NEW OHIO JOB NUMBERS... THE NON-RECOVERY CONTINUES: The Bureau of Labor Statistics posted its May employment numbers for states this morning.

Total nonfarm employment in Ohio in May (seasonally adjusted) was 5,385,600, compared to 5,384,500 in April and 5,385,200 in March. (The April employment figure is significantly lower than originally reported... see below.) That's just four hundred new Ohio jobs in the last two months... during which the national economy supposedly added over half a million.

The May figure is 19,000 jobs below May 2003.

Remember the supposed revival of manufacturing? In Ohio: 827,900 manufacturing jobs in May, compared to 828,800 in April and 828,900 in March.

Easy come, easy go: Last month the BLS reported (on a preliminary basis, as always) a gain of 4,300 nonfarm jobs in Ohio between March and April. This was widely interpreted as evidence that the recovery was finally reaching us.

This month, BLS has revised its April figure downward by 5,000, which means the state actually lost 700 jobs between March and April.

SHARI WEIR IN CRAIN'S ON THE FIRST ENERGY RATE CASE:

In the current case... the PUCO gave First Energy, conditionally, an additional $2 billion in exchange for nothing at all...

What if Gov. Bob Taft said his second-term economic plan was to pull $1 billion out of the northern Ohio economy in each of 2006, 2007, and 2008?

That's what Taft's appointee Mr. Schriber and a majority of the PUCO just decided to let First Energy do. The "Third Frontier" turns out to be our pockets.

Ohio Citizen Action has the whole Crain's op-ed posted on its website.

WASTE OF BANDWIDTH: Well, it's one week later. The Cleveland School District budget cuts, teacher and other layoffs, slashing of bus transportation, slashing of bilingual staff, etc. etc. are now final as of the School Board meeting Tuesday evening.

But there's still not a word about it on the School District web site... or on the Mayor's web site, either.

Should we conclude, charitably, that the District's PR office has been cut back and there's no one left to post press releases? But no, here's one posted on Monday. All about an administrator you never heard of who got a better job in Minneapolis, and how elated Barbara Byrd-Bennett is for her -- with five, count'em, five media relations staff listed as press contacts.

And here's another one, also posted Monday: "Six Students To Attend Camp Focus".

CLEVELAND, OH – Team Focus announced this week that four Cleveland Municipal School District students would attend Camp Focus Michigan on the campus of Concordia University in Ann Arbor, June 28th through July 2nd.

Additionally, two more students will attend the national camp in Mobile, Alabama, July 11th through 15th. Expenses are being paid by the national Team Focus organization.

With that kind of breaking news to handle, I guess you can understand why the District's five media relations professionals and its crack website staff haven't gotten around to the small stuff -- like the School Board amputating teaching staff and bus routes.

Geez, what a waste of bandwidth. Hey, I know where they can save some money...

SCHOOL BUDGET CRISIS INVISIBLE ON SCHOOL, CITY WEBSITES: Last evening at a School Board meeting at Garrett Morgan, the Cleveland Municipal School District administration announced its second big round of budget cuts for the coming school year, including hundreds of additional teacher layoffs. Everyone from CEO Byrd-Bennett to the teachers union to the press to -- well, everyone -- agrees that this budget-cutting process is an historic crisis for the schools. Everyone knows it's the prelude to a big tax levy this November. Locally, this is the most important public issue of 2004.

Here's the School District's "News and Information" webpage, with current news releases. And here's the news release archive.

Please note that there is still not one document with information about the budget crisis, cuts, or levy posted.

Mayor Campbell is the only elected official with responsibility for the operations of the CMSD. Here is Mayor Campbell's archive of press releases, current through today. Please note that here, too, there's not one document posted with information about the budget crisis, cuts, or levy.

I guess Cleveland citizens are supposed to get our information about our public school system from Channel 19.

A FERRY GOOD IDEA MOVES FORWARD: The Port Authority Board took delivery yesterday of its long-awaited feasibility study on Cleveland-to-Ontario ferry service. Bottom line: The market seems to be there for tourists and trucking; the economics look workable; let's move forward to bids from potential operators.

The PD's front page story is here:

A Cleveland-Canada ferry could shove off in two years - a ship that could carry more than 800 passengers and 400 cars and include restaurants, bars, shops and cabins to take a nap.

But no gambling, said Rose Ann DeLeon, director of strategic development for the Cleve- land-Cuyahoga County Port Authority.

A $400,000 port authority study recommended a one-way fare between $45 and $55 per person, according to season, and between $25 and $40 for a cabin. The cost of a car would be an extra $50 to $60.

Cost would be about $100 for a tractor-trailer, including the driver's fare, and between $100 and $120 for an RV, but does not include the driver's fare.

The trip would take between four and 4½ hours.

The full 87-page TranSystems study is already posted at the Port's website here.

TranSystem's proposed $45-55 fares are comparable to other trans-lake ferries, but the projected travel time is significantly slower. The new Milwaukee-Muskegon "Lake Express", for example, covers a similar 90+ miles across Lake Michigan in two and a half hours, at $50 per passenger. The difference probably stems from TranSystem's proposal to combine passenger/car and truck service in one vessel, which seems like a good idea to me. But if the trip is going to take over four hours to Port Stanley, it probably needs to be cheaper -- which isn't a bad idea anyway, if the Port wants its ferry to become a routine transportation mode, not just a tourist attraction.

Stay tuned, this is getting interesting.

P.S. Who brought up gambling?

RECOVERY STILL JOBLESS: The Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly employment numbers for metro areas are out today. Nonfarm employment for the Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria metro area was 1,107,200 in April, up about 6,000 jobs compared to March. But these are "non-seasonally-adjusted" numbers -- meaning that they don't take into account the fact that employment always ticks up in April compared to March. Compared to April 2003, the April 2004 job count is down by about 800.

Bottom line: Cleveland metro-area employment is essentially unchanged from a year ago. And from two years ago, for that matter.

CHASING WAL-MART PART 2, PART 2: Here's an article from the Sun-Times on Wednesday that lays out the sides in the Chicago City Council fight pretty clearly.

The Chicago Federation of Labor has made three demands of the retailing behemoth it calls "Public Enemy No. 1": that Wal-Mart agree not to sell groceries at any of its Chicago stores to avoid driving down the wages of its supermarket competitors, that the company remain neutral in any union-organizing campaign and that it pay its Chicago employees a "living wage."

None of those promises are included in the letter, and Wal-Mart made no apologies for the omission.

Asked why Wal-Mart won't pay the living wage of around $9.10 an hour when its Chicago area associates already average $10.77 an hour, regional manager for community affairs John Bisio said, "Wal-Mart is not a city contractor. Nobody that I know in retailing is promising to participate in something that doesn't apply to them."

Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon charged that 60 percent of Wal-Mart's employees are part-timers earning only $7.55 an hour.

"If this marketplace means so much to Wal-Mart, what's the problem putting it in writing for all the world to see?"

While initial plans call for the Wal-Mart stores in the Chatham and Austin neighborhoods to sell general merchandise only, Bisio said a super-center that sells groceries cannot be ruled out.

And another take from the Tribune, via the Joe Hill Dispatch (the Tribune site requires registration):

We have leverage here," said James Thindwa, executive director of Chicago Jobs With Justice. "They cannot maintain their level of profitability without going into urban centers like Chicago. This city has an opportunity to set a precedent, to really shift the terms of debate on Wal-Mart."

For some, that has already happened. Community leaders in the West Side's Austin neighborhood who support Wal-Mart's arrival to a commercial landscape dotted with dollar stores, fast-food restaurants and corner grocery markets have garnered a string of promises from the company, some of them unprecedented, Bisio said.

