I thought I'd share some reflections after just spending Cinco de Mayo facilitating dialogues around regional economic development in Akron, Ohio.  I, like so many other colleagues who have participated in various phases of the Voices and Choices process had my fair share of reservations and issues with various aspects of the two-year, multi-million dollar investment and experience.  While I found great value in working hard to facilitate regional dialogues with a healthy mix of participants representing diverse demographics, I learned firsthand how difficult it is to drive meaningful outcomes from such activity.  I, like so many others, was very candid about the many difficulties endured and faced during the process - perhaps the most prolific of which was a failure to have the mechanisms in place to capture the heightened energy and activation of the masses in an effective and timely manner to drive meaningful and positive outcomes.  A candid conversation I had today with Advance Northeast Ohio's communications director, Chris Thompson, completely validated my feelings, as he was in complete agreement on this point.  I laud Chris for such candor and really appreciated his astute comments. 

 

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)

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

Tonight I saw the hot new mockumentary The Green Chain at the film fest.   The best part is that we used our 'private screening' tickets from Pat and Dan Conway's gig tonight to get past the ticket taker then re-appropriated our access rights to see this mockumentary that got started around the same time slot.   To wrong the right... I offer up a nice plug:

Who:

Moebius Nature Center & Buckeye Sustainability Institute

What:

In living and working around University Circle, it occurs to me how stupid it is that there are literally five or six police forces operating within overlapping turfs... Cleveland, University Circle, Case, University Hospitals, and the Clinic each have significant police forces. In addition, Cuyahoga County has patrols in the area... all intersecting within a mile of each other... and you are probably as likely to get shot within a mile of that intersection as anywhere in America.

Dear Cleveland City Council Members: This is an urgent plea to exercise your right to cancel the 50 YEAR obligation by Cleveland Public Power to purchase 100MW of electricity from American Municipal Power’s proposed $3.4 billion power plant in Meigs County, OH.

When you don't have the money to keep the heat on, and it gets cold, the pipes freeze. 

Cleveland365.com (what persons/names/$ are behind this anyway?) is sponsoring what they call a 10,000 little ideas convo. 

 

Carl Pope is in Cleveland and on December 4, 2007 I heard him present his  (second to last of ten public presentations)   “mind of Cleveland” “bill board public art”  project at Cleveland State University’s (CSU) Levin College forum.

 

 I stopped and spoke with these two fellows to check on the current prices paid for scrap steel- a nickel a pound or $100.00 per ton. 

They were happy to converse, but weren't keen on being photographed up close. 

Each of their shopping baskets had, I would estimate, between 100lbs and 200lbs of rusty cast iron and steel - a 1 inch diameter steel rod about 3 feet long, a piece of angle iron, what looked like a plate that goes under the rail road rail and through which the RR spikes are hammered, etc.   These fellows had been gleaning the fields around the TriC area and were headed on Saturday to the scrap yard at E55th and 490.   

Christmas in Cleveland will be hard for many. 

But some have shelter, colored with red, white, and green. 

Cuyahoga County, Ohio, has been collecting a quarter percent more sales and use tax for almost 3 months now - since October 1, 2007.   Projected by Commissioners Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora at about one million per week, that extrapolates to about 11 million in the County coffers from the added sales tax.

I accompanied Cleveland City Councilman Zack Reed, (center with clip board above) a number of times as he collected signatures in order to allow a County wide referendum vote to determine if the voters would support such a tax.

Thanks to Crain’s for bringing this into the light. 

Tim Ferris wrote recently that his home on the West Side had appreciated about 2% per year over the 25 years he's been in it. 

MAKING THE BEST OF THE SITUATION:

Cleveland City Councilman Zack Reed, County Auditor Frank Russo , and Lakewood City Councilman Ryan Demro shake hands – after sales tax referendum petition efforts fail to obtain necessary 10% of Cuyahoga County registered voters’ signatures.

Fools rush in -  if you are for a sales tax to build a con center and kennedy mart - you honestly believe that this will trickle down and improve the NEO economy - then you should READ the resolutions (sales tax, use tax) passed by Cuyahoga County Commissioners Hagan and Dimora.  Look at the second line of either resolution.  "money goes into general fund".   There is no language in the resoluions that says that either the sales or use tax is for a  con center and kennedy mart.  This tax will go on for 20 years sucking in about a million a week.  Where will Hagan and Dimora be in 2008 when their terms expire?  Promises, Promises.  Printed in the Plain Dealer.

And Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, who voted "against" the tax is in fact complicit.  If he was really against the tax but for a con center (with support from hotel bed taxes as he said) Mr. Jones would have raised in the public hearings the fact that the resolutions were for money going into the general fund, not into a con center account.  Omitting to exercise this ringing argument puts Mr. Jones in a catagory of strong doubt about being "against" the tax.

So, if you REALLY want a concenter and kenmart you would do well to sign a referendum petition right away to help putitontheballot.com this spring.  Then you can vote the present resolutions down, and insist that the Commissioners introduce and pass   new resolutions which spell out specifically in the resolutions what the sales tax will be used for. 

