Cleveland City Council member Jenny Spencer won’t seek re-election

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cleveland City Council member Jenny Spencer won't seek re-election next year, marking the end of a five-year run as the representative for the Detroit-Shoreway, Cudell and Edgewater neighborhoods.

Spencer, who represents Ward 15, announced her intentions Wednesday evening in a Facebook live video in which she said that serving on council has been an honor.

Spencer's term ends at the end of 2025. She told cleveland.com she made her decision months ago, but wanted to wait until after the November election before revealing the news. She said she went public with her plans now because she wants to give residents who might be interested in running for her seat time to think it over before they would have to gear up for election season next year.

City Council is working on drawing new ward maps, as required by the city charter, in time for next year's election. Two seats of the 17-member body will be eliminated due to Cleveland's population losses captured in the 2020 U.S. Census. Most of the losses were on the city's East Side, where the most substantive changes to the map are expected. Spencer's ward, which includes the booming area around Gordon Square, is on the West Side, where map changes are expected to be less dramatic.

Council President Blaine Griffin, in a statement, said Ward 15 "will be treated fairly and equitably when it comes to redistricting and any other matters."

Spencer told cleveland.com she's leaving council for a variety of reasons. Along with clearing the way for a newcomer and helping cultivate the next generation of Cleveland's leaders, she said she feels like she's managed to accomplish, or make progress on, many of the goals she had when she first ran four years ago.

Also, she said, her decision comes down, in part, to how demanding the job is.

"It's really required the best of me every single day, and it's a pace that ultimately I don't think is sustainable. For me to do it the way I wanted to do it, I didn't think it'd be healthy for me to try to keep up that pace," Spencer said.

Among her proudest accomplishments on City Council was the overhaul of Cleveland's residential tax abatement policy in early 2022. In the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood, she said, it had become clear that the former version of the policy, which provided a blanket 100% abatement for all new projects for 15 years, was a problem. The new policy provides partial abatement in places like Detroit-Shoreway, and full abatement in less-developed neighborhoods.

"To help shape that policy was really important to me," Spencer said. "People who live here understood that years of a tax abatement policy with no limits contributed to housing pressures, and really tipped the scales in terms of values going up but in a way that was not sustainable. It also created displacement pressures. I remember thinking this is the one thing I absolutely needed to get done."

Spencer was able to add an "aging in place" provision to the policy that's meant to help keep seniors in their long-time homes, which has been another top priority for her in office.

Griffin, the council president, praised Spencer's work as Ward 15′s representative.

"She has brought a lot of insight and creativity to the Body of Council. Council is a tough job. But she handled it with a tremendous amount of grace, tenacity and care," Griffin's statement said.

Spencer joined council in 2020 when former Councilman Matt Zone stepped down. Zone championed her as the person City Council ought to replace him with, in a council appointment process that allows members of the body to decide how to fill some vacancies.

Until then, she'd served as the managing director of nonprofit Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization.