Following is a piece I posted on BFD in response to Ed Morrison bringing the Boston Civic Engagement Summit to my attention last week.  (the links wouldn’t copy live to BFD when I pasted in my Word doc. there, so I duplicate the post here with live links)

The plain, simple minded, Dirty Dealer is unable to cut through the glib assurances of Town Engineer Ciuni and others who continue to ambiguously suggest that  the Cuyahoga County owned University Square Plaza (mall) 5 deck parking garage is structurally safe .  The photo above shows a typical double T precast garage installation at another parking structure.  Notice that there is much more depth of the vertical leg of the T resting on the horizontal (beam is concrete in the above photo but steel in USq.) beam than in the USq. garage lower photo here in an earlier article on Realneo.

Boston Now, a free daily started last spring in Boston, Massachusetts, and reported about then on Realneo,  has closed up and pulled it's servers off line.  You can't even read about their closing on their web site.  Instead you can find the news here in Google's cache

Does this night shot of Good Year's noisy, fuel-sucking,   electronically advertizing Blimp pounding down  commercial money messages over the Indian's commercial electronical big screen stadium filled with it's captive electronically numb audience constitute GRAFITTI? 

We all know that North East Ohio and Cleveland have to shrink, to get smaller, to dissassemble what we've built.   We have been disassembling for about 50 years now  but we don't want to acknowledge the difficult task we have to do.  

No, we don't quite need to close Cleveland, but we have to become professional shrinkers. 

Get those extra houses out of sight, get those extra blocks where houses used to stand put into forest, tear down those vacant factories,  get rid of those extra cops, extra firemen, extra councilors - and on and on...and the extra banks…

So it is encouraging to see that one of our oldest and wisest corporate neighbors has chosen to really commit to the cause:   SHRINK NEO!

National City has nothing against sub-prime loans.   They brokered them, they sold them, they own them, they hold them,

Showing true grit National City held on to about 25 billion dollars of sub-prime paper.   That's the type of sincerity that I appreciate.   Putting your money where your mouth is.

On Monday, April 15, 2008 when I went to open my SBC Global.net webmail account, I got a message that said that “I had stumbled on a temporary yahoo problem”, and that I should be patient and check back later to see if the problem had been cleared. 

"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,

There’s a warren of artistic eclecticism on the West Side of Cleveland off Detroit in the American Greetings factory.   

 

Secor’s Nursery in Perry, Ohio specializes in bare root fruit trees.  Bare root means what it says:  the trees are propagated by digging them out of the soil in the fall after they have reached dormancy.   The saplings are brought into an unheated barn and stacking upright in rows according to their species.  The roots of all the saplings are covered with moist sawdust.  And then the lights are turned out and the barn shut up. 

 

Titled "Arachne Weaves Her Web", this imaginative low tech installation by Debbie Apple-Presser is testing viewers.  

Back on  July 13, 2007 Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones announced that her office had obtained a1.1 million dollar federal earmark for a “wind spire”.   The “wind spire” is a  scheme ( often also touted – here in an interview on Green City Blue Lake - by Mark Cironi)  pursued by CSU professor Dr. Majid Rashidi   as a Bernoulli Principle “trick”.

  Robert Carrick,  County Purchasing Department, holds a half million dollar bank check which was submitted as part of the K & D Group bid package.  The half million dollars are non-refundable to K & D should they not complete the purchase of the Ameritrust property.  There are two 6 month periods during which K & D can close the deal with the County.  But if K & D fails to close during the next 12 months, they forfeit the $500,000.00 to the County. 

 

Engineering continues to out do itself - with computers and finite element analysis  - creating "thrill" roller  coaster rides which test our faith in physics.   I love the physics – and the curvilinear ride tracks – and they say riding the coasters is safer than driving…but geezzz, why do it?  

Almost every time I post to Realneo I  find I am asking myself the same question  (which comes from a sense of urgency):   is this post what I should be spending my time on?  is the subject a priority?

