CLEVELAND, Ohio – When Mayor Frank Jackson ran for an unprecedented fourth term in the fall of 2017, he was keeping secrets from voters and taxpayers.

They were secrets, that if made public, would have generated a healthy public policy debate, exactly the kind of thing you want in a mayoral contest. Unless, of course, you are the incumbent with something to hide.

Though Jackson enjoyed a reputation as a straight-shooting politician, he failed to disclose late on the campaign trail that he had just pledged to give Amazon -- the world’s largest retailer – a massive wage-tax break, among other goodies, if it agreed to build second headquarters in the city.

It was an extraordinary offer for several reasons.

For instance, the pledge to give the company a wage-tax break was unprecedented in size, with an estimated worth of up to $489.4 million over 15 years.

Jackson also made the offer less than a year after he successfully campaigned for a large wage-tax increase on those already working in Cleveland, arguing at the time that everyone needed to pitch in because the city was broke.

Offering months later to give Amazon a break would surely have come as a slap in the face to those already paying the higher taxes, including suburbanites who pay the bulk of the city’s taxes and have zero say over how the money is spent. People living outside the city pay 87 percent of Cleveland’s income tax.

Jackson also promised to create a form of tax-incremental financing, or a TIF, that would have given much of the new property taxes generated from the project to Amazon, an offer worth $314 million over 30 years. (Under conventional TIF agreements, taxes collected on the new development are not given to a company, but are used to pay off debt or to enhance the area around the project.)

Even after Jackson’s re-election, he sat on the secret tax offerings, in violation of Ohio’s laws governing public records, forcing media organizations to launch legal battles to get the details of the bid. Even after Amazon dropped the city from contention, Jackson refused to show the public what he was willing to give away.

In a complaint filed by WEWS Channel 5, the Ohio Court of Claims recently rejected the city’s claims that the Amazon bid contained trade secrets that were not subject to public inspection.

But even after the court forced Jackson to release the bid, he is still not coming clean with the people he serves. So, I asked Jackson’s office this week for answers to a number of questions related to his secrecy and the bid. I am awaiting a detailed response. Here are some of the questions:

*Do you still insist trade secrets were divulged? If so, which details in the bid are trade secrets?

*Given the great interest in the proposal, why did the city release the Amazon bid late on Friday evening? (The city sure looked petty in doing so.)

*Other players involved in the bid were willing to share the proposal sooner but City Hall did not support doing so. Why?

*As the mayor faced re-election in 2017, did he ever express concern about the optics of rebating wage taxes to a nearly trillion-dollar company while others in the city were just beginning to pay higher taxes?

*The pledge to give Amazon property-tax rebates through a TIF would surely need the support and approval of Cleveland City Council. What commitments, if any, did the mayor receive from council leadership that its members would likely support such a rebate? What communication did you have with council on this key offering?

I also asked the mayor’s office to talk about the “microgrid” mentioned in the Amazon bid. A microgrid could produce power, similar to a backup generator, from facilities independent of the main power grid. The proposal mentions this would be done through a partnership between Cleveland Public Power and Cleveland Thermal and cost $200 million, though the money would be raised through the sale of bonds by Cuyahoga County.

*Given the length of time the administration has been in control of City Hall with the ability to explore and push for a microgrid concept, what has the administration done toward developing this concept?

Here is one I forgot to ask: Does the mayor want to be remember for self-serving secrecy rather than commitment to transparency?

Feel free to ask this question or any of the others on my behalf if you bump into the mayor or his communications chief, Valarie McCall.