CLEVELAND, OH – Mayor-elect Justin Bibb’s transition team selection shows he still doesn’t have a “statutory” clue about the “official duties” of a municipal mayor under the “Federal Plan” of government found in Title 7, Chapter 705 of the Ohio Revised Code. His head is not in the governing documents he’s going to swear to obey after he is administered an oath of office to be delivered to the Clerk of Council pursuant to Section 705.28 of the Ohio Revised Code.
The governing documents referenced in the oath of office contain the statutory words that will be used against him in a court of law if Bibb disobeys them as mayor. It is a requirement of Sections 3.22, 3.23, 3.24 and 705.28 of the Ohio Revised Code that every person elected or appointed to an office be administered an oath of office by an “elected official.” The content of the oath of office is identified in Section 3.23 and serves as the index to the instructions on how to discharge the duties of every elected or appointed public office in Ohio.

Whether an elected or appointed public official has read the constitutions and laws identified in the oath of office or not they have a duty to know them. That’s the inviolate standard for “discharging the duties” of a public office. If you do not read you cannot lead.
Of the seven people publicly identified as Bibb’s transition team co-chairs none have a background in upper management municipal government. Phyllis “Seven” Harris is a Cleveland resident. She manages the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland on Detroit Avenue. Bibb was endorsed by the Stonewall Democrats. It’s members are the political party’s “out” homosexuals. The Log Cabin Republicans are the “out” homosexual wing of that party. With Harris’ appointment and some of the others Bibb appears to be making an “identity politics” statement and giving payback to the homosexual community that supported him.
Erika Anthony, the director of the Ohio Transformation Fund, is reported as being from New York and living in Cleveland’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood with her husband. There’s no record of the Ohio Transformation Fund or the Ohio Transformational Fund as a non-profit on the Ohio Secretary of State’s website. Neither is there an annual 990 tax filing for the non-profit with the Internal Revenue Service. Without being registered with the Ohio or any Secretary of State, Anthony’s employer’s fund doesn’t exist and banks are not supposed to let them open an account. Seemingly innocuous information like this can open criminal investigations.
PNC’s retired president, Paul Clark, is a resident of Shaker Heights. Darrell McNair, MVP Plastics Corporation’s president resides in Aurora. Former local AFL-CIO president John Ryan lives in North Olmsted.
Bibb co-chair appointee Attorney Richard M. Gibson operates from a storefront in Garfield Heights and resides in Solon where he’s been voting out of precinct 4B since 2004. The legal reverend’s small membership church is in Cleveland on Elizabeth Street.

The overall transition team is being led by Bradford Davy and he’s being assisted by Jessica Trivisonno. Davy was raised in Cleveland Heights and has been registered to vote in Cleveland since 2014. Trivisonno since 2016. He’s 34 and she’s 28. Neither has a background in municipal government management.
Comparing what a mayor does to Bibb’s public moves and his early focus is found in the following off-focus categories. Economic Development. Education. Environment. Equity in Action. Health. Modern City Hall. Neighborhoods. Open Government. Safety. Talent.
Nothing in his 10 categories relates to the statutory compliance issues that plagued city hall under the twice FBI raided administrations of Mayor Frank Jackson and Council President Kevin Kelley. Bibb is naive if he doesn’t know that come January 1st he’s walking into the middle of ongoing federal investigations of the city’s compliance with federal laws his team doesn’t know exist.
Like ex-Mayor Jane Campbell and following her, Jackson, Bibb is acting as if he has to “reinvent” a municipal government that federal, state and local laws his predecessors failed to read and master began inventing in 1801. According to Bibb’s campaign website, his transition team co-chairs are supposed to serve on and lead the 10 committees he thinks will help him deploy 6000 city workers to manage over $600 million in general, state and federal funds.

