Posts Tagged Mayor White
It’s Fair Taxes for Honest City Revenue, Stupid
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, Media, People, Politicians on November 12, 2009
November 12, 2009… I haven’t read the 300-page-plus consulting report on management and efficiency of Cleveland government and I probably won’t. I’ll leave it to others. I know it won’t touch the one revenue source that Cleveland should tap if it had any concern for its citizens. It is out of the question. Won’t happen.
The so-called city income tax – the city’s largest revenue source by far – is really a payroll tax. It’s a tax on your wage income. It’s a regressive tax that takes from the first dollar someone earns. It’s a tax that hits people so poor that they don’t pay federal income taxes but must pay this tax. The feds at least tax somewhat progressively though the rich still get away with tax robbery.
If we really wanted a fair tax the so-called city income tax would be progressive. In other words, the guy who makes $150 a week would pay far less proportionally than the guy who makes $150 or $500 a day, or more.
It’s an obvious source of more revenue for cities. But it’s ignored. Why? Because wealthy people decide who gets taxed and by how much.
It’s legal theft calculatedly devised by professional hired thugs. Sometimes called lawyers or legislators.
Cleveland residents pay 2 percent on their earnings. If they work outside Cleveland and pay in the work community they may reduce the Cleveland tax by one-half, up to 1 percent. So, in other words, if they work in another city aside Cleveland they pay the 2 percent to the work community but get a half off Cleveland’s 2 percent.
So they pay 3 percent total. Someone who makes a lousy $10,000 has to fork over $300 to the city. That’s a paycheck and a half a week. A lot of money to a low income working stiff.
That’s a lot of money right off the top. No deductions. You pay on dollar number one. The city doesn’t care if you have heavy medical bills or other hefty expenses. Pay up. Now. In fact, before you take your pay home.
So it’s obvious if local government wants to raise revenue it should not go to unnecessary fees – increased sales taxes, catching people on minor traffic infraction and charging $100. THEY SHOULD GO WHERE THE MONEY IS. But they can’t seem to find the path.
Oh, that would be horrible, wouldn’t it? Taxing people with money. Outrageous.
- When the County Commissioners – Tim Hagan, Jimmy Dimora and Peter Lawson Jones (who didn’t vote for it but has gone along, as usual, for the ride) – wanted to raise big money for a medical mart and convention center, they didn’t go where the big money people live, but went to the small money people. They increased the most regressive of taxes – a one-quarter percent sales tax hike. It has raised $74 million as of last month.
It hits the little people hardest. Another quarter-percent to someone making $100,000, or $400,000 as Joe Roman at Greater Cleveland Partnership does, means nothing to them. But the pennies to someone trying to get by, that can add up to pain. Sometimes more pain than they can take.
- When Cuyahoga County, led by Hagan the Great White Liberal, wanted to raise funds for Gateway it didn’t go to those who HAVE money but to more sales taxes, so-called sin taxes on beer, cigarettes, wine and alcohol. And most heavily on cigarettes and beer. Plus, they charge sales tax on the sin tax!
- When the city wanted to build Browns Stadium, Mayor White, the African-American liberal, came up with an 8 percent parking tax, added 2 percent admission tax, increased the tax on car rentals, and best of all, added a 10-year extension of the sin taxes ($58 million collected as of last month).
This is FAR greater a mugging than anything stolen by the political thieves now being pursued by the FBI. I wish they could go after the legal thievery. That’s where the real money is.
But it passes without even a hint that a robbery is in progress.
In fact, The Plain Dealer promotes and propagandizes for these taxes without a hesitation or demands for an examination of other ways to pay for these projects. Unfortunately, the Pee Dee is the only major source of information for the public. That’s why it is so central to the ills we see.
So the public is essentially in the dark.
As an example, I wrote in 1995 when Council addressed the football stadium taxes, “The day council debated this issue for seven plus hours NOT ONE SINGLE MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC was present in the room.”
It’s not the first time. We have so little real citizenship here that it is no wonder that government is so bad.
But as usual the people who feed off government were much in attendance. I wrote: “The lineup was impressive. Tony Garofoli of Climaco, Climaco, Seminatore, Leftkowitz, told council what a good deal the legislation was. Garofoli, in this scheme, is the best representative for the city. After all, he had negotiated the Gateway leases at the stadium and the arena, both sweetheart deals for the team owners, and he had negotiated the sweetheart lease for Figgie (Chagrin Highlands), now in court… He’s got the perfect record of selling the citizen interests out.”
