photo – Thomas Ondrey / The Plain Dealer
story – Henry J. Gomez, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio — David Ellison helped the Green Party reach a milestone last week by running unopposed in the primary for Cuyahoga County executive.
The architect from Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood gave the political party its first candidate for countywide office after it struggled for years to gain ballot access.
Ellison’s chances of another first — winning the Nov. 2 general election to become the first leader of a new charter government — are much slimmer.
He lacks the money, name recognition and institutional support needed to claim such a powerful job. But Ellison, 50, has maintained a visible presence on the campaign trail, wasting few chances to raise his party’s profile.
“I wouldn’t be running if we weren’t given the privilege of being a party,” he acknowledged in a recent interview. “This is a huge breakthrough to allow this sort of participation.”
Rivals don’t see him as a threat, but while most offer mealy-mouthed answers to questions about the county’s Ameritrust and medical mart endeavors, Ellison shares personal experiences.
In 2007, he organized a small protest of the proposed demolition of the Ameritrust tower, which stands today as a reminder of the failures of lame-duck county officials. Commissioners favored razing the building to make way for a new governing center, but plans stalled, and the taxpayers’ investment exceeds $40 million.
The same year, Ellison helped lead a petition drive for a referendum on the quarter-cent sales-tax increase that commissioners approved to build the medical mart project. His group failed to collect enough signatures. Ellison blames a lack of support from anti-tax Republicans.
Though Ellison’s efforts were hardly a factor, he is able to cite his work as a citizen activist as proof that he has fought the old-guard politicians on issues that remain controversial.
“David is just excellent in the sense that he’s been consistent with his community activism,” said Brian Cummins, a city councilman in Cleveland who has been involved in Green politics and worked with Ellison on the referendum push. “He has a real strong social conscience.”
Last month, Ellison won a lawsuit against then-County Auditor Frank Russo after challenging the assessed value of commercial property he bought on Lorain Avenue in 2007.
Ellison paid $110,000 for the group of buildings, which he intended to renovate into a new office for his business. He was shocked when the auditor valued the property at $170,000.
He sued in 2009, after one of the county’s boards of revision refused to lower the 2007 value to reflect the purchase price. Judge John J. Russo — no relation to the recently resigned auditor — overturned the board’s decision. Ellison is awaiting word on how he’ll be reimbursed.
The week Ellison won his case, the first in a series of stories scrutinizing the practices of the revision boards appeared in The Plain Dealer. Ellison realized he was on to something.
Two months earlier, when he announced his candidacy, he told a newspaper reporter that one of his ambitions was to reform the system for changing property values and recouping taxes.
“The whole thing is illogical,” Ellison said in an August interview. “It’s backwards.”
Signs of the times
In late August, Ellison organized a small picket at the County Administration Building. He and about a dozen others held signs demanding Russo’s resignation. At the time, Russo had been implicated, but not charged, in a sweeping federal investigation of government corruption.
“I’ve been challenging government policies for years,” Ellison told reporters.
Russo resigned from office Sept. 9, the same day prosecutors charged him with 21 corruption-related crimes including bribery and obstruction. He pled guilty to the charges Thursday.
Ellison came to Northeast Ohio in 1987, after graduating from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He was born in Oklahoma City but moved around with his family to Albuquerque, N.M.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; and Darien, Conn.
His father was a nuclear physicist who worked on weapons projects, his mother a volunteer for various causes. Ironically, Ellison and his older sister became anti-nuclear. Their beliefs led both to politics; Carter Ellison is an aide to U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat.
Impassioned but civil debates were a staple in the Ellison household.
Growing up, “we would have these vigorous dinner-table discussions,” Carter Ellison said in a telephone interview. “And as David got older, he could always hold his own.”
Good time for a party
In 1989, Ellison launched a Cleveland Green Party with the help of attorney James Levin. The two met at a Sierra Club gathering and became friends. Levin, who as a Democrat made an unsuccessful bid for the new County Council, represented him in his recent lawsuit against the auditor.
“I was very concerned about the environment,” said Ellison, who over the next decade would work as an Ohio coordinator for Ralph Nader’s third-party presidential campaigns.
Added Levin: “We brought the Green movement to Northeast Ohio.”
Ellison also became active with the Cleveland Public Theatre, which Levin founded. Ellison served as president of the board and became its resident architect. Levin said Ellison deserves credit for the emergence of the Detroit-Shoreway area’s Gordon Square Arts District.
Story Compliments Of The Plain Dealer
