Shaking Things Up - Shaker Politics with Councilman Sean Malone

by Emily Qian

Sean Malone is a Councilman for the city of Shaker Heights. He serves as Finance & Administration Chair, as well as Chair of the Human Relations Task Force. He is running for re-election in December 2019. The Catalyst interviewed him to talk about politics, government, and student involvement at a local level.

Here at the Catalyst, we strive to increase student engagement on political and social issues. We find that the level of informed engagement of high school students is much higher on the national or state level. Why do you think that local politics aren’t as advertised or as visible as national politics? And why should young people care about local issues? 

Well I guess I’ll start with why young people should care. I think just about everything that touches their lives involves local government in some form. From the sewers that run under their houses, to the garbage that gets picked up in their backyard, the power supplies that goes into their house, the police and fire chief that keep their neighborhoods safe. All those things happen at the local level, whether it’s the city government like Shaker Heights, or a county government like Cuyahoga County. So from that standpoint alone, these points are maybe not the most exciting issues, but they are reason enough to pay attention to your local government.

And it’s accessible. You can show up to your local city council meetings, you can speak to your representatives, much easier than you can a national or state elected official. They’re generally more responsive - they’re not out raising money all the time. So you can actually make a difference, I think in a much more casual way than you can at a national or state level.

As far as why there’s not as much coverage, part of the problem is that there’s not as much journalism as there has been in years past. It’s a difficult business, so there’s been a lot of cuts to coverage of local issues. I think that’s a big part of it. Also, I think sometimes people get distracted by issues that generate headlines and clicks on national websites, and they tend to forget about the things that are happening in their own backyards.

Last December, the Council passed the 2019 Shaker Heights budget, which was almost $50 million. Given the recent dip in income tax revenue, how do you plan to obtain the money needed?

It’s interesting you ask about that. The income tax dip appears to have been a reaction to the federal income tax bill that was passed at the end of 2017, which got rid of a tax deduction that many people in Northeast Ohio, and Shaker in particular, had relied upon for many years, called the state and local deduction. So you were no longer able to deduct on your federal taxes the full amount of the state and local taxes you paid. As a result, a lot of people in Shaker and Northeast Ohio tried to pre-pay their taxes at the end of 2017 for the entire year of 2018, which meant the city wasn’t getting as much money.

Anyways, that’s a long way of saying we expect that we are going to see a recovery in income tax receipts, so Shaker is in a good position to pay for the things we’ve budgeted. There’s a lot of things we would love to do in Shaker, like overhaul Thornton park, the recreation center for the city - it’s not as great a facility as we’d like to have. We’d like to spruce up our parks even more, maybe even lower resident taxes at some point. But we have very challenging infrastructure needs - we’ve got a lot of old sewers, a lot of old roads that cost money.

Infrastructure has been a huge topic on the national level. When it comes to maintaining the infrastructure in your city, whose responsibility is that?

I think it needs to be a shared responsibility, at all levels of government. I think there was some federal money involved when the sewer systems in Northeast Ohio were first put in. So I would argue that these things are clearly a state and local asset. The city of Shaker Heights owns the sewers under our city, but I would argue that all levels of government should be helping to finance these systems, because they’re just a basic need for people in urban settings. We can’t all have septic systems and inner ring suburbs in the city of Cleveland. This is a place that’s been building up for at least a hundred fifty years . . . We hear a lot of talk about it at the federal level, but nothing happens. So the city is bearing the brunt of this, and it takes up a lot of our budget, and we’d love to have more support for it.

The council has also done a lot of work in the Van Aken district. How do you see the district contributing to Shaker, economically and otherwise?

We hope that the Van Aken district will continue to produce income tax and property tax revenue for the city. A problem with Shaker [is that] it was designed . . . to be a garden city kept away from the areas of commerce downtown, so we have very limited space for commercial and economic development. We’ve been very dependent on residents for income tax and property tax. We’re trying to change that. Van Aken has been, I would argue, very successful so far. As we bring more businesses into the district, we’ll be less dependent on individual residents for income tax. So, it’s great from a financial standpoint, but it’s also exciting to see lots of people coming to the Van Aken district from outside the city. We got the Shaker Rocks Climbing Gym that’s attracting people, we got a lot of great restaurants, some shopping, and people are living there. We’re hoping that it will be a place where everybody in Shaker, and from outside of the city as well, feels welcome.

