WEIRD CONVERGENCE: Two weeks ago Crain's had an editorial blaming the projected Cleveland City deficit on continued increases in City Hall employment (sorry, can't link, it's subscription only). This week Roldo in the City News says virtually the same thing. That's right, Roldo and Brian Tucker... together for the first time anywhere!

I have two comments about this line of attack:

1) If the Campbell Administration really wants to promote e-government, now's the time to start posting all the current finance and job numbers on the City website -- the same numbers Finance Director Baker is giving to City Council. I don't know if Roldo's numbers, or Crains' for that matter, are right or wrong. I don't know, for example, how many of the jobs they say were added in recent years were uniformed safety forces. But as a citizen I'd like to be able to find out for myself, without taking time off work to go hang around City Hall. That's what the Web is good for, and since we're about to have a really nasty municipal melee over numbers, this would be a great time for our City to put the numbers where everyone can see them.

2) The logical inference from the Crain's/Bartimole analysis is that they want City workers laid off, quickly. Let's do the math.

Optimistically, the City might be able to average $50,000 in saved salary and fringes for each worker laid off. (That assumes a fair number of police and/or firefighters in the mix, since those are the only General Fund workforces that have hundreds of people making over $40,000 a year.) So to get rid of a $50 million shortfall we'd have to get rid of a thousand jobs... one-seventh to one-eighth of all General Fund employees.

Leave aside, for now, the question of what this would do to services. What would it do to Cleveland's staggering economy? These are all Cleveland residents we're talking about. Since layoffs would start with the last hired, they'd certainly include large numbers of Black, Hispanic and female workers. Lots of younger residents with families, lots of new homebuyers two payments away from foreclosure. And they'd be going into a job market with (as Roldo points out) 13%-plus unemployment and no end in sight.

What a great scenario. Does this make it a little easier to understand why Campbell and Jackson "gambled on the Cleveland economy climbing out of the recession when preparing the 2003 city budget" instead of cutting the workforce last year, as Crain's and Roldo says they should have?

So maybe the firefighters are exploiting overtime. Maybe the City should have foregone the last class of police recruits. And maybe there are one or two dozen unnecessary staffers on the second floor of City Hall. But none of this comes close to fifty million bucks. That's a revenue problem, caused mostly by national economic failure and state budget politics, and there's no "tough decision" Campbell and Jackson can make to fix it in the next two years.

Taxes or layoffs, that's the choice. Or not, I guess, since everyone seems to agree that a tax hike for municipal services (unlike, say, a convention center and "the arts") is unimaginable... and that struggling to keep Cleveland residents employed by the City in the midst of a horrible private job market is indefensible.

Roldo and Crain's, united at last. Weird.