The more than $1.5 billion in general, enterprise and grant funds council will place in Bibb’s hands to manage in 2022 will be appropriated to remove snow, remove garbage, manage and negotiate labor agreements with 32 public employee unions, manage Hopkins International Airport, Cleveland Public Power, the Cleveland Division of Water, building, housing, community development, parks and recreation, planning, civil service, vital statistics, printing and collect municipal income taxes. Bibb’s duty is to ensure that he constitutionally deploys employees to solve homicides, rapes, assaults and robberies. They’re supposed to extinguish fires and solve arsons. The ill or injured inhabitants of the city are supposed to be visited by a warm and well-equipped EMS vehicle with trained EMT’s or physicians when 911 is called.
Contractors doing business with Cleveland’s building and housing departments aren’t supposed to be asked for bribes by city building officials operating without valid ordinance enforcement credentials. There are ethics forms they’ve been half-azzed maintaining while they were begging contractors for gifts, gift cards, food and secretly … cash.
Block grant funds are supposed to be allocated to the city’s impoverished census tracts and not divided 17 ways. There’s no evidence in their backgrounds that Bibb’s transition team understands the full scope of federal, state and local laws a municipal mayor in Ohio has the duty to know, obey and enforce. He’d better be going department by department and examining personnel records, disciplinary records, internal and external communications, budget spending and upcoming legislation. Have any on his team read Cleveland’s most recent audit and management letters?
With this team Bibb won’t even know if on January 1st the police he’s managing are Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy certified pursuant to section Section 109.77 of the Ohio Revised Code. The mayor not the chief of police is Cleveland’s chief law enforcement officer and the statutory signatory on the training request to the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy (OPOTA). Training approval from OPOTA needed Jackson’s signature no later than December 15th. Bibb would do well to read Section 737.06 of the Ohio Revised Code to know that it’s the safety director and not the chief of police who writes the police department’s regulations with the mayor’s approval. Every rule written by the chief of police is unauthorized by general laws of the state.
By the end of his first year Bibb is supposed to have led city workers to spend funds council appropriated that result in audits with no findings for recovery from the Auditor of State; and with an either improved or unaffected Standard & Poor’s bond rating. Bibb and those seeking to work for him should know that findings for recovery are required under Ohio laws to be automatically referred to the county prosecuting attorney within 90 days. His “ideas” for spending Cleveland’s $511 million in American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funds are irrelevant. Bibb has to read the 243 page federal law to manage it within the law to avoid legal and council troubles.

