that you think the people are too stupid to be trusted with the decisions that they make as far as who they vote for in city council. So how can you make you're making one argument overtly, but covertly you're saying you really don't trust the people's decisions because all of you were elected or re elected or whatever. So the people made their decisions when they put you all in there in the first place. So how can you say that you're doing this for the people because the people need the people need this. You know, people over stadiums is what they love to say. But at the same time, you're basically saying, we don't trust you with your own decision making on the people that you vote for. Exactly. That's my point about a savior complex. Don't listen to them, Listen to me. I have more credibility and I'm smarter than everybody. I can tell you what you really need because I'm going to invite you into a room so that we can put dots on a paper and tell everybody this is what we want to see happening in our community. And I can tell you right now. Now, let me tell you. I oversee a process where seventeen members have to get together and deliberate over where we take positions. And I can tell you that it is a bear to get seventeen to make sure that we agree in moving in the same direction. Let alone trying to get three hundred and seventy two thousand, six hundred and three hundred and seventy two one thousand, six hundred and seventy two people in a room and talk about, Oh, you're all going to have an opportunity to say, how we come up with a consensus on what we want to build things on. How is that going to happen? How is that going to happen? Lots of people have lots of questions. And right now, because we just got with a balanced budget and let me put the money in the play Darby on right now, we are about to end We're about to finish spending all of the arper dollars that we were given by the federal government. Wow, okay, so what does that mean? That means that now we are in a position that all of these uper dollars by the federal government are going to be gone, which used to be able to backfield some of the losses that we had through COVID nineteen is gone now, which means that we're already going to have a challenge in a tight budget in the near future where we're going to have to make several cuts and be with leaner, you know, leaner staffs than we've had in the past. So add this on top of it, not to mention other obligations we have through the voters voting for police reform and Issue twenty four and some of those things, we are going to be in a serious challenge budgetarily if we're not careful, and those are things that we got to be really really cognizant of as we move forward. Yeah, absolutely, Blaine. Let everybody know if they want to get more information about the No campaign, the website, the social media, all that, and so sure you can always go to keep keep cl safe, keep clsafe dot com, keep clsafe dot com, and once again just just vote no, but keep clsafe dot com, keep c l e safe dot com. That's what the No campaign has. You have several opas on there. One thing that I forgot I have to mention is that all of the major newspapers have also come out against this, several other special interest groups, and there's so many people that the more that they look into this, they're saying, we can't vote for this. This just doesn't make sense. So that's what we're trying to get the word out. And then after we get done with this, darv O, I hope we can reconvene with people like yourself and like minded folks to really do a better job of educating our people about how government really works, so that folks can really be empowered and advocate for their own special interests. Yeah, I think that's a conversation that absolutely, absolutely has to happen in the community because we're seeing now there is a continual, repeated effort by people outside of the community to try to come in and take advantage of the issues that are plaguing in our community. So we definitely need to have that conversation. But in the meantime, Blaine, thank you so much, Council President Blaine Griffin for coming on the show. Man. Really appreciate it. Always appreciate your stuffing by thank you you likewise my friend. Okay, all right, one more time, thank you to Blaine Griffin for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. We are out of here. We'll see you next time. Peace. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network, where real talk lifts. Visit us online at fcbpodcasts dot com.
