HOSPITALS, TAXES AND POLITICS: Cuyahoga County Treasurer and Cleveland mayoral candidate (note: not any more) Jim Rokakis has an enviable knack for showing up in the media to talk about public policy ideas, rather than scandals or fights with other officeholders. But that doesn't mean he always avoids controversy.

A few months back some fur flew in the suburbs when Rokakis called for the consolidation of a few municipal library systems. (Ain't it amazing how parochial and un-regional those upper-income communities can be when it comes to their own civic institutions?) And yesterday he was in the PD raising an even more dangerous issue: The property taxes not paid by the county's two biggest employers, Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals.

Rokakis' call for "payments in lieu of taxes" from these two institutions is backed up by two short studies he commissioned from Policy Matters, released December 17. If you care at all about local finances you should read them both, but here's the "money quote" from the second report, page 2:

Both in the city and the county, the two nonprofit hospital systems, the Cleveland Clinic Health System and University Hospitals Health System, are the major owners of charitable-owned property. County-wide, they together account for at least $1.3 billion in such tax-exempt property, according to records supplied by the Cuyahoga County auditor and treasurer. This represents close to two-thirds of the tax-exempt charity holdings and 1.4 percent of all the real property, taxable and exempt, in Cuyahoga County. If these institutions paid taxes on all of their exempt real property in the county as it is now valued, local school districts and governments would receive more than $34 million a year in additional taxes.

As the reports make clear, the tax-exempt status of most Clinic and UH medical facilities is based on their ostensible "charitable" purpose, and both systems are seeking exemption on this basis for even more of their properties (like some previously taxable suburban medical offices). So it's worth noting that the guys running these "charities", Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove and UH CEO Tom Zenty, are each paid over a million dollars a year. (Cosgrove's package is more than $1.6 million.) And the Clinic, in particular, has taken heat from many directions for the small proportion of its resources devoted to charitable care -- including a national class action lawsuit filed in July.

In light of the City's permanent service cuts, the School District's ongoing financial emergency, Metrohealth's pleas for more county money for uninsured care -- and the fact that large numbers of Cleveland voters are among the poor and uninsured themselves, with no love for big rich hospital systems -- Rokakis has picked a pretty interesting issue to launch his mayoral campaign.