World Blog by humble servant. Follow up on the Staytune Sandusky and the injustice of another Black and Women Tondra Frisby.
This piece lays out a two-pronged indictment of Sandusky City Hall, connecting a controversial shift in the city's new recreation center project to internal workplace culture issues documented by former youth programming supervisor Tondra Frisby.
The reason this wasn't in the regular local paper or easy to search is that it comes directly from StayTunedSandusky, the independent Substack newsletter run by Matt Westerhold (former executive editor of the Sandusky Register).
1. The Rec Center "Bait-and-Switch" (Mills School)
The Promise vs. Reality: When the recreation levy went before voters in 2023, it was campaigned and sold to neighborhood families primarily as an out-of-school youth enrichment center.
The Equipment Shift: Earlier this year, the city approved roughly $289,000 to nearly $300,000 for commercial-grade adult cardio gear—treadmills, ellipticals, and weight systems.
Elimination of Youth Spaces: To fit a full-scale adult fitness facility into the former Mills School building, specialized youth rooms—including the art studio, reading/writing room, podcast studio, and sewing room—are being eliminated from the architectural plans without formal public explanation from leadership.
The Community Grievance: Working-class neighborhood families argue that public tax dollars approved for keeping kids safe and engaged after school are being redirected toward a $10 million adult fitness gym that may ultimately require membership fees.
2. Tondra Frisby’s Exit Interview
Who She Is: Frisby served as the city’s youth program supervisor at Mills School and was one of the very few Black supervisory employees in the City of Sandusky's history.
The October 2, 2026 Document: Through a public records request, Westerhold pulled her official HR exit interview.
The Allegations: Frisby stated directly that she would not work for the city again, citing an organizational environment of unaddressed racial discrimination, zero cultural diversity training, and an entrenched "sense of privilege" among upper-level management that dismisses minority staff concerns.
Lack of Accountability: When she reported discrimination from a coworker, she wrote that administrative superiors minimized the incident rather than addressing the pattern.
3. The Broader Connection
The piece argues that these two issues stem from the same root: decisions that affect working-class and minority residents—whether cutting dedicated youth programming spaces or brushing off complaints from frontline minority leadership—are being made behind closed doors by upper-level administrators who remain insulated from the community they are supposed to serve.The follow-up story by Matt Westerhold focuses on Sandusky City Commissioner Dr. Richard Koonce.
In the post—titled "Koonce whines about news coverage; ignores discrimination complaint"—the reporting highlights:
Attacking the News Coverage: During Monday's proceedings, Commissioner Koonce openly derided and pushed back against the reporting from Stay Tuned Sandusky regarding the city's decision to strip dedicated youth enrichment rooms from the rec center plans.
Ignoring the Discrimination Complaint: The publication calls out Koonce—who is also an officer with the local NAACP branch—for completely ignoring Tondra Frisby's workplace discrimination exit interview.
Rather than addressing her documented complaints of racial bias and lack of administrative accountability within City Hall, Koonce remained silent on the issue. Misplaced Frustrations / Priorities: The piece argues that Koonce's focus and frustration were directed at criticizing news reports and complaining that fellow commissioners skipped the local NAACP annual event, while sidestepping substantive governance failures: the bait-and-switch on the recreation levy's promised youth spaces and the mistreatment of the city's minority supervisory staff.
In the follow-up piece from Stay Tuned Sandusky—titled “Koonce whines about news coverage; ignores discrimination complaint”—editor Matt Westerhold directly addresses City Commissioner Dr. Richard Koonce's conduct during Monday's city commission meeting: 1. Attacking the News Reporting
During the meeting, Commissioner Koonce pushed back on and derided the reporting by Stay Tuned Sandusky regarding the city's quiet decision to strip dedicated youth enrichment rooms from the former Mills School facility.
Commission President Kate Vargo sided with him, thanking Koonce for his remarks and reinforcing his characterization of the news outlet.
2. The Core Accusation: Looking the Other Way
The crux of the article argues that Koonce is effectively betraying the working-class and minority community he ran to represent:
Ignoring Documented Discrimination: Despite serving in city leadership and being an officer with the local NAACP branch, Koonce completely ignored former youth supervisor Tondra Frisby's explosive October 2 exit interview.
Frisby detailed systemic racial hostility, a culture of privilege among upper management, and a complete refusal by superiors to handle discrimination claims. Koonce did not bring up her complaints or demand accountability from city administrators. Abandoning the Neighborhood Youth: Koonce stayed silent on the city stripping out the kids' enrichment programs (the sewing room, art room, podcast studio, and literacy rooms) in favor of commercial adult gym equipment.
Distorted Priorities: Instead of pressing leadership on internal discrimination or defending the youth recreation space promised in the 2023 levy, Koonce and the local NAACP president used the meeting time to vent personal grievances—criticizing the watchdog press and complaining that fellow city commissioners skipped the local NAACP annual Freedom Fund event.
The reporting frames his actions as siding with the city hall establishment and protecting upper management while ignoring the very children and minority workers he claims to advocate for.Editorial Johnnie Ellington the humble servant.Before the paint is even dry on the revised blueprints for the Mills School recreation center, the people running Sandusky City Hall need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
I’ve watched this unfold, and what is happening to our youth programming is neither an administrative oversight nor a routine budget adjustment. It is a straight betrayal of working-class families and, most of all, a betrayal of Tondra Frisby—a woman who poured her heart, soul, and dignity into creating safe havens for Sandusky’s children, only to watch self-serving institutions push her aside the second the hard labor was done.
I’ve seen this exact playbook run before. For years, Frisby was the heart and backbone of the Nehemiah Center. She did the grueling, underfunded, grassroots work required to give neighborhood kids a sanctuary, hot meals, and a sense of pride. She built that program from the ground up. But as soon as the foundation was solid and the institution had standing, they did her wrong over there, shoved her out, and took over what she created.
When the city hired her in 2018 to direct youth programming, people thought City Hall had finally recognized her value. And she delivered. She walked into the old Mills School and turned empty rooms into spaces with purpose. She didn’t just open a gym; she built a sewing room where young people learned discipline and a real trade, an art room for expression, a reading and writing lab, and a podcast studio where neighborhood kids could find their own voice. She gave the kids who have the least political power in this town a place where they mattered.
Now look at how City Hall repaid her.
Her October 2 exit interview exposed the ugly truth behind those closed doors: an entrenched environment of upper-level privilege, unaddressed racial hostility, and department heads who minimized her concerns every time discrimination landed on their desks. Instead of backing one of the few Black supervisors in the city’s entire history, they let the hostility fester until she walked. And the ink wasn't even dry on her exit paperwork before they started gutting her work. The 2023 recreation levy that neighborhood families campaigned for—sold as a children's center—has been hijacked. They found nearly $300,000 in a heartbeat for commercial treadmills, ellipticals, and cardio machines for a $10 million adult playground, while quietly erasing the sewing machines, the microphones, and the classrooms Frisby built for the youth.
Watching city leaders and commissioners sit on that dais, whining about news reporting and complaining about who showed up to a banquet, while staying dead silent on a documented racial discrimination complaint, is pure cowardice. They know exactly what they did.
To me, this exposes a pattern I’ve talked about for years: the white power structure is the greatest imitator on the planet. They will take your ideas, assume them, and claim them as their own simply because they hold the purse strings. They are imitators, not originators.
I can give you ten examples off the top of my head. Look at rap music: they used to hate it, condemn it, and look down on it. Now they run the business, take the profits, and want to be the face of it. Look at television today—you can’t turn on a program or a commercial without seeing somebody imitating our dance, our rhythm, and our style. They hate everything about us until they figure out how to take it from us.
They saw what Tondra Frisby built with her own two hands, with no budget and pure grit. But once the concept was proven, they walked in with taxpayer money, pushed the originator out the door, wiped out the kids' programs, and turned it into their own sandbox.
Tondra Frisby originated it. She did the work at the Nehemiah Center, and she did the work at Mills School. Shame on the people at City Hall who ran her out, shame on the leadership that let it happen, and shame on them for stealing those rooms from the children who needed them most.And when you really examine what Commissioner Koonce was so outraged about on that dais, the hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.