From the look of his transition team Bibb’s head is in his “ideas” and not the statutory duties of the mayor’s office found in Title 7 of Ohio’s Revised Code, the charter and ordinances. He has no idea where to identify the individual sections of local, state and federal laws that pertain to the environment, education, economic development and health; and that’s not good. Neither is “diversity” if the skillsets among his seven-member diverse team of co-chairs includes only two Cleveland residents and all are void of any statutory knowledge of municipal government.
Hopkins International Airport is governed by federal aviation laws. How does this team using his topics prepare him to manage it? The environment? Who on Bibb’s team has read or is even aware of the city’s trash and landfill duties under the 1974 federal Resource Consevation Recovery Act? I see no one with knowledge of the Environmental Protection Act.
Every decision Bibb and his “team” is contemplating and will be making has to be sourced to an authorizing provision of constitutions and laws. What I had to learn within my first 72 hours as East Cleveland’s mayor was to read before I acted or signed a document that in the early days not even the director needing my signature had read. A successful mayor doesn’t trust what he or she is told. They verify. The verification gives you an idea of the reliability and thoroughness of your director’s words.
The worst place to play “identity” politics is a city hall in a municipal corporation full of residents who know more about governance than those engaged in the governing. Bibb as a new mayor doesn’t get a pass because of his age, his sexual orientation, the sexual orientation of his hires and publicly-expressed good intentions. Competent heterosexuals and homosexuals have worked for and been elected to Cleveland’s public offices for generations. Sexual orientation is not a novelty nor is it a trait that on its own is associated with municipal management excellence.
The answer to Cleveland’s poverty is in its payrolls and Bibb’s selection of two Cleveland residents among 7 co-chairs with no municipal government background to oversee his transition is the earliest sign of disloyalty to the taxpaying electors who voted him into the job. Cleveland residents are good enough to ask for a vote but not good enough to hire for a job. It doesn’t matter if a non-resident presides over a small non-tax paying church in the city. They don’t pick up municipal government experience through osmosis. While residency laws have been banned by the Ohio General Assembly, there’s no requirement that gives non-residents preferences to Cleveland’s city hall jobs, boards and commissions.
Bibb has already shown a propensity for disregarding immigrant laws with the inclusion of an Australian alien, Eden Giagnorio, as his deputy campaign manager. According to her social media pages Giagnorio, a former Australian government official, wanted to relocate to our nation to back “Progressive” candidates. Bibb did not publicly associate himself with Progressive Democrats Americans now know to be disguised Communists.
If Giagnorio told U.S. immigration officials she was entering our nation to infiltrate political campaigns she’d have been marked as inadmissible and told to turn around. Look at how Australia’s government officials are locking down towns and requiring vaccine passports. Last year she was living under British rule in a white supremacist nation governed by a “parliament” that’s China’s next door neighbor. The last thing Cleveland needs is that foreign shit planted in a patriotically-weak American mayor’s head. There’s no armed forces service in the backgrounds of most “frat boy and sorority girl” Cleveland politicians these days. Jackson and Carl Stokes are the only two Americans to have served in the U.S. armed forces as Cleveland’s mayor since 1969.
Giagnorio has no lawful right to be registered to vote in Ohio and federal laws prevent employers from hiring aliens with skills America doesn’t need. To justify hiring the Australian citizen for any job, Bibb’s administration would have to prove to the United States Department of Labor that no American had the skillsets to perform it. If he hires her anyway an American gets to challenge the hire with the United States Department of Labor. Every employee is supposed to complete an I9 form. Giagnorio last worked for the Australian government’s regional fire department in “public relations.”
All public relations departments and workers are the “propagandists” of the government they serve. She didn’t learn about George Washington, the American Revolution and Civil War from “our” perspective; and she would have no idea that the whipped cream she eats is one of the 326 uses an American Negro named George Washington Carver derived out of peanuts. Clothing dyes, paint thinners, peanut based chicken, beef and lamb … too. Meatless before meatless. And that’s after being castrated by his master at 12 to keep him from fucking his daughter.
Since 2015 Cleveland has been plagued with suburban residents of Twinsburg, South Euclid and Cleveland Heights lying about their Cleveland residency to campaign for council. Like foreign infiltrators both Jeffrey Johnson and Basheer Jones violated residency laws to be admitted oaths of office to serve on Cleveland’s legislative authority. On council they stole wages, benefits and a pension to cast illegal votes from usurped elected offices to decide the budget and laws of a city where they did not reside. Imagine if Cleveland city council members and the mayor were all illegal alien citizens of Russia, Canada, China, Israel or Nigeria who had entered the nation to steal and disrupt our democracy?
85 percent of the city of Cleveland’s municipal workforce consists of workers and decision-makers who do not reside in the city. That leaves 15 percent of the jobs and an even smaller percentage of the decision-making to actual home owning and renting city residents. It’s no wonder the city looks raped. Cleveland’s mayor and council, combined, have direct influence over $3.5 billion that’s being directed to economically benefit everywhere else but Cleveland. Residents who care about Cleveland are offended.
The statutory advice Bibb gets from his team is going to be important if he has a desire to avoid the jail term that his political enemies won’t care becomes a part of his life when he screws up. Even before he takes office as mayor Bibb already has a problem with the Ohio Ethics Commission for failing to report earnings as a Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority commission member. The last thing he needs on his team are “schemers” and “corner cutters.”

