STEELYARD COMMONS HYSTERIA... OR, ARE YOU EXPENDABLE?

My ZIP code, 44109 -- which includes my neighborhood of Brooklyn Centre, the Clark-Fulton neighborhood to the north, and a piece of Old Brooklyn to the south -- has more than 300 residents who are members of UFCW Local 880, the retail workers union, or BCTGM Local 19, the bakery workers union. Most of them earn their union wages and benefits at supermarkets (Tops, Giant Eagle, Dave's) or drugstores (CVS, RiteAid). All of them live within a mile or two of the proposed Steelyard Commons shopping mall, where the Plain Dealer and Channel 19 seem hysterically eager to see a new Wal-Mart put many of them out of work.

Is this too strong a characterization? Not on your life. The Plain Dealer's editorial yesterday, attacking as "appalling" the proposed ordinance to limit sales of food and other nontaxables in new big box stores in the city, makes clear that any attempt to mitigate the impact of Wal-Mart or Target on existing jobs and businesses -- or on traffic, for that matter -- will be denounced in the shrillest possible terms. 19 Action News took a short break last evening from its coverage of nude journalism and suburban sex to join the attack. Both outlets personally attacked Ward 13 Councilman Joe Cimperman, the ordinance's sponsor, who represents the Steelyard Commons site and the adjacent Tremont neighborhood.

When the PD editorial board and Channel 19 agree about an issue, sane citizens can usually just assume the other side is right, and move on. Unfortunately, both editorials are echoes of recent statements by Mayor Campbell, who should know better.

Here's the proposed ordinance, as introduced by Councilman Cimperman. It doesn't prevent the development of Steelyard Commons. It doesn't prevent the location of a Wal-Mart in Steelyard Commons or anywhere else in the city. It only creates a special category in the zoning code for big box stores ("large-scale retail"), and prohibits the use of more than 5% of such a store's interior sales area for selling nontaxable products.

Now here's a news flash: This ordinance wouldn't make it impossible for Wal-Mart or Target to open stores with grocery departments in the city. It would simply make big box grocery sales a non-conforming use, requiring a variance from the Board of Zoning Appeals. A variance request would entail the submission of detailed plans, public notice, public hearings, the airing of all relevant issues including job and neighborhood impacts, a showing by the developer that harm can be mitigated, etc.

In other words, Cimperman's ordinance creates a tool for regulatory review of proposed big box supercenters that the City now lacks -- especially in a case like Steelyard Commons, where "anything goes" zoning has made normal City review of issues like traffic impact, design, etc. just about worthless. (Did you know that Steelyard Commons will be open for a year before the developer completes any new road connections, so that shoppers will have to use Tremont streets to get to it? No, I bet you didn't.)

Why design this tool to deal specifically with grocery sales? Because food and pharmacy retail really is a special case. The studies constantly cited to show retail dollars "leaking" from the city don't mention it, but there are modern supermarkets and pharmacies in many city neighborhoods. Tops, Giant Eagle, and especially Dave's have all opened inner city stores in the last ten years, and there's getting to be a CVS, Rite Aid or Walgreen's on every corner. All these supermarkets and many of the drugstores pay union wages and benefits, and the majority of their employees are city residents. (UFCW Local 880 has nearly three thousand working members who live in the city.)

So unlike most of the retail sector, food and drug store chains are in the city, providing living wage jobs for city residents. In many cases (the Daves's stores at Arbor Park and Ohio City come to mind) they're the anchor stores for new neighborhood retail districts. Why would the city want to accommodate a development strategy like Wal-Mart's, which is specifically designed to attack their market shares and displace their workforces?

But that's exactly what the Campbell Administration and the PD are doing with their uncritical support for Steelyard Commons and attacks on the Cimperman ordinance. Since the ordinance would only affect big box grocery sales, its opponents' hysterical responses can only mean one thing: Wal-Mart intends to sell groceries at Steelyard Commons and won't locate there otherwise... and the City and PD want Wal-Mart there, no matter what.

And this, in turn, "sends a signal" (in the PD's words) that they consider Cleveland's existing grocery stores and pharmacies expendable, along with the thousands of Cleveland residents who work for them... including my three hundred neighbors.

Now that, to borrow some more shrillness from the Plain Dealer, is truly appalling.

SPEAKING OF MARRIOTT: In an entry a couple of days ago, I named the Marriott Corporation as one of the companies that pay low wages to Cleveland-area employees, but take most of the benefits of profitability (investor return, high top management salaries) out of the region. Marriott manages (I said "owns") four downtown hotels with a total of 1,300 rooms.

In the comments to that entry, Jason Birchem, who works in management at the Renaissance, took exception. I'm going to reprint his comments below in full. Then I'm going to raise some questions, which Jason (in an email exchange last night) said he'll try to answer. Look in the comments section of this entry for our continued conversation.

Jason wrote:

I can tell you from first hand experience that your rational that wages are of subsistence level is quite wrong. While it is true that most entry level jobs only pay in the $8 - $12 dollar range, Marriott as a company also has great beneifts. These are a costly part of doing business and hiring people. When taking one of the entry level positions Marriott makes it clear that with a good work ethic, and a willingness to learn they can progress in their careers. Go to any Marriott hotel and you will find people like myself who started out parking cars at a hotel in high school, went to college and came back at much higher salaries. Tuition reimbursement really helps too - and Marriott provides that. I would suggest that before you start coloring Marriott with broad (and innacurrately) based terms you actually take the time to learn of what you speak because you are flat out wrong on this.