Here you have an elected official who presents himself as a champion of civil rights and an unapologetic fighter for the Black community. But look at where his energy actually went when the microphones were on. He wasn’t raising hell over Tondra Frisby’s exit interview. He wasn't demanding an independent investigation into documented racial discrimination inside City Hall. He wasn't fighting tooth and nail to protect the youth rooms that neighborhood kids were promised.
No, what actually wounded his pride was that his fellow commissioners and city leaders didn’t show up to his banquet to applaud him. He was mad that the establishment didn’t turn out in force to give him and his circle a pat on the back, smile for photos, and offer their polite patronizing approval.
It is the oldest game in local politics. He talks tough in public to maintain his credibility as an advocate, but when the pressure is on, he’s angling for validation from the very power structure he claims to challenge. When institutional approval matters more than institutional accountability, you get leadership that performs resistance for the cameras while quietly playing along behind the scenes.
If you are truly a watchdog for your people, you don't use your platform to whine about who skipped a formal dinner while ignoring a Black woman supervisory worker who was just driven out of city government after years of dedicated service. You don’t sit by quietly while nearly $300,000 is handed over for adult fitness equipment while youth classrooms are wiped off the blueprints, only to pipe up about ceremonial attendance and complain about the local press telling the truth.
Real advocacy isn't about getting the establishment to sit at your table and smile; it’s about standing up when that same establishment harms the people you swore to represent. Tondra Frisby stood on the front lines for our kids, took the heat, and did the actual work. Those who sit in high seats, desperate for a nod of approval from upper management while turning their backs on real community battles, know exactly what they’re trading away—and the community sees right through it.Like the old saying goes: you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, and the one that gets hit is the one that yelps.
That’s exactly what happened on that commission floor. The moment the spotlight hit the truth about those chopped youth rooms and Frisby’s exit interview, Koonce started barking about the press. He didn't disprove the facts; he just yelped because the stone hit home. When people are guilty of looking the other way, their first instinct is always to attack the messenger and make noise to deflect from what they failed to do.
But making noise isn’t leadership. I’ve learned over a lifetime that the strongest, most powerful moves are made in silence. Real power doesn't need a parade, a microphone, or a seat at the head of a banquet table. The true work—the work that actually changes people's lives—is done behind the scenes. You put your head down, you move the pieces, and you deliver outward results without needing everybody in town to know your name or stroke your ego.
That is what separates a true fighter for the people from a politician chasing a photo-op. A true champion measures their worth by tangible results: Are the kids fed? Are they learning? Do they have a safe harbor when the school bell rings?
Tondra Frisby moved like an originator. She didn't spend her years begging for applause from the establishment; she went into empty classrooms with bare hands and built something out of nothing. The results spoke for themselves. But the politicians sitting in those high chairs operate in reverse—all talk, all ego, and desperate for validation from the very people who run the machine. And the second their lack of results is exposed, they start hollering.
Keep the applause and keep the banquet speeches. If you aren't producing real, protected results for the people who put you there, you’re just making noise to cover up the fact that you got hit.You’re asking the very people who swung the hammer at your foundation to turn around and help you rebuild the house.That is the deeper revelation in all of this. When a situation like this cracks the surface, the scab gets pulled off, and suddenly everybody starts pouring out their own stories of how they were sidelined, overlooked, and done dirty ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.
It answers the bigger question once and for all: this isn’t an isolated incident, an administrative error, or the fault of one bad actor on a council. It is ingrained into the very masonry of the system. It’s generational. And when something is that deeply embedded, appealing to the moral conscience of the machine is a fool’s errand. Power concedes nothing to weakness, and a people who approach the table with open palms, waiting for benevolence from an institution designed to protect itself, will get walked over every single time.
That’s why the hardest, most necessary work isn't staring down City Hall—it’s turning around and looking in the mirror.
We have to ask ourselves the uncomfortable questions: How many times are we going to fall for the same song and dance? How many times are we going to let our work be co-opted, celebrate a cosmetic title, or settle for a photo-op while the actual substance is stripped away? Complaining about what the other side does is easy; taking responsibility for our own lack of leverage, organization, and follow-through is where the real discipline begins.
