Chris Ronayne

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There is a furor around the surprise news last week that Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne wants to expand the Convention Center, even though he has no plan and no money, and the suggestion itself seriously imperils the lakefront development that is imminent.

How angry is the county council, Laura?

Well, they're ticked, except for Dale Miller, who won't say anything critical about anybody really.

But several council members told Caitlin Durbin that they learned about the idea through media reports rather than the county leadership that should be talking to them, and questioned why they were discussing this at all.

I mean, we know the county is broke, so why are we talking about a convention center expansion? Why is that a priority in any way, shape, or form? Chris Ronayne is saying that Destination Cleveland approached him with this concept for northward expansion sometime in the future, not naming any dates, no proposal, but just didn't want to rule out the possibility.

But Patrick Kelly and Michael Gallagher, two current council people, said they were blindsided.

And Gallagher said he checked with several other council members and a county rep who sits on the board overseeing the Convention Center, and they were unaware of it.

It also ties directly into the county's separate effort to create that unified zoning code we've been talking about that's aiming to eliminate some of these barriers in the first place.

Is all this just to justify Chris Ronayne creating a-

[laughs]

... transportation position out of thin air and paying the person-

I'm Chris Quinn, here today with Lisa Garvin, Layla Atassi, and Courtney Astolfi.

Layla, what are the multiple reasons that Chris Ronayne's last-minute bid to derail the downtown land bridge project to the Lakefront with a half-baked convention center expansion will fail?

Well, Chris, I think the biggest reason is that Cleveland has an actual project that's funded and it's moving toward construction, while the county has little more than an idea here.

And Mayor Justin Bibb is, is making it abundantly clear that he's not going to jeopardize years of work on the Lakefront to accommodate a hypothetical convention center expansion.

The, the...

You know that this is wrong because of the way they unveiled it.

Chris Ronayne didn't go public and say, "Hey, we've got a plan.

We've been working on this forever.

The county just released a budget for council to vote on, county council.

Ronayne is not cutting a piece of budgets for Health and Human Services.

It's tough.

He is talking about eradicating programs, eradicating safety net programs-

He's drawing more attention to all the scandal around him with his, his bluster and his bravado"? You're listening to Today in Ohio.

Cuyahoga County is broke, as we know, so why, Leila, is it considering spending $845,000 on another thing that is not in the county charter, not part of the county business, creating a zoning code for 59 communities within its boundaries? Isn't this just another of Chris Ronayne's many luxury items that he's squandering our tax dollars on and now hitting them u- us up for tax increases?

All right, so the idea here is that we've got these 59 communities and essentially 59 different sets of zoning rules.

Many of them were built on codes dating back to the '50s and '60s, and that means that a developer trying to build essentially the same project in two neighboring suburbs could face completely different requirements.

B- A- And if we were flush with cash, this might be a legitimate county service, but we're not, and this isn't part of the county's charter.

There's very specific things the county has to do.

Chris Ronayne has unilaterally expanded them, his sustainability office, his Lake Erie thing, one after another after another.

He's creating all sorts of positions that we don't need, that there is no requirement to do, and now we have a giant tax increase on the ballot to pay for some of the stuff they're supposed to do 'cause they've wasted all this money.