Cuyahoga County owns the University Square Plaza parking garage.  The garage is managed/operated by Inland Management.  Many of the concrete pre-stressed double T planks have failure cracks both at their ends, and all the RAMP planks, like the ones in the photo above, have cracks longitudinally along the outer unsupported edges of the T.  Notice how the gray-colored caulking between the edges of adjacent double T planks is stretched and webbed.  That means the edges of the planks are moving away from one another.  They are moving away from one another because the edges are sagging down.  You can feel the sag as a bumpety bump when you drive up or down the ramp. 

  On his  blog (Callahan’s Cleveland Diary), and at public meetings,  Bill Callahan presents facts.   He digs out the facts from the internet, from the news, and from public records.   He keeps it up week in and week out.    He posts originally researched content day after day.

 

In Ohio the sap is running.

So Richard Benjamin stokes 'er up - got to get that sap to 218 degrees F! 

At the City Club recently, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson-Jones suggested that the first priority for the County goverment was "economic development", and that's why the Commissioners and Fred the Fixer Nance were working so hard to be able to pay a wealthy developer from out of state to build and operate a public-private pirate ship here in Cuyahoga.

Of all the possible investments that are needed here in Northeast Ohio’s Cuyahoga County and in Cleveland,  the County Commissioners have chosen – in secret meetings and without the vote of the public – to spend over $900,000,000.00 (even more for a possible 60 year contract) in a scheme whose only acknowledged public benefit is amorphous “trickle down”.   

 

I visited the Arcelor Mittal Cleveland Works this afternoon to take a a look.   The sun came out making the scene fairly photogenic.  I began to take photos from the public way.

 

If you owned a $40,500.000.00 parking structure,  would these images concern you?  (by the way, if you live in Cuyahoga County, you DO OWN IT)

 What is it about Buddhists that encourages their intense involvement in politics?  

University Square was described in this 2003 International Council of Shopping Centers.
Two weeks ago I visited the mall and drove up to the top floor (5th) of the mall’s parking structure.    There is a stop sign on the entry ramp at the 4rd floor, and when I looked right, into the 4rd floor, I was surprised to see a section of shoring set up under the end of one of  the double T beams (the upper surface of the double T beams comprised the 5th floor parking deck).  I walked in and did my shopping and then had to leave in a hurry to make an appointment.   No time to investigate. 

  With all the public noise she's been exposed to  in NEO,  and with all the Dirty Dealer's un-ethical public noise about what was private, to see her today with her smile was an affirmation.

I attended the KennedyConCenter meeting this morning - held before the scheduled meeting of the Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners.  

  

Typical for the Dirty Dealer, they make a joke out of accounting for the public’s money on the March 11, 2008 editorial page. 

On April 3, 2007 there was a discussion about the proposal for a new Cuyahoga County Administration building here on Realneo.   Around that time I had read a letter written by Tim Ferris which suggested that the present County Administration building was originally built to be expanded upward.   Today I add the photo above to confirm that the building was intended to be continued upward – you can see the columns projecting right up through the roof on both the main Administration Building and the Annex building.  I’ll bet if you removed the copper flashing from the top of the columns, there would be a plate with bolt holes already in it, ready to accept the steel columns for floors 5, 6, 7, etc.  

 One of the few organizations in   Cleveland that seems to have truly meritorious objectives is The Cleveland Council on World Affairs.     

The water main break on March 6, 2008 in Cleveland’ Public Square is going to wring a lot of money out of a lot of water rate payers and other taxpayers and businesses in the downtown area.  I’ll bet the cost is over a million dollars by the time all the public and private impacts are assessed.

While snow piles up outside in NEO,  in Hawaii the anthurium are brilliant, waxy red.   A  friend just arrived Friday from Hawaii and hand carried these spectacular delicate stems.   What a thoughtful present.