Making the grade
Sometimes an ordinary event can leave an indelible impression, and for Akron, Ohio, Mayor Donald Plusquellic, that impression was made eight years ago at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum. The day was a celebration of the museum’s construction during which a few families got a sneak peek at its exhibits, including one specially designed with hands-on activities for children.
At one of the activity stations, a number of boys disassembled small household appliances, while a young girl watched and waited for her turn. Once her turn came, she seemed hesitant to begin, but after receiving guidance from a volunteer standing nearby, the girl was wielding the tools and inspecting the appliances just like the boys.
To hear Akron Mayor Donald Plusquellic tell that story, you’d think the event happened yesterday because of the strong impression it left on him about the value of the museum and the importance of exposing children to educational opportunities. “I don’t know what that little girl’s name is or whether she has any interest in being an engineer or chemistry major, but I know one thing: the more you can offer those opportunities for that little girl as representative of the next generation, the more people we will have to be creative and inventive, and that’s what will make our society successful,” he says.
Fueled by the desire to ensure substantial educational opportunities for Akron children, Plusquellic led a successful campaign this spring to raise local funds for an $800 million school facility construction and rehabilitation program. It was a hard-fought battle that eventually resulted in a unique alternative to relying on property taxes to finance school facilities.
In addition to advocating for better public education, Mayor Plusquellic has led a revitalization of the city that has resulted in burgeoning investment in the Akron region. While many cities across the country recently have seen declining revenues force layoffs and cuts in services, Akron has seen unusual prosperity under Plusquellic’s leadership. His creativity and determination have made the city a better place for families and businesses, and they have secured his spot as American City & County’s 2003 Municipal Leader of the Year.
The learning curve
Growing up on Akron’s southwest side, Plusquellic was raised in the shadows of the Goodyear, BFGoodrich, General and Firestone factories that made the city famous as the “Rubber Capital of the World.” His father worked in one of the tire factories, and Plusquellic — the only son among four siblings — worked summers and vacations throughout high school and college in a tire warehouse. “I was the only one I knew of in college that hadn’t gone to Florida for spring break,” he says. “We had a typical blue collar, middle class life growing up. We couldn’t afford a lot of things, so if I wanted a car and gas [money], I worked.”
Plusquellic was a standout at his high school as the star quarterback, and he earned a football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. After two years, he transferred to Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he was the captain of the football team his senior year. Despite aspirations to play for the Cleveland Browns, Plusquellic’s football career ended after suffering an injury to his throwing arm.
Upon graduation in 1972, Plusquellic returned home with plans to attend graduate school in the fall. However, that September, his father died of a heart attack at 49, leaving his mother and three sisters at home on their own. Plusquellic decided to remain in Akron and work to support his family. He soon married and began looking for ways to satisfy a nagging desire to give back to the community.
Knowing very little about city politics, Plusquellic ran for and won a seat on the city council, representing his ward at age 24. “I had the same kind of feelings I think the average person has right now about not trusting, not believing that people in the system were dedicated and trying to do what’s best,” he says. “I just thought, ‘I’m going to get in and try to fight for my ward that I owe so much to.’ It just felt like it was the right thing to do to give back to that community in some way, and that was the way I chose.”
Initially, he had planned to serve only one or two terms on the council, but, along the way, he began to really enjoy the work. After two terms as his ward’s representative on the council, he won a citywide seat and served in that position for another eight years. Meanwhile, he got a law degree from the University of Akron and opened a law practice. During his second term in the citywide seat, the other 13 members of the council elected him president.
He was serving his third year as city council president when Akron Mayor Tom Sawyer was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. As the council president, Plusquellic succeeded the mayor in his absence in January 1987. That fall, he campaigned for and won his first mayoral election. Since then, he has been re-elected three times, and he was elected vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Conference of Mayors in June. (At press time, he was campaigning for his fifth mayoral term. In addition to voting on the mayor, residents will decide whether to institute term limits for the office.)
Focusing on core subjects
When Plusquellic inherited the mayor’s office in 1987, he also inherited a host of challenges, not the least of which was the city’s faltering economy. The four rubber companies that had been the foundation of the city’s economy had moved their operations to the southern United States, following national migration trends.
