By Carty Finkbeiner
Guest Column
The city appointed Charter Review Commission has acted irresponsibly for the past few years – or ever since Mayor Kapszukiewicz was elected. They’s supposed to act on behalf of Toledo’s citizens. Instead, they do what the mayor wishes them to do – which is help his political career.
A little Toledo history. When Councilman Jack Ford, Lucas County Treasurer Larry Kaczala and I (as a city councilman) proposed to consider putting Strong Mayor-directly elected District Councilmen form of government to a vote of the citizens in 1992, we first traveled, with 40 Toledo business and labor leaders, to Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Louisville and Cleveland to study their respective forms of municipal government.
After returning to Toledo, we met as a team, and urged, via a 100-person committee, that Toledo citizens vote in the affirmative for the Strong Mayor and a City Council split 50/50 between at-Large and District Councilpersons. Because of our study of the other cities we visited, we recommended that mayoral service be limited to two consecutive four-year terms.
The nearly 18-hour days required of a mayor tend to burnout mayors, as well as presidents and governors, almost all of whom are limited to eight consecutive years in office. Councilmembers’ time demands are not as great, therefore three consecutive terms of four years was the recommendation of our committee.
Mayor Kapszukiewicz and his friends on the Charter Commission have been trying to sneak through a change in the City Charter to enable the mayor to serve a third consecutive term, rather than the terms called for in the 1992 Charter change. Could it be the mayor wishes to serve a third consecutive term on the public payroll so that his already generous retirement income will be enhanced significantly?
Just a bit more of Toledo History. When, in 2001, after having had seven productive years as mayor, I respected the two-term limit on my job and stepped down, we had just successfully secured a future for Jeep’s new north Toledo plant. We had also been recently named one of the ten All-American cities in this country. But it was clear in our City Charter that a mayor be limited to two consecutive four-year terms. I sat out for four years, before being voted back in a mayor in 2005.
Our present mayor should seek to consider a similar course. And, with violent crime rising back up, a considerable amount of blight in our older neighborhoods and alleys, and a local economy (Toledo) that today is the poorest of the mid-sized Ohio cities, with our African-American families living at the poorest level of the top 100 metropolitan areas in the country ($31,100 per family of four) – well there is a significant amount of problem solving on the mayor’s plate.
As one of the founders of our present form of government, and somewhat of a student of local government, while the mayor ponders his future, I might suggest that the change in government that should be studied by Mayor Wade, and fellow mayors across NW Ohio, is regional governance. Dr. Richard Ruppert explored linking cities and county governments into one regional government. The cities that have done that are prospering – Indianapolis, Louisville and Nashville. I believe such a linkage would bring a much brighter NW Ohio.
Carty Finkbeiner
Mayor 1994-2001
2006-2009