I replied:

Jason -- I have talked to people on the Ritz-Carlton (Marriott) housekeeping staff about their pay and benefits. My understanding is that people cleaning rooms there, as of five years ago, earned in the $7 to $9 an hour range based on production competition within the workforce. This is consistent with the ODJFS survey data that I quoted in my 1/29 entry, showing the 2002-03 median (not starting) wage for maids and housekeeping cleaners in Cuyahoga County at $8.25 an hour. I'd be delighted to hear more about this subject from your experience.

And Jason responded:

Bill - I am sure you are correct (and the numbers prove it) in stating that the median wage is $8.25. Here is what I know. Our entry level positions start at a minimum of $8 per hour. There is then a 90 day review (and correlating pay increase), a 180 day review, and then yearly reviews each year following. While the entry level pay ranges are lower - the opportunity to advance is extremely good. People that show a desire to take on more responsibility, cross train with other jobs will be moving up quite rapidly. One of the largest challenges in the Cleveland market is the education level (lack of) of a majority of the workforce. Reading, writing, communication skills, and general business accumen is sorely lacking in the general populace. Will organization help this - I do not think so. The individuals that work hard and *want* to get ahead will. I am on the management team and I feel our pay, benefits, and perks are very good. Medical, dental, vision, 401k, pto, sick time, great travel perks with free and significantly reduced rooms so that yes our employees can stay at our hotels anywhere in the world. My concern is that you had lumped Marriott in with the rest of the corporate world, in fact pointed them out specifically. I agree that many companies are lacking in their employee appreciation but Marriott is not one of them.

Just another quick note on hotels. It is true that Marriott manages the hotels (Marriott Key Center, Renaissance, and Ritz-Carlton) but Marriott does not own the buildings. The Jacobs group owns the Marriott Key, Forest City owns the Ritz, and TCF Holdings owns the Renaissance. Marriott manages the hotels for a fee and the profit goes to the local owners.

See more by clicking "Comments" below.

VOINOVICH: COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT "THE GREATEST PROGRAM EVER"

From a U.S. Conference of Mayors press release, January 18 (just three weeks ago):

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson discussed issues related to housing and other community development programs. He also addressed the mayors' concerns about CDBG. "CDBG has worked and continues to work in our country. The '06 budget is fiscally conservative, but we will address the needs of your concerns." Jackson said.

Senator George Voinovich also addressed CDBG calling it the greatest program ever. "We shouldn't be talking about decreasing it. We should be talking about increasing it," Voinovich said.

WHY PEOPLE WORK: Weatherhead professor Sandy Piderit explains why it's bad management for Ohio to sit on $330 million in federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funds: expectancy theory.

(Bad permalink fixed... thanks, Sandy.)

BUSH BUDGET WOULD ELIMINATE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT BLOCK GRANT

The Bush Administration's 2006 budget proposal, sent to Congress today, calls for the complete elimination of the Community Development Block Grant program, which provides nearly $30 million a year to the City of Cleveland.

CBDG and seventeen smaller HUD community grant programs would be replaced by a new "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative" in the Department of Commerce.

The HUD appropriation for CDBG in 2005 was $4.618 billion. The Commerce Department "replacement" would get nearly a billion dollars less... $3.71 billion in 2006.

As a block grant program, CDBG has provided a predictable flow of funds for discretionary use by U.S. cities and smaller communities. Cleveland has used its allocations for a wide variety of community investments in housing, commercial revitalization, code enforcement, infrastructure improvements, and community services like crime prevention and senior transportation.

More details as I get them.

UNION WEEK: BUILDING WHOSE WEALTH, WHERE?

First off, I want to second John Etorre's recommendation (in the comments on my last entry) to read this article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Now for the question: Why does it matter that so many Cuyahoga County jobs pay too little to support a family, with some money left over for savings?

The conventional answer is that it's not fair. People who work full time should be able to get ahead. Hard work should earn a piece of the American Dream -- a house, a vacation, a step up the ladder for the kids. Wal-Mart wages foster inequality and violate our sense of equity.

Of course I agree with this answer. Maybe you do, too. But let's be frank: "fairness" has a pretty small constituency among Cleveland's movers, shakers and talkers -- even those proud liberal Dems who make a point of visiting a union hall every year or two. "Fairness" sounds so... redistributionist. And we all know that creating wealth, not redistributing it, is where it's at.

So let's talk about low wage jobs and community wealth building.

In general, a community gains wealth to the extent that a) its members create economic value, and b) the economic value created by its members becomes their income. The fact that it's made here is no reason to assume it stays here. Money that's made by business activity in northeast Ohio, but ends up in accounts in Texas, London, or Shanghai, is not "Cleveland wealth".

But money that flows from local business activity to local workers is Cleveland wealth. It circulates back into local stores, pays local rents and mortgages, supports local churches. Most important -- if there's enough of it, it enables the earners' families to save and invest. It allows them to build retirement accounts, acquire home equity, start small enterprises, pay tuitions. It takes earners' families beyond subsistence and empowers them to start creating new value on their own... if there's enough of it.

From an economic development standpoint, the worst part of Cleveland's increasing dependence on low-wage occupations is that we get the poverty, while the profits -- the asset additions of shareholders and top managers -- mostly go elsewhere.

Look again at the list of low-wage occupations in Cuyahoga County. Where do these people work? Where are the new openings for unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the Cleveland job market?

