A Boy Mayor Has Problems

Cleveland's top executive may be headed for early retirement

At 31, Cleveland's Dennis Kucinich is the youngest mayor of any big American city. Aggressive, bright and ambitious, he seemed likely to make good on his campaign promise to shake up city hall and provide more efficient government when he took office last November. Since then, Kucinich has indeed shaken up Cleveland. But, for the most part, the results have bordered on the disastrous. Last week, after he fired popular Police Chief Richard Hongisto, citizen groups began a recall movement that may send Kucinich into early retirement.

Despite his youth and choirboy looks, the 5-ft. 6-in. Kucinich (pronounced Koosin-itch) is a savvy veteran of Cleveland's bruising ward politics. The son of a truck driver, he grew up on the city's ethnic, working-class West Side (his father is Croatian, his mother Irish). At 23, he won a seat on the city council and six years later was elected clerk of courts, the city's second highest elective office. A maverick Democrat with a strong anti-Establishment bias, he has built his power base among poor and working-class voters. Says he: "They need someone to stand up and fight for them." Once he even invited Cleveland's civic leaders to breakfast with him at Tony's Diner, where he has eaten for years. His usual order: two bowls of Special K with bananas and a steak, which the waitress cuts up for him to save him time.

Witty and energetic, he has great appeal among the young; he keeps a ventriloquist's dummy in his baronial office to entertain visiting schoolchildren. Kucinich has a large collection of comic books and has seen Star Wars six times. He is a master at manipulating the media. On the night that he edged out the official Democratic candidate for mayor by only 2,900 votes of the 180,000 cast, Kucinich was in the newsroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he once worked as a copy boy. While photographers clicked their cameras, he sent the edited story of his victory by pneumatic tube to the composing room.

After becoming mayor, Kucinich charged about the city, barking orders and firing anyone who he thought was not doing his job correctly. When blizzards closed Cleveland's airport, Kucinich sacked the airport director and supervised the snow removal himself.

He soon appointed to high city offices some 40 zealous followers, about half of whom are younger than he is. They share his distrust and disdain for bureaucrats, but some of them are inexperienced. Director of Finance Joseph Tegreene, for example, is a 24-year-old political science graduate of Kenyon College who worked as a stockbroker for eight months; No. 2 slot in the department of Public Safety is held by Tonia Grdina, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Cleveland State University. The Kucinich appointees quickly became known as the City Hall Raiders. To their credit, the Raiders rooted out hundreds of unproductive bureaucrats, mostly middle managers. But many Clevelanders complain that some of the Raiders have proved to be ruthless and arrogant. Concedes Kucinich: "The criticism has some merit as it relates to the bureaucracy, but we treat the general public with respect."

When it comes to economic issues, Kucinich is a real Raider himself. He cut the city's budget by $2.5 million, to a total of $129 million for this year. He upset the city's business community by rejecting a $41 million federal grant to build an elevated monorail that would carry people about the central city. For his part, Kucinich wants $1.5 billion in federal funds to be spent for new sewers in working-class neighborhoods. He also opposes as "ripoffs" the city's practice of offering tax abatements to businesses locating in distressed areas. One consequence: Cleveland (pop. 660,000) will probably continue to lose manufacturing jobs--65,000 since 1969--and population at a faster rate than any other major U.S. city. Kucinich's views have led to fights with the city council, which so far has overruled him on 13 issues.

Kucinich's worst mistake probably was tangling with Chief Hongisto, whom he hired last December over the misgivings of Cleveland's conservative, 2,000-man police force. Hongisto, a liberal and former San Francisco county sheriff, is a staunch defender of gay rights and won national fame last year by going to jail rather than enforce a court order to evict elderly residents from a hotel. Hongisto quickly won the respect of his force by personally patrolling Cleveland's streets, making arrests and enlisting support for the police from citizens' groups.

As the chief became more popular, the mayor grew increasingly unhappy with him. Finally, Hongisto touched off a public feud by charging that Mayor Kucinich was pressuring him to do "unethical things." Kucinich retaliated by giving the police chief 30 hours in which to prove his charges and then fired Hongisto when he missed the deadline. Two hours later, Hongisto described in detail six abuses, among them an allegation that the mayor had obstructed his efforts to clean up the vice squad. Cried Kucinich: "He's concocting these stories so he can exit as a hero." Hongisto then proposed that he and the mayor take lie-detector tests. Kucinich refused. Said he: "I may be dealing with a fellow who is pathological. His own lie-detector results would not be conclusive."

Kucinich and Hongisto have taken their battle to the public, appearing separately on TV talk shows and granting frequent interviews to reporters. The first wave of mail and phone calls to city hall ran heavily in Hongisto's favor. Indeed, if Kucinich's critics manage to collect the 37,000 signatures required for his recall, Hongisto has hinted that he might run against Kucinich in the new election.

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