COMPUTER TRAINING = JOBS? A PD op-ed (online not there but at the Washington Post) says George Bush's enthusiasm for computer training is somewhat beside the point in an economy that isn't creating jobs that use the trainees' new skills. Chris Seper comments. I respond at Cleveland Digital Vision.

BLOGGING OF THE PRESIDENT NOT ON WCPN THIS SUNDAY: From Chris Lydon's blog via Atrios:

Sunday January 25 from 9-11 pm EST, from Minnesota Public Radio and airing on public radio stations nationwide (here's a list of stations playing the program). Christopher Lydon will be hosting the first sustained blog conversation on network radio and you’re all invited to join in. The purpose is to air out the internet effects that the political campaign has suddenly made obvious. We want to encompass the new voices and communities, the critique of institutional journalism, the expressive possibilities beyond politics, the doubts, the hype, and the truth. Among the guests will be Atrios, Andrew Sullivan, and many more (a lot of biggies, we'll be updating the site daily) including you, if you’ll tune in, phone in, or just blog it as we speak.

Neither WCPN nor WKSU is on the list of stations, and it ain't on WCPN's schedule.

WCPN's phone: 216-432-3700. Fax: 216-432-3681. Dave Kanzeg is director of programming. I don't have his email but you can write to comments@wcpn.org.

MY BIG FOUR FOR '04: Here I thought I'd get all clever and kick off a new blogging year with a list of four big, big ideas that should move to the city's front burner this year. Good idea, yes? So good that David Eden beat me to it.

At first I was kind of deflated. Then I read Dave's list and cheered up. "Big ideas for the next hundred years?" Two more downtown real estate parlays (one with a sports gimmick attached), plus a bureaucratic reorganization, plus a bigger airport? (Gosh, you think they'll still be using runways in 2104? Or are we hoping for direct service from Medina County to Mars?) This does not exactly rise to the level of Alfred Kelly's canal move.

Okay, so if I'm so smart, what are my Big Four? Here we go:

1) Send Cleveland to college. Eden is right to put the expansion of CSU on his list, but "University Village" and Division I football miss the point totally. Cleveland now has the lowest proportion of adults with college degrees among the country's fifty biggest cities. Our best prospects for population growth come from the relative stability of poorer young people, plus immigration from Puerto Rico, Latin America and elsewhere. We need a university that's the absolute best at educating working-class students for scientific and professional careers and high-skill technical work. (Think City College of New York in the '30, '40 and '50s.) The community can help start CSU on this road by committing serious resources to send tens of thousands of our undereducated, underemployed adults and kids to CSU, and to help CSU develop world-class teaching and support systems for them. Let's change our city from the worst educated to one of the best educated in its class!

2) Play the Canada card. Let's stop beating around the Great Lakes Regional bush and get to the point: we're closer to London than to Columbus, closer to Toronto than to Cincinnati, and there's no reason why a few miles of water should stop us from linking up. Look at a map without the national borders: what great metropolis should be our natural center of gravity? Where would I-77 and I-71 go if they could? Maybe Jim Rhodes was right about a bridge, maybe not; but it's not necessary to argue about it because we can put a ferry in service for much less than the Port spent on the Rock Hall, and open up a whole new northern neighborhood. This is a total no-brainer. Let's stop studying the possibility and get on with it!

3) Home grown affordable energy. Northeast Ohio is a huge importer of natural gas, and we pay some of the highest electric bills in the U.S. In the city, many of those bills come from Public Power, which charges almost as much as First Energy and sends a lot of the money elsewhere for purchased power. This all impinges directly on household and business budgets, drains dollars out of local circulation, and represents missed opportunities for local enterprise. Plenty of people are on top of this -- Entrepreneurs for Sustainability, Green Energy Ohio, H2O, EcoCity, etc., etc. -- but energy tech is a big long-term local market with a lot of entry points that deserves more public focus than it's getting. (And here's a really fascinating "big idea" that somebody in Cleveland should be checking out.)

4) Neighborhood government. It's arguable that some public functions in greater Cleveland would be strengthened by more "regional" public authority -- economic development investment, transportation, broad environmental and land use oversight, etc. It's equally arguable that Cleveland neighborhoods suffer from too much centralized control of things that small suburbs are very happy to run for themselves -- playgrounds, street repair, local planning and zoning policies, not to mention the process of democracy itself. Each of Cleveland's 21 wards has as many people as the average Cuyahoga County city -- cities that have their own governments, taxing and bonding authority, and civic institutions. It's hard not to notice that most people, given a choice, choose to live in the smaller places with human-scale governments. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, virtually all our vaunted neighborhood revitalization of the last twenty years has been driven by neighborhood development agencies (the CDCs) in alliance with ward Councilmen empowered by growing "ward allocations" of funds under their control. Left to centralized City Hall departments, none of it would have taken place -- no matter what past and present Mayors would like you to believe. If 2004 is going to see a real debate about government reorganization, that debate must help to sort out where power and policy initiative should be scaled down to the neighborhoods, not just up to the county or region.

So that's my Big Four for '04. I think I'll try to make them the biggest part of Cleveland Diary's agenda for the coming year. Better than just bitching and moaning about politicians, right? Of course I also put a big priority on computerizing and networking everybody in the city, but you can read about that at www.digitalvision.blogspot.com. And somewhere along the line I have to explain why I think more unions and collective bargaining are vital for the whole northeast Ohio economy. And I'm sure there will be other things I just gotta yap about.

But these should keep me busy for a while.

PUTTING CHILDREN FIRST... OUT ON THE STREET: I ran into Tim Wells in the soft drink aisle at the Clark Ave. Topps on Saturday. Tim ran Clark Recreation Center in the Stockyards neighborhood, back when I worked for the local CDC. Now he's in charge of the Recreation Division's citywide "organized sports" programs -- what's left of them after the budget cuts.

Tim told me that the 16% cut in the Parks and Recreation budget means that about 300 Summer rec workers won't be hired this year, which means very short staff for programs at the City's 20 recreation centers and 19 neighborhood pools -- and no staffed programs at 30 neighborhood playgrounds that had them last year. The 19 pools will only be open for six weeks, from Tuesday through Sunday.

Think about this for a minute. The City of Cleveland has about 470,000 residents, of whom something like 100,000 are school-age kids. Last Summer, the City had over sixty places where those kids could go for some kind of organized, supervised recreation -- one place for every 1,500 kids, more or less. This Summer, thirty of those places will be gone, and another nineteen (the pools) will be closed for half the season. The ratio of staffed recreation sites to kids will fall as low as 1 to 5,000.

So if you want your child to play safely in a Cleveland neighborhood playground this Summer, and you don't happen to live near a rec center, get ready to go down there and stand guard for a few hours. Be sure to bring a broom and some trash bags along for last night's crop of broken glass... the City will only be cleaning once a month. And try not to do anything that could get you sued, since the City offers no liability coverage for parental volunteers.

Oh, you're working days? Too bad... guess you'll just have to lock the kids in the house with the X-Box for company.

Boy, this is gonna be an awful year.