Retail (cashiers, sales). The Cleveland Yellow Pages lists fifteen "department stores" with more than one location. For some reason they don't include Kaufmann's, Sears or Marc's, but add these in and you get about 110 stores under eighteen names. Of these only Marc's, with 24 locations, is owned and operated locally. Count the men's and women's apparel stores with four or more addresses, and you find another thirteen chains operating here, of which just two -- Dot's and Diamond -- are northeast Ohio companies. That's thirty-one significant chain retailers selling adult clothing (among other things) in Cleveland-area malls and strip centers -- and only three firms are controlled by local managers and investors.

Think about the rest of the familiar names at the mall -- shoe chains, toy chains, consumer electronics, office supplies, etc. -- and you'll see the same thing. In the convenience store niche, Dairy Mart of Hudson is now owned by a Canadian company and competes with 7-Eleven of Texas and Convenient Food Marts of Chicago. Our big two supermarkets, Tops and Giant Eagle, are now headquartered in New York and Pennsylvania, respectively -- leaving only Dave's and Heinen's here. Even the drugstore market, with two strong local players (Medic and Discount), is increasingly dominated by CVS (Rhode Island) and Walgreen's (Illinois).

Hospitality (housekeepers, counter clerks.) There are no locally owned downtown hotels, and few if any in the region. Marriott (Maryland) and Hilton (California) together own almost 2,000 of the 3,800 hotel rooms downtown. I could go on, but you know the other names as well as I do.

Restaurants (waiters, bartenders, dishwashers, etc.) Okay, this is more mixed and harder to track down, and there's more local franchising of national brands. But a quick tour of the malls and interchanges will confirm the increasing dominance of national chains in this market as well. And with fast food outlets, national brands are the whole ball game.

Well, I could go on, but you get the point. The companies that employ the largest number of Cuyahoga County's lowest-wage workers are not, for the most part, locally owned or managed. Their CEOs don't bring their seven- and eight-figure salaries home to Cleveland suburbs. Their investors are elsewhere -- in most cases, spread throughout the stock-owning world. The people who run their northeast Ohio operations are middle managers, not movers and shakers, and they bring the region neither wealth nor clout.

In other words, the only way these national retailers, hotels, restaurant and fast food chains (and movie chains, and food service companies, etc. etc.) are going to increase the wealth of this community is by leaving more money here. There's absolutely no regional logic to helping WalMart, Target or Marriott increase their Cleveland market shares, and send more money back to head offices elsewhere, by paying subsistence wages to local workers.

Which is why it's in the interest of the whole region to have more of those workers organized, and bargaining effectively (i.e., collectively) to keep a bigger share of the value they help to create.

That's what unions are for. Whatever you may think of specific unions, or the labor movement's role in politics or the community, there's no more effective way for wage workers to get bigger slices of the pies they help to bake. For undervalued workers, their families and immediate communities, union organization is one of the most effective economic development tools available.

In Cleveland's present circumstance -- needing to build wealth and jump-start enterprise at every level, but smothered in subsistence-wage chain outlets that generate profits everywhere but here -- the unionization of low-wage workers should be welcomed by virtually everybody. Yes, even the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the guys at Baker Hostetler.

I'm not saying that unionization is appropriate in every Cleveland workplace, or that there aren't rational reasons for some employers (and workers) to avoid it, or that unions aren't sometimes as dumb and backward-looking as the rest of us. Like many a union loyalist (see the NYT article linked at the top of this entry), I'm sure the labor movement needs to re-think its roles and strategies on many fronts.

But support for collective bargaining to get living wages for local residents at places like WalMart, Marriott, the national food and building service companies, the big restaurant chains? From the standpoint of building wealth and reducing poverty in greater Cleveland, this is just a no-brainer.

UNION WEEK: ALL THE LOW-WAGE JOBS

Okay, here's "Union Week" Installment One... sorry it took so long, but I've been digging up some numbers for you.

Take a look at this chart of Cuyahoga County workers in occupations with median wages of less than $9 an hour. (The data is from the state's Labor Market Information website.)

If you're not statistically inclined, remember than the "median wage" is the midpoint for its category -- half of all the workers in that occupation make less than that amount, and half make more. So the chart tells us (for example) that at the beginning of 2003 Cuyahoga County had 21,030 people working as cashiers, and that half of them -- 10,515 -- earned $7.22 an hour or less.

The occupations listed all had more than a thousand workers. They included about 121,000 of the county's 625,000 employed persons -- about one-fifth of our local jobs. Another 4,000 people worked in fifteen smaller low-median-wage occupations, ranging from veterinary assistants ($7.07) to movie projectionists ($8.21), barbers ($8.40) and sewing machine operators ($8.98).

A "full time job" generally means between 35 and 40 paid hours a week, or 1,820 to 2,080 paid hours annually. So the median annual pay of the 125,000 Cuyahoga County workers in these occupations ranged from $11,700 to $18,700, assuming full-time year-round work.

Why have I picked "below $9 an hour" as a rough equivalent for "low-wage" employment? Of course it's somewhat arbitrary, but here are three reasons:

1) The gross pay of someone working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for $9 an hour is less than the 2004 Federal poverty guideline of $18,850 for a family of four. (That's why Cleveland's Fair Employment Wage is currently set at $9.66).

2) $9 an hour ($18,360 a year) is also a less than half of the average pay for all persons employed in Cuyahoga County ($39,498 in 2003, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics). So $9 an hour is a pretty good dividing line for the bottom quarter of the county's wage structure -- in fact, it's probably closer to the bottom fifth.

