This is the FCB podcast network greatness. When they drawn jaw boot chagas dot dog, we don't listen to y'all that the Outlaw. We don't listen to y'all in the Outlaw. Make a scream out down like us sound dog because a rockets in the crowd, like a tune into from the Outlaw. From the Outlaw. Welcome to a special edition of The Outlaws. This is Darvo to Kingpinmorl. Don't forget too Like us on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash the Outlaws Radio, follow us on Twitter and Instagram at the Outlaws or Radio. It's a very special edition of the show. Today we spent the entire hour with Cleveland City Councilman Chris harsh Uh talking about an issue that is not only impacting us, but has been tried. There are some cities that are doing it, but there are the cities that are proposing it across the country, which is the idea of participatory budgeting. And we'll talk a little bit about what that is during the show. I think it's very important for people, no matter where you are, to hear this episode, to hear this interview and to hear not only the concept the idea, but also the number of reasons why it won't work. This is a disaster in the making, especially the way that it's being proposed here in Cleveland, and we'll get into that during the interview. But it's an absolute nightmare, and you want to be prepared whether you live in Cleveland or live outside of the city, or live outside of the state. This is a nationwide movement that people are pursuing in different areas of the country. So this is something you should absolutely be aware of no matter where you live. So this is this is something that people are trying to sneak in under the cover of darkness, and you know, describe it with flowery language that it is the people's budget and this is for the people, and all of that stuff that sounds really good. But when you look, as they say, the devil is in the details, and when you look, when you look into the details, you find the devil. So we are going to go to the interview with Council and Chris Harsh. Right now, we have a very special guest on the show today in studio with us. Here. He is Cleveland City Council and Chris Harsh. Welcome to the show. How you doing. Sorry, I'm very well. Thank you for having me. All right, So we're gonna talk about an important that are voters here locally, and this has been an effort that's been in different cities across the country as well. That's going on right now, which is the participatory budgeting or the people's budget or whatever you want to call it. First talk about the concept is the what is the idea of this? Yeah, so I'll try to be brief, but participatory budgeting or PB because it's kind of hard to say participatory budgeting a whole lot. But peb was born in South America and Brazil in the late eighties. They had a problem down there with a military junta that was running the country and there was a political party trying to convince people to embrace democracy. So they came up with participatory budgeting as a way to encourage people to pay taxes. Actually, the folks in the in the in the country were not keen on paying their taxes because most of the money went to the military, which was then used to put them down bad scene. And so they came up with this novel idea that the people could vote on how to spend the tax dollars that were generated if they won the election and took over, and in that respect it worked very successfully. Actually, a lot of more people started paying their taxes. Democratic government's got more money to spend, and they created this sort of institution of allowing people to collectively decide how to spend a portion of the funds. And it's important to point out that that was in response to a military rule in South American country, because we haven't had that situation here in quite some time. In North America. It spread to Europe as a sort of good governance reform type idea, and it is practiced in some European countries. And I would point out to folks, you should look up the tax rate difference between European and American cities. They taxed on the forty fifty sixty percent high level. They've got a lot more money to play with over there. But it got picked up over in Europe and then it sort of came to America via academia. It was a college idea. It was sort of one of those you know, thesis statement type studies that started in the Ivy League schools and sort of worked its way down through different nonprofits and you know, advocacy organizations to it becoming a topic of conversation in America about ten years ago. I think it's really when they started, you know, pushing this concept here in the United States. So that's kind of a very brief history of the thirty years of PB and how it got to Cleveland. All right, So on the November ballot there's an initiative that people will be able to vote for. It would be a charter amendment to possibly institute uh PB because, like you said, the same participatory lest Yeah, to institute that here in Cleveland. Yeah. Now, what's interesting is that the majority of Cleveland City Council and the mayor are opposed to it. So talk a little bit about what your concerns are with this proposal. Yeah, this is wild. This is wild. So they came to city council in the spring with an ARPA request. As I'm sure everybody remembers, the American Rescue Plan Act. ARPA was basically a federal bailout that gave cities hundreds of millions of dollars to soften the loss from COVID and City of Cleveland, you know, got five hundred and eleven million dollars, and city council had to figure out, along with the mayor, how best to disburse these funds. And this group came to city Council with the back end of the mayor at the time, asking for five million dollars and ARPA funds to be set aside. But what they really asked for, specifically was five hundred thousand dollars so that they could start the process. The first thing they needed was their paychecks, all right, and then they wanted us to hold five million dollars off to the side for them, you know, once they get this whole thing up and running, to figure out how to spend the money. And we said no. We said no to the five hundred thousand dollars to get it up and started, and we questioned the efficacy of spending five million dollars on projects that are unknown to people at the table. It's hard to spend money you don't know what it's being spent on. So this kind of upset them. They came back a few months later, having collected about sixty four hundred signatures in Cleveland to put it on the ballot in November. So now it's an actual charter amendment they're now trying to change. So the Charter of Cleveland is like the constant, right, yeah, yeah, it's the legal document that allows us to exist. Right. The federal Constitution allows Ohio to exist. The state Constitution of Ohio allows Cleveland to exist. The charter is how we do that. They want to actually amend the charter itself, the rules governing Cleveland to require two percent of the previous year's general fund to be put into a participatory budgeting fun a PB fund, and then they get three hundred and fifty thousand minimum. But really as much as they want to put together a program for people to figure out how to spend that fourteen million dollars, and you know, there's so many problems with this, I can't really get through it in one radio show. So I did challenge them to a debate, and they've accepted, and I hope everybody comes on down to Public Hall on September twenty six, that's six pm. We're going to debate them live in person. And the main problem this has is