As an example, Gibson is known by his deeds to some Clevelanders. He’s known as the second half of the two-preacher-duo who used the city’s referendum process, and our desire to vote on whether or not to support giving $88 million in public funds to renovate Quicken Loans Arena for a Cavaliers basketball team going forward without Lebron James, for their own goals. Gibson teamed with Olivet Institutional Baptist Church pastor Jowanza Colvin, a Washington, D.C. native and a Shaker Heights resident, to collect 22,000 signatures for the Cleveland referendum vote. Cleveland city council under Kelley obstructs voter referendum authority by unlawfully designating every ordinance or resolution to be a tautological “emergency.”
When Kelley obstructed Clerk of Council Patricia Britt from exercising her duty to accept the Quicken Loans referendum petitions Colvin and Gibson staged a “take us to jail” show using their best Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy imitations. I filed a criminal complaint against Kelley. An attorney for the committee filed a writ mandamus with the Supreme Court of Ohio to force Britt to accept the petitions and for council to put the issue on the ballot.
Behind the scenes Colvin and Gibson called themselves using the “opportunity” to negotiate a deal for a mental health facility. The two referendum hustlers got the Cleveland residents whose names had been used to form the referendum committee to withdraw the petitions using a process that existed outside the charter and Ohio law. The thought of majority American Negro Cleveland voters being deprived of a right to vote by two electorally-sneaky members of the Negro clergy was offensive. Bibb is a member of the church Colvin leads as pastor. His opponents could have had a different conversation if they had done the homework to “go there” with him.
Bibb’s penchant for the inexperienced and young administrators with no municipal government background like himself is exactly how Dennis Kucinich launched his single term mayoral administration in 1977. Cleveland voters quickly lost patience with Kucinich’s first year mismanagement that led to police layoffs. City activists gathered over 60,000 signatures to recall him within six months. Eight months into his single term in office Kucinich survived a recall by 275 out of 120,000 votes in August 1978. The then youthful “boy mayor” lost the next year to then Lt. Governor George Voinovich in 1979.

Single-term Mayor Jane Campbell in 2001 appointed a deputy law director who’d been licensed as an attorney for about six months. Subodh Chandra had worked in the health care fraud section of the US Attorney’s office. Imagine a guy with knowledge of the criminal side of federal health care laws arguing that medical records aren’t needed to save the license of an Indian physician. He’d been prescribing narcotics to patients without documentation. Campbell made the child of aliens from caste-loving Communist India – a place with Third World violent police, bribery justice and 33 “crore” Gods – her director of law. From her first year $67 million budget deficit to mishandling the homicide investigation of 14-year-old Shakira Johnson, Campbell’s single term was widely-viewed across the city as a failure.
It was the Campbell administration and Chandra’s constitutionally defective legal thinking the U.S. Department of Justice criticized for doing nothing with the first two investigations of the Cleveland Division of Police for their killing rampage and unconstitutional treatment of Americans in the city’s jails. Campbell’s head wasn’t wrapped around civil rights and neither is Bibb’s. Clevelanders got big azzed flower pots in front of city hall and 35mph speeds on Kinsman Road so Campbell’s Shaker Heights former classmates could drive quickly through our city to get back home.
Campbell thoughtlessly closed the parking lot next door to city hall that earned roughly $600,000 annually in enterprise revenue in exchange for “green space.” Campbell’s brain trust thought U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer would let her steal a piece of Wall Street’s back office operations from New York. Her daughters attended Shaker Heights schools while she appointed Cleveland’s superintendent and school board. Cleveland police drove them to their soccer games.
When I interviewed her as the editor in chief for Cleveland Life, Campbell hadn’t read Cleveland’s charter, ordinances, administrative code or Title 7 of the Ohio Revised Code before her Plain Dealer endorsed election in 2000. She was another “identity” candidate seeking to become the first woman elected to the job. Campbell hadn’t attended a meeting of council.
Campbell’s inability to see the “nuances” of municipal management created a $67 million deficit after 10 months in office. Like Bibb her background was in non-profits her mother founded. The Friends of Shaker Square and Womens Space. She didn’t see that agreeing to four percent retroactive raises to Cleveland cops, with an $1100 per cop bump, in exchange for the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association endorsement would create a $67 million budget crisis that could cost 300 cops their jobs.