3) Finally, and most important here, I think $9 to $10 an hour is the lowest hourly wage that allows a Cleveland family with two full-time earners and a couple of kids to have a thrifty but functional lifestyle without going into debt. In other words, a hardworking two-parent family in this city needs to make $35,000 to $40,000 a year ($9-10 an hour for two fulltime earners) just to get to the "takeoff point" for significant personal savings. And the wage needed by a single parent to get to this same point is even higher -- close to $15 an hour.

(Adjusting for inflation, this is very similar to the Economic Policy Institute's 1999 "basic family budget" calculation for the Cleveland area.)

Am I saying that lower-wage workers can never save money? Of course not. Many Clevelanders manage to put something aside while making beds, ringing cash registers and waiting tables for a living -- through heroic household management, second and third jobs, grandparental support, etc. But it's a very difficult trick to pull off... and not one that we can reasonably expect from the majority of households in this situation.

So why does it matter? I'll get to that in my next installment.

One more thing:

According to ODJFS projections, four out of the five occupations with the most annual job openings in the Cleveland SMSA from now through 2010 are on the low-wage list:

Cashiers
Retail salespersons
Combined food preparation & serving workers, including fast food
Waiters and waitresses

In fact, the combined 5,995 annual openings in these four occupations represent one out of every seven jobs projected for the Cleveland-Lorain region.

And please note: they're in two industries -- retail and restaurants -- whose growth is most dominated by national chains, and whose managers are most averse to unions.

CITY CLUB "NEW LEADERS" DEBATE: "Unions in Northeast Ohio: Fueling the Economy or Applying the Brakes?"

John Ryan of the Cleveland AFL-CIO versus Richard Leukart of Baker and Hostetler on "the relevance and role of unions in the future of Northeast Ohio's economy"... next Wednesday, February 2.

Leukart's profile at the Baker and Hostetler website features his expertise in "union avoidance" and says:

He has substantial experience in concession and cost reduction bargaining and has managed strikes and concurrent negotiations including temporary and permanent replacement of employees and the creation of non-union departments from unionized sub-departments.

So it's Cleveland's #1 union booster, in the ring with a proud pinstriped union buster. This should be one of the City Club season's hot tickets ($20 for non-members... get your reservation in now!)

But can we expect any light on the subject -- or just flamethrowers and advocacy-group statistics at twenty paces?

Maybe a little prior discussion would help.

People who read this blog know that I think Cleveland needs more unionization... especially in the sectors which employ the most low-income, undereducated Cleveland residents, like big-box retail, hotels, food service, building maintenance and security services. I think we need unions, not just for reasons of economic and legal fairness -- though those are perfectly good reasons -- but to advance the more fashionable goals of wealth creation and resurgent entrepreneurism.

The City Club debate is a good excuse to spend a few entries on why I hold this strange opinion. So, from now till next Wednesday, it's "Union Week" at Cleveland Diary.

Let me start with two simple propositions:

1. In general, a community gains wealth to the extent that a) its members create economic value, and b) the economic value created by its members becomes their income.

2. The cure for poverty is not more work (as any slave can tell you), but more wealth.

Continued tomorrow.

NEW OHIO JOB WATCH FROM POLICY MATTERS:

Ohio did not gain jobs in 2004, and employment now is lower than at any point since the 1990s. According to the latest seasonally adjusted payroll numbers issued Jan. 21 by the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services, the state has lost 200 jobs since December, 2004. Gains reported earlier in 2004 have been wiped out by job losses since then.

INTERESTING NEW BLOG from Toledo City Councilman Frank Szollosi -- at szollositoledo.blogspot.com.

Did you know there's a website devoted to dead shopping malls?

SOCIAL SECURITY -- THERE IS NO CRISIS.

Locally, "Advocates at work to keep Social Security unchanged".

WAL-MART'S EFFECT ON LOCAL POVERTY: The next reporter to interview Mayor Campbell, Economic Development Director Greg Huth, or any member of the Cleveland City Planning Commission really should ask them if they read this recent study from Penn State before signing off on a Steelyard Commons plan that's almost certain to include a Wal-Mart Supercenter:

Wal-Mart and County-Wide Poverty
by Stephan Goetz and Hema Swaminathan, Penn State University, October 2004

The presence of a Wal-Mart store hinders a community's ability to move families out of poverty, according to this study. After controlling for other factors that influence poverty rates, the researchers found that those U.S. counties in which new Wal-Mart stores were built between 1987 and 1998 experienced a significantly smaller reduction in their poverty rates than those counties that did not add new Wal-Mart stores.

(Abstract from Hometown Advantage.)

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY: It's now almost thirty-seven years since King was assassinated in Memphis. He was there to support a strike against the city by AFSCME Local 1733, a union of African-American sanitation workers seeking recognition and better pay.

A year earlier, King said this to members of Hospital Workers Local 1199 in New York:

When there is massive unemployment in the black community, it is called a social problem. But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it is called a Depression.

We look around every day and we see thousands and millions of people making inadequate wages. Not only do they work in our hospitals, they work in our hotels, they work in our laundries, they work in domestic service, they find themselves underemployed. You see, no labor is really menial unless you're not getting adequate wages.

Now there's a text to preach on today in Cleveland... thirty-seven years later.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S MAJOR ATTACK ON COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FINALLY ARRIVES: After four years of incremental pressure on Federal programs that fund community development in cities like Cleveland, the Bush White House has apparently decided it's time for a major assault. From a story in yesterday's Washington Post (free registration required):

The White House will seek to drastically shrink the Department of Housing and Urban Development's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program and folding high-profile anti-poverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments, administration officials said yesterday.

