The faint pulse of the Mendenhall team

DESPITE MAYOR Plusquellic's trouncing of Warner Mendenhall's forces in the recall election, a faint beat goes on. The Akron Law Department continues to receive post-election public records requests from Mendenhall's allies, including Miss Tia and the mayor's long-time nemesis, Bob Smith. To what end? No doubt they are frantically fishing for information that might be useful to help their slate of candidates in the September primaries.

Miss Tia's request that remains active would require the city to research and turn over an estimated 500 documents, says City Law Director Max Rothal. Confronted with that burden on the staff, the department is trying to work out a compromise with Miss Tia to lessen the workload. An example of the administration's opponents' search mission: Copies of all correspondence between the Law Department and also the Mayor's office with First Merit Bank. What? That's what they're asking at the Law Department and now that the recallers have been vanquished at the polls, it seems like a reasonable question to ask.

P.S. Who is Miss Tia? She's Miss Tia. That's her legal name, which she requested some time ago for reasons only she can explain.

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Sunday morning e-mails...

MAX ROTHAL'S morning routine has taken a significant turn since some people foolishly decided that  Akron's only salvation lay in recalling Mayor Don Plusquellic from office.  Each morning or so, Rothal - the usually unflappable city attorney - finds one or more e-mails demanding satisfaction from a long-time nemesis, Hudson real estate man Robert Smith.   The fellow has apparently thrown in with Atty. Warner Mendenhall to create costly havoc to the Plusquellic Administration with their recall movement.  "I even see some e-mails that were sent on Sunday morning,"  Rothal said.  "The guy never stops."

So what does Mr. Smith want in what appears to be a non-stop search-and-destroy mission? "Oh, public records of this and that, documents and other things,"  Rothal says, unhappily.  And of course, because they are public records, Rothal won't refuse Smith's requests.  "But it goes on and on," he says, "as we have our  staff at City Hall try to locate the records that Smith wants.  It's time consuming and it's costly.  It takes people away from the jobs they normally do." 

 Largely, it's a fishing expedition that leads to nothing other than more requests in an effort to find something that might embarrass the mayor in a recall ad. Another word for it is "pestering" at public expense, both the records' searches and the cost of a special election if  Mendenhall and his cronies follow through on their threat.  

Frankly, it's hard to know the motives behind the notion other than Mendenhall has a vendetta against Plusquellic, regardless of  how it might harm to stability of the city at a time  when economic survival is on everybody's mind.    Plusquellic,  after all, was one of  a group  of mayors who have been meeting with President Obama and congressional leaders to get a share of the stimulus money for their cities and has repeated his proposals on national TV  this week.  It's hardly a time to be bombarding  the mayor's administration with ludicrous requests and political threats.  That says a lot about the ones who recklessly remain unconvinced of the gravity of  the current economic crises, don't you think?