For example, area churches and other groups would have a say about which banks handle daily deposits for the store and which contractors would help build the store at Kilpatrick and Grand Avenues, Bisio said. The company has also said at least 75 percent of the 300 jobs created at the store will go to people from the community, including the possibility of hiring ex-convicts; it will pay "competitive wages" that start at $7 an hour; and it will consult local leaders on where corporate donations would be most useful.

Wal-Mart executives are in similar discussions with groups in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side, Bisio said.

"We've weighed the pros and cons of having a Wal-Mart in this community and the pros far outweigh the cons," said Rev. Joseph Kyles, chairman of the 37th Ward Pastors Alliance, a group of 24 area churches on the West Side. He characterized the various commitments as opportunities to address such long-standing local concerns as bank redlining, affordable housing and deteriorating public schools.

More here and here.

CHASING WAL-MART PART 2 -- WHAT WE CAN LOOK FORWARD TO:

There are lots of stories today about Chicago City Council voting to approve one new "neighborhood Wal-Mart" but not a second. Here's the AP story from the South Bend Tribune...

Last month, Wal-Mart launched a lobbying campaign to overcome the opposition. The retailer used a telephone bank to connect people who said they supported the stores directly to several aldermen's ward offices.

The supporters were found by pollsters hired by Wal-Mart, who called hundreds of Chicago residents Monday and Tuesday. Anyone who said they supported the stores was patched through to one of 11 aldermen, according to Thom Serafin, a public relations consultant hired by the retailer.

WHY AREN'T WE FEELING BETTER YET?

MaxSpeak sez: "Economic growth is great, unless you have to work for a living."

From the Economic Policy Institute article he's pointing to:

Corporate profits have risen 62.2% since the peak, compared to average growth of 13.9% at the same point in the last eight recoveries that have lasted as long as the current one. This is the fastest rate of profit growth in a recovery since World War II.

Total labor compensation has also turned in a historic performance: growing only 2.8%, the slowest growth in any recovery since World War II and well under the historical average of 9.9%.

...Growth in total wage and salary income, the primary source of take-home pay for workers, has actually been negative for private-sector workers: -0.6%, versus the 7.2% gain that is the average increase in private wage and salary income at this point in a recovery.

These are ominous signs, suggesting a new march toward greater inequality in the American economy. Worse, the growth in profits combined with a drop in wage and salary incomes suggest that the recovery has a narrow base, with most American consumers only able to increase their purchasing power through debt. Wage growth is not just fair, it is also necessary for a more sustainable recovery.

CHASING WAL-MART: Via Ed Morrison via Brewed Fresh Daily, we learn that Good Jobs First has a new report out documenting a billion dollars in government subsidies to Wal-Mart. This will not be surprising to those who follow Policy Matters Ohio, which published this two years ago.

But in the light of the Campbell Administration's ongoing pursuit of big box stores for city locations -- and the rumors I keep hearing that the city has been talking to Wal-Mart -- this new report does bring up an interesting question:

Exactly what economic development goal would it serve for the city to subsidize the location of one or more Wal-Marts (or Targets, which run their business pretty much the same way) in Cleveland?

If the goal of economic development is to spur local "wealth creation", Wal-Marts would seem to be a negative. The chain displaces local retailers, has no significant local ownership, exports its profits to Arkansas or somewhere like that, buys no products locally, is actively anti-union and pays crappy wages.

If the goal of economic development is "job creation", city Wal-Marts (or Targets) will make little or no net difference. Their suburban stores already hire city residents, and new stores are likely to simply displace other retailers and move existing jobs around (in some cases from better-paying unionized stores, which was the root of the recent California grocery strike).

I know, I know, the idea is to recapture city residents' retail dollars that are now flowing to the suburbs. Get a big, irresistible magnet store in a Cleveland location and other stores will cluster around it (including maybe some small locals) and create a newly viable retail district. But this just begs the main question. If most of the spending in the new retail cluster goes to a multinational company that sends its profits out of town, and pays lousy wages while displacing other local job opportunities -- and turns the neighborhood into a never-ending traffic jam -- who is "capturing" whom?

So why even think about chasing and subsidizing this kind of business in city locations? Who -- except for some real estate developers and maybe a couple of trash haulers and landscaping companies -- stands to gain?

With all the talk about smarter economic development, it would be nice if somebody -- maybe one of her foundation travel funders -- would ask Mayor Campbell this question before she boards the plane to another retailers' convention.

IS MANUFACTURING COOL NOW? All of a sudden, the "M" word is on the lips of Cleveland's talking heads. And now "The Quiet Crisis: Manufacturing" makes it official -- we still care about companies that make actual physical objects in northeast Ohio factories!

As you probably know, Joe Frolik's newest TQC panel airs tomorrow night on Channel 25 and runs in the Plain Dealer Sunday. But you can get a jump on the official release by reading the entire, somewhat ragged transcript here.

It's not a bad session as TQC panels go. The panelists are mostly in the business -- Bill Brake of ISG, Jack Schron of Jergens and Scott Rickert of Nanofilm are particularly interesting -- but there's also Weatherhead prof Sue Helper raising some big-picture issues not typical for TQC. (Like... if we have all these productivity improvements, maybe we could have shorter work weeks instead of fewer jobs?)

My favorite quote, from ISG's Bill Brake:

We're very proud of our partnership with the United Steel Workers of America... What a region can offer for us is an employee that's more sophisticated than a high school graduate of 20 years ago that comes into a large manufacturer and works on an assembly line or works in the mill.

A key component of our success at ISG has been the ownership, and accountability and responsibility of the hourly worker and they have truly taking an ownership of it. In order to make that successful, they have to be aware of business basics. They have to understand the costs. We explain EBIDTA to them to make sure we all understand what our key metric is for us. We share sales prices, we share costs of materials, things that weren't done as recently as five years ago. To explain to a worker, do you know that roll costs us X thousands to get refurbished, is that the right decision to make and let that individual make the decision. To have that successful, I need a sophisticated worker that cares about his business.

Hey, here's an innovative, outside-the-box thought: How about somebody from that Steelworkers local in the discussion? Or from the UAW local that sold Ford on reinvesting in the Brook Park engine plant? Or anybody at all from a union?

But there's an even worse sin of omission. Why, why, why isn't John Colm of WIRE-Net on this panel? Apparently he's in a supplementary interview, but when the "experts" are lined up, once again he's not there.

If you don't know WIRE-Net, do me this favor: Look through their website, consider that John has worked for fifteen years to build this nationally recognized operation from the ground up... and then ask yourself what it takes to get listened to in this town.

PD DOES A GOOD JOB ON JOBS TODAY: Alison Grant's long article on Ohio employment in this morning's Plain Dealer ("Want answers on jobs? Study patterns, not rhetoric") is several cuts above the paper's norm. Grant (along with her editor) deserves a lot of credit for a thorough, careful, ambitious piece on a really difficult subject.

How many local reporters, for example, try to explain to general readers how Ohio's manufacturing workforce is shrinking partly because our workers are so productive? And omigosh -- the story actually reveals that

...new claims for unemployment insurance [show] the state still flashing a recessionary signal. Ohio had more than 12,000 new claims during the first week of May. A more normal figure for this time of year would be about 7,000.

... a fact that George Zeller of CEOGC has been trying to get into the PD for months.

If the PD's going to make "Ohio jobs and the election" an ongoing beat, I'm rooting for Grant to get the assignment.

...AND THERE'S MORE: Steve Talbott writes that "Education may be the impetus for innovation we need"...

If the future is about no longer depending on the Big Three for our economic well-being but, rather, relying on the ingenuity of our highly educated work force, Ohio is not making the grade. We need to become innovators again.