... Congressional housing aides say the $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program -- the bulk of the community planning budget -- could be cut as much as 50 percent. Cities have become dependent on HUD's development programs, especially the CDBG, which has existed for 30 years, city officials said.

The Community Development Block Grant has been the financial cornerstone of neighborhood revitalization in Cleveland since the mayoralty of Ralph Perk. Our recent City budgets include nearly $30 million a year in CDBG funds, as well as $7 or $8 million in "HOME" funds for housing development and additional HUD grants for programs for the homeless and victims of AIDS. CDBG money pays the bills for the whole Community Development Department (including building and housing inspectors), most of our community development corporations, many community-based social service programs (senior centers, crime watch, community gardens, community arts, even some computer centers), and a piece of virtually every grassroots housing or commercial development initiative.

In short, the proposed gutting of HUD and CDBG is a very big threat to Cleveland's future.

If you care at all about community revitalization in Cleveland -- or Toledo, or Columbus, or Akron, or Dayton, or Cincinnati, or Lorain, or any other city of any size anywhere in the U.S. -- now is the time for a scream of indignation in the direction of Senators Voinovich and DeWine. I mean right now, today. And tell your friends to do the same. This baby must die in the cradle!

Contact info for Voinovich is here. DeWine's is here.

"Senator, where do you stand on the Bush Administration's reported plan to take community development programs away from HUD and make major reductions in CDBG funding to Ohio communities?"

Please, do it now. And if you get a reply, please let me know.

Update... A reader wrote back that she had trouble using the email forms on Senator Voinovich's and DeWine's website contact pages, which are linked above. If you have the same problem, you can try these regular email addresses:

senator_voinovich@voinovich.senate.gov
senator_dewine@dewine.senate.gov
I'm sure everything ends up in the same staff routing system.

SBC TV = DIGITAL REDLINING?

If you saw Chris Seper's story in the PD Friday about SBC's plan to start offering TV-over-internet ("IPTV"), you should also take a look at this:

Ministers Denounce SBC Internet-Cable TV Push as 'Digital Redlining'

SBC's announced $6 billion program to deliver high-speed Internet and cable TV over fiber-optic phone lines will target affluent customers, amounting to redlining of disadvantaged communities, the Ministerial Alliance Against the Digital Divide (MAADD) charged today.

"This is another discriminatory scheme disguised as technological progress by SBC," said Reverend James L. Demus III, co-director of MAADD. "These so- called investment proposals by SBC come with one fat string attached: no franchise agreement, and thus no requirement to invest in an entire community versus only the wealthy parts."

"This is nothing short of digital redlining. SBC is planning to deprive poorer customers of access to $6 billion in vital new technology," continued Demus. "We urge municipalities to stand firm and demand that SBC sign contracts that require it not to cherry-pick customers."

The $6 billion in investment by SBC is sure to almost completely bypass poor and minority neighborhoods -- SBC's own briefings to investors and analysts show the company intends to bring its new services to only five percent of what it calls "low-value customers" while targeting 90 percent of high-spending customers.

The ministers' group cannot have been reassured by the Reuters story on SBC's initiative:

Not yet clear is the issue of regulation, and whether municipalities will seek to force franchise agreements on SBC for its local service as they do with cable companies.

... And the issue is already on the mind of the regulator-in-chief, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell.

Powell said IPTV posed challenges for U.S. regulators who are used to regulating new technologies in distinct categories, whereas IPTV blurs boundaries between television, Internet and cable.

"If you are SBC and you deploy IPTV are you a cable company? Are you a telephone company? Are you a satellite company?" he said in a question-and-answer session at the show.

If that's what's on Michael Powell's mind, there's going to be a problem for municipalities -- and that problem will show up almost immediately on the doorstep of Cleveland City Hall. One of the Powell FCC's abiding interests has been to reduce local communities' cable franchising powers. Cleveland, still one of SBC's major markets and with our cable franchise with Adelphia up for review next year, may well become a test market for FCC/industry initiatives aimed at taking local government out of the "converged media" game completely.

TUBBS-JONES HAS SENATE SUPPORT FOR CHALLENGE ON OHIO ELECTORAL VOTE TODAY: According to Keith Olbermann's blog at MSNBC...

Nothing is in writing and daybreak is a long way away, but it appeared all but certain in early evening Wednesday that House Democrats had secured the support of up to half a dozen Senators to formally challenge the Electoral College slate from Ohio, when the votes are opened before a joint session of Congress tomorrow.

Congressional sources tell this reporter that the house half of the written objection — which has the declared support of more than a dozen Representatives — is expected to be signed by Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio...

As it is, a written challenge would require the joint session to suspend for several hours, during which the Senate and the House would meet separately and debate the merits of the objection.

The ad hoc group formed by Representative John Conyers of Michigan has also today published its staff report, concluding that before, during, and after the election in Ohio, many state laws may have been broken, in every area ranging from the allocation of voting machines, election day "anomalies," and the recount. It recommended a formal Congressional inquiry, and additional legislation to reform voting laws.

The full Conyers report (House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio) is available as a pdf file here.

Update: Representative Tubbs-Jones has a letter in the PD today in which she says, among other things:

... this objection does not have at its root the hope or even the hint of overturning or challenging the victory of the president, but it is a necessary, timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious process in our democracy.

You have to scroll down from the link to find Tubbs-Jones' letter. While you're at it, be sure to read the first and third letters, from (respectively) Geoff Beckman and Judy Gallo. Here's Geoff's, with a link added:

Tuesday's editorial screed ("Please, let it go") about "beating a dead horse" omits one critical fact: There is absolutely no point at which voting authorities in the state of Ohio - or The Plain Dealer - considered the horse to be alive.

