Facing yet another sloppy recall effort, East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton summed up the faded prospects of his city in a brief conversation Friday afternoon:
"Voters can throw the bums out if they want and bring in new bums, but that won't change anything. This city currently doesn't have the fiscal means to safely survive," he said.
Call it gallows humor if you want, but Norton is not laughing. He is desperately seeking ways to keep his fiscally paralyzed city afloat, but has run out of options. On Wednesday, he took the extraordinary step of asking Ohio Tax Commissioner Joseph Testa to approve a petition for municipal bankruptcy. To default on a municipal bank loan is one thing. Cleveland went through that trying and humiliating experience in the late 1970s. But it is a completely different animal for a city to be declared bankrupt and unable to meet its financial and contractual obligations. There is no record of an Ohio municipality being declared bankrupt in the state's 213-year history.
"Despite the city's best efforts, East Cleveland is insolvent.... Based on financial appropriations for the years 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, the city will be unable to sustain basic fire, police, EMS or rubbish collection service," Norton wrote to the tax commissioner.