Perhaps even more astonishing, two-year community and technical colleges accounted for just 47 percent of the state's postsecondary enrollment - compared to a 60 percent average nationally. Two-year schools are powerhouses of opportunity for kids coming out of high school and for workers who need to retrain. But even though we need them more, we're using them less.

The good news is that the goal is within our grasp. All we need to do is become obsessive about education, college education.

Yes! Send Cleveland to college!

OHIO GAINED JUST 4,300 NONFARM JOBS IN MARCH... leaving the state down 16,500 jobs compared to a year ago.

The U.S. Labor Department released state-by-state April employment statistics this morning. Ohio's nonfarm employment: 5,389,500 jobs in April compared to 5,385,200 in March, 5,373,500 in January, and 5,406,000 in April 2003.

The count of unemployed Ohioans also rose by about 5,000 from March to April.



Cleveland metropolitan area numbers are due for release June 2.

LIFE IN THESE OLD-ECONOMY BONES YET: You probably know that International Steel Group completed its acquisition of Weirton Steel on Tuesday. And if you drive in that general vicinity, you've probably noticed that the West Side ISG mill is back in production.

But have you picked up on the fact that Cleveland's ISG is now the nation's biggest integrated steel company?

With the acquisition completed, Richfield, Ohio-based ISG has moved up from the No. 2 integrated steel maker in the country to No. 1, surpassing Pittsburgh's United States Steel Corp., when measured by domestic production capacity.

Cleveland, Ohio... Steel Capital USA.

SHIPPING NEWS: From www.boatnerd.com (officially the DAILY GREAT LAKES and SEAWAY SHIPPING NEWS):

Another cross-lake fast ferry on the Great Lakes...

5/20

The fast ferry Lake Express arrived at Milwaukee's breakwall shortly after 3:30 Tuesday. On hand to greet the ferry were assorted tugs, including the G-tug Virginia, pleasure craft and government vessels. The Lake Express made a short tour of the outer harbor off downtown Milwaukee and then proceeded to the Port of Milwaukee's Heavy Lift dock.

With the new ferry dock not quite finished, the Lake Express will use the Heavy Lift dock as a base of operations for additional crew training. Trips on Lake Michigan are also planned and a trip to Muskegon is expected as well.

(The new privately owned ferry, built in Alabama for $18.5 million, will carry 250 people and 45 cars on the Milwaukee-Muskegon run across Lake Michigan three times daily. The distance is similar to the proposed Cleveland-to Port Stanley route. For more see the operator's page here.)

And...

Lightning Strikes Tall Ship Denis Sullivan

05/19

The Tall Ship Denis Sullivan, enroute to Milwaukee, Wis., from Erie, Penn., was struck by lightning Tuesday night in a storm north of Mentor, Ohio. While none of the crew was harmed, the electronic systems failed making it difficult to navigate. Fortunately, one of the mates had a hand-held GPS and managed to make it to Cleveland's North Coast Harbor.

S.S. William G. Mather Museum operations manager and live-in ship keeper, Bill McDonald, offered assistance when he discovered his new neighbor moored next to him at the end of East Ninth Street Pier. The Sullivan crew was appreciative of Cleveland hospitality, including hot showers and cold beverages.

The Sullivan last visited Cleveland during 2003's Tall Ships Harborfest. The S/V Denis Sullivan is Wisconsin's Floating Classroom and Ambassador Flagship. Some proponents of Cleveland's lakefront development suggest that Cleveland might also benefit from a similar tall ship vessel with Cleveland's North Coast Harbor as her home port.

While taking a tour of the Mather Museum Tuesday afternoon, the crew of the Sullivan said they would know within the next few hours if they have sufficient repairs to resume their journey. With thunderstorms anticipated through the rest of the week, they do not want lightning to strike twice.

THE "RE-SEGREGATION" OF CLEVELAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS? Sunday's PD spread ("66% of Cleveland's minorities attend racially isolated schools") and Roger Jones' column in the current Free Times both draw attention to the same sorry fact: Fifty years after Brown v. Board, and twenty-five years after Reed v. Rhodes, most black kids in Cleveland are going to overwhelmingly black schools. (A lot of Hispanic kids are going to majority-Hispanic schools, too, but that's a different issue with a different history.)

Is this the "re-segregation" of the Cleveland schools? Well, on one level, of course it is. If you go through the 2003 enrollment statistics for all 86 Cleveland Municipal School District ("CMSD") buildings with students in grades K-5 (they're here), you find that 46 of those buildings had student bodies that were more than 90% black. These kids were undeniably isolated from their peers of other races. (Speaking of "isolated", the average number of white students in these buildings was five.)

Most white CMSD students, on the other hand, go to schools that are "integrated" by any usual standard. Only one grade K-5 school was more than 75% white in 2003... William Cullen Bryant in Old Brooklyn, whose students were 86% white, 6% black and 9% Hispanic. Six other schools -- three in Old Brooklyn, three in West Park -- had white enrollments above 60%, with black and Hispanic students filling out their rosters in roughly equal numbers. These seven "mostly white" schools accounted for about a third of all the white kids enrolled in the CMSD's K-5 and K-8 buildings. The other two-thirds went to schools where 40-80% of their classmates were "students of color".

How can the Cleveland schools be segregated for most black kids but integrated for most white kids who go there? The answer, of course, is that there aren't enough white kids to go around... and there are large parts of the city where none of them live.

The CMSD's overall student demographics in 2003 were...

Black students -- 50,480 (70.6%)
White students -- 13,209 (18.4%)
Hispanic students -- 6,528 (9.1%)

... with "others" at less than 2%. So if you took all the white and Hispanic kids and distributed them evenly thoughout the city, all the black kids would still be going to mostly-black schools.

Why so few white kids? It's not mainly because of private school competition... the 2000 Census showed a higher percentage of whites enrolled in K-12 private schools than blacks or Hispanics, but two-thirds of the city's white kids were still in public school. If all the private-school students in Cleveland, of all ethnic backgrounds, rejoined the CMSD tomorrow, black kids would still be 65% of the system's customers, and whites would barely exceed 25%.

The simple fact is that Cleveland has become a "city of color", especially among its younger citizens. White Cleveland residents are now just the city's biggest racial minority. And pretty much all the city's families with school-age kids, of any race, are poor.

In this environment, do "segregation" and "integration" have any meaning in Cleveland 2004? Maybe it's time for a new paradigm.

Or maybe it's the same old paradigm in a new setting. Maybe Cleveland needs to insist on putting a unified city/suburban school system at the top of the "regionalism" agenda.

IF YOU MISSED PLUG IN CLEVELAND (or even if you were there), Dan Hanson has posted a complete account with pictures at the Magnum Computers website.

IT AIN'T FLASHY BUT IT'S GOT CONTENT: Cleveland City Council is now posting the full, official City Record on its website each week... with a complete archive all the way back through 1996! (Also posted... the Mayor's proposed 2004 budget.)

ELECTABILITY: A few Sundays ago, Brent Larkin wrote a Forum column about Mayor Campbell's election prospects. It was mostly old news, except for the parts that were somebody's weird wet dreams (e.g. the return of Mike White, but only the 1990-95 version). Predictably, Larkin prescribed an unnamed "big idea" to salvage the Mayor's ratings. When life was simpler, this used to mean the convention center, but now it's probably downtown gambling. (Apparently tearing up a major highway and cutting the port in half to build houses and parks all over the lakefront isn't "big" enough.) Yada yada....

Anyway, I was more interested in the Mayor's own analysis as quoted through the column:

Campbell knows she has disappointed many. Her take on why is essentially this:

She became mayor as the economy tanked and tax receipts went south...

