Councilman Elect

Jon Morrow

Mayor

Rocky Radeff

Law Director

David Graves

WHY THIS TYPE OF LETTER, AND THINKING, SHOULD SCARE ALL RESIDENTS OF SHEFFIELD LAKE

Sheffield Lake residents should read the above letter the way a sailor reads a sudden drop in barometric pressure. Not because the paper itself is magical, but because it reveals the weather system behind it.

What you see in the letter is not merely a mayor who is irritated by a website. It is a mayor who is willing to act illegally as the law director of the city to put the full weight of government stationery—your city seal, your city name, your implied taxpayer-backed authority—behind a threat that treats ordinary political speech as a kind of crime. The letter does not say, “We disagree with your message.” It does not say, “Here’s a civil concern; let’s resolve it through normal channels.” It leaps straight to insinuations of identity fraud, telecom fraud, federal consumer-protection violations, and computer crimes. That escalation is not an accident. It is a tactic.

Let's examine the four baseless threats - shall we?

The City of Sheffield Lake, OH Website

My Campaign/Community based Website

Please, Mr. Mayor, try to make the case in court that these websites look even remotely similar. What are the hallmarks of this fraudulent design that you claim?

I am absolutely soliciting people's personal identifying information for a survey about the city and the Mayor's performance.

This is basic information that is freely available at the Ohio Secretary of State's website and from publicly available database sets.

I never claim to be the City of Sheffield Lake's municipal government, and I am completely allowed to use the term "City of Sheffield Lake" as a descriptor for the website in denoting the area this free-speech forum covers.

Let's remember it is a court of law, and I am innocent until proven guilty. How will you make the case that I am misrepresenting the purpose, legitimacy, and misrepresentation of the website? In addition to two already prominent disclaimers indicating who runs this website and for what purposes, I went to the extra effort to ensure that residents were not deceived by placing a third disclaimer right before you clicked to take the survey.

Here, the Mayor's grasp of the law is ridiculous.

• My identity on the website is clearly disclosed - please tell me how you intend to prove identity fraud?

• Telecommunications fraud is like stealing credit card information, Social Security numbers, and identities. I never once asked for any of that type of information.

• I am soliciting information for a survey - I am not stealing anyone's data - and I do not need anyone's authorization to host a community survey.

• The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - involves hackers - asking people who visit my website to take a survey is not an attempt to hack their computer.

All of these are misapplied statutes designed to threaten and menace me for perfectly legal activities. I would argue that the Mayor either did this intentionally or he did not do this intentionally - in either case.....

1. If the Mayor misapplied these statutes to bully and intimidate me, he abused the power and position of his office, and he violated Ohio's rules of professional conduct for attorneys (he is a licensed attorney).

2. If the Mayor is just that ignorant of the law then he is a grossly incompetent attorney.

Mayor Radeff, please explain to the world exactly how I am placing residents of the city at risk of identity theft (when I ask for nothing that I could steal identities with), financial loss (when I ask for no money), and privacy invasion (when I am asking them to volunteer their opinions and information)? Your arguments are as absurd as they are preposterous

Mayor Radeff's demand is that I take down the website and quit collecting information. The website is still up, and I am still collecting information, and I will continue to do so. I'd also like to disclose that there were no prior discussions with the Mayor reaching out with his concerns - there was just this illegal threat.

A free society runs on a simple bargain: citizens may criticize officials, and officials may answer with argument, evidence, and persuasion. The moment an official substitutes threats for persuasion, the bargain is broken. When the mayor dresses himself up as prosecutor and judge—announcing criminal statutes as if he were law director, grand jury, and court rolled into one—he shifts the relationship between resident and government from “we serve you” to “we will punish you if you displease us.” That is not leadership. That is the psychology of coercion.

And notice the architecture of the threat. It is intentionally broad, a legal shotgun blast. It does not grapple with your actual conduct: that the site carried disclaimers, that you asked for routine demographic inputs already available commercially and through public datasets, that no money or sensitive identifiers were sought, that the poll is a commonplace political tool. Instead, the letter relies on a fog of criminal-sounding labels to frighten you into silence. The purpose of such a fog is not to win a legal case; it is to make you too expensive, too tired, too nervous to keep speaking. It is the government’s version of a bar fight where the first swing is aimed at the lights.

If this were an isolated lapse, one could chalk it up to temper or poor judgment. But you and the public have seen a pattern. The same administration that warns citizens and council members about “political speech” in a donated public forum turns around and uses city resources to frame levies and projects in advocacy language. The same legal office that strains to criminalize a campaign website strains again to disqualify an elected councilman by omitting the restoration statutes that Ohio law put in place for exactly that situation. The target list is not random: it is the people who disagree, who obstruct, who refuse to kneel.

That is why residents should be concerned—this letter is a window into how power is understood at the top. An official who believes he can threaten citizens with criminal law for political inconvenience will eventually apply that belief elsewhere. Today it’s a website. Tomorrow it’s a public-records request. The next day, it’s a neighborhood group meeting that goes “off script.” The common thread is not the medium; it is the premise: dissent is treated as a nuisance to be suppressed rather than a right to be respected.

In a healthy city, the mayor’s office is a steward. In a sick city, it becomes a weapon. And a weapon does not need to be fired to do damage; it only needs to be displayed often enough that people start whispering to each other, “Don’t say that. Don’t post that. Don’t get involved. It isn’t worth the trouble.” At that moment, the city is no longer governed by law. It is governed by fear.

So yes—residents should be alarmed. Not because a mayor wrote a harsh letter, but because the letter signals a governing philosophy: that political opposition is something to be punished, that the machinery of the city exists to protect the officeholder’s comfort, and that threats are an acceptable substitute for constitutional limits. A community that allows that philosophy to stand unchallenged will wake up one day to find that the rights it assumed were permanent were, in practice, only permissions—revocable at the pleasure of whoever holds the pen on official letterhead.

The remedy is not panic. The remedy is sunlight and spine: insist that law be read honestly, applied evenly, and kept in its proper channels; insist that the city speak neutrally with public resources; insist that elections be honored unless a court, using the full and correct statutory framework, says otherwise. And insist that no public official—mayor or law director—treat the power of government as a cudgel for personal or political revenge.

That is the line between a city of citizens and a city of subjects. And this letter tells you, plainly, which direction the current administration is willing to walk unless the people stop it.