George Victor Voinovich (July 15, 1936June 12, 2016) was an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, he was a United States senator from Ohio from 1999 to 2011, the 65th governor of Ohio from 1991 to 1998, and the 54th mayor of Cleveland from 1980 to 1989. He is the most recent Republican to serve as mayor of Cleveland as of .
Born and raised in Cleveland, Voinovich graduated from Ohio University and the Ohio State University College of Law. He spent more than 46 years in public service, first as an assistant attorney general in 1963. He began his political career in the Ohio House of Representatives before serving as Cuyahoga County auditor, county commissioner, and Ohio lieutenant governor. He was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1979 and gained national recognition for helping restore the city's financial stability after its 1978 default.
Voinovich was elected governor in 1990 and reelected by a landslide in 1994. As governor, he emphasized economic development and government efficiency. He won election to the U.S. Senate in 1998, where he became known as a moderate Republican and a leading advocate of fiscal responsibility, and was reelected in 2004. Voinovich retired after his second term ended in 2011.
Voinovich was the 15th person to have served as both the governor of Ohio and a U.S. senator and one of only two Cleveland mayors to later become governor of Ohio and a U.S. senator; the other was Frank Lausche. He is also the only person to have served as both chairman of the National Governors Association and president of the National League of Cities.
Early life and education Voinovich was born in Cleveland, the son of Josephine (Bernot) and George S. Voinovich. He was the oldest of six children. His father was of Serbian descent (from Kordun, Croatia), and his mother was of Slovenian ancestry.
Voinovich grew up in the Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland and graduated from Collinwood High School in 1954. He was raised Catholic and was a lifelong member of his neighborhood parish, Our Lady of the Lake in Euclid (formerly Holy Cross). He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in government in 1958 from Ohio University, where he was a member of the fraternity Phi Kappa Tau and served as president of the student body and the men's dormitory system. Voinovich received a Juris Doctor from the Ohio State University College of Law in 1961.
Early career Voinovich began his career in 1963 as an assistant attorney general. He then served as a member of the Ohio House of Representatives from 1967 until 1971. From 1971 until 1976, he served as County Auditor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 1971, he made an unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Cleveland against Ralph Perk, who went on to win the general election. From 1977 to 1978, Voinovich served as a member of the Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners. In 1978, he was elected lieutenant governor of Ohio as the running mate of Jim Rhodes. Voinovich was the first Ohio lieutenant governor not to be elected separately from the governor.
Mayor of Cleveland (1980–1989)
1979 Cleveland mayoral election
By 1979, elections in Cleveland had become nonpartisan, and with then-Mayor Dennis J. Kucinich (D) about to enter a tough reelection campaign, Voinovich began to consider running for mayor again. Finally, on July 26, he entered the race, calling the decision "one of the most difficult in [his] life". He remained lieutenant governor until he won the election.
Aside from Kucinich, Voinovich's opponents in the race included State Senator Charles Butts and city council majority leader Basil Russo. As the election drew closer, The Plain Dealer endorsed Voinovich. Voter turnout in the primary was greater than that of the 1977 race among Perk, Kucinich and Edward F. Feighan. In the 1979 nonpartisan primary election, Voinovich received 47,000 votes to Kucinich's 36,000. Russo (who got 21,000) and Butts (with 19,000) did not qualify for the general election. The biggest surprise was Voinovich's showing in predominantly African American wards, where he was expected to finish last. He trailed only Butts, with Kucinich last.
On October 8, 1979, a few days after the primary, Voinovich's nine-year-old daughter Molly was struck by a van and killed. The event brought the Voinovich campaign to a virtual halt and made it difficult for Kucinich to attack his opponent. Still, he challenged Voinovich to a series of debates in various Cleveland neighborhoods. Voinovich declined the invitations, saying the debates would be unproductive, but they did debate on November 3 at the City Club. Voinovich won the election with 94,541 votes to Kucinich's 73,755.
Voinovich was reelected twice in landslides. In 1981 he defeated former State Representative Patrick Sweeney, 107,472 to 32,940, to win Cleveland's first four-year mayoral term. In 1985 he defeated former councilman Gary Kucinich (Dennis Kucinich's brother), 82,840 to 32,185.
"The Comeback City" Voinovich was considered shy and a rather low-key politician, a description he adopted himself. Once elected, he met with Ohio Governor James Rhodes to solicit the state government's help in clearing up the city's debts. Voinovich negotiated a debt repayment schedule and in October 1980, with the state serving as guarantor, eight local banks lent Cleveland $36.2 million, allowing the city to emerge from default. Still, the city's economy continued to decline, and federal funding was cut. Two weeks earlier, voters turned down another 0.5 percent income tax increase. The opposition was led by Kucinich, who had been keeping a low profile since losing the election. Voinovich said he would resubmit the tax issue on the February ballot to avoid facing a deficit in 1981. That time the voters approved the tax increase.
