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.