Posts Tagged Cleveland
Subsidies Cause More Problems Than Cure
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, Media on March 7th, 2010
March 7, 2010… The Plain Dealer reported Sunday about the troubled downtown commercial properties. Empty and emptying buildings. It’s a shame.
“Turmoil in commercial real estate,” says the article by Michelle Jarboe here:
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/03/commercial_real_estates_challe.html
Yet The Plain Dealer – with business and political leaders – has been pushing for more and more subsidies to build new. That’s just one of the major reasons there are so many empty buildings. We are helping to create excess.
You can’t build new when you can’t even keep the old relevant.
At the same time retail and commercial properties go into foreclosure Cleveland political leaders are using hefty subsidies to produce more retail and commercial. Why?
You can’t have everything you want. Isn’t that what we teach children?
Why then isn’t that good advice for developers.
As business declines downtown the answer we seem to get is to open new property for development. As buildings are emptying, we are providing very heavy – in the multi-tens of millions of dollars – to the Wolstein project on the East Bank of the Flats.
The Port Authority wants to open land on the lakefront to the same kind of development. Now there’s a push to get rid of Burke Lakefront Airport and open it for development.
Cleveland, in a dirty deal, opened more than 500 valuable acres in Chagrin Highlands two decades ago. Now, Eaton Corporation will move out of downtown to Chagrin Highlands. So will University Hospitals with a new hospital facility. And other business have been attracted to the open spaces at the Highlands, city owned land that never should have been opened to greedy speculators. But then Mayor George Voinovich, tied to the project via his old Calfee-Halter law firm, and then Council President George Forbes, tied to Dick Jacobs, worked a deal that has hurt the city and will continue to damage downtown.
You can’t have it all. We seem to be urged by major institutions to grab more, however.
The Port, of course, has gotten itself into trouble with its attempt to serve more as an economic development body than a port. Its desire to open up land on Lake Erie is self-defeating. Developers, led by John Carney of the Port board, push this direction.
The Plain Dealer has been doing a good job of being critical of the Port Board and how it does business. However, the PD has been a chief cheerleader in the past. It helped push the Port into being a financial conduit, starting with its financing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Again, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Corporate and civic leaders (aren’t they same?) and The Plain Dealer have pushed and applauded the politicians into thinking they are developers. More and more various levels of governments are acting as economic development entities. As if they know what they’re doing. They don’t. They do what developers tell them.
For years and years the politicians have been using public funds to subsidize almost any project that came to them for handouts. I don’t believe they know what they are doing. They obviously don’t care since it helps them, sometimes with campaign dough, sometimes with kudos and pressure from the totally undiscriminating news media, and sometimes, I’m convinced, via the greased hands of corruption.
How do we stop it?
Citizens have to more and more tell public officials upfront that they dislike all this welfare to business.
Tax abatement and tax exemption have produced some development. However, it’s rather clear it also has damaged other business.
At the same time the public services that cities, counties and state should provide its citizens declines. Cleveland can’t even pave its roads. Not enough money. That has to change.
Here are some links with evidence of what I’m talking about:
Cleveland’s Real Corrupters
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, Media, Politicians on March 5th, 2010
March 5, 2010… The Cleveland Corporate Corrupters had a big meeting yesterday. They’re already deciding how to spend tens of millions of dollars we don’t have.
It’s an act of piracy seldom defined by the mass media. The media simply play it as “that’s the way things are done” apparently.
No other voices need be raised. The Plain Dealer, our major source of information, doesn’t have the imagination to even prompt dissent or an alternative view. It’s not in the mass media’s DNA.
One of the greatest needs in Cleveland is a new Public Square, according to these masters of the county’s universe. These people set our civic agenda for their selfish private needs. Never expect less.
The headline in the Plain Dealer says, “Business leaders see $100 million in new income.” So let’s grab it guys,” should have been the subtitle.
These plutocrats already have it spent. On things THEY decide WE need.
These same people – corporate leaders – have been setting the agenda in Cleveland forever. I’m familiar with what they have done since the mid 1960s. It’s always been shameful. And selfish. And largely mistaken. Just look at where we are.
It started with an urban renewal program that helped destroy much of the east side of Cleveland, forced a black migration, then white flight and promises never realized. They sent tens of thousands of people out of their homes without providing adequate replacement housing.
That’s why a federal urban affairs official told me, “Cleveland’s our Vietnam. We’d like to get out but we don’t know how.”
Our corporate and legal leaders – changed in name only over the years – have continued to set the agenda as THEY see it. Typically, they want welfare for themselves. The hell with the rest of you.
Some 500 of these vultures met under the auspices of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, a corporate front group that leads politicians around by their noses under the auspices of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, our chamber of commerce.
The latest theft derives from what they say will be an extra $100 million a year. THEY know how it should be used. The money, they say, will come from cutting Cuyahoga County’s budget by $50 million and adding another $50 million from casino revenue. Lick your fingers, guys.
The article appears in this morning’s Plain Dealer here:
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2010/03/business_leaders_see_potential.html
This is undiluted propaganda. The Plain Dealer doesn’t ask anyone to give a contrasting view of how such money – if it ever is realized, should be spent. Can’t expect the Pee Dee to report honestly of the duplicity of these business front organizations. They are one and the same on such issues.
What do they want? These takers.
Another renovation of Public Square. They never seem to get in right. So let’s do it again.
Put more retail and housing on the lakefront, they say. Great idea? Except you’re just shifting the business from one downtown spot to another. At public cost. And even as we are greatly subsidizing the same kind of development in the Flats.
Corporate leaders, according to this report, are “thinking boldly.” Who’s to prove that? Not the Plain Dealer. Thinking greedily would be more accurate. We won’t get that kind of truth from our morning paper.
There are many needs in our city and county. Needs that go unmet. Ordinary people’s needs.
Nothing is said, for example, about one of our great needs – public transit.
The Regional Transit Authority (RTA) keeps cutting services and thus losing business. Never hear the big shots cry about this. They have Mercedes. BMWs.
Two hundred million dollars is okay for the bus service up Euclid Avenue from Public Square to University Circle. This fits the corporate desire to bolster downtown and the Circle area. One wonders whether there is any validity to this. Isn’t it just another bus line? But more productive? More meaningful to those who use it?
But bus service for people who depend upon RTA to get to work, to the hospital, to doctors, to shop. Well, we have to cut that. Don’t have the money. Don’t have the resources. Can’t pay for it.
Little voices don’t get heard.
I’ve been pressed by people who say the RTA has eliminated the bus service on the No. 25 Madison Ave. line in Cleveland.
RTA, they say, reversed itself and nixed the elimination of the route into Lakewood. They see RTA bending to Lakewood Mayor Edward FitzGerald. He’s running for County executive and that, of course, could affect RTA in the future. Suspicious but with a hint of truth.
“How are these poor people going to get to the West Side Market and Lutheran Hospital without the No. 25 bus?” they ask. They also complain that RTA didn’t hold a public hearing on the Cleveland change.
RTA says that one of its rail stations is right across from the West Side Market. However, you’d have to be on a rail line to get there. Minor point.
The point here, however, is that corporate leaders appear privileged to decide. It’s as if there is no alternative way to decide. The community agenda is set by these high muckety mucks. Others don’t have a seat at the table.
So sit back and what you need will be decided by Joe Roman and the boys. Joe made $451,241 in pay and bennies in 2008. Nice work if you can get it. And he does.
Isn’t this the leadership that has put us in the dire straits that we find ourselves? Can’t we ever get rid of it?