"Now what do we have?" she asks. "We have a decrease in income tax receipts, a state government that is completely uninterested in cities and a federal government that has walked away from investing in them. So now people are mad cause the mayor can't deliver.

"If I had money, everybody would love me. But the city has no money, and all the things people want cost money... I think anybody who would be mayor at this point in its history would be challenged to produce."...

"You always worry about an election," she said. "There's two ways to run - unopposed and scared. In 19 months I have to produce investments in safety, in housing, in making this an economically viable community. The more successful I am along these lines, the more electable I will become."

Whiny as it may sound, the first part of this analysis is essentially accurate. Republican administrations in Washington and Columbus, combined with a tanked national economy, are the proximate causes of the City's fiscal and economic emergencies. It is a near-impossible task to balance the books, keep the trash trucks rolling and keep your friends happy in this situation. (Just for fun, let's imagine how Mayor Raymond Pierce would be doing at this point in his administration.)

And the problem for the city goes way beyond fiscal difficulties. Every dollar of lost wage tax signifies fifty dollars of lost personal income for some taxpayer. Cleveland has thirty-some-thousand citizens looking for work, not to mention those who've given up looking. We've got homes going into foreclosure at a record rate. We've got gas and electric bills going unpaid, cars being repossessed, hard-working people going bankrupt. Cuts in city services (like glass all over the playground and no staffed summer program where your kid used to play) are just insults added to these injuries.

So the Democratic Mayor has every right to point the finger at Republican Washington and Columbus, at budget cuts and economic mismanagement, as the source of Cleveland's (and her) immediate woes. But the next question is: What's she gonna do about it? And the answer seems to be: Not much.

In 19 months I have to produce investments in safety, in housing, in making this an economically viable community. The more successful I am along these lines, the more electable I will become.

No. Wrong answer. "Producing investments" will do little to make the Mayor more electable, because "investments" are not what the voters (or the business guys, for that matter) are looking for. What we're looking for is results -- actual jobs that we can get, actual peace and safety on our streets, actual tenants to rent our vacant offices, actual recreation staff and cleanup crews down at the playground. And because of the external obstacles the Mayor has correctly pointed out, she's not likely to produce enough of those actual results between now and Summer 2005 to make us believe things have turned around. (Sorry, but visions of new neighborhoods and parks on the water, which might seem like nice ideas in better times, become gratingly irrelevant when you've just filled out your 90th job application at the nursing home or Dollar Store.)

But there's one thing the Mayor can do to make herself more electable in 2005... something that speaks directly to the national environment that's causing us so much pain:

Campbell could make it her first priority to help produce a massive voter turnout in Cleveland this November.

By "massive" I mean 190,000 or 200,000 votes, compared to the 136,000 that voted here in 2000. That kind of turnout would go a long way toward delivering Ohio's electoral votes to John Kerry, which could, in turn, put him in the White House. If that were to happen, and Jane Campbell played a significant role in making it happen, her "electability" factor would improve dramatically. Why throw out an incumbent who's the new President's good friend?

As a side benefit, a really big turnout might also help pass the school levy, whose failure will cause major damage to her remaining base of support.

There are already serious players -- not all of whom are Campbell's friends -- in local voter registration and voter turnout efforts, and lots of national resources, so it would be wrong to suggest that there's a vacuum for the Mayor to fill. But a sitting Mayor has opportunities to do things and mobilize resources that others can't -- money, people, free media. Campbell should be asking herself if it would be smarter to start targeting those resources toward winning a friend in the White House... rather than, say, toward bailing out the Sports Commission's grandiose plan for the International Children's Games.

Win or lose the Presidential race, the Mayor's re-election will still hinge on convincing stressed-out city residents that she's actually doing something that matters to our lives. I don't know if that's still possible. But it would be a lot easier with the support of President John Kerry.

Just a thought from the bleachers.

FOR A GOOD TIME...

click here now.

(Courtesy of the Georgy Russell for Governor Blog.)

MORE SHAMELESS PROMOTION DEPT: Plug In Cleveland 1.0 is coming this Wednesday.

If you still don't know what Plug In Cleveland is, click here.

If you want to get your ticket on line, click here.

If you want to see a picture of special guest Jiffy the Robot, click here.

BLOGGER PROBLEM: Blogger went live with a "new, improved" system Sunday evening. Naturally, what it's giving me so far is a new problem: it now insists on displaying the entries on this main page from earliest to latest, putting the newest entries at the bottom of the page.

I don't see any way to fix it in the settings. So... for the time being I'm telling Blogger to show only one day of postings here. For anything earlier you'll have to look at the archives (which don't have the same problem.)

I know this looks strange, but I'm sure it's temporary.

WHY WE CAN"T KEEP ANYTHING STRAIGHT DEPT: The PD headline this morning reads "Cleveland's high-tech center is $3.5 million over budget". The lead paragraph says:

Mayor Jane Campbell's administration badly underestimated the cost of a new high-tech center for city computers and needs an extra $3.5 million for the project.

But when you read the rest of the story, it turns out that a) the "underestimate" of costs on the original project is actually $1.7 million (which is plenty bad enough); b) the rest of the "extra $3.5 million" is not an overrun but a proposal to expand the project by adding facilities for the separately funded Water Department and the Municipal Court, at their cost; and c) the money that the Mayor wants Council to approve is from Homeland Security grant funds and Water and Court funds, with construction bond money as backup -- no General Fund money is at issue.

Now this is all in Mike Tobin's article, which is quite straightforward and even-handed once you get past the lead. And the core story -- estimating screwups and strategy changes in the tech center project -- is certainly legitimate news. A $1.7 million, 50% cost overrun is serious business. I'd love to know more about the hows and whys: Did they get a bad work estimate from the architect? Does the building have structural or environmental problems that somebody missed? Is the contractor market less soft than they expected? Did someone just do the math wrong? Is there some other backstory we haven't heard about?

And while we're asking questions, why did it take the Water Department and Court this long to decide to join up? Has this whole project been pushed too fast because of the International Children's Games?

The article doesn't address any of these questions, so we don't know if there's more to this than meets the eye. But here's what we do know:

A $1.7 million shortage in the project budget is not the same as a $3.5 million shortage. Which makes the PD's headline false, and the lead sentence very misleading.

"Give light, and the people will find their own way." Oh, I'm sorry, that was that other newspaper.

DO THE JOB STATISTICS MISS ENTREPRENEURS? George's permalinks still aren't permalinking, so you'll have to go to the top of BFD and scroll down a few entries to "Callahan by the numbers" to see Anita Campbell's comment about my last post and my reply to it.

It would be nice to get a comment or two here... but heck, I'll take what I can get.

CLEVELAND METRO AREA "GAINED" 6,000 JOBS IN MARCH: The Bureau of Labor Statistics released their metropolitan area employment numbers for March this morning, as promised. The Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria MSA shows 1,100,500 nonfarm jobs for March compared to 1,094,200 in February and 1,090,300 in January. Good news, right? Except that the March number is 20,000 jobs lower than the figures for October, November, and December, as well as last May and June.



These numbers are not seasonally adjusted, and Cleveland seems to have an annual first-quarter slump, so it may be too early to see anything important here. Over the last full year (March 2003 to March 2004) the BLS shows a metro job gain of 8,600 -- about .8%. If this continues, we may see local employment through the Summer and Fall that's slightly higher than 2003 and 2002, but still 20-25,000 jobs below the 2001 level. Look at the Summer peaks in this longer-term line:



So is this a "recovery"? I guess it depends on whether you're one of the lucky 8,000, or the unlucky 20,000.

