Frank Jackson
mayor, City of Cleveland
Frank Jackson will not call a press conference to tell you how powerful he is. He will not pound his podium or impose his plans through a fearsome display of overwhelming Frank Jackson-ness.
The idea is as ridiculous as the thought of Cleveland, the mighty central city, dictating its will to all of Northeast Ohio. That’s a relic. So, in the past four years, the business community has warmed to a different kind of mayor: humble, honest, candid, quiet.
Jackson’s successes have not come in spite of his mild personality but because of it. His soft-spoken approach makes him an effective diplomat who defuses old tensions. He smoothed relations with the Rock Hall’s New York foundation and convinced them to hold the induction ceremony here in 2009 and possibly every three years — stitching up a wound in Cleveland’s pride.
Leaders in Greater Cleveland talk a lot about cooperation but rarely cooperate. So Jackson’s no-poaching and tax-sharing agreements with several suburbs represent regionalism’s biggest advance. It’s “a spirit of cooperation like I’ve never seen in my entire life,” raves Umberto Fedeli (No. 13 on our list).
Consider some other dogs that haven’t barked as Jackson treads softly through City Hall. Cleveland’s growing budget challenges have led to no layoffs, no bad-news-dodging while angling for higher office, no vindictive power plays against an enemies list.
“If we would have some other mayoral personality right now, they would either politicize it or drop the ball,” says city councilman Joe Cimperman.
Instead, business and government are following up on summer’s sustainability summit and mounting a second effort at redeveloping the Flats East Bank. Continental Airlines seems happy to keep Cleveland Hopkins as a hub airport, a result of careful offstage conversations between the city and the airline, Fedeli suggests. Jackson’s gotten testy with the Medical Mart’s developers, but his challenge could just as likely strengthen the project as scuttle it. And when Issue 6 made the county commissioners lame ducks, Jackson stepped into the leadership gap.
“[To] people who are critical because they don’t hear him enough,” says Cimperman, “[I say,] maybe you’re not listening enough.”