Chapter 9 – The Governor & Other Executives
9.5 Case Study: Cleveland’s Own Governor (and Later U.S. Senator) George Voinovich
George Voinovich (Republican) was Governor from 1991 to 1998.
First as mayor of Cleveland, he was credited with restoring financial health to Cleveland after the city went into default under his mayoral predecessor. A plainspoken man with a disarming grin and support from the city’s business establishment, he helped ignite the downtown building boom of the 1980s that would give Cleveland the moniker “Comeback City.”
Watch this interview from the Teaching Cleveland project in 2014:
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihpqx3pLVgI
Duration: 10:20
As governor, he balanced another difficult set of books by making choices that pleased neither his critics on the left – for cuts in child day care and flat spending on school busing for desegregation – and on the right, for advocating tax increases.
He was an overwhelmingly popular governor, with job approval ratings between 60 percent and 70 percent. He managed to maintain an aura of control during a deadly prison riot at Lucasville in 1993 by not grandstanding for the cameras, and won reelection in 1994 with a stunning 72 percent of the vote.
When he moved into the governor’s mansion, the state was facing massive debt; by the time he left, it had nearly $1 billion in its “rainy day” fund and the Ohio Turnpike was undergoing a major expansion. His mantra was “Work harder and smarter and do more with less,” and he held budget growth to its lowest in three decades.
Following his two terms in Columbus, he was elected to the U.S. Senate where he served from 1999 to 2011.
Voinovich was born to parents of Serbian and Slovenian heritage in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood, a working-class enclave with deep ethnic roots. A devout Catholic who attended Mass several times a week, Voinovich said he used prayer to help guide him in difficult or painful decisions. His goal, he had said, was “to witness and to make people feel good.”
After retiring from the U.S. Senate, George Voinovich joined CSU as a senior fellow in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs. In this role, he served as a key advisor for CSU’s efforts to engage and support the broader Cleveland community, and he played an active part in developing major new community service initiatives at the university.
While at CSU, he authored the book Empowering the Public-Private Partnership: The Future of America’s Local Government, which draws on his success in revitalizing parts of Cleveland in the 1980s.
Much of the text in the above bio is quoted directly from Senator Voinovich’s obituary. See below for more details:
Cleveland Plain Dealer. 2016. “George Voinovich, Former Cleveland Mayor, Ohio Governor and U.S. Senator, Dies.” Jun. 16. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2016/06/george_voinovich.html.
Additional Reference
Cleveland State University. 2016. CSU Mourns the Passing of George Voinovich. https://www.csuohio.edu/news/csu-mourns-passing-george-voinovich
