43
"Career politician" to leave office in disgrace
On the side
The two announced 2016 Democratic candidates for the Ohio House 63rd District seat are also running in the November general election for their existing elected positions.
And the two candidates – McDonald Mayor Glenn Holmes and Hubbard 1st Ward Councilman Ben Kyle – are unopposed in those races.
So we have two officeholders looking to run for the Ohio House who are first seeking re-election to elected positions they really don’t want to keep.
The filing deadline for the 2016 primary is Dec. 16, a little over a month after the Nov. 3 election.
The district includes a majority of Trumbull County and is strongly Democratic.
On the other end of the political spectrum is the Youngstown Board of Education. There are four open seats, but only three candidates filed. It’s a telling sign about how meaningless and unimportant it is to serve on the city school board.
That fourth position will be filled by the winner of a write-in campaign – assuming residents file by the Aug. 24 deadline.
Ronald V. Gerberry is the epitome of the term “career politician.”
First elected in 1973 to the Austintown school board at age 19, he then went to the Ohio House in 1982 and was elected to nine two-year terms before leaving at the end of 2000 because of the state’s term-limit law.
Ever the astute politician, Gerberry found a place to land, getting elected in 2000 as Mahoning County recorder. He left that job in May 2007 to fill a vacant seat in the House, and then was elected to four two-year terms.
This final term for Gerberry was to expire Dec. 31, 2016.
After that, the 62-year-old Austintown Democrat was almost certainly going to ride into the sunset as a party elder statesman with a sweet pension and political war stories to tell to whomever would listen.
But there won’t be a big banquet honoring Gerberry for his years of public service with politicians singing his praises.
That’s because whatever good Gerberry did during his time in public office will be forgotten.
Instead, he’ll be best remembered for the disgraceful conclusion of his political career – or at least that’s what should happen.
Gerberry will be in front of a county common pleas court judge a week from today to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of unlawful compensation for filing false campaign-finance reports.
It could have been a lot worse, but Gerberry was at least smart enough to cut a deal and cooperate with law enforcement investigating the never-ending political corruption in the Mahoning Valley.
Friday is also the same day that Gerberry’s resignation from the Ohio House takes effect.
He loved being in the state Legislature. Having to quit in shame has to hurt. But it would never had happened if Gerberry didn’t pull a scam with his campaign finances.
Known for being cheap, Gerberry took that reputation to the nth degree.
Sources close to the investigation tell me that Gerberry overpaid vendors with campaign money to make it look like he spent a lot and then had much of it returned to him as a refund.
This occurred with several vendors, one source said.
The reason for doing this was that Gerberry didn’t want it to look like he had a lot of money in his campaign fund so he could pay less to the Ohio House Democratic Caucus.
The caucus wrote in a prepared statement that the article I wrote revealing this criminal behavior is “deeply concerning to this caucus and this institution. Obviously, we will look closely at the details and facts as they emerge from this situation.”
Local Democrats expressed shock and surprise about Gerberry, though it was inevitable.
Prosecutors in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-corruption case revealed in a Jan. 8 filing that evidence it had in its possession included campaign-finance reports of Gerberry for 2008 to 2010 and a spreadsheet of his campaign contributions and expenditures for those three years compiled by an FBI agent.
With Gerberry out of the state House next week, Democrats need to find someone with integrity to replace him. Of course, Democrats believed Gerberry was a person of integrity.
The two leading candidates are Mahoning County Commissioner Anthony Traficanti, and John Boccieri, a former U.S. House member who also served as a member of the Ohio House and Senate.
Despite the fact that the Ohio House 59th District is in Democratic-dominated Mahoning County, it’s a seat that can be won by a Republican.
The district includes Boardman, Canfield, Poland and rural portions of the county, which are far less Democratic than the 58th District, which includes Democratic strongholds like Youngstown, Struthers, Campbell and (most of) Austintown.
Gerberry won the 2014 election by only 7.6 percentage points over Paul Mitchell, an unknown and underfunded Republican.
In 2012, Gerberry crushed Republican Kimberly Poma, a Boardman school board member, by 17.3 percentage points.
Before Republicans added more of their own to the district with the 2012 election, Gerberry breezed to big wins in 2008, by 20.2 percentage points, and in 2010, by 22.9 percentage points.
Mahoning County Republican Party Chairman Mark Munroe said both political parties need to do a better job of finding good people to run for office.
County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras said it was “sad” that “a person with as long a career as Ron is going out like this.”
Don’t shed a tear for Gerberry as he hatched this scheme.
But it’s definitely sad for the Mahoning Valley, which endures and, more importantly, largely accepts political corruption as the way things are done around here.
No lessons seem to be learned as the lengthy list of corrupt Valley politicians grows.