that Cleveland, if if you recall, is one of the poorest cities in America. We aren't rich, and sometimes we're number two. Sometimes we're number one. Sometimes we're number three or four, but we're usually in that top five, right right, And that's because Cleveland doesn't have a lot of money, and what they want to do is take two percent of the money we do have and put it into this fund. But they don't acknowledge the fact that that has to come from somewhere. They're not proposing a new tax, they're not proposing a revenue stream for this money. The two percent, by the way, I don't think I said this show, is fourteen million dollars. Fourteen million dollars is more than our entire Department of Building and Housing. It's more than our entire Department of Public Health. It's actually more than all of city council and our discretionary funds combined with a four million gap left over. They think that we're sitting on these huge piles of money and that Cleveland's just you know, the bank. But Cleveland is running a very tight ship. In fact, to the Mayor's credit, last year, for the first time ever, we passed a balanced budget. There was not using any kind of fancy payroll math. It was a structurally balanced budget. As Chief Abenamas is fond of saying because in the state of Ohio, legally you have to have the cities have to pass a balanced budget. Correct is correct, That is absolutely true and important fact that there's lost on a lot of these folks. We can't have any deficit spending. We're not the state of Ohio, we're not the federal government. We can't spend money we don't have. So if we were to figure out where to take fourteen million dollars from, it would be a hit. It would be a hit to a service, or it'd be a hit to a job. The city spends seventy five percent of our general funds on employees. These are the guys and gals out there paving streets and making the water run. These are the people that you know they expect restaurants. These are the police, fire ems. These are the people that do all the daily tasks that culminated in the City of Cleveland. And we would have to lay off one hundred and forty one hundred and thirty or or here's the other option, we could just do away with their supplies. I mean, I don't know what good a street department is without concrete and asphalt. But like, we could just take away all the supply, and we need that in this city. You know, I mean, nobody in Cleveland comes to the table every year, any year and says, our budget is awesome, We've got everything we need. Don't worry about us. Just you know, we're gonna be on our way now. Everybody always needs more because we don't have enough, right And so these folks don't understand or won't acknowledge that taking fourteen million dollars away from the city's general fund is a hardship. It is a real hardship. As one of my colleagues, Accounciman's Life, just said, we're not trying to be hysterical, We're trying to explain accounting, right, that's just that's just the way the city works. And there's actually to the best of my knowledge, and I think I've talked to everybody, and I don't want to overstate my colleague's position, but I don't believe that there's any members of city Council that are supporting the ballot measure to amend the charter. Okay, there is some sympathy for PB in city Council, but the charter amendment on the ballot that makes it a permanent part. I don't believe that as any support from city Council. It definitely does not have the support from Council President Griffin. I'm adamant about this. This is just bad governance, This is irresponsible. This is, you know, a dereliction of duty. I believe for me to not speak up against this because this is going to have real world consequences for the people of Cleveland. But the mayor is totally against this is administration is against this. I've talked to a number of former council members and said, hey, give me some you know, outside the game perspective. Is this a good idea and we're just being and they're all like, no, no, this is terrible. You can't do this. There's not a single union in town, and I'm talking about all of them. Every single union is opposed to this because they understand municipal finance and when they come to negotiate wage increases for their members, they don't want the other side of the table to say, well, sorry, we just lost two percent of the general fund. We can't give any raises this year. Right right, there's six thousand people that work for the City of Cleveland, and there are real people with real lives and jobs and families, and we need to make sure that we do right by them. Yeah. Absolutely, and and two things we're talking about. Cleveland City Councilman Chris Harsh, I just want to let you let the audience know we're right outside of downtown Cleveland, so you may hear some jets flying. I've heard them a couple heard him a couple of times because they're practicing getting ready for us for the for the Labor Day we get I've heard it a couple of times, so I just want just in case people are listening, what the hell is that? Ears man? Maybe I was just too listening to my own voice, but yeah, I wanted to make sure I acknowledge that. You know, you used to do radio. It's always it's it's better to get it out than to than to hide it. So just in case if you heard it and you're like, what the hell is that? Yeah, we're right outside of downtown Cleveland. They're practicing for the air show. You may hear some jets. Hey. If you ever want to talk about word economy and pregnant pauses and dead air, I'm all about that. That is a true pro right there, I listen to the I Love College Radio and I'll be driving her off my kids, and DJ will pause too long and I'll just look at dead air something. Yep. That's how I went to went to broadcast at school, and they was like dead air was the devil, Like you do not allowed dead air. Your listeners ain't here for the for the cliffhanger. That's why they're listening right content exactly. So so on back to to PB. You know, it's interesting because they talk about the two percent of the budget like it's nothing. Right, It's like, oh, what's it's only two percent, But when you talk real dollars, it's fourteen million dollars, it's fourteen million. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of money. I mean, especially when we are you know, you said, that's the that's the budget of the that's that's more than the health department. It's more than the entire Department of Health. And we just went through a critical pandemic. We and and and and let's not forget too A lot of people are promoting a more care response co response, uh, instead of police response to crises situations, and so we're looking to the Department of health to actually head up a lot of that. So the Department of Health doesn't just inspect restaurants, although they do, or air quality although they do, or you know, lead standards although they do. But they're also the department we're looking to to try to figure out how to handle some of these like critical social problems that we have where people just ain't quite right out there and they're they're they're getting kind of kind of wild in the street, and we don't want to send the cops in because it's maybe it doesn't need an armed response, but we need maybe you know, social workers, mental health professionals. We're looking to the Department of Health to do that. So we're actually trying to figure out ways to sort of expand their workload. But yes, fourteen million is more than their entire budget. It's more than the entire Department of