For four solid months prior to the election, nonpartisan voter registration groups in almost every county expressed concern about the boards of elections' visible lack of preparation for what would obviously be an extremely high turnout. But reports of 120-day delays in processing registrations, voters being improperly removed from the election rolls, unreturned phone calls, unmailed postcards and lack of response to questions about preparations were brushed aside. Words like "alarmist," "unnecessary" and "premature" were employed, because the horse had not been born yet.

The day after the election, the Ohio secretary of state and this newspaper announced that statewide voting had gone smoothly, with no major errors. The horse, we were informed, had died a peaceful, natural death.

Would The Plain Dealer be kind enough to inform citizens who have concerns about how voting is handled in Ohio exactly when they may be permitted to air their concerns without being scolded?

I second that emotion.

USA TODAY: "BELLS DIG IN TO DOMINATE HIGH-SPEED INTERNET REALM"

It's the dark side of the fiber story.

The regional Bell companies have made much of their billion-dollar plans to run broadband networks across the USA. Yet they're also quietly trying to erect hurdles that would make it hard — or expensive — for anyone to compete with them.

Besides municipalities... the Bells are going after their phone rivals, Internet carriers and major metro areas — anyone with an interest in building services that might compete with the Bells.

Critics say the Bells' efforts are an attack on competition and that consumers could be the big losers.

"If municipal governments and others are blocked from entering this market, the vast majority of Americans are going to wind up on the wrong side of the digital divide, because they will be unable to afford high-speed services," says Gene Kimmelman of Consumers Union.

More from Esme Vos at MuniWireless...

ROLDO WANTS ROKAKIS TO RUN: Roldo Bartimole has an interesting column in today's Cool Cleveland urging County Treasurer Jim Rokakis to run for Mayor even if his polling shows he can't win.

With all respect to Roldo, it's not the greatest career move to run a citywide campaign you're pretty sure you can't win, just to have a platform. And Roldo's concluding challenge to Rokakis, "What else do you have to do as you reach your 50th year?", has an obvious answer: Keep being a good County Treasurer. The pay's good, you're in a position to make good things happen, and 50 ain't that old.

But I have to admit, listening to Rokakis explain his hospital "payment in lieu of taxes" proposal on WCPN the other day, I was thinking the same thing -- and had a pang of disappointment when he said he'd decided not to run. Lucid, sensible, unrhetorical discussion of complex issues is a scarce commodity in Cleveland politics at any level these days. Rokakis does have a talent for it... and a knack for finding actual policy innovations to talk about.

In a rational world, his fellow Democrats would be looking for ways to promote and develop this talent as a strength for the party. But in the screwed-up world we have, elected Democrats mostly see each other as competitors -- so the only way a Rokakis can get new ideas or approaches taken seriously outside his own own fiefdom is to run for another office.

I assume Rokakis' information and judgment about his chances are better than Roldo's or mine. I don't think I would waste my time and money running for a job I don't think I can win. But hey, I know where Roldo's coming from.

WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE? I went to the Cleveland School Board meeting tonight to watch them take the first step in the campaign to pass an operating levy in May, i.e. they passed a resolution listing the next round of cuts that will happen if a tax increase doesn't. Among the highlights:

... fourteen schools closed next year
... $10 million in security cuts
... $8 million worth of additional layoffs
... more cuts in arts, transportation, college counseling, extracurriculars and
... cuts in varsity sports (so long Tarblooders?)

So there we were in the School District Board room, with big decisions being made about the financial future of a critical public system, a crowd of citizens worried about it, and lots of speechmaking that could only be called political. Democracy in action, right?

Except... there wasn't a single elected official in the room.

"IT'S HARD TO OVERSTATE HOW GRIM THINGS LOOK FOR THE CLEVELAND SCHOOLS THIS YEAR."

Plain Dealer education columnist Chris Sheridan had a sharp, scary piece yesterday in which she said some things out loud that insiders have been saying very quietly up to now:

Barbara Byrd-Bennett will soon be gone.

The levy defeat in November showed that Byrd-Bennett has already lost a lot of her political luster, leaving the school system without effective public leadership. (Sheridan doesn't mention that BBB's big slide has been with African-American voters, whose support in Wards 1 through 10 fell from over 80% in the 2001 bond levy vote to only 55% this time.)

"The downward spiral started more than a year ago, when city leaders squandered the prime electoral opportunity posed by the November 2003 ballot... Rather than capitalizing on the chance to secure the district's finances, leaders allowed dithering over a convention center to stall all other progress."

Sheridan doesn't name the "city leaders" responsible, probably because the list is too long. Cleveland Tomorrow, the Growth Association, the County Commissioners, labor leaders, and her own newspaper would all be near the top. But the Mayor is on there, too... and so are Byrd-Bennett and the mayor-appointed School Board, if only through their complicit silence.

In not naming these names, Sheridan's otherwise dead-on analysis obscures a crucial point: The schools' political failure in 2003-04, and the "controversy, confrontation and, ultimately, chaos" they face in 2005 as their leadership and finances continue to shred, represent the failure of a system, not just a few individuals. We're now experiencing the first big test of the governance model known as "mayoral control" -- the "reform" system that was supposed to centralize accountability, eliminate petty politics, and empower professional management of the schools.

And mayoral control (which I personally voted to continue two years ago, along with 72% of my fellow voters) appears to be flunking that test.