By the time Voinovich was elected, Cleveland had become the butt of late night comedians' jokes about the Cuyahoga River and Mayor Ralph Perk's hair catching fire (in separate incidents)Ralph J. Perk; Former Cleveland Mayor Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1999. Retrieved July 25, 2010. and as the only major American city to go bankrupt.Jordan, George E. Two cities offer a blueprint in image-building The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), July 20, 1997. Retrieved July 25, 2010.
Voinovich took an aggressive approach. He reversed a defensive attitude projected by the Cleveland media, going to "war ... to save one of this country's greatest cities". Others soon jumped on board. For instance, The Smythe-Cramer Co., a local realty firm, tried to restore the city's former glory by running a series of ads with photographs of downtown Cleveland captioned "Take Another Look. It's Cleveland!" In May 1981, The Plain Dealer sent its Sunday subscribers bumper stickers reading, "New York's the Big Apple, but Cleveland's a Plum." The paper also passed out thousands of "Cleveland's a Plum" buttons and ran a huge picture of publisher Thomas Vail, with a smiling Voinovich beside him, throwing out the first plum at a Yankees-Indians game. Sportscaster Howard Cosell hailed the city during a baseball game, and Voinovich subsequently presented him with a key to the city. A survey showed 65 percent of the residents of Greater Cleveland were very satisfied with their life in the city and that 57 percent claimed to be very satisfied even in 1978, the year of default. A national poll found Detroit to be the city with the worst image, with New York City second and Cleveland fifth.
The New Cleveland Campaign, a promotion agency formed in 1978, began sending out news releases promoting Cleveland's virtues and circulating reprints whenever it got a favorable story. But to show how much the "new" Cleveland had improved, it had to highlight how bad the old Cleveland was. In particular, it stressed the city's 1978 default of $15.5 million short-term loans from local banks, even though New York City owed nearly 150 times as much when it received a $2.3 billion federal bailout to avoid bankruptcy in 1975.Zeitz, Joshua New York City on the Brink American Heritage magazine, November 26, 2005. Retrieved July 24, 2010.
The restoration campaign reached its peak in October in the society magazine Town and Country's article "Cleveland's Come-Around", which said that "businessmen, lawyers and concerned citizens" had rescued the city from "the petulant, pugnacious Dennis Kucinich". It called Voinovich's Operation Improvement Task Force under E. Mandell de Windt "the most significant undertaking in Cleveland since Moses Cleaveland stepped ashore on the bank of the Cuyahoga River in 1786". It also enticed its readers with Lake Erie and its "beautiful and exciting year-round sailing".
So confident was Voinovich that during election season he even attracted presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to debate in Cleveland. "Cleveland is making a comeback," Time declared at the close of 1980. "During the past year, convention business has flourished, school desegregation has proceeded peacefully, and a modest construction boom has begun.... Most impressive of all, the city dug itself out of default."
Downtown development and other improvements In order to allow them to accomplish more, Voinovich felt that the terms for mayor and members of the Cleveland City Council ought to be extended. He offered a referendum to voters to extend them from two to four years and also asked voters to approve cutting the number of council members from 33 to 21 to help ease the city's strained economy. Both proposals passed.
During the Voinovich years neighborhoods began to see some improvement, starting with the Lexington Village housing project, $149 million in Urban Development Action Grants, and $3 billion of construction underway or completed. In particular, the neighborhoods of Hough and Fairfax, then two of Cleveland's worst east side neighborhoods, began to see new houses built and less criminal activity. Voinovich also quietly moved to reconcile the warring groups of the 1970s. He made peace with business leaders and posed with them in photographs that ran in New Cleveland Campaign ads in business magazines, captioned with the Voinovich slogan "Together, we can do it." He refined the neighborhood groups, which, with the breakdown of the Democratic Party, had become the most potent political forces in the city. He also extended his hand to unions, in particular the Teamsters.
As mayor, Voinovich was a member of the National League of Cities, of which he was elected president in 1985. Voinovich also oversaw an urban renaissance downtown. Sohio (purchased by BP America in 1987), Ohio Bell, and Eaton Corporation all built new offices downtown (most notably the BP Building). Brothers Richard and David Jacobs rescued the troubled Cleveland Indians. The two also improved the desolate area located by the Erieview Tower and turned it into the glass-roofed Galleria at Erieview. Voinovich also enticed Society Bank to build the Society Center, the largest skyscraper in Cleveland and the 15th largest in the nation (since renamed Key Tower). In addition, the National Civic League awarded Cleveland the All-America City Award three times in five years (1982, 1984, 1986), in addition to its first, won in 1950.
Municipal Light