Incumbent Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz claimed a record re-election victory Tuesday night, telling exultant supporters at a downtown brewpub that Toledoans voted to embrace a “limitless” future.
With 79.6 percent of county precincts reporting, Mr. Kapszukiewicz was leading by 68.9 to 29.7 percent over his opponent, former Mayor Carty Finkbeiner.
Saying that Toledo has made “real momentum, real progress” during his first term, Mr. Kapszukiewicz said, “our future is as bright as we dare to dream it to be.
“And tonight, by a record margin, Toledoans overwhelmingly voted to embrace that future and reject the past,” he said to cheers inside the Earnest Brew Works bar in the Warehouse District.
The previous record for a mayoral victory margin was set in 2005 when Mr. Finkbeiner defeated incumbent Jack Ford with 61.8 percent of the vote. Mr. Kapszukiewicz was also only the second mayor to be re-elected, after Mr. Finkbeiner’s re-election in 1997.
Mr. Kapszukiewicz, 49, the endorsed Democrat, was joined at the victory celebration by his wife, Sarah, and their children, Emma, 17, and Will, 15.
He made reference to the $180 million in federal coronavirus assistance funds that Toledo must decide how to allocate.
“We still have a lot of work to do, with the American Rescue Plan, the opportunity we have over these next four years to make the kind of investments to improve our community. The decisions we make will affect Toledo for the next 40 years. I will be working as hard as I possibly can, as I have over the last four years, to make Toledo proud, to continue to build on the momentum we started so that we can embrace a truly limitless future,” he said.
There were a total of 69,446 ballots cast, or 23.6 percent of all registered voters in the county. In the last election in which Toledo mayor was on the ballot, 2017, the total turnout was 30.2 percent, with 91,264 voters.
Mr. Finkbeiner addressed his supporters before the vote count was complete, declining to concede defeat. He credited his volunteers with working to turn out the vote, though it was an uphill battle.
“We had a hard time getting people to go to the polls to vote,” Mr. Finkbeiner said. Despite the failure to turn out voters, he said the campaign’s priority issues were the correct ones: stopping violence in the city and cleaning up neighborhoods.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we weren’t wrong,” he said, speaking at his campaign headquarters in South Toledo.
Four years ago, Mr. Kapszukiewicz stepped down in the middle of his fourth term as Lucas County treasurer after defeating incumbent Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson, then the endorsed Democrat.
In this election, he was endorsed by the party, and by most of the major labor and business groups. Mr. Kapszukiewicz urged voters to look to the future, rather than back to the past, a subtle reminder of the sometimes stormy and controversial terms Mr. Finkbeiner served.
Mr. Kapszukiewicz ran on having kept promises to grow the police department, repair city roads, boost economic progress. He said he was the first mayor in 12 years to increase the size of the police department, raising it from the 602 officers in place at the start of his term to 634 now.
He cited successful redevelopments of former failed shopping mall sites Southwyck and North Towne Square, and the city’s winning of the nationally coveted Site Selection Magazine Governor’s Cup this year for cities in Toledo’s population category based on the number of corporate expansions. In that announcement, the mayor said $2.2 billion worth of projects were under way or recently completed that are expected to create about 3,500 new jobs and 1,079 new residential units.
Mr. Kapszukiewicz ran four years ago with an “aspirational goal” of implementing universal preschool, with the condition that he was not promising to commit city funds. That goal did not advance.
In 2020, Mr. Kapszukiewicz tried to pass a levy that would have added another 0.5 percent to the city’s then-2.25 percent income tax. The additional tax would have brought in about $110 million annually, with some of the money targeted for roads and other funds to hire safety forces, create recreation programs, save in the budget stabilization, and fund universal preschool.
Voters rejected the proposed tax hike by 56-44 percent. The mayor returned in November with a proposed 0.25-percentage point increase dedicated to road repairs and voters approved it.
This year, Mr. Kapszukiewicz’s administration came under the shadow of an FBI investigation into his administration’s overhaul of Summit Street.
No charges and no findings of wrongdoing have been disclosed. The investigation is believed to center on the administration’s agreement last spring to pay Buckeye Broadband for the relocation of its utility lines under Summit Street, while other utility companies were not reimbursed.
Mr. Kapszukiewicz and his law director, Dale Emch, later explained that they concluded that under state law Buckeye couldn’t be forced to pay for the relocation of its cables because the project was not predominantly related to necessary transportation infrastructure.
The administration did not want to delay the work as the beautification was part of the city’s attempt to spruce up for the arrival of the prestigious Solheim Cup professional golf tournament in September.
The Summit Street affair surfaced in the campaign during a live debate on WTOL-TV, Channel 11, in which Mr. Finkbeiner accused Mr. Kapszukiewicz of having taken a “political bribe.”
The mayor brushed off the accusation as false, saying, “no one that’s investigated has found any indication of wrongdoing.”
He reminded voters that Mr. Finkbeiner had been convicted of an ethics violation. Mr. Finkbeiner pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor ethics charge of failing to disclose a $10,000 payment made to him in connection with the purchase of his condominium to allow for construction of the Owens Corning world headquarters in 1994.
During the mayoral campaign, Mr. Finkbeiner raised a fraction of the campaign war chest collected by Mr. Kapszukiewicz and reached voters by going to meetings, bowling alleys, and grocery stores, and waving to motorists on major streets.
He, or his campaign, made use of Facebook, adding bright red hearts to all his posts to indicate that “Carty Loves Toledo. One post that stayed in a prominent position for weeks was a photograph of Mr. Kapszukiewicz riding in a University of Toledo homecoming parade in a Ford Bronco.
“Mayor Wade has turned his back on Jeep, Jeep Workers, their families and Toledo,” Mr. Finkbeiner’s Facebook post claimed.
Mr. Finkbeiner, 82, an independent Democrat, was mayor from 1994 to 2002, and again from 2006 to 2010, when he did not seek a second term. He based his campaign on the high number of homicides in Toledo the last two years, painting the mayor and his top staff as disconnected and offering no solutions to make the violence stop.
The former mayor, known for his indefatigable energy, was involved in various community crusades, none so high profile or successful as his involvement in the campaign to prevent the University of Toledo Medical Center from being taken over by ProMedica Health System.
First Published November 3, 2021, 3:17 a.m.