ROKAKIS NOT RUNNING FOR MAYOR: I just listened to Jim Rokakis on WCPN's "90.3 at 9", with Zack Schiller of Policy Matters, talking about the hospital "payment in lieu of taxes" issue.

Asked about his possible candidacy for mayor, Rokakis said he's decided not to run.

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.

PRESS SILENCE ON SUNOCO ENDS: After three months of silence, the Toledo Blade finally had an article yesterday on Ohio Citizen Action's fight to protect East Toledo residents' health surveys from a Sunoco subpoena.

If you wrote the Blade a letter, thank you!

CHECK THESE OUT...

Hotel Bruce has two excellent articles on Ohio City/Near West neighborhood development -- "Who can afford Ohio City?" by Marc Lefkowitz, and Lee Chilcote's look back at thirty years of organizing and development efforts that started in the Lorain Avenue Savings and Loan building at Lorain and Fulton. There's plenty to argue about in both pieces, but together they shed considerable light on the real, difficult issues of neighborhood work.

And Brewed Fresh Daily catches an enlightening piece from SmartMobs.com about tech-empowered strikers at a factory in China that supplies WalMart.

"DO-IT-YOURSELF ANTI-MUNICIPAL BROADBAND KIT": Esme Vos at MuniWireless has the goods on a piece of "model legislation" now being circulated by a Washington think tank with honchos from BellSouth and Verizon on its board.

A couple of days ago, MuniWireless also flagged Ohio House Bill 591, introduced in the General Assembly's waning days by Representative Thom Collier (GOP-Mount Vernon). It's not the same thing as Pennsylvania's House Bill 30 (as Harold Feld of Media Access Project explains at Wetmachine), and it was introduced too late to go anywhere in the session that just ended, but... it's one more reason to expect a serious legislative attack on city-sponsored broadband when the new session begins in January.

(Incidentally, for the last two years Rep. Collier has served as chairman of the House Economic Development and Technology Committee.)

And here, again from MuniWireless, is why this all matters to non-geeks in Cleveland: "Wireless broadband: Anti-poverty weapon".

CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Sunoco attorney in Toledo demands that Ohio Citizen Action members pay his legal fees.

"Sunoco's Toledo attorney filed papers with a Toledo court on December 14, demanding that Ohio Citizen Action members pay his legal fees. Louis Tosi had previously subpoenaed Citizen Action demanding that the organization turn over to him all health questionnaires, including personal medical information, about Sunoco neighbors, with their names and addresses."

MR. TOSI, CALL YOUR OFFICE: DOUBLE STANDARD AT SHUMAKER, LOOP

While Sunoco attorney Louis Tosi has been trying to force Citizen Action to turn over confidential health interviews from neighbors of Sunoco's Toledo-area refinery, other lawyers at his own firm -- Shumaker, Loop and Kendrick -- recently convinced the Ohio Supreme Court to protect the "source confidentiality" of a Toledo radio news director who fed a sex rumor about a Toledo Blade reporter to the station's morning talk show host... who was then sued by the reporter for repeating it on the air.

As the Shumaker, Loop website proudly reports:

TOM PLETZ of the Toledo office spoke at the Toledo Bar Association "Media Law Seminar" November 8, 2004 on the subject of the Ohio "reporter's shield" law, which protects news reporters from being required to disclose the identitiy of their news sources in court.

Tom and NEEMA BELL (Toledo) obtained a ruling from the Supreme Court of Ohio November 1, 2004, which protected a Clear Channel Broadcasting radio station news director from disclosing the identity of a news source who had provided a tip. The Supreme Court merit decision without opinion effectively extinguished an earlier adverse Sixth District Court of Appeals' opinion which had construed the statute quite narrowly, and which would have required the Clear Channel news reporter to name her source.

The case (Svoboda v Clear Channel Communications, Inc.) was summarized here last March, when the Sixth District Court of Appeals upheld a Lucas County Common Pleas Court order telling WVKS news director Tricia Tischler to reveal the name of her source for the rumor about Blade reporter Sandra Svoboda ... essentially because it wasn't actually "news". That's the decision that Shumaker, Loop lawyers just got overturned.

More of the gory details of the lawsuit can be found here.

So to sum up, here's the position of Mr. Tosi's law firm:

1) The right of a radio news director and talk show host to protect the source of a scurrilous sexual rumor about a rival reporter is absolute, and must be defended all the way up to the Supreme Court; but

2) The right of citizens who provide private medical information to a civic organization's health survey to have that information held in confidence is a "frivolous" claim, and the organization's efforts to defend that claim should be punished, financially and criminally.

You gotta have principles.

JUDGE SAYS CONSUMER GROUP MUST TURN OVER CONFIDENTIAL HEALTH SURVEYS FROM TOLEDO REFINERY NEIGHBORS TO SUNOCO; MEDIA IS SILENT

You know how, when reporters are told by prosecutors and judges that they have to name their sources or go to jail, it's immediately a national news story? Even when the reporter is protecting a criminal -- like say, a source who leaked classified information to damage a political opponent?

Hold that thought while I tell you a story.

Since August, Ohio Citizen Action, a nonprofit consumer and environmental action group, has been fighting a subpoena in Lucas County (Toledo) Common Pleas Court. The subpoena demands that OCA turn over (among other things) copies of personal health surveys, filled out by 473 neighbors of Sunoco's MidAmerica refinery, to attorneys for Sunoco. OCA has been ordered by Judge Ruth Ann Franks to comply. OCA says the information was collected in confidence and they can't turn it over unless individual respondents give their permission. If they don't, OCA staff and leaders face contempt of court charges and possible jail time.

