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Great thoughts from Norm. Make sure you click thru for his excellent pics too:

Until I started brainstorming about local foods with City Fresh’s Maurice Small, I never thought about the industry of food, and how much more sense it makes to grow and produce food for a community within the community - food for a home within a home. Considering taxpayers pay government to maintain huge amounts of “public space”, why is that space usually planted at our expense with grass and trees that do not produce food, when it would be less costly to make these lands farms, creating industry for individuals and feeding them in the process? It seems to make such sense. But then I stumble upon something that makes even less sense than not growing food, which is seeing fruit ripening on a tree in a place where people can’t afford to eat well, and people not reaching up to pick the free food and eat it… seeing hundreds of good apples rotting on the ground. That shows us how far we have strayed from a sensible society, and how much we need to change. Everything…

Qustion of the Day: Why isn’t there food growing everywhere, and why don’t we eat it when there is? | REALNEO for all

From John Ettorre’s blog:

If you’re a Northeast Ohioan, I hope you’ll consider taking in at least part of the COSE small business conference in three weeks. By all accounts, it gets bigger and better each year. This year, I’ll be on a panel talking about blogging and Web 2.0, and how people in business and the arts can better harness the tools to connect to more and better opportunities. But I’ll let my friend Roxanne, who I mentioned briefly last year, tell you first-hand about its benefits. In this brief video, she talks about the energy boost she got from attending last year’s conference…

Please click thru to WWW for the links. I’ll be there moderating the panel.

Working With Words

• Robert Reich's Blog: The New Deal, and the Era of Angry Populism "The Era of Angry Populism has only just begun"

Adding capacity in a mature, slow growth market has consequences…

The SEA estimates that convention center expenses will outstrip revenues by $3.8 million next year, in part because of charging below market rents to attract conventions and out-of-town tourists. The SEA is getting $1.7 million a year from state slots revenue to help cover the deficit, but Ms. Conturo has said that won’t be enough to eliminate it.

Convention center looking for cuts as deficit looms

Forecast: Business travel is decreasing…increased use of teleconferencing and tighter budgets. Read more.

In Travel and Leisure Mag:

Then: Immigrants from Croatia and Slovenia came here in the 1880’s to work in the railroad yards of this shoreside neighborhood in the far northeast corner of the city.

Now: A neighborhood development group started to stimulate growth in 2004 by buying buildings and leasing them at low cost to boho businesses such as Music Saves, an indie-rock record store selling original vinyl as well as tickets to rock shows at the next-door Beachland Ballroom…

Thanks to the Franchise King for tweeting.

America’s Best Secret Neighborhoods | Travel + Leisure

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I only need 2 Prius and probably not that many solar panels:

Sure, the $66,666.67 per household may not be enough to buy a Tesla Roadster, but this money could go a long ways towards stimulating a green economy. If $700 billion was distributed to every US household for green technologies, each household could buy:

* 75 solar panels that produce 200 watts each
* 3 Toyota Prius
* 25 wind turbines that produce 3.4 kWh per day

Well, you get the idea. Rather than dividing the money up among households, the investment could turn our economy green on a larger scale…

Imagine a $700 Billion Bailout for the Environment : Red, Green, and Blue

• The green economy could create "tens of millions" of new jobs - Green Daily
• My Future Past: Local food: Fresh Fork Market

I love listening to Ned Hill. What makes him enjoyable is the verbal wave that he sometimes surfs. Take this quote from Jay Miller’s article in Crain’s:

“Edward W. Hill, interim dean of the Levin College, whose teaching specialty is economic development, called the plan, “the first time any (state) department of development in the country is being held accountable for something outside of deal flow.”

That would be news to economic developers in Colorado, Oregon, Indiana, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota, Maine, Wisconsin and California.

Ohio now joins a growing crowd of states embracing innovation and metrics to measure progress. See the national Governors Association publication on state policies to promote clusters. (Statewide Innovation Indexes trace their history back to Massachusetts which launched an index in 1997.)

Ohio’s innovation hub initiative follows similar statewide strategies in Pennsylvania (Keystone Innovation Zones), Michigan (Smart Zones) and Washington (Innovation Zones).

Ohio’s got a good strategy, but we are late to the game. Execution represents the critical next step. It’s important to focus on the heavy lifting ahead and maintaining focus.

Lee Fischer has done a good job barnstorming the state and raising awareness of the stakes. See for example this article from Mansfield or this article from Youngstown.

We face some really tricky challenges.

Take the important area of workforce development. Ohio operates one of the most dysfunctional public workforce systems in the country. While the Ohio Skills Bank looks very promising, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the details.

In another important area, Ohio has an antiquated public sector. This “overhead” is costly and places persistent upward pressure on tax rates. Addressing this challenge with government innovation will be tough, as the McKernan-Shepherd Commission is learning in Indiana.

The editors at the Chillicothe Gazette got it right:

The Strickland administration has given Ohio a workable, sustainable plan for its economic future. The turnaround comes in how well they live up to that plan’s details.

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Cleveland missed deadline to join fight on city residency laws

Losing this case will strike at some key neighborhoods in the city.

Just learned the University of Oklahoma and Purdue University have agreed on a joint certificate in Open Source Economic Development. We start next spring.

(The University of Oklahoma houses the Economic Development Institute, where economic development professionals get their training.)

We should be able to offer this training in the region through a partnership between Purdue and the University of Akron. We are working on the details.

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