Smitherman vs. Sittenfeld: Texting dispute snags Cincinnati's next mayoral hopefuls

Dan Horn | Cincinnati Enquirer

Show Caption Hide Caption Will one of these councilmen be Cincinnati's next mayor? The 2021 campaign is already on P.G. Sittenfeld and Christopher Smitherman are widely expected to be candidates for mayor in 2021. Incumbent Mayor John Cranley is term-limited.

It didn’t take long for the court fight over texting at City Hall to become a political fight over who gets to be Cincinnati’s next mayor.

The dispute is complicated. It involves Ohio’s public meetings law, a string of politically charged text messages and as many as nine and as few as five City Council members, depending on which lawyer is doing the talking.

A judge will likely need months to sort it all out, but one aspect of the case started to come into focus last week: The top two candidates in the 2021 mayoral race see the texting flap as a very big deal.

P.G. Sittenfeld and Christopher Smitherman have been pulled into the texting fray and recognize its potential for both political peril and opportunity. They're rivals for the seat now occupied by Mayor John Cranley, who can't run again because of term limits.

“There’s a desire to come out on the winning side,” said David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. “And there’s certainly a desire to keep the dirt running downhill and away from you.”

The dirt started flying three months ago when Cincinnati resident Mark Miller sued five members of City Council for texting and emailing one another about city business as part of “an elaborate scheme to avoid public scrutiny.”

The texts and emails, sent on March 8, were about council’s response to an ongoing battle between Cranley and former city manager Harry Black. It’s still not known how many texts might be relevant to the lawsuit, but those that have become public include some harsh criticism of Cranley and several exchanges related to council’s work.

An email sent by Sittenfeld to the other four – Wendell Young, Chris Seelbach, Greg Landsman and Tamaya Dennard – refers to gathering the “thoughts and suggestions” of the group into a letter they would discuss on a phone call later that day.

Miller’s lawyer, Brian Shrive, said the communications show Sittenfeld and the others behaved like a “cabal” to subvert open records law, which requires council to do its business in public.

Smitherman pounced on the case and accused his fellow council members, known as the “gang of five,” of breaking the rules.

But last week, things got more complicated.

Former council candidate Derek Bauman filed a motion to intervene in Miller’s lawsuit, accusing Smitherman and the rest of council of doing the same thing in a different string of text messages.

In those messages, Black sent an update to all nine council members about the departure of Assistant Police Chief Dave Bailey. Smitherman responded by texting he was “disappointed” in the way the city manager handled the matter.

He and Young then exchanged a series of texts disagreeing about what the city manager should do.

Smitherman said his texts were nothing like the “gang of five” texts, primarily because he responded to the city manager while the others secretly planned council business.

Smitherman said he suspects Sittenfeld is behind Bauman’s motion.

He noted that Bauman’s lawyer, Paul DeMarco, is a long-time Sittenfeld friend who once set up a super PAC to support Sittenfeld’s failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat. DeMarco also donated $20,000 to the PAC.

“This is P.G. Sittenfeld making a political maneuver to divert attention from his behavior and to attempt to stain me,” Smitherman said. “It looks like P.G. Sittenfeld has defined me as a top mayoral candidate in 2021.

“He wouldn’t be putting his attack dog on me if he didn’t think I was a serious contender.”

Sittenfeld won’t talk about the texting case, but DeMarco said Bauman approached him about the case because he’s concerned about transparency in local government. If Sittenfeld and the others did anything wrong, DeMarco said, so did Smitherman and the rest of council.

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” DeMarco said of Smitherman.

DeMarco said he gathered the text messages cited in Bauman’s motion from several council members, including Sittenfeld. He wouldn’t discuss his conversations with them prior to filing the motion.

“I’m not going to get into who said what and when,” DeMarco said.

But he did suggest that “Smitherman and his allies” are trying to use the texting case for political gain – at Sittenfeld’s expense.

Shrive, Miller’s lawyer in the original texting lawsuit, said he is not allied with anyone, despite a $1,100 contribution to Smitherman’s last council campaign. Shrive said the donation had nothing to do with his involvement in the lawsuit and he didn’t discuss the suit with Smitherman before filing it.

He said he believes Sittenfeld and DeMarco now want to make sure that any punishment handed down by a judge because of the texts is imposed on all council members – not just on Sittenfeld or the “gang of five.”

The penalty for violating open meetings laws could include fines or a court order, also known as an injunction, barring council members from future violations of the law.

“Their goal is to make sure Sittenfeld isn’t the only mayoral candidate with an injunction hanging over his head,” Shrive said of Bauman’s motion. “The motivation behind filing this is clearly political.”