Building and Housing, which inspects every single property in the city of Cleveland, right, And we always need more money for them. We need money, right, right, Like all the permits, all the construction and Cleveland runs through a department that it spends less than fourteen million dollars a year, right, And so so this is this is a lot of money, and speaking of which not only just with health or housing, you know, even with safety. We already know, I mean there's there's been We've talked about this on the show numerous times. We already know that we're having issues with our police force, We're having issues with fire and ems. That money has to if if you're if there's a fifteen or fourteen million dollar hole blown in the budget, it has to come from somewhere, right, right, That's right. They do not really want to acknowledge that. I know that personally in their own lives, many of them do advocate for defunding the police. It's a policy position that some of them are very open about. The campaign for PB isn't advocating for that as openly or directly, and I doubt that they will because we are going through a you know, a doubling of auto thefts, and you know, my neighbor and Old Brooklyn is I think one of the top one or two neighborhoods in Cleveland force stolen KEYA and Hyundai's And just to give perspective, yeah, Old Brooklyn for those of you who are listening outside of city Cleveland. Old Brooklyn has been known as one of the safest, more stable neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland. So it shows that the issues that we're dealing with, it's everywhere. Now, It's not in one geographic location specific to the city. It's everywhere now. Yeah, no, I mean we've had we just had some teenagers and a stolen Kia kill a woman. They were driving ninety miles an hour up Pearl Avenue. They weren't even being chased. And this is really really intriguing. I'm not happy to talk about this subject because it hurts my heart. But they weren't being chased. They stole a Kia and they were just joy riding going ninety miles an hour. It hit this person who was making a legal left turn and killed the young lady. She was a twenty one year old woman from Cleveland. She had moved out of state, but she was back home to celebrate the Puerto Rican Porto Rican Parade and be with her family, and she lost her life at the hands of kids on a stolen car who were not being pursued by the police. And I bring this up a lot because you know, the first dangerous act in the chain of police chase is the stolen car. Right, that creates a danger, and that creates a dangerous situation for everybody else. The second dangerous situation is erratic behavior in the car when you don't drive right right, when you're when you're speeding and not following the laws. The third problem is if the police start a chase that then escalates the danger to others. Right, that becomes the third But the first two causes are they really you know what gets the whole the whole ball rolling exactly? But yeah, no, we we've had an I don't know anybody know. I think everybody know broken right now and knows somebody who's had a car sol and if they didn't have their own car solon. I have neighbors that had their car sold two or three times. Wow. And and oh, by the way, the kids who killed the lady on Pearl are also from the neighborhood. They live in the neighborhood, right, I mean, this is like the souling car thing is just so easy now everybody's doing it. But but aside from that, the murder rates up. Crime is not you know, at the levels that we would expect to be able to maintain for a city of three hundred and seventy five thousand people, you know, yeah, yeah, I saw. As a matter of fact, this morning a story came out that said, we're approaching nineteen eighty two levels when it comes to murder in the city. That's that's not good, and which if you're young, you know, was the heart of the crack epidemic, correct, which was just driving crime through the through the roof. Those were crazy times. And I'm nineteen eighty two, is is before my time, But I'm old enough to remember the tail because I was born in the late eighties. I remember the early nineties was still rough too, so I'm old enough to remember the end of the crack. It didn't end, and then it turned into meth and it got wider and more rural, but the same problem. And people take drugs that are basically speak, they go out and do crazy things. Right, speed makes people, you know, do more things, not fewer things. But anyway, uh so, the hit to public safety is very, very real, And a lot of people say, well, you just use that as a scare tactic. You just you just want to scare you know, grandma, thinking that if this passes, they're going to take away you know, the last remaining cop from Old Brooklyn. But here's the real problem. When you're looking at a cut to two percent of the budget, that's you know, one out of fifty dollars, right, two and one hundred one fifty dollars. You try to do it somewhat equitably, and you try to do it across department, But the easiest place to look is always salaries, because you can't really take away supplies, right you don't have a street department. If you don't buy the asphalt, you can't do capital repairs, if you don't have some of the some of the equipment laying round. You've got to keep the cars running. You got to keep the snowplows running. Whether you have enough drivers or not, the equipment's got to work. So the easiest place in the place that every municipality in America looks when there's a budget crunch is salaries. And you look across departments you don't like. It's unlikely that we would ever gut one whole department and say, well, Department of Health, you're gone. We just use that as comparison. But would we lay off people in public safety? Probably that would probably have to happen. Or else you would just have to make one department bear the brunt of it. And people think that there are these, you know, money hiding departments. I think people believe that there's like a whole like fake department at city Hall where we just stash cash, right Like, that doesn't happen. We we stash cash in the Rainy Day Fund. We have a we have a whole fund that we acknowledge is for stashing cash right right, the Rainy Day Fund. It's there for a good reason. It's it's it's sound fiscal management. But we can't dip into that for PB because that goes away, right, it doesn't replenish. So you have to look for sustaining cuts, and that would mean most likely cuts to services in safety or other critical areas that people in Cleveland rely on to live their lives. And again, I just want to reiterate because I think some you know, a lot of times, you know, our frame of reference of government and politics is the federal government, which can deficit spin. You guys cannot. And I want to reiterate that you must pass a balanced budget every year. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, the easiest way to explaining this is that the federal government makes the money right, they run the mints. They can print more money, they can print less money, they can spend in deficits, spend of their hearts content. The country has been doing it for decades. The City of Cleveland is not allowed to do that. There is no credit card at the City of Cleveland. But it brings up an interesting sector of this conversation. The proponents of PB knows so little about municipal finance that they honestly, vigorously said for months that half of this fourteen million could come from the capital budget. I'm throwing up my air quotes around capital budget. Okay, I throw up air quotes around capital budget because there is no such thing as a capital budget in the City of Cleveland. They thought, I believe that part of the revenue of Cleveland every year went into a fund to pay for rec center roofs or you know, re re finishing basketball courts or playgrounds and stuff like that. And that's not how we fund that stuff. It's not like a regular fund like oh or every year we have ten million dollars to spend on projects. We fund those projects through issuing bonds, and bonds are monetary devices sold on a market that allows cities to raise a whole bunch of money very quickly and then paid off very slowly. It's like a mortgage on your house, right you can't afford one hundred thousand dollar house, so you go to the bank. They loan you one hundred thousand, and so you pay them back for thirty years, and when you're done, you end up paying them back way more than one hundred thousand. The city bonds out every year if we need to. We actually don't even bond every year, but the city bonds out based on our capacity to pay debt on bonds and our needs, and so it's a math equation every single year, what are the needs of infrastructure in the city versus what is our capacity for bond debt? As we pay off old bonds, are we have renewed capacity for debt. But the average bond debt is a dollar seventy three per dollars, So if you bond out ten million dollars, you're gonna pay end up paying back seventeen point three million. That's the average debt price of a bond over the course of thirty years, which means that if they bond half this money about seven million. We have to pay five million dollars in debt on that. Wow, So the fourteen million now becomes nineteen million, and then that compounds every year, so every year we have that extra debt on the bond. And I was thinking about this fourteen million. I think we're going to throw this number around so much people are gonna get kind of numb to it. But think about this, over the course of a decade, that's one hundred and forty million over ten years. Over the course of thirty years, it's four hundred and twenty million. Okay, four hundred and twenty million dollars is roughly equivalent to the public's input into a stadium. They're actually talking about the same amount of money over the course of thirty years that we would be asked to pay for if we were to publicly fund the new stadium. And all the participants, all the promoters of PB are very fond of saying the stadiums are bad and bad investments, yet they want the exact same amount of money, you know, like, this is a this is a huge, huge hit to the city of Cleveland. And I haven't even gotten too the reasons why it won't work right, right, We're we're gonna do that as well. More with Councilman Chris Harsh. When we come back here on the Outlaws, Real talk, real conversations. We got the heat. Yeah, this is the Outlaws Radio show. Welcome back, Welcome back. Make sure that you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you listen to the show on Apple, please make sure you leave us a five star review and a comment. It's very important for the algorithm and for those of you who've already done so, thank you also very much. And now let's get back to the interview with Cleveland City Councilman Chris Harsh. Address this. You know a lot of them like to say, okay, well, this is about the people's budget, and how can you be against the people participating in the budget. Like what do you say to those who are saying, look, we're just trying to get more public engagement in the process. Yeah, no, it sounds wonderful, right. I have knocked on sixty thousand doors in my life. I have sat on thousands of couches in Cleveland listening to people telling me about the city. At no point in my life as anyone ever said, you know, Chris, what we really need is direct access to the budget. No no one's ever said that to me. They say, we need streets, we need better schools, we need more job opportunities, we need better housing, we need you know, better amenities. No one's ever said, I need a personal process to go through and control the budget. I like to call this the privileged people's budget, actually, because the only people that spend time on this are people with the luxury of free time. They want to set up a process where they're going to come up with all these community meetings. They're going to require evenings and weekends, hours and hours to go to these meetings and pitch ideas and listen to other pitches, and then have all these elections scattered throughout the city. We're not quite sure how they're going to pull that off yet, and then go out to a whole new election process and vote on your favorite idea. But we know from experience in America, less than five percent of any community ever participates. And it's not because the idea of being involved in your local government is bad. It's because people don't have time for this nonsense. When you ask somebody who doesn't vote why they don't vote, they usually tell you one of two things. They say, either I don't care, they're all the same, it doesn't matter anyway. But they say I ain't got time for that. I just don't, and they just don't bother with it. I think the PB crowd has incredibly misjudged why people aren't voting. And because they've misjudged why people don't vote, they think they've got this novel solution to that problem. But we know we've done this in America. Cleveland would not be the first city. It's not the first city. It's they've been trying this for over a decade. In some cities, it never involves more than five percent of a community, and the five percent it does involved. In the Carolinas, they had this argument, we're mostly the upper class income members of that community. As a matter of fact, in one city in one of the Carolinas, they basically said it was a gentrifying effort because because people in neighborhoods with money had more time to spend on projects and basically favor the projects in their neighborhood, and people in neighborhoods with less money and less time to spend on this type of stuff, got no projects in their neighborhood. Because at the end of the day, you've gone, you're gonna have to go to all these meetings, You're gonna have to go here, these pitches, you're gonna have to go to these public debates and forums about what we should spend this money on, and then you gonna have to go vote on all this multiple times. This isn't even just like one election, right, this is like a whole series of them. Don't have time for that. So, like it's kind of nonsense to even believe that this is going to result in some great, you know, revitalization of the electorate that's gonna come out and droves now and start voting that have never voted before because now they've got access to maybe maybe a project that they like. It's ridiculous. So yeah, that's that's insane. So the interesting thing about their proposal it is, does it seems like there is a misreading of the reality on the ground. And I believe as young as thirteen can vote, right, And I've talked to I've talked to people like we we don't even know how what the mechanism would be to set this up. I've talked to people that are connect to the Board of Elections. They're like, we don't even know how to like, we're not set up to do that, So how does that work? I called them too, You called them Yeah, me too. I was like, I was like, Hey, this is counselman Harsh. I got a really dumb question for you. Please don't laugh at me, but I need an honest answer. Could you conduct an election for high school class