But then again, maybe you were born yesterday. 

Ever wondered how a designer conceives a product? What the process involves? Top CIA graduates innovating products for corporations such as Chrysler, Hyundai, Hasbro and Kyocera will open the vault, displaying sketches, concept drawings, renderings and actual consumer products at the second-annual Design Values alumni exhibition at CIA’s FUTURE Center for Design and Technology Transfer, June 1—August 3, 2007.

 

I recently posted on realneo about a report I saw on CNN profiling Lucien Gambarota, an inventor in Hong Kong who has developed and begun manufacturing micro wind turbines - see http://realneo.org/Micro-Wind-Turbines. He is also working on technologies to capture energy from waves, and hybrids of wind and wave.

While not currently a powerhouse in Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Northeast Ohio is positioned to begin excelling with FOSS in some very strategic ways that may add great value to the regional economy. 

Because of FOSS, we may now bridge the digital divide more quickly and completely here than has any other large urban center in America, we may soon have the highest percentage of workforce properly educated for the new economy, and we may lead the world in some fields of application development and technology innovation with global, open standards, all if the region now embraces FOSS..

I received an informative email this afternoon from Richard McDougald Enty, Planning Team Leader, Programming & Planning Department, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, about some of their Transit Oriented Development initiatives and vision. It is very exciting to see this as an active subject for discussion and planning here. I am a strong supporter of Transit Oriented Development and consider it the core foundation on which we should rebuild the City of Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.  Here is the vision from RTA:

A snippet from Palm Beach Post on organic juice sales.   Though I consume it in tandem with organic milk, organic juice availability just has not kept pace.   Looks like they finally are waking up in the Orange belt.  Tropica (worlds largest juice guru) only got into the game this Feb.   See how behind the ball the big boys can be.   Looks like it wont be much longer now.  I wonder what is next? 

Look here to read the Buffalo News and their Feb 21, 2007 article on the 8 Clipper turbines which are going into the defunct Bethlehem Steel slag dump in Lackawanna, just west of downtown Buffalo.  The blades are made in Brazil,

This was tucked away in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Business section today, straight out of Associated Press, without any local perspective - yawn, how boring is this subject. Well, over the next few months expect to see it is not so boring!

 

Thanks to Susan Miller for pointing out an important article in the 02/03/07 Plain Dealer regarding the war to eliminate lead poisoning in our region by 2010 - an outlandishly aggressive objective, as Cleveland ranks among the top five cities nationally for lead poisoning. In 2004, St. Luke's Foundation funded what has been the most important collaboration ever for the future of Northeast Ohio: the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC), aligning over 80 agencies and organizations at local, regional, state and federal levels toward the common objective of lead eradication in our region within the next three years. On February 1, 2007, St. Luke's brought together the leadership of many other foundations for the expressed purpose of convincing as many foundations as possible to join them in funding the next three years of GCLAC initiative. The article states the objective of raising $3 million from foundations to leverage for far greater support from government sources.

 

Thanks to an anonymous donor, East Cleveland has received some excellent equipment to start setting up a pilot proof of concept wireless broadband mesh network in some part of the city - location to be determined. The donated equipment is from a similar proof of concept deployment in Washington, D.C., and includes several commercial wifi antennas and routers and cabling to set up a small multipoint demonstration network, running the open source CUWiNWare mesh application and wifiDOG contained portal application, all routing to the city of East Cleveland's open source Drupal community portal, at http://eastcleveland.org. All this, combined with other digital divide bridge programs there, makes East Cleveland approaches to information technology some of the most interesting in America.

Your opinions and feedback are important! Attend this Public Open House to Learn About the Next Steps for the Cleveland Innerbelt Plan. The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) invites you to attend a Public Open House to review the Recommended Preferred Alternative. ODOT officials and their consultants will be available to answer questions.

Ohio Department of Transportation - Cleveland Innerbelt Project Presentation

Cleveland City Planning Commission Meeting - January 19, 2007

Prepared as a Public Service by: Ed Hauser

11125 Lake Avenue #402 - Cleveland, Ohio 44102

Ohio's Citizens and Taxpayers Deserve a Valid Engineering and Economic Impact Study

In November 2005, ODOT stated that its "Preferred Alternative" was the Northern Bridge Alignment. However, ODOT never publicly stated the true cost of this alternative by failing to include the cost to replace the existing Innerbelt Bridge with a new eastbound bridge in 21 years. As a public service, I have done the arithmetic for them. The cost to replace the existing bridge in 21 years was about $1.5 billion, with a total cost of $2 billion for ODOT's "Preferred Alternative." These are the most accurate and only calculations until ODOT's engineers submit their calculations.

Re: Formal request to get your answer to the questions of : WILL CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL DEMAND THAT ODOT CONDUCT A VALID ENGINEERING STUDY AND ECONOMIC IMPACT STUDY TO COMPARE THE COSTS, FEASIBILITY, AND TRAFFIC INTERRUPTIONS FOR THE NORTHERN AND ORIGINAL SOUTHERN BRIDGE ALIGNMENT ALTERNATIVES?