Who else was there?
“There was Joe Roman, executive director of Cleveland Tomorrow (now Greater Cleveland Partnership), the tail that wags city government. (He) had an entourage of professionals, including Bob Dykes, a political researcher and pollsters popular at city hall; Andy Juniewicz of Wm. Silverman, politically popular public relations firm, and testifying to what a good deal the city had before it was CT member and member of the mayor’s task force, Paul Carleton, managing director of Carleton, McCreary, Holmes, another investment firm.
“Tim Offtermatt, former chief financial officer at Gateway (certainly a qualification for another smelly deal), now with A. G. Edwards, a broker and public finance firm, was there, along with Alan Baucco of the firm. The financial data presented was worked up by Paul Komlosi of McDonald & Co., so you can expect that firm to be part of the deal.
“All the pros were there for their bite of the apple.”
So the average guy doesn’t stand a chance here or in Washington, D. C. because he’s absent in the decision-making.
But there should be no crisis in government funding – here or nationally – if only the rich are taxed fairly.
Can we make that happen? Just a little bit. A city income tax with a graduated tax to slightly even the score.
It would take Ms. Susan Goldberg and Mr. Terry Egger to use their front page headlines in the manner of selling Issue 6 to do that. Can we expect it? Tell me.
Major Institutional Failures Helped the Imperial Avenue Murderer
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, People, Politicians on November 11, 2009
November 11, 2009… Were there failures or absence of institutional and community structure that helped make the mass murderer of Imperial Avenue get away with the killings so easily? Yes, there were.
People ask the question, why didn’t someone notice what was happening? How did this happen right under the noses of the police and the community? Where’s the “community?” What’s the matter with people?
Cleveland neighborhoods have been deprived of many things but likely most destructive has been the purposeful neglect and sometime suppression of community activism over a long period of time here. It has worked its destructive way.
You can’t have an aware, alive community that’s a repressed community.
Cleveland in the 1970s enjoyed strong community activism. There were many problems. But there was some fight in people! Neighborhoods formed their own power bases and community development corporations (CDCs) received federal and foundation funding for neighborhood improvement. People were feeling their power.
But there were flaws that eventually led to failure. It didn’t have to be.
Cleveland is a town with heavy upper institutional power. Lots of wealth. It rules. Not timidly at times.
Here’s Diana Tittle’s description in her book on the Cleveland Foundation called “Rebuilding Cleveland – The Cleveland Foundation and its Evolving Urban Strategy” that I believe has relevance to today’s situation:
“In funding community development corporations the Foundation reforged a precious link with the city’s community development department. But the narrow gauge of the Foundation’s interests exposed it to criticism behind certain doors. Because the CDCs concentrated primarily on rehabilitating commercial strips with new benches, street lighting, plantings and the like, the Foundation’s neighborhood program took on a decided bricks-and-mortar cast – much to the dismay of Harry Fagan, the architect of a burgeoning if loose confederation of neighborhood advocacy groups, whose activities the Cleveland Foundation seldom funded.”
Neighborhood groups in the 1970s got some funding and support, especially from the Catholic Commission. But it didn’t last, as we shall see.
The Cleveland Foundation and its sister the Gund Foundation could never countenance strong, demanding neighborhood groups. How could they accomplish their other desires – new stadiums, theaters, office buildings and other downtown amenities – AND neighborhood renewal? Attention strayed. There’s just so much to go around.
Tittle continued, “Executive director of the Commission on Catholic Community Action, the social-action arm of the Cleveland diocese, Fagan found the Foundation’s neighborhood program shortsighted and incomplete. ‘Any strategy that develops physical structure without developing people will fail,’ he believed. ‘The Foundation never understood that you’ve got to help moms and dads take responsibility for their neighborhoods.’
Help moms and dads take responsibility for their neighborhoods.
How important was that statement. Does not that say something about the failure of so many neighborhoods in Cleveland and elsewhere today? It does to me.
I think it has relevance to the Imperial Avenue killings.
Too much people power, however, makes civic and political leaders nervous. It can get out of hand.
The advocacy groups spurred by the Catholic Commission put pressure on officials. Sometimes too much.
A couple of incidents probably helped make neighborhood activism unacceptable to city leaders.
