Posts Tagged foundation
Public Square Low On Cleveland Need List
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, Politicians on December 20, 2009
December 20, 2009… Steve Litt is back on the front page today promoting another supposed uplift for Cleveland’s despondent condition: this time another redo of Public Square.
He writes: “City planners have dreamed for decades of doing something to resolve the conflict between vehicles and people in the square and to restore the sense of the town commons implied in the 1796 street plan that gave downtown its form.”
I wish he’d name the city planners doing this dreaming.
I hate to break it to Steve but Cleveland even by 1815 was a village and hit a population of 500 only by 1824. Maybe these people, who likely knew most of each other, (and even lived in the city) could amble about a public square and find out the latest news and gossip. A true community public square. What Sunday fun!
But now we have the Plain Dealer, television news and something called an internet. They give us the gossip, insipid as it may be.
Really this another downtown plan by the same downtown interests as always. Their real interest is keeping certain people off the public square: Homeless people. Young black. Panhandlers. You know those people who interfere with the business of downtown interests.
It’s being pushed by two front groups of the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) – Parkworks and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance.
The money – always available for these Establishment projects – comes from The Alliance and the John P. Murphy Foundation. Both occupy space at Tower City whose front door is Public Square. The Murphy Foundation has a fair market value of $40 million.
One proposal suggests a 76 feet mound of dirt. Now isn’t that clever planning. That must have taken imagination.
This is another Greater Cleveland Partnership project for the rest of us to finance. The Greater Cleveland Partnership, if you don’t know, is the representative of the top corporate people in Cleveland. It doesn’t represent the interests of ordinary people. GCP gets something as the Murphy Foundation interested and we’re off to the races.
All the usual suspects have usual trite things to say. City Planning director Bob Brown finds the ideas “fascinating.” Joe Cimperman Public Square is “pretty thrilled.” Chris Roynane is “excited.”
Is there anyone here who thinks for him or herself? Does everyone have to eat the pie served by GCP and its boosters?
In the mid 1980s we spent some $12 million to spruce up Public Square and I’m sure more than that (though I can’t find a figure) in 1975 when the wife of PD publisher and Editor Tom Vail, Iris Vail, headed up a beautification of Public Square.
Unfortunately, Litt, who has the PD morgue files, doesn’t tell us just how much we’ve already spent in “bettering” Public Square.
With all the problems that Cleveland has why is the PD pushing once again – at the behest of downtown interests, not the least the Tower City gang whose front door is Public Square – for another redo of Public Square.
Can’t they pay attention to the real problems of real Cleveland people? And then they grouse about “leadership” as they march in lock step to every task presented by the downtown business people.
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
The grandiose talk of turning Public Square into a Chicago Millennium Park is so farfetched as to be laughable. Litt should be ashamed of himself for putting this as even a thought. Chicago’s park cost $475 million, some $270 million from the city’s revenues.
Have you noticed that the city is supposed to be so hard-up that it has to charge $8 a month to collect people’s garbage?
I’ve walked across Public Square many times. I’ve been to demonstrations on Public Square. It can serve its purpose as it is. Let’s not get carried away with all this feel good stuff that’s being sold by the same old people.
“The project shows that a critical mass of leaders in Cleveland now believes that landscape design is essential to the success of the city and not a matter of added shrubs when a major building project or highway is finished,” Litt writes.
Please.
We Pay Lucky Lerner… The Billionaire Sport
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development on September 2, 2009
September 2, 2009… In 2009, so far, we taxpayers of Cuyahoga County have given $8.8 million to benefit the Billionaire Lucky Lerner family.
Since August 2005, you have generously paid in those sales tax pennies on alcoholic drinks $56.4 million to aid the Lucky Lerners. How lucky some people are. Wonder how that happens.
Actually, you can’t blame anyone but yourselves. You voted for it.
When Cuyahoga taxpayers voted to extend the Gateway sin taxes another 10 years it resulted tens in millions of dollars going for the Lerner family.
Why the family? Because the Lerners, now headed by Randy Lerner, control the Browns Stadium for paltry $250,000 a year rent. The impoverished City of Cleveland actually pays way more than that for property taxes on just the land. Just the land because former Mayor Michael White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan saw to it that sports stadiums pay no property taxes. Tax exempt. Forever, says the law.
Lucky Lerner pays no property taxes on Browns Stadium, which sits empty almost every day of the year. Maybe nine or ten days there are paying fans – paying to Lucky Lerner, of course.
The Browns also run a charity called Cleveland Browns Foundation.
I find it almost unbelievable that the charity makes the statement that an “officer receives compensation” from the Foundation. It names Randolph Lerner. It doesn’t give much of that old transparency that everyone seems to believe would be helpful with credibility. It gives no amount of compensation or any reason for the compensation. So we don’t know how much the Lucky Lerner takes or, indeed, gives if he does.
For a link to the foundation’s IRS documents see: http://www2.guidestar.org/ReportNonProfit.aspx?ein=34-1885593&Mode=NonGx&lid=1165092&dl=True
The documents of the charity also note that “During the year, the Cleveland Browns Foundation may have received services and/or extension of credit from taxable organizations with which the officers, directors or trustees were affiliated. All such transactions were performed at arms length and did not result in any impermissible benefit.” Do we trust them?
We have to that the Browns word for it because it is not further explained.
The Browns foundation states that “the primary purpose of the Cleveland Browns Foundation is to help meet the needs of the disadvantaged youth and inner-city youth in the northeast Ohio area from childhood through teenage years. The Foundation’s goal is to attempt to address the social, cultural, financial and other problems faced by disadvantaged youth and try to cure or minimize such problems before the problems occur.”
A noble cause, indeed.
It always makes me wonder then how one of its largest, if not its largest, donations for a number of years is $100,000 annually to the Hero Fund for the “annual support of the families of police officers and fire fighters who died during the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.”
Also a noble cause but one that has many other contributors.
Why take from the needy children of Northeast Ohio for this?
And does Lucky Lerner make it appear that this is his contribution to this fund?
Lucky (Randy) Lerner is worth $1.5 billion as of 2008. He was chairman of MBNA, the credit card company which was bought by Bank of America for $35 billion. He has a penthouse “in what many consider to be New York’s most prestigious Park Avenue address. The New York Observer … pegged Mr. Lerner as the buyer of the $27.5 million apartment, which is at 740 Park Avenue and was once owned by the philanthropist Enid A. Haupt.”
So I can see why Lucky Lerner would want to contribute to the New York Fund at $100,000 a year, especially since if it comes not from his pocket but from the pockets of Northeast Ohio kids.
By the way, the fact that the Browns Stadium doesn’t pay property taxes on its structure means also that it takes tens of millions of tax dollars from the Cleveland school children while the Browns play out their lease at the lakefront.
How UNLUCKY some people are.