The Power 100: Don Plusquellic

Here’s the rap on Don Plusquellic: He’s hotheaded, unpredictable, stubborn. And here’s the case for Akron’s mayor: He’s a doer. He makes the big deals. He gets along with the people who count.

Plusquellic’s had a tough past three years: Voters barely re-elected him in 2007 then shot down his plan to sell Akron’s sewers for scholarship money. Sensing weakness, all the enemies that the loud, brusque, charging bull of a mayor made in 23 years of blustering and shouting ran their assassins’ knives against grindstones then plotted a motley effort to recall him.

But business leaders’ confidence in Plusquellic, and Akron, never waned. In those same three years, the mayor helped broker the key deals that kept other markets from stripping the tires right off the Rubber City: The $900 million Goodyear Riverwalk Project (now on hold), which kept the company headquartered in Akron, and the new $102 million technical center for the Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations. Site Selection, the monthly bible for public-private business deals, named Akron the country’s second most successful mid-sized city at attracting corporate facility projects two years in a row.

Plusquellic has an “innovative and entrepreneurial approach to making things happen,” says Dan Colantone, CEO and president of the Greater Akron Chamber of Commerce. He’s creative as he assembles the financial support and infrastructure improvements businesses want. And it’s no one-man show: Plusquellic collaborates with the City Council and Summit County government to make deals happen.

The results add up to $1 billion in downtown investment during Plusquellic’s tenure. They also added up on recall-election day last June. Voters kept him in office by a 3-to-1 margin. The stubborn mayor’s day of reckoning became a Sinatra-esque triumph of personal will.

“When [he’s] challenged with differences of opinion, he’s showing his style of leadership,” says Colantone. “He’s willing to stay with his convictions.”

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