president? And then the guy that's that's the answer I got. The guy was like what. I was like, could you conduct an election for people under the age of eighteen? He was like no, like like like he's like, he's like what no, of course no, Like, no, I can't do that. They don't have files for anybody under the age of eighteen. The voter file starts at eighteen. You can if you're seventeen, you can register if you're gonna be eighteen by the next election, So that's cool, but that's because their file starts on election day, and if you're eighteen on election day, then they have a file on you as as a registered voter. So it's it's actually a really really huge problem with their proposal. They cannot conduct these elections through the bo right, and I don't think they realized that. As a matter of fact, if you if there's if there's a Twitter detective out there that wants to go do this. I did, but a lot of people are said I shouldn't do. I got into a Twitter tussle with them for about forty eight hours a couple of weeks ago, but I found out a few things I needed to know, and one of them, I said, you know, you can't do this the BOE. And one of the supporters of the PB initiatives said, well, councilmate, if you could get the BOE to run this for us, that'd be great. And I was like, dude, you're the prime promoter of this, right, this is something Jonathan Well said, And I was like, this is your idea. You should have actually already looked into this. The BOE cannot conduct non state sanctioned elections, and by requiring people under the age of eighteen to participate or allowing people under the age of eighteen to participate, that removes the BOE from their list of options on how to run this election, which means they have to run this election. Okay, they have to run the election. You heard the saying it's not who votes, the count's who count. So they're going to step an election process and they're going to count the vote. That's a disaster. Oh, it is corrupt. This is going to be the most corrupt process in the history of Cleveland government. You think that anything we've ever done was bad. This is like setting up a new little mini Tammany Hall. This is like setting up a new little group of people. There's gonna be ten of them, with one person on staff from the mayor. These eleven people are going to control fourteen million dollars, specifically, with no oversight from the mayor or Cleveland. That is very specific language in the charter mem and no oversight from the mayor or city council. They got fourteen million dollars, they're going to set up their own election process and then they're going to count the votes. They can't ask for ID They cannot, they have no legal authority to ask for ID. Plus, they want to do this election in like libraries and rec centers and stuff. I don't know how they're gonna staff that, but you know, if a twelve year old from Lakewood. If a twelve year old from Lakewood comes in because somebody put the West Side market on the ballot and wants to give, you know, five million dollars in capital and five million dollars in programmatic funding to the West Side market. By the way, this will probably happen if it passes and some kid from Lakewood wants to come in to vote on the west one hundred and seventeenth Street library. How are they going to know? How are they gonna know he's twelve? How are they gonna who lives in Lakewood? They can't demand id They have no legal authority to demand your right. That's a good process, that's a good point. And we have several neighborhoods that border suburbs like yours, like mine, Oh my god, if they're If the people in Old Brooklyn wanted to put something on there to repay Fulton Road, Parma would vote for that. Oh my god, Parma people would come into Cleveland like, yes, please, I drive Fulton all the time. Pay that thing. They would, and and there would be no way to stop it. They don't have an answer for any of this stuff, because honestly, they didn't think this through. This to them is like a passion project. This is something that like gets them feeling good in the morning, and you know, they do their jumping Jackson, like let's go out there and let's talk about participatory budgeting and saving the world, and it feels good. You know, this is a very emotional thing. But this is disaster on paper. And because they can't use the Board of Elections, they can't even they can't even use Ohio election bribery laws. I looked into the I looked into the laws that it's surround election bribery in Ohio. They're all related to primary, general, special is or a fourth election type oh and party elections. Believe it or not, the political parties have to follow election laws in Ohio. But that's it. And those are defined as elections that are run by the Board of Elections. The Board of Elections is the only group that runs state sanctioned elections in any county. You can't set up at an independent Board of Elections and tell the state of Ohio that you're going to run the next election, right, So by telling by making it so that people over thirteen can participate, they are exempting themselves from the Board of elections, which means they're exempting themselves from election laws. Do you ever do fantasy football? Yeah? Okay, so you're in a league, right, right? Okay, so your league has a commissioner, right and you vote? Does your does your league vote? Yeah? Okay. Does this happen at a bar? Uh? No? I did this. I've done it several times with with some groups of groups of friends. We came up with our own things. I'm terrible at it, but I've done most of my friends that do fantasy I don't do fantasy football because I'm just a Browns fan and I don't want to get in the way of rooting for my team, right. So, but most of my friends that do fantasy football do it at the bar. And there's a whole lot of bribery involved, right right. They're they're buying rounds, they're they're they're lining up shots, like making me the commissioner here that shot I want to commission And that's not illegal. That's fine, you can do that. Like the second the Attorney General is not going to, like, you know, open up an investigation into the dinas, you know, fantasy league, right, But honestly, the process they set up would be no different in terms of legality from a fantasy league. You know, uh commissioner election. The paying people to vote a certain way I don't believe would be illegal in a participatory budgeting process. Right now, it's illegal for me to pay you for your vote, right for good reason, and if anybody does it, they can go to jail, huge consequences. But if the Haslems check this out, if the Haslems wanted to put their their team together, there's fourteen million dollars on the table. Let's just pretend this passes. There's fourteen million dollars on the table, and the Hasms like, we would love fourteen million dollars. We know that only like three thousand people are going to vote. We know there's gonna be a really small group of people actually voting, so we don't need that many votes to win. Right, we could win and say the Hasms put forth the proposal says we want seven million dollars to go to the stadium infrastructure. We want seven million dollars to go to the fan experience. Right. The fan experience is what the Browns use for their you know, just sort of catch all promotional stuff. If they said we will give one hundred dollars to every person who votes for the Cleveland Browns Stadium. One hundred dollars times two thousand people. If I do my math right, I believe it's two hundred thousand dollars. I think two thousand times one