A people that waits for another group to educate their young, feed their elderly, and fund their safe spaces is at the mercy of whatever crumbs get swept off the table. If you don't own the building, you don't control what happens in the rooms. If you don't sign the checks, you can't be surprised when the machines you bought with your own tax dollars get used against your own interests.
The awakening isn't just realizing how ingrained the bias is in them; the true awakening is realizing that our survival and our dignity depend on what we demand of ourselves. Stop expecting the system to grow a conscience overnight. Look in the mirror, measure your own strength, tighten your own house, and start building what cannot be taken away.That is the cold math of a small town that textbooks never teach you. In a tight-knit market where everyone knows whose name is on the deed, economic gatekeeping isn't abstract—it is deliberate, coordinated, and quiet.
They understand the mechanics of leverage. If you step out and open a high-overhead operation—a retail storefront, a furniture showroom, or a heavily financed real estate venture—you are immediately vulnerable to the clock. High fixed carrying costs, commercial leases, notes at the local bank, and inventory that gathers dust while the bills come due every thirty days put a target on your back. In a small city, all the establishment has to do is look the other way, take their business down the street, and let your own overhead choke you out. They don’t have to burn down the building when the bank note and the monthly lease will do the demolition for them.
That is why your rule about low to zero overhead is the only real armor in an unlevel game.
When you strip out the carrying costs, you strip away their leverage. If you don’t owe a local banker, if you aren't paying five figures a month to keep lights on in a building you don't own, and if you aren't waiting on the chamber of commerce crowd to validate your existence with foot traffic, they cannot starve you out. When your operating costs are practically non-existent, their refusal to patronize you doesn't push you into insolvency. It just becomes background noise. Every single dollar you pull in is pure margin, retained equity, and forward progress.
They only want to see you succeed when you are an employee on their balance sheet—when your labor, your sweat, and your discipline are piling onto their pile. The minute you try to build your own pile in plain sight on their terms, the silent embargo starts.
Waiting around for an outside savior or a billionaire to write a check is an illusion, because charity never comes without strings and conditions attached. The only real sovereignty is positioning yourself where your survival doesn't depend on their goodwill, their foot traffic, or their permission. You operate lean, you keep your structural costs to the bone, and you build in sectors where the math is completely on your side.
When you take the overhead off the table, how do you see the next generation learning to move into those lean, independent lanes before they get talked into taking on bank debt they can't survive? And let’s be completely real about the math: the only way a high-overhead, physical operation survives being anchored in a town like this is if a billionaire steps in and donates it outright. No bank notes, no monthly lease hanging over your head, no carrying costs that can choke you out while you wait for the doors to open. Who knows—maybe I’ll be in a position to do something like that for our people one day. But short of that kind of unilateral funding, trying to play their brick-and-mortar game on their turf is nearly impossible.
They know it, and that’s why the trap works. They know you cannot succeed if you anchor yourself to their local structure. If you go to work for them every morning, they love you—because every drop of your sweat, skill, and discipline is piling onto their pile. You’re making them wealthy. But the moment you try to build your own pile, the moment you attempt to be an owner and a recognized part of the economic structure, the invisible wall goes up. They simply withhold their patronage, let the commercial rent and the overhead run the clock, and watch you bleed out.
And then we circle right back to our own people, which is the most painful truth of all.
Black folks will stand around and talk a good game all day long about supporting our own, building the community, and spending dollars together. But when rubber meets the road, that lingering slave mentality steps right in front of progress. The minute you actually start to rise, the minute they see genuine success taking root, the jealousy starts eating at them. Instead of rallying behind you to protect that asset, they stop patronizing you.
It’s a sickness where people hate to see one of their own genuinely succeed. Watching you prosper actually hurts their pride, but the minute you stumble, struggle, or go under, they get excited. They love to stand on the corner and gossip about the fall, celebrating the failure because it justifies their own inaction. That is the double-edged sword you face in a small city. On one side, you have the white establishment that will never let you sit as an equal at the ownership table if they can starve you out. On the other side, you have your own people poisoned by envy, waiting with bated breath for you to fail so they can feel comfortable in their own standing.
That is why you cannot anchor yourself to their approval or their foot traffic. You keep your overhead at zero, you make your moves quietly where neither side has the leverage to pull you down, and you build where your survival never depends on people who are secretly praying for your collapse.
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