THERMA-GONE?

I really, really hope I'm wrong about this. From all reports, Carol Latham has been a spectacular entrepreneur, a model employer and good citizen of her neighborhood. Maybe she really believes that her company can continue to prosper on Detroit Avenue as a small division of its new multinational owner. Maybe she's right.

But...

Here we have a $15 million-a-year patent-driven family-owned startup, with less than a hundred employees, being bought by a multinational with 4,500 employees spread around dozens of facilities in ten countries, with annual sales between $700 and $800 million. The new owner, Laird Group, has already bought two other thermal-product companies in the last seven months to add to its Laird Technologies division, which makes a wide range of components for circuit board manufacturers -- Thermagon's main market. The biggest, fastest-growing piece of that market is in Asia. In the last four years Laird has closed plants and laid off workers in the U.S. and Britain, while making major investments in production capacity in China, Korea and Japan.

So how long will Latham get to run Laird's "thermal materials business worldwide" and produce Thermagon's products -- mostly for export to China and other faraway circuit-board centers -- from that rehabbed building at West 47th and Detroit, with her "special culture" of neighborhood workers? And what happens when she retires?

Thermagon, our spunky inner-city tech startup with a heart of gold, has been one of Cleveland's favorite business stories for years. But it turns out we've only been reading the first chapter. Now it's Chapter 2, the entrepreneur has cashed out, the spunky startup is suddenly part of a big global machine, and the characters and plot become a lot more complicated.

Will this still be a Cleveland story? Will it end happily for Thermagon's West Side workers and neighbors? Will the Laird Group keep the dream alive on Detroit?

I sure hope so. But so far, this neighborhood hasn't seen a lot of happy endings.

NEW CITY COUNCIL WEBSITE: Some time in the very recent past Cleveland City Council put up a new version of its website, and it's a big improvement... still pretty basic, but much user-friendlier than the old one. My favorite new features: the ward finder and the searchable City Charter and Ordinances.

Also, for those obsessing about the "regionalism issue", they've posted the full text of Council President Frank Jackson's City Club speech last Friday.

MARYBETH TALKS SENSE, AS USUAL:

What a lot of people seem to forget is that not every voter forms an opinion about the Cleveland schools from what is reported in the media. Many Clevelander's opinions are developed by what they observe in the community...

If the schools want to get community support, then they need to reach out to the community.

...If every school sent delegates to the neighborhood block clubs and business associations, and became proactive in opening communications, rather than waiting for volunteers to come to the school, it would be so much easier for the voting public to get to know all the good things that are going on in the individual buildings.

In politics, as in education, as in life, relationships are everything. If teachers in Cleveland public schools were the neighborhood leaders they could be, both the schools and the neighborhoods might work a lot better.

Go get em, MB.

OHIO GAINED 8,000 JOBS IN MARCH... leaving the state 17,000 jobs down compared to a year ago.

The U.S. Labor Department released state-by-state March employment statistics yesterday. Here's "Table 5. Employees on nonfarm payrolls by state and selected industry division, seasonally adjusted". Ohio's numbers: 5,381,400 jobs in March compared to 5,373,500 in February, 5,378,600 in January, and 5,398,100 in March 2003.



You gotta look pretty hard to see a recovery in that picture.

For the longer view of Ohio's recent experience, here's a chart generated by the incredible Economagic site. The pink area is the official national recession, which started in March 2001 and "ended" the following November.



The metro area numbers are supposed to be released Wednesday. For the story on greater Cleveland, stay tuned.

THE PORT OF OHIO: Why worry about regionalism? department:

I took an hour off and went to the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority board meeting yesterday. The idea was to learn more about the Ontario ferry project, which I did and will report about later. But I also learned that the Port's economic development bond financing has taken some interesting turns.

The board approved two financing packages yesterday. One was for a manufacturer in Eastlake, which, you may recall, is in Lake County. The other was for a shopping center project in Parma Heights, in which there's another partner -- the Port of Toledo.

It seems that the Ports of Cleveland and Toledo have an understanding that they can call each other in to help sweeten deals. This was Toledo's second investment in Cuyahoga County. Cleveland hasn't put up any bucks for Lucas County yet... but a couple of years ago, both Ports went in together with the State to help finance a food processing plant in Chillicothe.

And you think we have no public officials with regional vision!

This was all explained to the board yesterday by Cleveland Port Director Gary Failor, who just coincidentally used to have the same job in Toledo, where he developed the whole port-bonds-for-other-development-projects thing. Interestingly, some board members seemed to have no idea this has been going on.

MORON MEDIA: Channel 5 gets to the important stuff...

Byrd-Bennett said she will give up her upcoming raise and bonus, some of which she has given to charity in the past, NewsChannel5 reported.

She added, however, that if questions persist about her salary instead of the $100 million budget deficit, she will take action.

"If it is the pleasure of this board and this mayor, I have absolutely no problem in returning my entire salary because my contract is up at the end of December. That way, you will have the opportunity to find a leader for your school district," she said.

Be sure to check out the accompanying poll.

So in less than one news cycle, we've gone from "How to deal with the deficit" to "Should BBB work for free and then leave?"

Aaaaaarghhh!

MORE PUBLIC EDUCATION, PLEASE: Cleveland schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett went to the last two School Board meetings with presentations about large budget cuts to eliminate a projected $100 million deficit for the year starting July 1. At last night's meeting she laid out her layoff scenario, which includes over 600 teachers and about 300 other employees. Here's the Plain Dealer coverage of that meeting.

In preparation for this announcement, the district put letters in all their teachers' mailboxes yesterday. It was no surprise, since talk of layoffs has been circulating for months.

So presumably the district has had time to put Byrd-Bennett's two School Board presentations into html format and post them on its expensive website, where teachers, parents, and other citizens alarmed or perplexed by the news coverage could see what she actually said.

Here's the "News and Information" page of the CMSD site. Note that two press releases were posted yesterday. Note that one of them is headlined "CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett to Address Budget Reduction Process". But the link leads only to an announcement of a media briefing prior to the Board meeting, at which "No specific numbers will be discussed".

Okay, it's early. Maybe it will all be posted later today. We'll see.

But if Byrd-Bennett wants the community to "understand" the district's financial emergency and step up to the big tax hike she wants in the Fall, she'd better start taking steps to help us understand. Step One would be to put aside the made-for-TV histrionics ("Byrd-Bennett fights back tears") in favor of more open, timely sharing of real information, financial and otherwise. You know -- transparency. No more secret Board committees, no more carefully orchestrated press releases. Just put it all out there, unfiltered, free of extraneous packaging, and easy to find. And then be prepared to respond to public questions with real, timely answers.

Here's an example question to start with: If the average classroom teacher makes $45,000-50,000 a year, how can laying off 618 teachers save $61.5 million, as the PD story says?

Here's another: How many kids actually received diplomas from the Cleveland schools last year?

And here's a third: May I please see the District's most recent audited financials and the current year's line item budget?

This kind of information should be available to any Cleveland citizen, with a minimum of hoop-jumping. On the web -- once a capable site is up and running -- this can be accomplished at practically no cost. Right now would be a really good time to start.

I don't mean to be adversarial here. I believe the CMSD needs a tax increase -- should have tried for it last Fall, in fact -- and I intend to vote for any reasonable version of one. I believe that laying off teachers is a bad move. I believe that Byrd-Bennett has been a good CEO, on the whole, and deserves much benefit of the doubt.

But that doesn't exempt her, or the Board, or the teachers -- or the Mayor -- from the simple equation repeated so often in classrooms and halls: Give respect to get respect.

