When Matt Zone was on Cleveland City Council, he kept a list of “Polensekisms” — favorite sayings of his colleague, Mike Polensek. Here are just four:
“You’re trying to sell me snowmobiles in the desert.”
“The proof is in the pudding — and I want to eat the pudding.”
“I deal with four-legged and two-legged critters all the time, and I prefer the four-legged critters because they’re more predictable.”
“This city is going down fast. It’s like we’re rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.”
Former Council President Jay Westbrook recalls another Polensek favorite: “That’s about as smooth as a barbed-wire enema.”
Polensek (with an accent on the second syllable) is Cleveland’s longest-serving council member at nearly 48 years and counting, dwarfing a predecessor who died in office after 34 years. In November, just before his 76th birthday, the record holder easily won four more years in a redrawn Ward 10 against an incumbent with a mere eight years on the job.
In all his years of service, Polensek has never seemed to run out of words or mince them. According to The Plain Dealer, he’s called Westbrook a “weasel” and former Mayor Michael White “a son of a bitch.” He’s asked whether “people at City Hall have lost their minds.” He’s described street criminals as “two-legged hood rats.” He made worldwide news for a 2007 letter to a suspected drug dealer calling him “you crack dealing piece of trash” and telling him to “go to jail or the cemetery soon.”
The current Ward 8 councilman loves Cleveland, his lifelong home, and lambastes it. “Every frigging negative list, we’re at the top,” he says with some exaggeration, “and positive list, we’re at the bottom. The poorest city (the second poorest big one, by some counts), rat population (a mere 11th),” lice infestation (no such list that we can find)…”
Fellow leaders say Polensek spars vehemently but not spitefully or underhandedly. Mayor Justin Bibb says, “He’s a straight shooter. He fights for his residents. He’s always willing to pick up the phone and tell me what he thinks, which I appreciate.”
Polensek, mostly Slovenian, partly Italian, never seems to spare targets because of their gender or race. Colleagues say he calls out everyone equally and serves them equally.
At the bidding of his activist mother, a teenage Polensek hung leaflets on doors for Carl Stokes’ racially pioneering mayoral victory. On council, he sponsored a fair housing law and a neighborhood equity fund. He marched against a Ku Klux Klan rally. He keeps winning in increasingly Black wards, getting 68 percent of the vote last month against Black incumbent Anthony Hairston in the new Ward 10, where 79 percent of the residents call themselves Black, indigenous or of color.
Working for the ward
Polensek claims to log every constituent call and return it or stop by the caller’s house. Colleagues call him tireless. “He’s the last one to turn out the lights at night,” says Ward 15 Councilwoman Jenny Spencer.
Delores Hewston, who chairs the East 156th Street Neighborhood Association, says, “Everyone knows that we have the best councilman in the city. He says what he does. He does what he says.”
At a recent association meeting, Polensek kept calling members “my brothers and sisters.” He added, “You’re like my extended family.” He also silenced background chatter a few times with “Listen up!”
Polensek has served four wards with different borders, all including Collinwood, Cleveland’s northeast corner. He helped the Cleveland Metroparks take over, expand and improve the neighborhood’s lakeshore parks. He helped the Cleveland Food Bank, Collinwood Recreation Center and Hospice of the Western Reserve build. He welcomed Habitat for Humanity homes. He helped create the Waterloo Arts and Entertainment District, demolish the blighted National Acme factory, save the LaSalle Theater and restore the arch of the bygone Euclid Beach Park.
He has redone several streets and rezoned them to ban businesses he considered undesirable. “I’ve blocked or knocked out 104 liquor licenses,” he says. “No one’s remotely close to that.”
A Collinwood High grad and St. Mary of the Assumption member, he has fought to save his ward’s public schools and Catholic churches. In 2007, he wrote, “We have seen the church spend millions of dollars to settle claims of sexual abuse within the diocese, while at the same time churches and schools, which we need for our spiritual and educational well-being, are now being considered for closure.” He says he told the late Bishop Richard Lennon, “You close any church in my neighborhood, from that point on you can call me Muslim Mike.” Lennon held off.
Now Polensek is fighting plans to close more schools, promoting a deal to redevelop the site of a defunct Dave’s Supermarket, seeking an upgrade of the Memorial-Nottingham Branch library and pursuing many other goals.
