CH makes questionable leadership decision

Cleveland Heights must really be desperate! Instead of expanding its search to recruit from all of the highly qualified and successful professionals with municipal government experience and potential, Cleveland Heights chose to make Akron’s former mayor, Dan Horrigan, one of its top officials?   

What an embarrassment! Cleveland Heights deciding to hire Horrigan as the new city administrator is akin to any municipality deciding to have Timothy J. McGinty, Michael O'Malley, or Jimmy Dimora represent it. It's distasteful and a poor reflection.

By doing so, Mayor Kahlil Seren finally revealed how inexperienced, uninformed and gullible he is to ineffective, out-of-touch-with-reality, underperforming career politicians who are merely recycled rejects from a neighboring city that suffered primarily due to [extremely] poor leadership.

Did Mayor Seren and Cleveland Heights City Council not care or even do their homework to discover Akron, Ohio, consisted of a city government that has yet to recover from sustaining a national black eye as a result of a discriminatory, overzealous police department's involvement in the Jayland Walker fiasco (and a history of other abuse-of-law incidents that Mr. Horrigan refused to respond to appropriately that involved people of color during his time as mayor of Akron)? On top of that, Mr. Horrigan, as a mayor and former city council member, has never been known for having a genuine relationship whatsoever with the minority community (other than maintaining a limited one with his then brown-nosing trio: Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Charles Brown, Deputy Mayor for Intergovernmental Affairs Marco Sommerville and—his like-minded daughter—Akron City Council President Margo Sommerville).     

It's clear the city of Cleveland Heights still has not discovered how to shed its own long-held reputation as a community known for racism in all these years. Hiring figures like Dan Horrigan will not help to overcome such beliefs.

Maybe Mayor Seren and each member of CH City Council (especially Council Vice President Davida Russell, who claims to have such strong "connections in the city of Akron through her work as a labor executive," and who alleges to have found out that Mr. Horrigan was a "fair and decent man" after inquiring about his management style and relationship with city employees) should've considered having conversations with community leaders in Akron like former Akron City Councilman Russel Neal, Attorney Imokhai Okolo, Rev. Raymond Greene Jr. or Mr. William Melver. 

One thing is certain, most of Akron's Black community has a much different opinion of Dan Horrigan than the picture that has been painted of him by Mayor Seren and Cleveland Heights City Council, and for those reasons and more the residents of Cleveland Heights deserve to know what their city council members have chosen to do by making such an improper decision.

Tiffany Howell

Tiffany Howell is a common citizen who uncommonly pays attention to what goes on in the community.

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Volume 18, Issue 2, Posted 12:12 PM, 01.31.2025