POLENSEK - Where's the beef?

The mood at the first Cleveland City Council meeting of 2007 was light, almost festive. More council members wanted to go on the record in support of a big Buckeyes win that night in the Fiesta Bowl than for anything else.

Then Mike Polensek had to go and get all serious on everybody. It's all well and good that council's got warm relations with the administration now that former Council President Frank Jackson is mayor, he told his colleagues. But a year had passed, and what was there to show for it?

"If you don't think the city will drop below 400,000 people, you're sadly mistaken," the nine-term Ward 11 leader predicted. "We are on that path."

He didn't know that on January 22, Jackson would unleash a $1.5 billion, five-year capital improvement program as the cornerstone of an even-broader citywide plan, Connecting Cleveland 2020, that's been in the planning stages since Mike White was mayor. So Jackson, at least, had something to show for the previous year. But with an aim to pour resources into many of the city's deepest cracks — with little to no input from council members — the plan left many leaders from less blighted wards disheartened. None perhaps more than Polensek.

That afternoon, Jackson's chief of staff, Ken Silliman, invited Council President Martin Sweeney and the two Collinwood ward leaders, Polensek and Roosevelt Coats, to a meeting. Only Coats would emerge smiling.

The news: The three-years-vacant Big Lots in Polensek's seen-better-days commercial corridor on Lakeshore Boulevard would remain a stain on the area for longer than anyone had thought. The city purchased the site a year ago for $900,000, then sank $112,000 into architectural plans to convert it into a new Collinwood Recreation Center — and all this was on top of the millions put into the adjacent 32-acre Humphrey Park for an outdoor sports complex to compliment the planned indoor facility. But the $10 million funding for that project, Polensek was told last month, likely won't come through until 2010, and at that point, Jackson would decide whether a rec center would be located on Lakeshore, or perhaps somewhere in Coats' ward — potentially the abandoned factory adjacent to the $6 million Collinwood High football complex the city built last year.

"I was just scratching my head," Polensek remembers, "saying, "You're going to throw a million to the wind of taxpayers' money?'"

The two decades Collinwood residents had spent arguing over where their rec center would be placed had gone into extra innings.

Later that day Polensek fired off a letter to Jackson: "Our community thought the issue had finally been resolved with the designation and the purchase of the property. Now, once again, Ward 10 and 11 are pitted against one another, and for what reason?"

Polensek, who had campaigned for former Mayor Jane Campbell, complains that the new mayor had promised to honor "projects Campbell had in the pipe." Coats, of course, is overjoyed that Jackson has reconsidered. He says he's got plenty of stains to remove from his ward, too.

"For the first time in my 19 years as a councilman, there's a plan there," Coats said outside a recent council meeting on Jackson's new housing reinvestment strategy to focus greater attention on the city's least stable housing stock. "And there's $1.5 billion there to back up that plan. Mr. Polensek says he's got land for a rec center. I have 50 acres of land. I've got land all over the place. Collinwood needs a rec center. The mayor is convinced that this is going to go in Collinwood. That's good enough for me."

Chief of Staff Silliman says Polensek never had a promise, just a mistaken understanding.

The purchase of the 60,000-square-foot Big Lots — wedged between a state park that used to be the Euclid Beach amusement park, a half-dozen senior high-rises, a trailer park, a strip center anchored by a Dave's Supermarket, and the ballfields and courts of Humphrey Park — was decided on just before Campbell's tenure was through, perhaps as a gift to potential voters. Silliman noted that the engineering work, though approved by Jackson's Board of Control, was paid for with Polensek's ward funds.

"That did not mean Mayor Jackson committed to a rec center in Ward 11 at that particular site," Silliman says. "You are correct that we did finance a land transaction, but that land is a resource. We judged the land to be something the city needed to get its hands on regardless of what the final use was."

Polensek won't say whether he thinks Jackson's move was politically motivated. He'd rather take issue with the overarching ideology, followed by a long line of mayors, of serving the least fortunate first and with the most resources.

"They think the outer edges of the city can fend for themselves," he says. "And you know what? All this is going to do is lead to greater disinvestment and greater apathy and a greater willingness to get the hell out of here."

A lot of money is at stake. About $1 billion of the five-year program's $1.5 billion, about two-thirds of which will be funded through government bonds, will go toward larger enterprise projects: utilities upgrades, port control and refurbishment, improvements at Cleveland Hopkins, and the possible purchase and renovation of the former ISG coke plant to make it fit for sale.