He has supported some downtown projects but opposed both stadiums. This month, he was one of two council members to vote against a deal for the Browns to leave their stadium and raze it.
Statesman of the streets
You could call Polensek proudly humble. He loves to say, “Never forget where you came from, and never forget who you represent.” Also, “I’m a street politician … I honed my trade in the streets of Collinwood and Glenville.”
Michael David Polensek is the oldest of four children raised in those neighborhoods. When he was 9 years old, his father took off. The son sometimes accompanied his mother to pick up powdered eggs, blocks of cheese and other free food.
He ran and played free safety on Collinwood High’s football team. He started working at age 14, making crates, then washing cars.
After graduation, Polensek became a machinist at White Motors, was laid off, studied briefly at Cuyahoga Community College Metro and helped recruit Girl Scouts. He was 19 when the first of his two wives bore the first of his five children. He says his long hours of work were hard on the marriages.
He lost bids for council in 1973 and 1975. In 1977, he upset a Republican incumbent who opposed Cleveland Public Power, which Polensek has always championed. Four years later, he beat council’s majority leader in a merged ward.
Polensek was council president from 2000 to 2002, then stepped down when Jane Campbell became mayor, respecting a tradition back then for the mayor and president to be of different races.
Now he shares a small, cramped office at City Hall with Mary Louise Jesek Daley, his assistant for the past 27 years. The office has one luxury: a balcony. “They gave me a balcony hoping I might jump off,” he says. But the balcony is currently closed for repairs and its door kept shut by a bungee cord to a file cabinet.
Polensek serves on the board of Ginn Academy and the advisory committee of the Benjamin Rose institute on aging. He has won the American Nationalities Freedom Award and a berth in the Cleveland International Hall of Fame.
He calls himself “an old-school Democrat.” He’s a party ward leader and Cuyahoga County executive committeeman. But he calls both parties’ national leaders too extreme.
In 2021, Polensek sent a resident an email about Rebecca Maurer, who was running successfully for council from Slavic Village in Ward 12. “Ms. Maurer, who I don’t even know, is running a slate of extreme left wing candidates citywide in an attempt to turn Cleveland City Council and Cleveland into Portland Oregon. God help us!”
Looking back, he doesn’t regret his barbs. “Sometimes I say I should have been more obnoxious.” But he adds, “It’s never been personal to me. It’s about the neighborhood … I’ve fought with people, but I never said I wouldn’t help them if they needed me.”
Frequent past foes Mayor Michael R. White and Council President George Forbes supported his latest campaign. White, who joined council the same year as Polensek, says, “He’s going to fight no matter what he thinks the odds are, as long as he believes the fight is justified to support and represent and defend his community.”
Forbes says, “He hasn’t changed … This guy’s a great councilman … Whenever I needed him, he was there to support me.” When a Black family’s home was torched in the rookie councilman’s ward, “He came to me: ‘We gotta do something about it!’ He’s been that way ever since.”
Polensek has often found humor in feuds. Former Council President Martin Sweeney, a leading foe, once performed the Heimlich maneuver on him. Afterwards, the rescued man said, “I’m surprised he wasn’t squeezing higher, like up around the neck.”
In no sense retiring
This year, council had to trim two wards because of shrinking population. Several members say that Polensek promised this year not to run for re-election. He says that he just mentioned the possibility.
This time around, Polensek says he was in the middle of too much to stop. “I couldn’t take the chance of these projects not happening … These are projects that I’ve been working on for years.”
The Plain Dealer endorsed him as before, praising his “pugnacious, independent and experienced presence” and his “pragmatic approach and aggressive constituent service.” Columnist Brent Larkin wrote, “Those who dismiss him as a loud-mouthed pest fail to understand the city and its people. Never has there been a more tenacious fighter for the people he represents.”
Polensek says he lost 10 pounds campaigning door to door in his steep new territory of Euclid Green. He considers himself healthy and blessed. “They call me the old dinosaur, but my teeth are still sharp!”
Someday, he admits, “I know retirement is coming.” Still, “retirement scares me. I see so many people retire, then they’re dead.” Besides, how would he pass the time? He says his only hobby is gardening.
He says he’s often been asked to run for higher office but would rather stay focused on Collinwood. “I came in as a councilman. I’m going out as a councilman.”
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