The minimal form of respect owed by a public agency to the public is open, easy, complete access to its information. The Cleveland Municipal School District is still a public agency... an agency that badly needs the voters' respect this Fall. Do the math.

CLEVELAND PUBLIC POWER MAKES HISTORY... But no press release, please. In February, for the first time in living memory, electric bills for at least some residential Public Power customers were higher than bills for the same service from CEI/First Energy.


According to the PUCO's monthly Utility Rate Survey, CEI's monthly charge for 750 kwh in January, February and March was $82.64. CPP's bills for the same usage were $80.28 in January, $83.98 in February and $80.87 in March. The February CPP bill was 2% higher than CEI's.

The February spike in CPP's energy charge was a small anomaly -- the "typical" CPP customer still had a tiny savings over the "typical" CEI customer (about 1%) during the whole first quarter. And the gap during the five summer months may be greater (it was 5% to 9% in 2003). But February's mini-historical event illuminates the shameful fact that Cleveland Public Power -- which still likes to posture as the affordable, competitive alternative to high-cost CEI -- has stopped being part of the solution for city consumers, and is now part of the problem.

The meaningful point of comparison for both Cleveland utilities is the average 750-kwh bill paid by customers of Ohio's other major private electric companies. i.e. those not owned by First Energy. In March, that average was $62.60 -- 29% less than Cleveland Public Power.

COMPUTER VOTING IN CLEVELAND? From the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition via What's Up:

Voter Verified Paper Trail for Electronic Voting -- Town Hall Meeting
Friday, April 23, 2004
Laborers Local 310 AFL-CIO Hall, 3250 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland

Demonstrations of machines with verified paper trail capability from 4-6 p.m.

Discussion from 6-8 p.m. with State Senator Teresa Fedor; State Reps. Peter Ujvagi, Mike Skindell, Claudette Woodard, Shirley Smith, Annie Keys; U.S. Congress Rep. Marcy Kaptur; Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting

Make sure your vote counts. Don't let the computer eat your ballot. No matter what your political party, your vote must count.

Sponsored by the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition.

Bev Harris' website is Black Box Voting. It offers a free PDF download of her book of the same name.

CUT BEACHWOOD CITY COUNCIL: The Free Times editorial called "Cut City Council" is unsigned, but it sure sounds like Editor-In-Chief David Eden, so at first I thought it was about Beachwood. After all, Beachwood Dave's hometown of 12,000 people has not only a full-time Mayor who makes more than $80,000 a year, but seven part-time Council members... not to mention its own Police Chief, Fire Chief, Building Commissioner, Finance Director, Law Director, Service Director, Community Services Director, etc., etc.. As the editorial says, this does seem a bit "top heavy" for a community with half as many residents as the average Cleveland ward. And I know Beachwood Dave is a hometown community activist, having run for that very remunerative mayor's job a few years ago. (I guess that's how he knows so much about mayor stuff, like he keeps reminding us.)

But then I realized that the editorial is talking about my home town, where the average ward's 23,000 people (who would be Cuyahoga County's 12th biggest city if they seceded) get exactly one elected person to represent them and deal with their daily mountain of neighborhood problems and complaints.

So, okay, Beachwood Dave or whoever wrote this nonsense, listen up: I've been active in neighborhood work in Cleveland for twenty-two years, through three mayors, four Council presidents and about a million downtown/suburban schemes du jour for "bringing back the city". The only real improvement in Cleveland's civic structure during that twenty-two years has been the strengthening of the local Council Members' role in day-to-day neighborhood governance -- the result of better staffing, reliable "ward allocations" of CDBG and other funds, working partnerships with community development groups and planning staffs, and (frankly) smarter Council Members.

Some Councilmen do it better than others, of course, which is why we have elections. But generally the system works far better at the neighborhood level than it did twenty years ago -- which makes it just about unique in modern Cleveland experience.

It works because the territories and populations of the wards -- like those of most suburban municipalities -- are human scale. Council Members who put in the normal fourteen-hour days can return their calls, get to community meetings, pay attention to local project and budget issues, communicate with the safety and service departments, and still show up to legislate. They have a fighting chance to know constituents personally. And when they come up for election, they -- and their opponents -- can still campaign effectively without huge campaign budgets.

Access for ordinary citizens. A capacity for local problem-solving. Face-to-face politics. Yes, it's all a terrible waste of money.

The citizens of Beachwood need to put a stop to it. And Dave Eden is just the Beachwood citizen to get the ball rolling.

Maybe that will keep him too busy to screw up my city.

SCHOOL BUDGET, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: Max Hayes teacher MB Matthews makes it real.

SHAMELESS PROMOTION DEPARTMENT: I work for Cleveland Digital Vision, a coalition of groups organized to strengthen community technology and tech literacy efforts in Cleveland neigborhoods. We often work with Computers Assisting People, which fixes up and donates hundreds of used computer systems to local nonprofits every year.

On May 12, our two organizations are holding Plug In Cleveland 1.0, a big party to raise money, honor some of the city's unsung Digital Divide heroes, and have a really good time. It's at the Midtown Innovation Center, home of Orbital Research, CleveMed, NeoBio and similar cutting-edge techies. We expect a great crowd, including George Nemeth, Craig and Sue James, Stan Miller of Neighborhood Centers, Chris Warren of Shorebank, Cindy Andrews of IBM, Tom Furnas of ideastream, Tony Houston of the Empowerment Zone, Jim Cookinham, Dan Hanson... well, you get the idea. Not to mention lots of the people who are out in the neighborhoods working for digital literacy and opportunity every day.

It costs $25. You should come. Learn more here. Get your ticket here.

CLEVELAND SCHOOLS SHORTFALL IS $100 MILLION: Channel 5 had "exclusive tape" last night of Barbara Byrd-Bennett choking back tears as she told a School Board meeting about a letter from the Governor announcing more state funding cuts. The Plain Dealer has a less theatrical account of the situation this morning.

For actual information about the School District's finances, see this article in the January Catalyst for Cleveland Schools, which provided some line-by-line background to Byrd-Bennett's November "State of the Schools" speech. And while you're there, read Charlise Lyle's companion editorial, which began:

If the business and political leaders of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County had their priorities straight, Cleveland voters would soon be casting ballots on a much needed school operating levy. Instead, when they go to the polls March 2, they likely will vote only in the primary elections.

And Cleveland's school children likely will pay the price next school year through deep cuts in school staffs, textbooks and transportation.

Civic leaders have known for some time that Cleveland schools are due for an increase in the operating levy; it's been seven years since one appeared on the ballot. They also know that the schools desperately need the money.

This year, the district is operating on a no-growth budget even though costs have risen. And recently, schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett made clear that still more budget cuts are on the way. Yet our civic leaders have spent all their time trying to ramp up for ballot requests to finance other projects that, ultimately, failed to win the public's support.

Uh-huh.

The proposed cuts described in today's PD article are just the beginning. Reportedly the district, which must approve the 2004-2005 budget by June 15, will lay off up to 1,400 workers including hundreds of classroom teachers. Then we'll have a levy on the November ballot, which has been floated as 10 to 15 mills (but would have to be more to reverse all these layoffs and program cuts). 15 mills is close to $30 a month for the owner of a $75,000 home.

Who's in charge of this slow-motion train wreck? Byrd-Bennett is cast as the protagonist, but she's ultimately just a $300,000-a-year hired hand. The School Board has to pass the budget and authorize the levy, but they're an obscure, unelected sounding board for the CEO. The only elected official responsible to the voters for the affairs of the School District is... Mayor Jane Campbell, who appointed them all.

