How we’re examining Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposal to spend taxes transporting women for abortions: Letter from the Editor

Here’s a case study for how a story develops in our newsroom.

We start with a breaking news story, the announcement by Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb that he plans to set aside $100,000 in tax dollars to pay travel costs for Cleveland residents going to other states for abortions.

It’s a story that checks several boxes for big news. It’s about abortion, one of the controversial topics of the year. It’s a radical proposal from Cleveland’s still-new mayor, someone who campaigned on breaking with the status quo to solve problems. And it’s a stretch of how tax dollars are used.

City Hall reporter Courtney Astolfi published the news story when it broke, but what happened next is where you’ll find insight into how our newsroom works. We put aside the abortion debate for the moment, and talked about the purpose of taxes. With multiple people participating, the conversation, in fits and starts, went something like this.

We largely pay taxes to support government services that serve us all. Schools. Police. Fire protection. Trash collection. Park maintenance. Snow plowing.

But Bibb is proposing to spend tax dollars on individuals, who must now go out of state if they wish abortions. That’s unusual. How unusual, though? Do any parallels exist, or is this an entirely new and radical idea from the new mayor?

What about people who adamantly oppose abortion? Is it okay to use their taxes to help support abortion? Who could answer that question?

Of course, government spends our taxes on lots of projects we might adamantly oppose. The entirety of Cuyahoga County appears dead set opposed to spending another public cent on the failed Medical Mart, but the out-of-touch Cuyahoga County Council is about to borrow $31 million to do just that. Taxes will be paying that money back for years.

Would you rather your taxes help someone in need get an abortion or pay for a useless building that most taxpayers will never visit?

There’s the question of whether spending tax money for abortions is legal. If legal, is it proper?

One parallel we discussed is providing lawyers for indigent families facing eviction in Cleveland. That’s not required under any law. Cleveland City Council created the program to help people in desperate situations have some advocacy, to much acclaim. It was a stretch of the use of tax dollars for a laudable purpose.

What about public health, we wondered. Cleveland runs a Health Department. Part of the city mission is to ensure the health of city residents. Is providing access to abortion a legitimate expenditure for healthcare?

We chewed on the topic publicly, in the Tuesday episode of our weekday podcast, Today in Ohio, where editors discuss the biggest news of the previous 24 hours. (You can listen here.) Sometimes, those discussions spark emails from listeners with other perspectives.

We also turned to some of you. I sent a note out to subscribers to my weekday morning texts, where I discuss what we are talking about in the newsroom, and I heard from more than 100 people with their thoughts and questions. (We published a piece with some of the text responses.) We want to make sure we run the gamut of perspectives.

The questions continue to swirl. We know a big part of our job is providing context for the news, and we do that by asking questions. With such an unprecedented story as this one, we had no end of questions, and Courtney has been seeking the answers. Look for her story, or stories, soon.

We suspect Courtney’s follow-up reporting will raise more questions and perspectives, via email to her and letters to the editor.

The conversation will continue.

Thanks for reading.