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Entrepreneur and developer Alan Glazen is trying to engineer an effort to defeat the renewal of the 'sin tax.'

(Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – One of the key figures in convincing voters to narrowly approve Cuyahoga County's original sin tax in 1990 now is working to engineer the tax's defeat in May.

Alan Glazen, a retired advertising agency owner whose firm promoted the sin tax's creation in 1990 to fund the Gateway complex, as well as the renewal in 1995, now calls the campaigns "deceptive." He has started a Facebook group called "IT'S A SIN, CLEVELAND," which had more than 600 members as of publication time.

Glazen said during a Monday interview that in retrospect, he provided the community with false information in his sin tax ads. Specifically, he said, the issue’s backers “lied” in promising 28,000 “good-paying” jobs, when the real number has fallen short.

“We were hired to be the people sending that message out, and that message was not honest,” Glazen said.

Since retiring from advertising, Glazen has started a second career as an entrepreneur, investing in bars and other businesses. Among his portfolio: a coffee shop in the East Fourth Street development, which sin-tax backers hold up as exhibit A of Gateway’s positive impact on downtown development.

The Gateway development, “did generally provide great growth opportunity for Cleveland,” he said. “There’s no question these structures [Progressive Field and Quicken Loans Arena] have contributed to the part of town I love the most. But on the other hand, we were deceived because the most prominent civic leaders were just throwing out numbers.”

Glazen also said city and county leaders have failed to aggressively negotiate terms before sending the latest sin tax request forward. He said his strategy is to attempt to defeat the measure in May, forcing the teams and government officials back to the table.

“There is no doubt this thing is going to go down in defeat. I’d just like it to go down in a big enough defeat that the citizens can say: ‘We were able to stop it. Now talk to us,’” he said.

Tom Yablonsky, executive vice-president of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, acknowledged during an appearance on radio program "The Sound of Ideas" on Monday that the number of new jobs has fallen short of what was originally promised.

But, he said: “We’ve come much more close to that number than the rhetoric would suggest.”

Yablonsky said in an interview with Northeast Ohio Media Group the actual jobs created could be 24,000 jobs -- a combination of 12,000 temporary construction jobs, plus “as many as” 12,000 permanent downtown jobs that he believes were created, but couldn't immediately document. He also said there has been $700 million in investment in the area adjacent to the Gateway complex.

Specific job creation numbers aside, pro-renewal campaign spokesman Nancy Lesic said the Gateway complex has generated $400 million in local taxes, plus a bevy of other benefits.

“We know that the teams have generated more than $4 billion in economic activity with more than 75 million visitors to just the Gateway facilities since they opened,” Lesic said. “This has inarguably had a tremendously positive impact on downtown Cleveland and job creation and retention.”

Besides the nascent social media campaign, there is not yet any organized opposition to the sin tax renewal, which Cuyahoga County Council unanimously voted last month to send to the May ballot.

But the tax renewal's backers – the business community, the professional sports teams and the Cleveland Building Trades Council, among others -- have ground to make up. An internal poll performed in November showed voters rejecting the measure by a nearly 10-point margin, issue backers told Northeast Ohio Media Group last month.

Based on collections over the past several years, a 20-year extension of the sin tax would raise at least $260 million. The Cavs and Indians have shared $135 million worth of stadium work they expect to need within the next 10 years, including $24 million in scoreboard upgrades.



The county's sin tax is assessed at 4.5 cents per pack of cigarettes, 1.5 cents per 12-ounce bottle of beer, 6 cents per 750-milliliter bottle of wine, 32 cents per gallon of mixed beverages, 24 cents per gallon of cider and $3 per gallon of hard liquor.