Yup... we're about to see how Mayoral Control works when the shit hits the fan. Would an independent, elected School Board have allowed the rest of our "civic leadership" to put off the levy this long? Will this unknown, unelected Board have any credibility with the public when it counts -- either in explaining major program cuts or asking for a big tax hike? Or will this all come down to the shredded coattails of the Mayor, whose career would be ended by a loss, but not necessarily ensured by a win?

All this and the Presidential election, too. It's gonna be quite a Summer.

AND SPEAKING OF THE CLEVELAND SCHOOLS... Here's a little peek at someone doing it right, from MB Matthews.

ABOUT THOSE 308,000 JOBS: Don Iannone echoes the general elation about the national job growth figure for March.

Here's a less enthusiastic perspective from MaxSpeak:

If you like the payroll "establishment" survey, we have fewer jobs now than when the recession ended in 2001, an execrable record.

If you like the household survey, reputed to reflect the creative upsurge of self-employment and entrepreneurial initiative, job growth for the past two months is negative, and the employment level now is lower than in the fourth quarter of 2003.

So tell me again how the tax cuts have worked? What events would signal that they had not worked?

Some more detailed analysis along the same lines here.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics won't have state and metro-area breakdowns of these figures until mid-month. I'll be watching this site with great anticipation.

P.S. Just took a closer look here and realized that "mid-month" is off by a fair amount. The BLS release date for state-by-state job numbers is April 23; for metro-area numbers it's not till April 28.

OUTSOURCING: One of my two favorite bloggers on national economic issues is Brad DeLong, former Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy in the Clinton Administration who's now teaching at Berkeley. (The other is Max Sawicky of the Economic Policy Institute, who argues with him on a regular basis.)

This morning DeLong put up two long posts about the "outsourcing issue". The first is a draft of an article he's writing with his Berkeley colleague Stephen S. Cohen. The second is a long quote from a piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal by David Wessel.

You should read them.

WHY FIRST ENERGY FEARS REGIONALISM: From the Sunday PD, in a historical sidebar to the "Region Divided" article (page A13, not online):

1901: Tom L. Johnson is elected Cleveland mayor. In a city without suburbs, he pushes reforms that equate to early principles of regional government: home rule, public ownership of utilities, a professional approach to government and planning.

So this is all a plot to expand Cleveland Public Power to Bay Village and Solon. Now I understand...

NANO, NANO: The speakers at NEOSA's "Futures Forum" last week were all pretty interesting, but the guy I wanted to corner after the show was Scott Rickert of Nanofilm, who asserts joyously that the Great Lakes Rustbelt is well on its way to becoming the NanoBelt. Nanotech, Rickert says, is all about a new generation of materials that are inevitably going to replace the metals, plastics, etc. that now surround us. The U.S. and the Great Lakes states in particular have a big lead in this technology -- says Rickert -- and there's no reason to think it can't become NE Ohio's big new manufacturing sector.

After the session Rickert elaborated: nano materials are so light that shipping from anywhere to anywhere is cheap; the only raw material needed in quantity is water; and labor is only 2-3% of production cost, so labor cost is immaterial. Hmmm, I asked, so is that because nanotech production needs very few workers? Yes, Rickert replied; very few and very well educated.

So there's a possibility to chew on -- a future NE Ohio with lots of high-tech manufacturing that pays high wages but employs almost nobody.

Chris Seper advises me not to take Rickert's image of jobless manufacturing too literally, pointing out that Nanofilm has a real workforce at its Valley View facility. So... who knows? A story worth following...

And speaking of Chris and nanotech, his blog today features this helpful Infograph on the subject from the Onion. Mmmmm, ice cream!

INQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW: I just ran into this terrific line attributed to William Gibson: "The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed." Can anybody tell me the source?

PRIORITIES: The PD editorializes somberly this morning about the Cleveland School District's announced budget cuts.

There is no arguing the district's desperate financial straits. The last several months have witnessed midstream cuts in state aid, dwindling property tax revenues and fast-climbing charter-school and health-insurance costs... The district plans to address one half of this equation by seeking new taxes in November. Residents last approved a city schools levy in 1996, but back then the economy hummed, and the city hadn't laid off more than 300 safety workers. Even if school officials secure a miracle win this year, the money won't arrive in time to avert the certain downward spiral forced by this spring's cuts.

The district escaped academic emergency status just last fall, a proud moment. But it will be desperate once again when classes open this August. The near future looks ugly, and the sooner citizens accept this reality, the better chance Cleveland has of launching speedy repairs.

But for some reason the editorial fails to mention why the school levy was put off until this November instead of going on last Fall's ballot, when the coming crisis was already evident to every public official, business leader and editorial writer in town.

Children, can you say "convention center"?

FREE CULTURE FOR FREE: The entire text of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is available for free download here.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE... The Plain Dealer reports this morning that everything you suspected about your official "consumer advocate" in Columbus is true:

Former Ohio Consumers' Counsel Rob Tongren "deliberately concealed from the public" a consultant's findings that might have slashed electric bills in FirstEnergy territory, a state investigation has found.

Tongren's senior staff members, meanwhile, appeared to have urged the consultant - Boston-based LaCapra Associates - in a series of e-mails "to destroy their own records of the report and the underlying work product," says the report, which was released Tuesday.

It also says Tongren, who has since resigned from his job representing utility customers, accepted meals, refreshments and golf outings from utilities 71 times between 1999 and 2003. He failed to properly report more than $1,000 in gifts.

Tongren also was reported to have paid his own way, or gotten in free, to dozens of events at which utility executives and lobbyists were present, including an excursion to the Fiesta Bowl in 2003 on Columbia Gas' jet.

Tongren's replacement, Janine Migden, has taken some flak for her stint as an Enron lobbyist. But among the people who applied, she was probably a pretty good pick. She started her law career as a paralegal at the OCC back in the '80s, when Bill Spratley, the original Consumers' Counsel, was still making an effort to act like a genuine consumer advocate. And as lawyer for Hahn Loeser in recent years, she's been something of a green power activist, serving on the board of Green Energy Ohio among other things.

Frankly, anything's got to be better than Tongren. For a little update on what lies in store for Migden -- and northeast Ohio utility consumers -- see Ohio Citizen Action's clips today.

CMSD GRADUATION RATE STILL UNDER 40%: BFD posts a quote from teacher Mary Beth Matthews:

We cannot attract businesses to the region without a trained workforce. The regions largest school district is hemorrhaging students. Cleveland's student population numbers over 70,000. The district's graduation rate is only 38%. Realize, that means 62% of those 70,000 will not receive a high school diploma. That is HUGE. The implications are staggering.

Those who discuss revitalizing the region, without considering Cleveland's education crisis are like physicians trying to treat the symptoms while ignoring the cause.

Amen. And to underline Matthews' point, the new "State report card" for the district is out with the 2002-2003 graduation rate -- 39.4%. That makes the sixth straight year Cleveland's grad rate has been under 40% of entering ninth graders. Here are the last eight years:



Barbara Byrd-Bennett is fond of saying, most recently in her November speech to the City Club, that the graduation rate is up ten percentage points since she arrived. As you can see, the "report card" numbers don't support this claim.

Neither ODOE nor CMSD makes the data underlying the "official" grad rates available, so we don't know what these percentages really mean -- and it may be true that the district's data problems help to make it look worse than other "urban districts" in Ohio. But that doesn't change the reality that thousands of Cleveland high school kids continue to leave without a diploma, and that the situation is just about as bad now as it was in the state takeover period, before Byrd-Bennett took the reins.

Every year this continues means at least a couple of thousand new entrants in the city's work force without diplomas. When the last census was taken in 1999, Cleveland's percentage of adults without diplomas (31%) was the sixth highest among the fifty largest U.S. cities. And ominously, the 1999 count found that a full 38% of Cleveland's youngest adults -- 18-to-24-year-olds -- had neither diplomas nor GED certificates.