Much of the remaining half-billion, Silliman says, will go toward projects in Cleveland's neighborhoods until 2011, with a marked concentration on wards in the central core. About $30 million will jumpstart redevelopment plans on the West Shoreway along the edge of Matt Zone's Ward 17. Directly downtown, $67 million is slated for a variety of beautification and development projects. In Mayor Jackson's neighborhood, Ward 5, $19.4 million is slated to be spent.

JACKSON - What's the beef?

In outlying areas, however, wards could get as little as Polensek's $5.3 million or even Ward 16 Councilman Kevin Kelley's $625,000. About half of the city's 21 wards got no more than $5 million. Council President Sweeney, who in caucus urged colleagues to support Jackson's approach, received the least amount of all for Ward 20, about $500,000.

"Our plan does address areas in the most need of maintenance and repair," Silliman says, "but if you look at some of the outlying neighborhoods, there are some significant projects. After we catch up to some that have gone years without upkeep, then we'll be able to do more in those outlying areas."

And by "we," the administration apparently does not mean council.

Ward 21 Councilman Mike Dolan got a total of $2.2 million. About half of that is slated to further the Kamm's Corners reinvestment project Dolan's been coaxing along for six years, with the difference going toward things that several wards got: bike lanes to further connect the city to the Towpath Trail, a resurfacing project here and there, fire station repairs.

Dolan's main beef is that he needed that other $1 million to finish up the Kamm's Corners project for good and now must go hunting for the money elsewhere, or play nice with Jackson so that maybe he'll change his mind.

"Nobody ever consulted me about what the priorities were," Dolan says. "I would have liked to see it all go toward Kamm's Corners. There's been $85 million in private investment in Kamm's Corners in the last 10 years, and the only player that hasn't stepped up to the plate is the city of Cleveland."

A substantial portion of the money for Polensek's ward money will go toward bike lanes, and he's not happy about it. "Listen, I bike, but I'd never do it down Lakeshore Boulevard. You'd get run down. This is just going to make people get on their bikes, turn around and head right out of town."

But there's only so much to go around, Silliman says. That's why Jackson has appreciated the efforts of council members like Ward 15's Brian Cummins, who helped secure $750,000 in federal funding for the $1.5 million redevelopment and restoration of Treadway Creek. He got an additional $385,000 from Jackson, which he says "flies in the face" of talk that all of the money is being spent in the worst neighborhoods.

"It's a trail connector going into one of the best neighborhoods in the city, but [Mayor Jackson] is just saying that we should be rewarding the leveraging of external funds and good planning," Cummins says. "Still, I have to agree with Polensek that we can't be just going to the suffering wards first because we are losing our middle-class tax base."

Chris Ronayne, executive director of University Circle Inc. (and planning director under Campbell), says he was pleased to see that the five-year plan was "driven up from the neighborhoods" through the process of creating the Connecting Cleveland 2020 citywide plan. Many of the projects he remembers neighbors barking about when he was in office are finally getting attention, and a heavy emphasis has been put on "neighborhood placemaking," a theme long cultivated by city planners which attempts to rebrand long-overlooked areas.

But, he says, "What it seems not to have in it are those crown-jewel projects of the wards, like the rec center in Ward 11."

And that can lead to sour grapes. Still, he notes, the distribution of money spent throughout the city is wider than it could have been: "I see in the plan the intention of not over-promising and then under-delivering, and that's probably pretty wise."

For now, a majority of council appears to be acquiescent to Jackson's "worst-to-first" approach. And it isn't just the five-year capital plan where it's being applied.

In late January, members voted 20-1 to allow Jackson to decide where this year's $2.8 million in parks funds would be spent. It was the first time council had deviated from a process created two decades ago to allow for equal shares across the wards and to give ward leaders discretion over how that money should be spent.

"When he was council president, he never would have let Campbell do that," says Polensek, who cast the lone dissenting vote. "Now, we've just given it to him. Frank's a well-intentioned guy, but what happens if we get a real prick in there that says, "You're going to do things my way or you're not going to get any money for any of your projects'?"

And though they all voted for the change, other council members are starting to air their gripes with Jackson's methods. Ward 7 Councilwoman Fannie Lewis says she'll fight proposed improvements to a park that she says is overrun with drug dealing. Councilman Zach Reed, whose Mt. Pleasant Ward 3 got $2.5 million, laments that not a dime was earmarked for improvements at mammoth Luke Easter Park, while money was dedicated to parks that don't need any help.

"It's going to come down to how much we're willing to put pressure on the administration to change that plan," Reed says.

Polensek is unsure how many of his colleagues will find the courage to do that. "They're pissed off, but there's this fear that if they show it, if they don't vote for this, then maybe they won't be considered for any money in the future."