Three-and-a-half months before the city of Cincinnati settled any outstanding claims with former City Manager Harry Black, Black’s attorney wrote the city solicitor a letter accusing Mayor John Cranley of violating the city’s charter by interfering in personnel matters and economic development and giving developers “sweetheart” deals that contributed to the city’s deficit.
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Three-and-a-half months before the city of Cincinnati settled any outstanding claims with former City Manager Harry Black, Black’s attorney wrote a letter to the city solicitor accusing Mayor John Cranley of violating the city’s charter by interfering in personnel matters and economic development and giving developers “sweetheart” deals that contributed to the city’s budget deficit.
The May 30 letter from Black’s attorney, Stephen Simon, said Black would make the claims in a lawsuit against the city that accused it of violating Black’s First Amendment rights, damaging his reputation and destroying his career. The Business Courier obtained it through a public records request.
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Black has not responded to messages seeking comment over the past two days. The Courier provided the mayor’s office with questions about the specifics of Black’s letter, but he did not answer them directly.
In a prepared statement, Cranley said, "I have always been fully ethical and transparent and reject any insinuation otherwise. From GE to FCC to neighborhood investments, I am proud to have made a difference in bringing jobs to the city."
The city settled with Black on Sept. 5, paying him $370,000 in addition to $274,000 in severance, plus accrued vacation and other benefits for a total of nearly $644,000. Acting City Manager Patrick Duhaney cited the costs of the litigation to the city as the reason to settle. The settlement terms were revealed late Friday. Each year, the City Council budgets a certain amount for legal judgments that can be used at the city manager's discretion without prior council approval.
Cranley blamed the new amount paid to Black on City Council, which rejected a $424,000 deal in March. The mayor did not say whether he supported the settlement signed by Duhaney.
"Had council approved the previous settlement that Harry Black signed on March 17, it would have been significantly cheaper and prevented a second settlement," Cranley said.
In the letter, Black’s attorney outlines his version of the series of events this spring that led to Black’s resignation as city manager.
On March 8, Cranley and Black had a late-night telephone call in which both men cursed at each other, the letter alleges; Black told Cranley that night that he was “corrupt” and that his improper interference in economic development deals would no longer be tolerated.
Black had placed the call that night to discuss his intention to fire the Cincinnati Police Department’s then-No. 2 official, Assistant Chief David Bailey. Chief Eliot Isaac had recommended the firing, which Black told Cranley he planned to carry out, according to the letter. Cranley told Black he did not want Bailey fired.
“Mr. Black was frustrated, justifiably so, that both before this call and during it, the mayor was trying to interfere in this personnel matter,” Black’s letter alleges.
The letter alleges that the Bailey situation was not the only one in which Cranley had acted outside his duties in the charter. The charter specifies that the city manager is the city’s chief executive officer and that he or she makes all hiring decisions. Under the charter, the mayor recommends a candidate for city manager that a majority of council must approve in order for him or her to take office.
“The mayor had demonstrated a history of interfering with the city staff’s negotiation of economic development deals,” the letter alleges. “(T)he mayor repeatedly interjected himself in the middle of such negotiations, uniformly on the side of the developers.”
Numerous times, Cranley would increase the percentage of tax abatements or loans the city would provide a developer for projects, contrary to the city administration’s position, the letter alleges.
“(T)he mayor would insert himself into the negotiation for the purpose of giving the developer what it wanted, including using money in the city’s capital budget to fund the project,” the letter alleges. “Mr. Black believed these ‘sweetheart’ deals were fiscally terrible for the city and had contributed to the city’s budget shortfall of $25 million for 2018.”
Black did not provide specific deals in which Cranley interceded. Reached in Chicago, the city’s former economic development director, Oscar Bedolla, declined to comment on Black’s letter.
In Cranley's statement, he said his actions concerning economic development fall within the charter because it alone gives him the power to refer legislation to the City Council.
"The charter and the public expects that the mayor is involved with economic development," Cranley said. "I have to be involved and should be."
The letter also alleges that Cranley had a financial reason for interfering in the deals. In early March, Black had a one-on-one lunch with Cranley, who told him that if he could not seek a statewide office after the conclusion of his second term, he would return to “facilitating development deals for private developers, which had been the core of his work as an attorney in the years preceding his seeking election as mayor,” the letter alleges.
“It was indeed very troubling to Mr. Black that many of the developers for whom the mayor had secured favorable development deals with the city were the mayor’s former clients,” the letter alleges.
Sources have previously told the Courier that Cranley had hoped to run for governor of Ohio sometime after his second mayoral term. Cranley recently ruled out a run for Hamilton County prosecutor in 2020.
The letter noted that Cranley omitted the discussion of private developers in his initial account of the March 8 call to four City Council members. The mayor's letter said that Cranley told Black that Bailey’s job status was the city manager’s call. In a statement on March 30, Cranley said Black had obstructed city business and made unprofessional and offensive phone calls. Cranley has maintained that his actions concerning economic development were legal and appropriate.
Cranley has said that he believed Black should leave the city because he was abusive toward city employees, but the letter alleges that the dispute over economic development was the true force behind Cranley’s drive to remove Black from office. On March 9, the day after the phone call, Cranley asked Black to resign.
“Such a motivation for termination is plainly unlawful, as Mr. Black’s comments during the March 8 phone call were protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the letter alleges.
The May 30 demand letter came six weeks after Black had made specific allegations about economic development matters on April 18, while he was still city manager. The April 18 letter alleged that the then-director of the city’s economic development department told Black about an alleged pay-to-play arrangement discussed by a lobbyist between the mayor and a company seeking city financial assistance. Cranley and the lobbyist have denied that allegation.
“To our knowledge, the memo resulted in absolutely no investigation by City Council,” the letter alleges. “Rather, the next day, Councilman Greg Landsman, who proved to be the fifth deciding vote on council, announced his support for terminating Mr. Black.”
The letter rejects Cranley’s assertion that he sought to remove Black because the then-manager was abusive to city employees. It also alleges that Landsman blamed Black for the death of teenager Kyle Plush, something that was “patently unfair.” The letter notes that Cranley had praised Black’s management of the 911 center during his 2017 re-election campaign.
“It made little sense to immediately terminate Mr. Black while the police department’s investigation of the death was still ongoing and weeks before the investigation report was completed,” Black’s letter says.
On April 19, Landsman said the reason he would vote for Black's dismissal is that the manager had failed to be fully focused on the 911 center issues surrounding Plush’s death and that having a new city manager was an important step towards fixing the problem.
On Saturday, Landsman cited an April hearing in which Black did not name any specific steps that had been taken at the center since Plush’s death. Landsman said he thought long and hard before making the decision to vote to terminate Black and came to it with “enormous conviction.”
“It was absolutely clear that Harry could no longer do his job, and that on something so big as our response to the tragedy of April 10, we needed our city’s CEO to be fully engaged in fixing our emergency call center issues,” Landsman said. “Harry wasn’t, and said as much at the Law and Public Safety Committee a week later when he explained that we ‘simply needed the existing reforms to take hold.’”
The damage to Black wasn’t simply the loss of his job, the letter said.
“(H)is career in municipal government has been destroyed,” the letter said. “At age 55, he should be in the prime earning capacity of his work life. Instead, he finds himself trying to reinvent his career. In short, his economic losses are staggering. If this matter proceeds to litigation and Mr. Black prevails at trial, we submit the award could be in the seven-figure range.”