HEY, I'M AN URBLOG: I know about Otis White's Civic Strategies site mainly because BFD keeps bringing it up. This morning, however, having finally gotten my blogroll to function, I went googling for any links to Cleveland Diary that I should reciprocate. And up pops this on Mr. White's site...

Urban blogs are those that are focused on a metro area, provide interesting commentary about local politics, culture or urban life and aren't so ideological that they're painful to read. So how much ideology is too much? Hey, it's our list, so we get to decide...

Here's our list of urblogs worth spending time with:

Bill Callahan's blog is a jewel. He writes frequently and well, not only about Cleveland politics but economics. And he does so with an independent point of view. You can find Callahan's blog at... [you're already here].

Well. I guess George is right -- Otis is the man. How often do you get not just a nice review, but number one billing in a whole new cultural category? (Okay, "urblog" is more of a sub-sub-sub-sub-category, but even so...)

Hey Mom, I'm an urblog!

The other links on the page, from various cities, are interesting and nice company to be seen in. And note that White's looking for nominations for more urblogs to list.

Go ahead, feel free, I don't mind. My place in urblog history is secure.

WHERE WE WORK: This week's Crain's has a new list of the "Largest Cuyahoga County employers" (there's a link to it on the web site but it doesn't work). Here are the top twenty in order of workforce size:

1 Cleveland Clinic
2 University Hospitals (including their partnership with the Sisters of Charity)
3 Cleveland Municipal School District
4 U.S. Office of Personnel Management
5 Cuyahoga County
6 City of Cleveland
7 Progressive Corporation
8 KeyCorp
9 National City Corporation
10 U.S. Postal Service
11 MetroHealth
12 Ford
13 CWRU
14 Tops Markets
15 Giant Eagle
16 Continental Airlines
17 State of Ohio
18 General Motors
19 RTA
20 Sherwin-Williams

These twenty employers currently account for 152,000 employees, which is almost one-fourth of the county's total employment (613,000 in January according to OBES). They include all county payrolls with more than 2,500 workers.

Only three of the top ten, and nine of the top twenty, are private for-profit companies. Five of the top ten are government entities (counting the USPS). Numbers 1 and 2 are nonprofit health care systems.

Of the 152,000 people working for the county's twenty biggest employers, only 42,000 -- less than a third -- work in the "private sector".

DO-IT-YOURSELF COMMUNITY ENERGY POLICY: Don Iannone's ED Futures today points us to the Rocky Mountain Institute's Community Energy Opportunity Finder. Don says:

The Community Energy Opportunity Finder is an interactive tool that will help you determine your community's best bets for energy solutions that benefit the local economy, the community, and the environment.

Developed by energy experts at Rocky Mountain Institute, the Community Energy Opportunity Finder mimics the preliminary analysis of an expert consultant in order to help your community realize the benefits of wise energy use. The Finder was released in February 2004.

The Finder helps you collect information on your community's energy use, and then demonstrates the potential energy savings; dollar savings; reductions in carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide emissions; and job creation from energy efficiency programs. The Finder also gives you an overview of the kinds of renewable energy sources that could power your community.

GEEK VS. NERD -- ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS: Chris Seper blogged yesterday from a business journalism conference where he learned the distinction between "geeks" and "nerds", to wit:

Nerds use knowledge to make money.

Geeks revel in the knowledge without doing anything with it.

Quite a range of possibilities, isn't it? I wonder where Berners-Lee fits in that model.

LAKE FERRY -- WHILE CLEVELAND STUDIES, ROCHESTER SAILS: Daily high-speed ferry service between Rochester and Toronto starts April 30.

From the operator's press release on Canada News Wire:

Canadian American Transportation Systems is establishing a Fast Ferry service between Rochester, NY and Toronto, Ontario. The service will be "high speed", operating at over 50+ MPH, accommodating approximately 750 walk-on passengers, up to 220 cars and up to 10 trucks and buses. More than just a method of transportation, the Fast Ferry is truly a unique travel experience, offering amenities and ambience worthy of a mini cruise ship. Importantly, the two and a quarter hour "port to port" trip will act as a "virtual" bridge, connecting the national highway systems of Canada and the United States, and acting as a catalyst for two regions coming together, economic development, tourism activity and job growth on both sides of the border.

The Port of Cleveland has been studying the possibility of a ferry to Port Stanley since 1999. A draft of the latest million-dollar study is expected in April.

NO MORE BUSINESS CYCLE HERE? A strange new establishment slogan popped up in last weekend's Quiet Crisis panel in the PD: National business cycles aren't important in Cleveland any more.

David Abbott: "We still tend to focus too much on business cycles. Thinking about [the future] in terms of the recession and recovery from the recession is a dangerous thing for us to be doing, because I don't think that's really fundamentally what's going on. We're really talking about a fundamental transformation of the economy in this region. We are, in effect, sort of leading the nation in some ways in the transformation of the national economy, and we have to come to grips with that and . . .We can't be lulled by the fact that we might come back as the recession ends."

Joe Frolik's summary: "Clevelanders need to realize that the old business cycle of recession and recovery is dead; productivity and global competition mean that lots of jobs lost during this recession are never coming back."

Mark Rosentraub: "If we accomplish one thing, and this would be enormous if we accomplish it, it is that people begin to understand that it's not a business cycle. We're not in a down cycle. We're at the cusp of a change in the economy and in demography, and we need to understand that and respond to it."

WE'RE NOT IN A DOWN CYCLE? Is that what the Dean of Cleveland State's College of Urban Affairs said?

Click here for a chart of Cleveland city income tax receipts from 1993 to 2002.

Click here for a chart of quarterly job growth in the county from 1990 through 2003. And click here for a chart of Cuyahoga County sales tax revenue from 1990 through the present. (Last two links are from George Zeller's CEOGC research page.)

Looking at these charts, it's pretty obvious that something very bad started happening to the local economy in 2001, and it ain't over yet. What do you suppose that sudden event was? Did the "fundamental transformation of the economy in this region" just arrive that year? Did we trip over a cusp and fall down?

The answer, of course, is that a national recession started in March 2001, followed by the shock of 9/11 and a long "jobless recovery" that continues to this day. The U.S. economy is still more than two million jobs short of its employment level in March 2001. As with previous national downturns, Ohio and Cleveland started falling earlier, fell deeper and are taking longer to climb out. And since the whole economy still has a bad cold -- and quacks in charge of curing it -- Ohio and Cleveland are still bedridden.

(Incidentally, the same is true of Greater Seattle, which might be taken as evidence that a big tech sector, new wealth and a hot market for "creatives" don't make you cyclically immune -- if anyone was interested in evidence.)

Yes, the long decline of traditional U.S. manufacturing and the structural shift to service, financial and new-tech industries have clearly hurt greater Cleveland and made us more vulnerable to national downturns like this one. Yes, in the long run everyone in northeast Ohio has a stake in economic transformation. But Cleveland's immediate economic horrors -- our catatonic job market, our empty downtown, our record foreclosures and bankruptcies, and our disastrous local tax shortfalls -- are very directly tied to the national economy, and will improve significantly when and if the national economy starts adding jobs at a normal pace.

Abbott, Rosentraub, Nance, etc. know this perfectly well. So why claim otherwise in the newspaper? Why try to make The national business cycle doesn't matter any more the next thing that "everyone knows"?

Bad assumptions lead to bad policy. Cleveland already has too many half-truths (and a few outright falsehoods) being mouthed thoughtlessly by "informed" people. This one needs to go away, right now.

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.