hundred it's two hundred thousand. Okay, they could spend two hundred thousand dollars getting two thousand people to vote to give them fourteen million dollars? Now, is that a good roy Like? That is? That is every single day people would spend more for less. A lot of people would spend more for less. And here's the weird part that I don't think would be illegal in this election because it's not a state sanctioned election, and and everybody's going to why he's being hysterical, he's being crazy, Great, prove it, prove it to me, show me the laws. But that would actually be illegal because the PB folks require in their Charter Amendment proposal that all meetings be conducted under open government Sunshine laws. In other words, they have to do everything in public, which includes counting votes. They can't count the votes in private, okay, they have to be here by sunshine laws. Means everything they do have to be open and in public, so there would be no such thing as a secret ballot. When pb PB were to happen, they would like people could subpoena and say, I don't need to know, I want to know how everybody voted. It would also be the only way to check against fraud from outside of Cleveland or from people under the age of thirteen. You would have to audit their vote right to make sure that they're actually even following their own rules. And and and they give us a mechanism to do that, Sunshine Laws. But that means there's no secret ballot. So if the laws against bribery and electioneering only apply to state sanctioned elections, and there are plenty of people willing to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to get a couple of million dollars, how did they ever stop this from being the most fraudulent corrupt process the City of Cleveland has ever seen. They don't have the mechanisms in place to stop it. And so my next question, and I was sitting there thinking this as as as I'm hearing you talking, and we're talking with Cleveland City Councilman Chris Harsh. You know, I was one of the only jets I actually really cared about was social studies and government, the best one, big fan. So I know that the power of the purse is with the legislator, right right. So I've heard some people say that there's questions of if this is even if this is even legal to begin with, how does how does how does that work? When the power of the purse is with the legislator that's supposed to come through you guys. I talked to a constitutional lawyer at a college, and you know, he said, look, the people are allowed to amend their charter and they are allowed to do weird things if they want. There could be a challenge though, because it violates the spirit of separation of powers, right right. So the mayor is the administrative branch of the government, the executive branch, right, The mayor's in charge of running all the departments, but the legislative branch or city council, holds the her strings. The PB board would be composed of five people appointed by counsel and five people appointed by the mayor, but then there would be an eleventh person that works for the mayor in the administrative side. That would be sort of like running everything right there. They would be the point person and those eleven people make all the decisions. There's a really healthy argument that this violates the constitutional provision for separation of powers by giving the mayor controlling interest over two percent of the funds of the city budget. And that is never supposed to happen. The mayor is not supposed to be able to reach into the into the bank account and pull money out rights, no executive right. They need permission. This is like, really really important, right. I take financial oversight very seriously. This is a major part of my job. But there is a really good argument that the PB board would actually allow the mayor to assert his own agenda directly into the process and then steer those funds by controlling the votes, which is unconstitutional. Which would be unconstitutional, right, And I'm sure that that challenge would be made. There's a larger issue, I think around one person, one vote. We just had an election in August where I think most of Ohio did the right thing. I don't know where you stood on it, but the whole sixty percent win threshold that the Republicans were trying to change, you know, a ton of Republicans split on it and came back and said, one person, one vote. If you give a privileged class of people, i e. Those people that have time for PB a second vote and how the city spends their money, does that relegate somebody else's vote to a lesser status. So electors are supposed to be equal. We're supposed to be equal. So my vote is just the same as your vote. But we all get the opportunity to vote on election day for our representatives in the mayor and then after of words, a separate group of people with the time on their hands get to go make more decisions involving the power that I just bestowed on someone else. Right, I just said, council person, you run off and take care of you know, do this job right, and I will let you know when what I think of you all the time. That's that's what our that's what our constituents do. And uh, now you find out there's another group meeting over there and it's just a couple of thousand people and they're controlling two percent of the budget. Does that limit the power of your vote to be equal to their vote? Right? I think it does. I think this actually violates the one person, one vote. Uh you know framework that we just went to voters too, by overwhelming numbers, by partison, by partisan overwhelming numbers. I mean, you know, I was shocked. I tried to spend a little time on Twitter as possible, but like Lee Weingarten was out telling people vote no, right, Matt Doland was telling people vote no. Every former elected, every former governor of Ohio Democrat and Republicans saying vote no because one person, one vote is really important. There really isn't a Democraty, there goes the airplane. Yeah, there really isn't a democracy unless all of our votes are equal, and the participatory budgeting process could very well set up a new unequal distribution of power for citizens by giving some of them a second vote. Well, the interesting thing to me is the hypocrisy because some of the same people who were just campaigning against Issue one are campaigning for this. Dude, hypocrisy, let's talk about it. So one of the arguments from the pb crowd is that representative democracy is failing. That's actually like, that's like the core of their argument is that representative democracy doesn't work because the people elected somehow just don't do a good enough job representing the people that actually just elected them, and voices are being lost, So we need direct democracy. Those same people, Jonathan Well in particular, or run co ops in Cleveland. They use representative democracy to govern their own co ops. I was on their website reading about they've got it. They've got an electric co op. By the way, good work. I'm really supportive. They've got an electric co op and they've got like one set up in Detroit shortway, and one set up in Lakewood or somewhere else's a third or fourth and they elect representatives to go sit on a larger board or body to help make decisions for efficiency purpose. So how are you gonna come at me on Monday and say representative democracy ain't good enough, we need direct democracy and then on Tuesdays sneak off to your co op meeting and say that, oh, represent democracy works for us. Well. And the thing about it that bothers me