She didn’t see the future admininstrative disruption in returning two cops the city under then Mayor Michael Reed White had taken great statutory steps to terminate for beating a nearly-blind American Negro man on the west side while they were drunk and off-duty. She gave them $363,000 each in a precedent-setting move that made terminating and prosecuting bad cops even more difficult.
None of Cleveland’s mayors and councils have followed the charter’s “overtime” language when it comes to police, fire and EMS. Overtime is requested of the council in an “emergency ordinance” before it’s approved. That’s the purpose of using the “emergency” designation in an ordinance to keep control of public funds in the hands of council on a macro level. The work week is no more than 40 hours, period, in Cleveland’s charter. I won’t make it easy. Look it up. That language pre-dates any collective bargaining agreement which reads otherwise. Understanding the “nuances” of municipal management is important.
There’s also nothing “Carl Stokes’ish” about Bibb. Comparing the city’s fourth elected American Negro mayor to its first is a comparison Stokes might not appreciate. Stokes boxed Golden Gloves, earned a GED, served in the United States Army, worked as a state liquor enforcement officer when gangsters ran the industry, earned a law degree, passed an examination to be admitted into the practice of law, practiced law, served in the Ohio General Assembly and started a family before he served as mayor for two terms. He also played a helluva pool game. We played and I won a game of “straight pool” against him. I haven’t seen Bibb at Long Green’s or any of the area’s dwindling billiard parlours … ever.
Bibb at 34 is publicly single. He’s said little to nothing about his personal relationships while Stokes’ two families and his children with both his wives were known. Clevelanders have met Bibb’s mother and grandmother.

Sources describe Bibb as ” secretive.” No wife or husband. No visible girlfriend or boyfriend. No current income source but he’s living in a swanky downtown apartment that costs about $1300 a month for rent. He’s a college educated frat boy who earned a degree in law but has failed to pass the Ohio Bar Examination twice. Inside sources say he lives with a Caucasian male room mate.
Bibb is the first Cleveland mayoral candidate in my lifetime where some of the political players he’s reached out to for support have asked his sexual orientation. They’ve said it didn’t matter as each accepted his “no” answer to whether or not he was homosexual. One claim is that he was the president of the Stonewall Democrats, but a Wayback Machine search of the local website doesn’t confirm it. What all have said is they’ll feel deceived to learn otherwise. “If he lies about that he’ll lie about anything even though his personal life is none of our business.” The woman in his life is allegedly a politically-powered girlfriend resident of the Carolinas.
Bibb should know that since he first introduced himself to Clevelanders as a mayoral hopeful he’s been under investigation by people whose mission is to get to “know” him. Bibb and every member of his team is and will be investigated, surreptitiously, by Cleveland police officers individually and collectively. They’ll be investigated using law enforcement tools and techniques neither he nor his transition team co-chairs know exist; let alone how police are violating federal and state laws to learn non-public facts about their new bosses. Whatever is learned will be shared with contacts in the media. The friendly journalistic faces making him feel good today will have no choice but to expose it.
The transition leaders of Cleveland’s newest mayor show him as headed for statutory trouble and not accolades; and Bibb might as well get accustomed early on to the political reality he’ll be facing once he’s administered an oath of office to obey and enforce two constitutions, federal, state and local laws no one around him seems to know are “stay out of jail” important.

Bibb will be held accountable by the voters of Cleveland who reside in the city he’s pissing off before his administration starts with his inexperienced transition team of suburbanites. More Clevelanders voted for other candidates than Bibb in the primary. In the general election the numbers show a lot of Clevelanders stayed home. It doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention and talking among themselves about the new mayor and his decisions.
The Plain Dealer, Cleveland.com, Scene and Crain’s can act like they’re impressed. Bibb isn’t impressing the council members and voters who didn’t endorse or vote for him. He’s not impressing the Cleveland voters who didn’t know enough about either candidate and stayed at home.