Mayor Who Said Ice Fishing Leads to Prostitution Resigns

Craig Shubert, the now-former mayor of Hudson, Ohio, resigned on Monday after saying that ice fishing could lead to increased prostitution.

Officials in a Feb. 8 City Council meeting were discussing requests to ice fish on Hudson Springs Lake, and whether opening up the lake to fishing could result in injuries on the ice that would overburden paramedics, firefighters and police, according to Cleveland.com.

This, apparently, led Shubert’s train of thought down a different track. “If you open this up to ice fishing, while on the surface it sounds good, then what happens next year?” Shubert wondered aloud. “Does someone come back and say, ‘I want an ice shanty on Hudson Springs Park for X amount of time?’ And then if you then allow ice fishing with shanties, then that leads to another problem: prostitution. And now you’ve got the police chief and the police department involved.” 

Other people in the meeting laughed nervously; the guy sitting next to him looked stunned. Following the meeting, news outlets around the country covered this absurd comment with incredulity.

"My comments at Tuesday’s workshop were made out of concern for our community; what could become of unintended consequences of new legislation, based on my prior television news reporting experience," Shubert wrote in a statement announcing his resignation. "My attempt to inject a bit of dry humor to make a point about this, in the midst of a cold, snowy February, was grossly misunderstood.”

If you didn’t know anything about Shubert before hearing this, it would be easy to give him the benefit of the doubt: It does seem like this was a metaphor about slippery slopes that got away from him while the words were leaving his mouth. But the former mayor’s statements made headlines previously in 2021, when he demanded that every school board member resign, accusing them of disseminating child pornography in a classroom. Shubert had claimed that he’d gotten complaints from the community about schools assigning a book of writing prompts, 642 Things to Write About, for high schoolers earning college credit through the class. 

He went to a school board meeting for the first time ever following those alleged complaints, accusing teachers of grooming and declaring, “It has come to my attention that your educators are distributing essentially what is child pornography in the classroom.”

An investigation by Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh found this not only to be false, but the reason school officials were severely harassed and threatened. “The reckless conduct by Hudson’s mayor resulted in threats, fear, and hate-filled words from around the country,” Walsh said. 

In the last few months, school board meetings have become The Place to spout your most unhinged opinions at officials, about everything from Covid-19 restrictions to books that parents personally find too historically accurate for their kids to handle. Most recently, there’s been a push to ban (and even literally burn) books because they’re “pornographic,” using the word pornography to mean anything subjectively obscene or indecent. 

At least people laughed at Shubert’s ice-fishing non sequitur; with a different audience, they might just as easily have nodded in agreement.