the most about that argument is that they're saying, on one hand that this is for the people, but you're saying that the people are too stupid to be trusted with the decisions that they make on the people that they vote for. Yeah. Right, So I got elected with like sixty two percent of the vote. Right, it's a pretty healthy margin. So you're gonna seriously turn around and tell sixty two percent of the voters in Old Brooklyn that y'all just don't know what you're doing. You don't actually represent this community, and we need to go do something else. Because voters are engaged. Yeah, we're like one of the Like we're never number one, we're always like number two or three. Right turn out, Yeah, we have a really good engaged electorate electorate, and yeah, it does send a message to those people. We don't value your vote. We don't think that you're doing the right thing. So we want to take you know, the money that you've voted for people to spend, and we want to take that away so that we can do our things Ultimately. It some journalists asked me if this was going to get personal. I was like, I'm not gonna try to make any of this personal. But there are people advocating, so I feel like a lot of this advocacy is very childish. I feel like it's sort of like I didn't get what I wanted, so I'm gonna take the ball and go home, right, Like I didn't get to play horse, So I wanted to play horse, and you are playing three on three. So I'm gonna take my ball and I'm gonna, you know, just leave and then you can't play, right, Like, I feel like that's kind of, you know, part of the emotional drive of the proponents. They're upset that the city isn't doing specific things that they want the city to do. Well, get in line, Like, I don't know anybody that isn't upset with some level of the city. Now I'm upset with the city not doing some things that I want the city to do. And I'm one of the seventeen members of council. Right, none of us get our way all the time. Part of democracy is the maturity of understanding that we can't all have our way all the time, right, And I think this is actually one of the reasons why democracy is a really hard system of government. Right. It kind of requires a level of maturity that not everybody has, right, you know, That's why you have That's why you have checks and balances, That's why you have separations and powers, That's why you have a representative democracy instead of direct democracy, because direct democracy leads to mob rule. Were you reading Plato, because this is actually this Plato Soccer is one of those Greek dudes. They talked about this. They had They tried to do direct democracy down back in Greece, back in the day, and it led the mob rule. It was just whoever could get whip the largest number of people into a fervor they won that day. Right and frankly, this is a problem with politics and America, left and right. This isn't This isn't a partisan issue. There's a bipartisan issue. We have a problem with manipulating emotions in order to move agendas. That is a huge problem in America. That's actually why I wanted to have this debate again on September twenty six at six pm. I wanted us to have a substantive conversation about the policy issues, not about the egos involved, not about the people, but about the policy because we use emotion almost on a guttural level to push agendas, and I think that that leads people into a state of disbelief. When you vote out of passion and then fail to get the result, you might have lost all your steam. It's such a corrosive it has such a corrosive impact on the system. I think that's I think that's what you see now at the national level, where you have an overwhelming amount of both Republicans and Democrats who no longer trust the system. Correct. Correct? So about how old am I forty five? So about twenty years ago somebody told me something I've been trying to disprove it ever since. I can't. They said, there's a formula for figuring out whether or not a person is going to vote. And that formula is it's pep. It's a B plus D divided by C. And I don't know why this pen doesn't work, but I'm gonna write this down. So it's D. You're ready. D plus B divided by C equals v. D is civic duty. If you have if you are maxed out on your concept of civic duty, you will vote every single time, no matter what. And we all know a couple of people like this, A lot of older folks, especially in the African American community, right, a lot of people that really were in the civil rights movement and struggled for the right to vote because we had to fight for it. Yeah, never go to miss an election, right, I mean, there's just it ain't gonna happen, right, because they are maxed out on civic duty. Nothing will ever get in the way of them exercising their right and be as benefit usually personal benefit. If you see a reason that you're you can connect an election outcome to your personal benefit, you might take the time to go vote. Right, So you combine those two things sense of civic duty plus personal benefit, and you're divided by c which is cost. And cost can be thought of as time, It can be thought of as money, it can be thought of as effort. It can be thought of as all the things that go into you actually knowing what's going on on election day. But elections do take time. You gotta get there, you gotta get your ballot, You got to research the issues, you gotta know who's who, you gotta do all the candidate research. And if the combined sense of duty and personal benefit overwhelms the cost, you will be a voter. And if it does not overwhelm the cost, you will not be a voter. And we have a huge crisis in America of civic duty. Right. People don't feel they have a responsibility or obligation to be part of this. You know, the Democratic experiment, and we have a massive trust problem when it comes to benefit where people walk into any bar in America and somebody's going, oh, they're all the same. It doesn't end black bar, white bar, Latino bar, right, those same because we've been saying this for so long that people just innately believe it and they don't look at the differences not only between candidates but between parties, and they don't really get into the nuances, and so they think it's all the same and they don't really care, and it doesn't matter they don't vote. PB doesn't address any of that. PB doesn't speak to any of those people, which is why in America we've never seen PB lead to an increase in voting turnout rates. It's never happened anywhere. They're fundamentally missing why people don't vote in the first place. And that's sort of like that bothers me because you know, you say that you represent the people, but you got a big misunderstanding of how the people are and why they're not voting. No one's ever said, Chris, I don't vote because I don't have direct control over two percent of the budget. Right, And see, Chris, I don't care. It does matter it. You know, in my life, it doesn't matter if Trump was president Obama was president. I had the same life no matter what. Right, nothing helped me. Right, That's real, yea, and that at every every day. I mean, that's a third of the country that doesn't vote, and that's like the number one reason it doesn't matter. Right. This does not address that and that that kind of bothers me because it's a fourteen million dollars experiment that's going to hurt the city. It's going to hurt the residents who actually just voted and raised taxes a couple of years ago for better services, and it's not going to get us any tangible benefits. It's not going to do what they say it's gonna