Cincinnati City Council yesterday made the very rare move of rejecting an appointment by Mayor John Cranley, a sign that this term’s council won’t always be friendly to the mayor’s agenda.
Cranley appointed Rayshon Mack, a nurse who rides Metro buses to work, to the board of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority. But the six Democrat members of council voted against the appointment, citing Mack’s sometimes-combative tone on social media.
Among other inflammatory posts, Mack has retweeted a joke from another user about Seelbach’s weight and has made disparaging remarks about various black leaders in Cincinnati who did not support Cranley’s reelection campaign last year. Mack has since locked his Twitter account.
A month ago, Mack tweeted strongly worded criticism about council members P.G. Sittenfeld and Chris Seelbach for supporting responsible bidder, a contentious ordinance that requires companies bidding on work with Greater Cincinnati Water Works to have apprenticeship programs in place. Opponents of responsible bidder, including Cranley and conservatives on council, say it grants privileges to union companies over non-union contractors, who often don’t have such job-training programs. That in turn, their argument goes, puts minority-owned contractors at a disadvantage when competing for those contracts.
Mack called these policies “just as racist as Trump’s words” in that tweet, which was read aloud during yesterday’s council meeting.
“There are tens of thousands of bus riders and I suspect most if not all of them don’t have Twitter feeds that disparage black leaders and labor leaders,” Councilman Greg Landsman said explaining his vote against Mack. “We are too divided politically and racially, but we can heal these wounds together and I’m all in to do that.”
Cranley and the three council members who would eventually vote for Mack’s appointment — Amy Murray, Jeff Pastor and Christopher Smitherman — sought to frame controversy about Mack’s appointment as a fight over his political affiliations and his views on the streetcar.
In tweets referring to the transit project, Mack has called for the city to “scrap that piece of shit.” Mack was also a vocal supporter of Smitherman and Cranley during their reelection campaigns and an ardent detractor of Cranley’s opponent, then-Councilwoman Yvette Simpson.
Cranley argued that Mack’s viewpoints are needed to create a diverse SORTA board.
“Turning people down because they don’t agree with your politics doesn’t strike me as creating a big tent,” he said.
Cranley and Mack’s supporters on council said that he should be considered for his support of Metro and his commitment to winning more resources for the region’s beleaguered bus service.
“At the end of the day, I take full responsibility for everything I say,” Mack said after Cranley called him forward to talk to council. “I do want to be clear that I’m not a Republican. I’m an independent black man. What troubles me is that no one on this council has come to me and asked me anything about Metro.”
Usually, these appointments to various boards and commissions are run through very quickly at the beginnings of council meetings, sometimes in batches.
Councilman Wendell Young suggested creating a committee that would vet mayoral appointments from this point forward. Cranley is set to appoint seven members to SORTA’s 13-member board during his term, many of them in the near future.
“We rubberstamp basically all the appointments you’ve made, Mr. Mayor, and I think that’s a mistake,” Young said.
This article appears in Feb 14-21, 2018.
