Emmanuel Remy was appointed to Columbus City Council in 2018, like all of his colleagues on Council, not elected. On the very first day he took office, Remy voted to approve the City’s “district” system that some consider fake, and even racist. Remy faced off against community activist Adrienne Hood at the polls yesterday and won with 60 percent of the vote. Hood’s campaign, however, made a strong showing for an activist candidate not endorsed by the local Dem machine by earning nearly 60,000 votes, 40 percent of the vote.

Eastside activist Jonathan Beard, who has kept a close eye on how the “fake” Council districts came to be, remembers that City Council meeting in January of 2018 as if it were last night.

“On the very first day new member Remy took office, Shannon Hardin passed legislation to put his ‘fake districts’ proposal on (a local) ballot,” said Beard. “Shannon needed Remy’s vote because he did not have the votes to pass it, due – in part – to Councilmember Tyson’s unwillingness to disregard the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s concerns about the potential illegality of Shannon’s fake district proposal.”

Remy will now represent North and South Linden, which are both part of District 4. It is ironic, considering Remy is a white man and Adrienne Hood is the Black mother of Henry Green, a young man shot and killed by Columbus Police’s “jump out boys” in 2016.  If any Columbus neighborhood could use a strong, African-American matriarchal-type and former veteran, they are in North and South Linden.

During his campaign, Remy exposed who and what he truly supports – those setting and spiking the market housing rate in Columbus. The community can blame drugs for those on our street corners begging, but certainly the stress of trying to pay the rising cost of housing in Columbus also put them there.

Hood was appearing more and more of a challenge to Remy, so he desperately turned to the Ohio Realtors Political Advocacy Fund (ORPAF) for help, which of course is the arm-twister at the Statehouse for landlords.

Just days before the vote, a Remy mailer, paid for by ORPAF, went across the entire City. In District 4, anyone can tell it is majority African American, yet it didn’t matter because the vote was at-large. (The Free Press will publish the District 4 vote itself when it becomes available).

“This Remy advertisement was in my mailbox. Emmanuel Remy is literally paid for by the Ohio Realtors, who were part of the lobbying effort to prevent rent control in Ohio,” stated Beard in a Facebook post.

In one year, from 2021 to 2022, rent in Columbus rose 20 percent. It was rising before this and continues to rise. All under Remy’s watch. 

Activist Black candidates for City Council – or any activist candidate for that matter – don’t have a chance to ever win (sure seems that way). When asked who was the last activist candidate to win a seat on City Council, several sources told us they don’t know. Complicit is the Franklin County Democratic Party, which also hasn’t endorsed or put an activist candidate on their sample ballot in recent memory, if ever. 

In District 4, the Black population is 46 percent compared to 33 percent white. Hood, a retired air force Master Sergeant, is “most passionate about public safety, mental healthcare, affordable housing, and public education,” states her campaign website. Remy, as Chair of the Environment Committee, created the Cleaner Columbus Initiative in 2019, to combat litter with help from Scarlet the Litter Cardinal.

“If it were just my District to win, I’d have a huge chance of winning,” said Hood to the Free Press last week.  

Instead, the City and Dem machine cheated and a realtor who believes in a spiking market housing rate will continue to represent the Linden community.