In the 20 years prior to Plusquellic’s term, the city had lost 35,000 jobs. “When I became mayor, we not only were going through the final stages of that process, but the beginning of globalization hit us like a two by four alongside the head,” he says. “Bridgestone bought Firestone. Continental bought General, and Goodrich merged with Uniroyal out of Michigan, and then Michelin purchased Uniroyal/Goodrich. Then, about the same time, those companies moved their corporate headquarters. Here we were as the ‘Rubber Capital of the World’ and suddenly, not only had we lost all of the blue collar jobs to various other places around the country and the world, we were losing our identity that we thought would always be here, which was the corporate offices. It was a tremendous shock to people.”
Plusquellic was faced with leading a depressed citizenry through some hard times. “We had to start convincing people that we were going to survive, we just needed a change,” he says.
The city turned its attention to the businesses that remained. Although the rubber companies had moved their headquarters, they all still had research and development facilities in the city that focused on developing new materials, such as polymers and plastics, for products that typically were made from rubber.
The city took hold of the fact that the University of Akron had a polymer engineering program, and it began marketing itself as a center for polymer science. It began attracting similar companies to the area to take advantage of the educated work force and the supporting machinery industry and gradually pulled itself out of its economic slump.
In the 1990s, the mayor also began focusing attention on the city’s downtown area, which follows the path of the Ohio & Erie Canal. The mayor enticed the National Inventors Hall of Fame to construct a $38 million museum downtown in 1995, and the city built a convention center soon after. Six years ago, the city built a minor league baseball stadium that has sparked restaurants and retail stores to open nearby and has brought residents downtown in the evening. “Companies feel confident that they can attract and keep good employees because of the stadium and the convention center,” Plusquellic says. “It’s a whole new atmosphere that we’ve helped create by making public investment and then encouraging and attracting private investment in office buildings.”
This year, the city opened an 8-acre park in the center of downtown with an outdoor amphitheater, which brought 50,000 people to summertime performances. “The city has completely changed its face in the last 10 years,” says Dan Dahl, executive director of Lock 3 Live, the outdoor amphitheater. “It’s because of the mayor’s vision, persistence and leadership.”
As a result of the growth, the city’s income tax revenues grew by 1.4 percent last year, and it is on target to see additional growth of 2.5 to 3 percent this year. “We were fortunate to have something that we could build upon, and that is the polymer industry,” Plusquellic says. “No one here would argue that back in ‘87 we were fortunate to have the rubber companies leave. I’d still like to have some of those 35,000 true rubber jobs, but we were very fortunate compared to others in that when we lost one industry, all of a sudden, there was another that [could be] very beneficial to us and our economic well-being.”
Cramming for answers
The city’s revived economy helped lay the groundwork for Plusquellic’s efforts to find alternatives to using property taxes to fund schools. School funding has been a controversial topic in Ohio for several years, driven by a lawsuit brought by school districts against the state in 1991. In DeRolph v. State of Ohio, school districts claimed that the state’s system of funding public schools primarily with local property taxes was unconstitutional because it resulted in per-pupil expenditures that vary significantly between school districts. The state Supreme Court ruled on the case three times, most recently in December 2002, saying that the state’s school funding system remains unconstitutional, and the state legislature needs to find an equitable way to pay for schools.
As one result of the lawsuit, in 1999, the state devoted $10 billion from the multi-state tobacco settlement to rebuild and rehabilitate every school building in the state. Starting with the six largest school districts, including Akron, the state allocated funds on a sliding scale. For Akron Public Schools, 71 percent of which are at least 70 years old, the state pledged to pay 59 percent of the $800 million it would cost to rebuild or rehabilitate facilities. The state approved Akron’s $800 million project in July 2002, giving the city one year to come up with its share of the money.
However, the city was in a bind. In November 2001, city residents had approved a large property tax increase (8.9 mills) to fund school operating costs, and no one wanted to see another increase anytime soon. “We had this back-to-back problem,” Plusquellic says. “[In 2001,] I went out to every senior citizen group and stood there talking to people who are on fixed incomes, asking them to take a few dollars more out of their paycheck every month to help support the schools. What I did say was ‘I will try every way I can to find an alternative [next time the schools need money.]’”