do. That's a failure. The conclusion of our interview with Cleveland City Councilman Chris Harsh is up next here on the Outlaws walcome Back. You're listening to the Outlaws, and now let's get to the conclusion of our interview with Cleveland City Councilman Chris Harsh. We're talking with the Cleveland Councilman Chris Hartson. We're gonna read a wind down here, so before we h we start to wrap up any other, any other points that you see as to why this won't work. So it won't work because it's going to be fraud beyond measure. It's going to be absolutely cannibalized by interest groups who want fourteen million dollars or as much of it as they can get. It won't work because it doesn't have any benefits. It won't lead to more people participating. I actually probably have the opposite result. We will probably get more people mad. You know, they're gonna pit neighbor against neighbor right there. They're going to make more people mad. It won't work because the immediate result of trying to implement it is going to be a decrease in services. It's going to cause a quality of life hardship for Clevelanders, and it won't work. The implementation of it is just it's six pages. I would encourage anybody to read it. By the way, it'll be up on very soon. If you read through this thing, I mean, I didn't really want to come on here today and go page by page, paragraph by paragraph. But there are just poorly written paragraphs that you scratch your head and ask yourself how to do that? And and and there's no good answer, like how do you set up an election for thirteen year olds? How? Like no one's even figured this out, right, there's a there's a there's a ward in Chicago that's been doing PB for twelve years, Award forty nine. And last year they had five hundred and forty eight people vote. Award in Chicago has fifty five thousand residents. Wow, that's less than one percent. Less than one percent actually participated. And they've been doing it for over a decade. It's not even new to them, right, Like, oh, and it's ran by a council person they call him Alderman in Chicago, but it's ran specifically by that person in their ward for their award. Right, it's been going on for over a decade. Like, it achieves no benefits, it's going to cost us more than we can afford. And they spend less than a million, right, nobody spends fourteen million. That's the other thing. If they talk about places. So they've been know this in New York for a decade. They've been doing this in New York for ten years. They spend one million dollars in the entire city of New York, and that's a bunch of council people that got together and do it together. And their their general fund is a billion dollars a year. Their general fund is a billion. Our general fund is four hundred I'm sorry, five hundred, four hundred and ten million dollars. Sorry, And it doesn't even compare. It doesn't even compare. You know, I come to the debate, I wrote, I don't want to go through I don't want to go through all my arguments. I don't want to give them too much of a sneak peek in my case. But you know, we're I want to have a healthy conversation about this. It's one thing I've always really wanted to do after, you know, coming into city Council, was figure out how to have more substantive conversations about policy and and I don't think that the well in City Hall on Monday night is the best place to do it. At first, I thought, you know, maybe we should all stand up and get more flowery speeches on Monday night, But you know, those meetings are more geared towards the business side of things. I would love it if we could do more annual policy debates in Cleveland Fell in love with debating in high school, and I've always thought that it had more applications out here in the real world. So I hope that you know, this event on September twenty sixth at the Cleveland Hall Public Hall, right across the street from the City Hall, will be a model for us to discuss more issues in the future. Like I was even thinking next year, maybe we could debate the role of public funding for finance, public financing for stadiums, right, that'd be that'd be a cool debate. Maybe we could debate whether or not Issue twenty four or Section one oh five is working. Right. Maybe we need to have a conversation another year or two about is the Civilian Police Oversight Board working? Is it doing what it's supposed to do? Right? So anyway, I'll stop talking here. That's my that's my super cool queue, all right, So one more time, let everybody know when the when the debate is, where it's at. Also, is it being broadcast anywhere for people who won't be able to attend. Yes, yes, and yes it is being broadcast TV twenty, which is Cleveland's you know, public access internal station, will have it on TV twenty. It will be broadcasting on YouTube as well on their channel. It's at Public Music is at Public Hall across street from City on Tuesday, September twenty sixth. It'll be at six pm Public Hall. We we have a small side. It holds like three hundred people. I don't think we'll sell out, but it would be awesome if we did. It be incredible if there were people lined up because they couldn't get into a public debate. That would make that alone would be a win worth running for office. It's free. Let's let's get that clear. There is no cost to come into this. It will be so first come, first serve, so you know, get there around five thirty if you want that good seat. We are running it independently. We're still having some discussions about how the whole thing is going to be run. But the idea is that this is not run by the media. This is not going to be you know, a journalist getting phase time, lobbying softballs and a chance for people to sort of like build up their personal profile. This is going to be moderated by Kerry Koefer, who is the speech and debate coach for Rhodes High School and a coach out at Hathaway Brown and she is in the Hall of Fame for Speech and Debate in Ohio. She is fantastic. I've known her for a little while now. She is going to moderate and time keep this. This is an actual policy debate. This is this is going to be there's me, I'm gonna have a partner. I'll be announcing that next week. There's two on their side, and we go back and forth through a very timed procedure. The whole thing takes less than an hour, so you'll be able to come down and live and then maybe we'll do questions afterwards. But there is no audience participation. This is They're going to say why they think PB is good, and we're going to explain why it's that terrible idea, right all right, and let everybody know if they want to get in contact with you. Social media all that good stuff. Oh sure. So I'm on Twitter at Chris Harsh. My name is Speedovk. It's kr I s. My last name is spelled like the word h A R s H. So my Twitter is at kr I s H A R s H. You can find me on Facebook. I'm both Chris and Christopher and my email at City Hall. Is K Harsh at Cleveland City Council that RG so k h R s h at Cleveland City Council. That RG easiest way to get me all right, Thank you so much, councilman for coming on the show. Really preci sure. I appreciate you inviting me down here and let me sit in the studio with you. I know you offered me the opportunity to do this remote, but I I like radio, I like podcasts, and I see the person I'm talking to. So thank you. We're glad to have you, so glad you stop by. Appreciate it. One more time, I want to send a special thank you to Cleveland City Councilman Chris Harsh for coming on the show. We 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 FCB podcasts dot com.
