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I spoke with Gary Byers,
former judge of the Maumee Municipal Court and the
Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for Lucas County
Commissioner. Byers is also a music aficionado.
Perryman:
How are you today? Please tell our readers a little bit
about you.
Byers:
Originally, I was from the Akron area, but I came to Toledo
to go to law school back in the late 70s stayed after I
graduated from the University of Toledo School of Law in
1981. Shortly after that, I was a felony trial prosecutor
in the Lucas County Prosecutor’s office for seven years. I
became the Director of the Board of Elections for several
years and that’s where I learned about government and all of
the offices that fall under the purview of the county. After
that, I became the director of the Toledo office for the
State Attorney General’s office under Lee Fisher and I did
that for several years. And then in 1993, I was elected
judge of the Maumee Municipal Court and was judge there for
24 years. And that’s in a nutshell what I’ve been doing
professionally for the last two decades.
Perryman:
Please talk about your life in Akron prior to coming to
Toledo.
Byers:
I graduated from Hiram College, which is in northeast Ohio.
I actually graduated as a music major and a political
science major. And it’s kind of funny, you never quite know
how things are going to go. For the last 21 years, on
Friday afternoons I volunteer at the schools in Maumee and I
sing for first and third graders. And I’ll sing for a
couple hours with the kids on Friday afternoons and it’s
something that I wouldn’t have foreseen when I was an
aspiring music major in college, but it’s been not only a
good experience, mostly for the kids, to see somebody in the
community that comes on a regular basis, but also for some
of the families that go to some of these schools and have a
tough way to go. I know it’s also been positive for me
because it gave me a perspective when I was a judge as to
how things go and what’s important and a good experience.
Perryman:
Music somewhere has been deemed the universal language. What
type of music is your preferred flavor?
Byers:
I like a many kinds of music. As far as listening to music,
I like jazz. I try to follow Ramona Collins when she’s
singing. We used to have Dégagé here just a couple blocks
from my house we could walk up to and we used to go to that
before they closed it. We have a very vibrant music
community in Lucas County and there are a lot of good
musicians.
Perryman:
Who are your favorites?
Byers:
Dave Brubeck, I like. Actually, I went to see a group last
night, Radio Free Honduras, it’s a Latin band and a friend
of mine actually plays guitar in the band. They’re actually
from Chicago, but Dan Abu-Absi is in the band, he’s from
Toledo and so they were playing at The Village Idiot last
night and I went to see them.
Again, with the kids, and
I guess this sort of goes along with the fact that I enjoy
jazz, I try to teach the kids that you have to do active
listening, music is a participation sport. You have to let
it affect you physically and so when I do this thing called
active listening where the kids songs that I’m singing with
the kids, I change them all the time and a lot of times I’ll
have the kids interacting with movements or whatever, and
when I change it, if they’re not listening, then they can’t
do it. You can understand and let it affect you more if
you’re actively listening to what’s going on, and that’s
what I like about jazz.
But even a symphony, we
like to go to the symphony and they’re trying to keep up
with the times, which is a good thing. They’re doing sort of
this electronic media at the same time that you’re listening
to them perform and so they’re focusing on the people that
are doing solos or what part of the orchestra that has the
lead melody line at that particular moment, and I find it
kind of distracting. But they seem to be getting some
positive feedback about it, so you’ve got to change with the
times.
Perryman:
Well, as I transition from your connection with music to the
county commissioners race and your candidacy, you talk about
jazz, which features improvisation and freedom of ideas
expressed within a defined structure, and then the symphony
and orchestra, which is more characterized by scripted
structure and predetermined movement in a type of
“concerted” coordination of large-scale orchestral parts in
order to capture the spirit of the work.
Approximately 84,000 or 19
percent of the county’s population of 434,286 (2014 U.S.
Census) are black. What ideas do you have that will address
the urgent needs of the black community in Lucas County?
Byers:
Well, one thing I was involved in when I was a judge and
would continue with as a commissioner is the MacArthur
Foundation Grant. The purpose of MacArthur Foundation is to
reduce minority populations in custody, and actually Lucas
County has done some really impressive stuff as far as
making major steps in reducing those populations. We got
the MacArthur grant and started with this program of
pretrial release, that if it’s a nonviolent offender, why
are these people being kept in custody?
If you have to release
them in two weeks, release them now so that first of all it
costs less to the county and secondly, the impact on the
people that are held in custody that lose their work, it
affects their family, it has all of these pejorative results
and actually when all the judges in the county started using
this tool, that basically nonviolent offenders are likely to
come back into court when they’re being released immediately
rather than waiting down the road. And we had actually
reduced pretrial populations by approximately 13 or 14
percent just in a year. But it’s been something that other
communities are copying and something that we need to
continue with. I want to sort of pick up the ball where
departing commissioner Carol Contrada left it and continue
the good work that she’s done on the MacArthur Foundation.
(Our conversation on
Byers’ ideas for the black community continues next week in
Part II)
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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