Plusquellic devised a plan to work with the county to increase its sales tax and devote the money to school capital improvements. “I sifted through the Ohio Revised Code, and I came up with a sales tax,” Plusquellic says. “I found a provision in the state code that allowed for a half cent sales tax to be imposed at the county level for improvements to public facilities. It had never been tried in Ohio.”
He proposed that the tax would stay in place for 30 years, and the revenue would be distributed equally per pupil to each of the 17 school districts in the county. The sales tax increase was on the ballot in November 2002, and although Akron residents approved the referendum by 57 percent, the measure failed countywide. “The sales tax vote was an opportunity for people that hate the central city to really vent,” says Summit County Executive James McCarthy. “There [were some people] that didn’t want to see it be successful because it would have made Don more successful. They were against [the measure] when it was in their own best interest, but they couldn’t see it. Now that it’s over, some think it’s a good idea, and if it went back on the ballot, they would vote for it.”
Plusquellic was disappointed by the outcome but heartened by the positive response from Akron voters. “A significant number of suburban residents saw it as an Akron issue, and no matter what we did, no matter how hard we tried to get everyone to pull together, there were some typical suburban versus city attitudes, so it failed,” Plusquellic says. “It was a shame because it would have distributed equally per child and provided capital dollars for every district in our county. It wasn’t on the backs of senior citizens. It really was a fairer tax than the property tax, but it failed.”
Passing the test
Unwilling to miss the opportunity to secure state funds for school building improvements, Plusquellic searched the state laws for another way to raise money for schools. He found a provision that allowed local governments to work with school districts to use income taxes to fund “community learning centers.” The state code defines community learning centers as facilities that can be used for educational, recreational and community activities by all residents. By changing the definition of schools to community learning centers and leaving them open to residents and community groups for use after school hours, the city could use income taxes to raise the matching funds for the reconstruction project.
Plusquellic proposed raising the city income tax by a quarter percent (from 2 percent to 2.25 percent) to generate $12 million annually to finance bonds over 30 years to construct community learning centers. Time, however, was running out to secure the state funds. The city council agreed to put the income tax increase on the ballot for a May vote, and the mayor and the school district began a citywide campaign to get it passed. “The entire community was engaged in this thing,” says Sylvester Small, superintendent of Akron Public Schools. “The mayor went to all the senior homes, all the churches. Labor groups and businesses donated money to fund the campaign. On election day, it passed by 64 percent. The community came together because of the efforts of the mayor and city government and school district working together.”
The sales tax increase will take effect in January, and it will be collected only on earned income (not pensions, social security, IRA earnings or dividends) from people who work in Akron. As a result of raising the tax and securing state matching funds, by 2017, Akron will have rebuilt or renovated all of its school buildings, providing air conditioning so facilities can be used in the summer and infrastructure for computers in classrooms.
City leaders view the facility reconstruction as an important step to meeting the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. “No Child Left Behind talks about every child receiving a certain type of education, and you have to have adequate, up-to-date facilities to do that,” Small says. “Our buildings were built to deliver education in a time that’s passed. If you’re going to deal with No Child Left Behind, you have to have the educational facilities that allow you to do that.”
Besides committing money to school facility upgrades, the city allocates $125,000 in its annual budget to support Akron After School, a program run by the city school district. Also supported by state and federal grants, the program provides tutoring and enrichment classes — such as dance, theater and sports — after school to elementary students at nine schools. “I know the mayor really has a heart for the kids of Akron, and he’s very passionate about giving them the opportunity to be successful,” says Desiree Bolden, project director for Akron After School.
If residents remember nothing about the tenure of their long-standing mayor, Plusquellic hopes his efforts to improve the city’s schools will at least leave an indelible mark on Akron’s educational system. “We’re trying to do on a local level what we think the federal and state [governments] should do to help children,” Plusquellic says. “I probably will be most proud of trying to drive this community to be more concerned about our youth and preparing [them] for those opportunities that I know will be there.”