There’s also a newly created Sustainability Committee for Shaker Heights - tell us a bit more about that, and what you hope it will accomplish.

I could probably talk to you for about half an hour about that. I’ve been a pretty big part of that since the beginning. In 2014, there was a lot of flooding in the city in Shaker Lakes; the dam over by Horseshoe Lake overflowed and a lot of residents had their basements flooded. It prompted the mayor at that time to create what he called then the Climate Change Task Force. I was not on council then - I was a resident on the Safety and Public Force Committee, and I became one of the members of the Climate Change Task Force. We made a full series of recommendations at the end of our one year long task force - things that the city could do, things that the residents could do, to try to implement environmentally responsible practices and take better care of our assets.

Once I joined the council, I became the chair of the Sustainable Shaker Task Force. It wasn’t a full fledged committee at that time, but I chaired for 2 years. I planned all sorts of events around the city, helping residents put rain barrels in their backyard, promoting the decreased use of pesticides, encouraged the city to purchase renewable electricity instead of carbon-based sources, encouraged residents to put solar panels on their homes. But we were somewhat limited, because we didn’t have staff. It was me and four other council people and resident volunteers, but Mayor Weiss came on board at the beginning of 2018, and soon thereafter decided he wanted to elevate this task force to a full fledged city committee, and that meant that we were able to hire a consultant. Michael Peters was the individual who was hired after a process, and Michael was one of our Sustainable Shaker Task Force members from the very beginning. He owns an electrical car sharing company, so he is very well suited for this. He’s been pushing us to do some new stuff, and he’s right now taking an inventory of all of the city’s energy uses. 

So the Mayor would like to do not just some great projects for the sake of great projects, but he would also like to save the city some money, and finding cost savings. One thing we'd like to do is to see solar panels on the roofs of buildings, and we also like residents to stay engaged the way we did the Sustainable Shaker Task Force. We're hoping to do the same with this full fledged committee. There's going to be a Lead For Cities certification program that the city is going through. We're trying to get a stamp of approval from a national organization, one of a handful of cities across the nation that's trying to get this certification.

In the past, Shaker has struggled with racial integration and income disparity -  how are you hoping to fix these problems, and what steps have you or the Council taken to do so?

I actually have an op-ed that I'm hoped will get published in the Plain Dealer. I grew up in Shaker, so I spent a lot of my time as a child living with and going to school with, playing with kids who didn't necessarily look like me, sound like me. When we grow up though, I think as adults, we're not as good about spending time with people outside of our natural habitats: our neighborhoods, our places of worship, our work workplaces. And so sometimes we're not as able to talk to people about difficult issues, about their sensitivities, the way they feel, or how they may feel slighted. Shaker has a history of trying to promote unity among people of different backgrounds, and it goes back to the Ludlow Community Association back in the sixties and seventies, when some black families moved in. Actually even before then, there was violence, there were efforts to kick them out of the neighborhood. But a group of Shaker residents stood up and said they didn't want that happening in their neighborhoods, and they deliberately tried to integrate Ludlow. And there were boxing programs so that kids from different sides of the city would go to school together. Even though they might live in neighborhoods that weren't integrated, they would see each other in school. And I think I was a beneficiary of some of those programs growing up. Over the years, there's been less appetite locally and nationally for this kind of structured and deliberate integration.

As the chair of something called the Human Relations Task Force, one of the things I'm hoping to do is to bring people together from all over the city. We're trying to make Shaker more welcoming place; whether you were born in Shaker, lived here your whole life, or whether you're just moving here from Cleveland or from the other side of the world, we want you to feel welcome in Shaker. We want everybody to feel welcome in all parts of Shaker, wherever you go in the city, even if it's not your neighborhood. And we're trying to encourage people to spend time in fun, community wide events. We just had a great parade yesterday. It was a great example of how the whole community can come together. It just reflects the wide spectrum of everyone in Shaker.