Mayor Dennis Kucinich, a progressive, got a taste he didn’t appreciate. It was the late 1970s.
During the Kucinich administration a Broadway neighborhood group went to the home of the mayor’s community development director making demands for a fire station. Instead of attention the director called the police. Later, a neighborhood organization dumped garbage in the office of Kucinich’s service director. Then some 500 senior citizens showed up at city hall demanding a meeting with Mayor Kucinich about safety. He ducked out of city hall but Council President George Forbes, his foe, walked out of his office to meet with the seniors.
The neighborhood groups were beginning to feel their power. They overplayed their hand.
In the early 1980s, neighborhood groups demanded $1 billion be set aside by SOHIO (Standard Oil of Ohio at the time) for conservation subsidies for low and moderate income people. At the time, SOHIO was enjoying mounds of cash flow from its Alaskan oil interests. It had more money than it knew what to do with. Literally.
But this was outrageous. A grab for an oil company’s revenue. Unheard of.
Then the unforgivable happened. It is described richly by Randy Cunningham in, “Democratizing Cleveland – the Rise and Fall of Community Organizing,” You can find my review of the book here:
The attack on the exclusive Chagrin Valley Hunt Club in Gates Mills. Cunningham writes:
“What occurred when the 600 demonstrators landed at the Hunt Club was not just a political event. It was a collision of worlds that barely recognized each other’s existence, and that never came into contact. That afternoon at the Hunt Club, the club chairman’s Saturday lunch was in progress. The veranda was full of well dressed diners while on the grounds members in English outfits were tending their mounts, gather for the afternoon’s equestrian events. (The target was SOHIO’s top executive Alton Whitehouse, who wasn’t there.)
“Pouring out of the buses were organizers in jeans and working-class and poor people in polyester. The Hunt Club never before seen so many African-Americans or so many who were not among those the English call ‘the great and the good.’ As Marlene Weslian of CBBB (one of the organizing units) remembered, ‘How dramatic to see the difference in how people live…. It was so clear who had it and who didn’t when you went there.”
The elite didn’t like it. Funding dried up.
The head of the SOHIO public relations staff said, “That was the last straw that really caused us to take steps to be sure that the usual funding organizations in the city knew what these groups were doing. Whether they were defunded, I don’t know.” The money dried up.
Here’s another example I’ve written about before. I’ll be brief.
A bonafide citizen’s organization fighting for better schools (what’s would be more important in Cleveland?) couldn’t get Mayor Michael White’s attention. So they went to his future wife’s Winton Place apartment to seek the mayor’s attention. Once again, it was the hoi polloi visiting the high on the hog.
They got White’s attention but the results were bad.
At the time the organization, Education/Safety Organizing Project (ESOP), a truly low income group, was on line for some foundation grants.
The Cleveland Foundation dropped them. $85,000 gone. The Gund Foundation dropped them. Another $85,000 gone. The Joyce Foundation of Chicago, working with the other two, dropped them. $160,000. Not a cent.
Cost of the little demonstration at the doorstep of the mayor’s girlfriend: $320,000.
“That’s severe punishment for a group whose parents are not only interested in the Cleveland schools but see their children being destroyed by the schools and the conditions around them.
“If anyone has the right to radical action, these parents do,” I wrote at the time.
Couldn’t the Cleveland and Gund Foundations handle it differently?
Couldn’t the non-profits try another approach? Cutting community activism has backfired on all.
Then, too, the CDCs became more as little housing developers than neighborhood-focused problem solvers. More creatures of City Council members. Not the teachers Fagan pictured to get moms and dads to take responsibility for each other and the neighborhood. Community became a victim.
Neighborhoods have fallen apart. They left no real glue of community to hold them together.
Cunningham quotes a former neighborhood staff member: “I don’t think they understand or see the need to empower people. Their goals are just mainly to develop real estate. They don’t do any other type of organizing.”
The civic and political leaders got more silent neighborhood reaction. They un-powered the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods got more apathetic. Apathy trumped controversy. Apparently, the exchange suited Cleveland’s leadership.
So the eyes and ears to watch over neighborhoods that would be encouraged by organized citizens – not there anymore.
It hasn’t been a good exchange for neighborhoods.
Eleven women may have paid the ultimate price for the comfort of civic and political leadership.
Neighborhoods continue without street leaders. That was too uncomfortable for some. The city continues its steep decline.
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