But you know, when we have these kinds of fun events to bring teams together, and you meet somebody who's not from your neighborhood, then you're able to have some more difficult conversations about some of the not so pleasant history that we've all shared in our country. So I'm trying to build this in a way that's not forcing it down people's throat: “Let's sit down and talk about all these terrible things that are happening. Let's just get to know each other on a personal level.” And then it's a little easier to have difficult conversations with people after you get to know them better.

Outside of the city council, you volunteer at the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association’s 3-R program, which connects lawyers, judges, and paralegals with Cleveland high school students. Can you tell us about your experience volunteering there and why you joined the program?

The 3-R program is a terrific program. I've been doing it maybe eight years. You go into the classroom, usually it's a group of four or five lawyers. Once a month we go in and we teach a class about legal concepts, some of the things you might learn in law school. Due process, first amendment, free speech rights, any number of legal issues. And we also include career counseling as a component of it. We want kids to know their legal rights, particularly when and if they're stopped by police officers. You want them to have safe interactions with the police, but we also want them to know what the police should and should not be doing so that they understand how that encounter should proceed. And a lot of times police are wearing body cameras anyway, so everything that happened is going to be recorded. But it's a great opportunity to be with kids, and I really enjoy it. I think it could be a worthwhile program to bring to Shaker too.

In your opinion, what does it take to be a city council member or any other elected official on the local level? Can anyone do it? Would you like to see more people running for office or joining the open council meetings?

Absolutely, I'd like to see more people doing it, I’d like to see more people running. I'll preface this by saying I'm running for reelection this fall, and as of right now, four seats are up for reelection. Three of the four incumbents including me are running again and there's one incumbent who has not made up her mind. But if she decides not to run, we do have one other resident who is interested in running, which gives us 4 residents running for 4 seats. So we're all gonna win. While that may be great for me personally, I think it's terrible for democracy. It's terrible for our local government. A couple of years ago, there was an election in University Heights where I think nobody ran, and there weren't enough candidates. So the council had to then appoint somebody. I don't think we want a handful of people just appointing our elected officials. 

Anybody can run for office who’s over 18. I think in Shaker, you get 180 signatures of people saying that you're qualified to be on the ballot. I will say I think a certain amount of life experience helps, but you don't have to be of retired age to be on City Council. But I do think it helps to have a little bit of work experience, a little bit of life experience, before you decide to run; and from a practical standpoint, it's easier to get elected when you know more people in your community. But I'm just gonna be honest with you, I'm turning 42 later this week, but I'm the youngest on City Council by a number of years in Shaker, and I don't necessarily think that's a good thing. I think we should have younger people getting involved too.

As a final question, how can high school students get involved in local politics in their city? What kind of change can they create within their community?

I think the sky's the limit. You're doing a perfect example of one thing that high school students could do. They could actually call up an elected official in, and have a conversation, and then write about it and spread the word. Because there are interesting things that happen with the local government, and you can actually spend an hour, hour and a half, and go to a City Council meeting on a weeknight. You can just check out our web website that gives our schedules. Most of the interesting work happens at the committee level, even before I think it's come to the council level. I know you've got a number of students who showed up at our committee meetings. And I think you learn a lot and you really start to think about things differently. In terms of influencing elected officials, I think elected officials pay more attention the younger the person is who's writing to them. I think when we get letters from third graders, that stuff is really neat to read, and we typically respond. When we get letters from 10th graders, we're excited that somebody that young is just taking an interest in us in the work that we're doing, so we're more likely to respond. That's why I say the sky’s the limit.

We had, I think it was a sophomore at the time, a kid lived on my street who wanted to know why we couldn't fish on the Shaker Lakes. It's kind of a random request, but I said to him, I don’t know. So we looked into it, and we're starting down the path of - perhaps in a year or so, some of the bigger Shaker lakes - people may be able to use them more than they have in the past. And this is just one high school student who had a random idea that he approached his City Council member with.