Haven't heard about this? There's a reason for that. The media is ignoring the story.

The surveys were collected in August from residents of the low-income East Toledo neighborhood near the Oregon, Ohio refinery as part of an ongoing OCA "Good Neighbor Campaign" to reduce the facility's toxic emissions. They contain respondents' names, addresses, and personal health information. The compiled results were released to the media and sent to the Toledo-Lucas County health commissioner with a request for a formal public investigation into the serious, recurring health problems reported by neighborhood residents.

The subpoena was issued to OCA by Sunoco attorney Louis Tosi in connection with a class action lawsuit filed by fifteen neighbors of the refinery in March. OCA isn't a party to the suit, didn't organize support for it, and has had minimal contact with the plaintiffs' attorney. Nonetheless, Tosi's subpoena demands that OCA turn over virtually every scrap of paper and computer file in its possession that has anything to do with the refinery... including the 473 original survey forms.

The whole history of the campaign and the subpoena (from OCA's viewpoint) can be read here. But here's the bottom line:

On November 22, Judge Franks denied OCA's motion to quash Sunoco's subpoena and ordered the organization to turn over the survey forms within fourteen days. That clock ran out on December 6.

OCA has asked for time to contact the individual respondents and ask for their permission. Without that permission, OCA says it can't comply with the judge's order. Contempt of court citations are the likely result.

Now here's the weird part. This story was last covered by the Toledo Blade on September 9, three months ago. Since then, despite numerous OCA press releases, there's been no media coverage of any kind -- not by the Blade, or Toledo television, or the AP, or the Cleveland Plain Dealer, or the Columbus Dispatch, or NPR. Nobody. Nothing. Total silence.

Try to imagine that it was a reporter or a newspaper in this situation -- facing jail time for protecting the confidentiality of low-income residents who filled out a form describing their personal health problems. Would there be media attention? The only question would be the size of the headline on the front page of USA Today.

Ohio Citizen Action needs your help in this fight. I think they deserve it. (Disclosure: I worked for OCA throughout the 1980s and my daughter works there now... which is the only reason I know about this.) Here's what you can do:

First, send an email or letter to Sunoco CEO John Drosdick asking him to contact his lawyer Louis Tosi and get the subpoena withdrawn.

Second, write a letter to the Toledo Blade asking why this story isn't being covered.

And third, spread the word. If you're a blogger, please blog this story. I don't give a crap if you link here or not... feel free to write it up yourself and take credit, but please get this out into blogspace!

Thanks.

LAPTOPS MAY DAMAGE MALE FERTILITY

I always knew the Digital Divide must be good for something.

WAL-MART ON THE CUYAHOGA: So now it turns out that Steelyard Commons, the big inner-city mall development a few blocks upstream from ISG's West Side mill, may well be anchored by a Wal-Mart... maybe even Northeast Ohio's first Supercenter.

Funny how this wasn't mentioned a few months ago, when the great new project was rolled out to delighted squeals at City Hall. Funny how it also wasn't mentioned in October, when the Planning Commission gave Steelyard a thumbs-up in a "design review" process with no tenants identified.

I could start reciting all the downsides of the Wal-Mart scenario, but Alison Grant's article does a pretty good job of that, so instead I'm just going with a prediction:

Unless it comes with unprecedented labor and community protection agreements (and I stress the word unprecedented, as in "highly unlikely"), a Wal-Mart in Steelyard Commons will become one of the most important issues in the mayoral election next year and may well cost Jane Campbell a second term.

You read it here first.

HOW MANY OF ME ARE THERE? An email this morning from Jeff Sugalski at CSU's Neighborhood Link:

NeighborhoodLink is the exclusive online home of the Cleveland Neighborhood Market Drilldown Study conducted by Social Compact!...

If you haven't heard about it, the Cleveland Neighborhood Market Drilldown was designed to provide the city, the local business community, and Cleveland neighborhoods with a unique set of dependable business-oriented data and market insights that cannot be accessed through traditional market sources. It aims to help fuel the flow of private capital by supporting informed business decision-making for future investment in Cleveland's inner city and undervalued neighborhoods.

You can visit the Cleveland Neighborhood Market Drilldown Study website on NeighborhoodLink and see what it has to offer at http://www.nhlink.net/socialcompact/.

You might remember that this is the study released with great fanfare in November that claims to prove the city of Cleveland has 100,000-plus more residents than shown by the U.S. Census... and also implies that our average income is even lower than the Census told us. This is supposed to be good news for retail development in the city -- which makes sense, I guess, if the retail you have in mind is Wal-Mart.

It does make me wonder, though: If the Campbell Administration, which has embraced the Social Compact findings, really thinks we have a population approaching 600,000 people, why aren't they loudly demanding an immediate increase in our "official" body count for purposes of Federal funding formulas... like for the Community Development Block Grant allocation? Seems like an undercount equal to the population of Youngstown is a pretty big deal.

What am I missing?

FAIRNESS AND BALANCE: Okay, since the last two entries are somewhat snarky toward the Campbell Administration, I've got to tip my hat in the Mayor's direction for two pieces of positive news:

First, while I'm one of the many local citizens who find the return of the Convention Center issue profoundly depressing, I'm glad to see Campbell staking out an early position for renovating and expanding the existing place, instead of wandering back into the swamp created by Cleveland Tomorrow and Forest City in the last go-round. The only way to keep this thing from turning into an election-year monster is to set some reasonable limits, make clear to Cleveland voters what you're doing, and stick to it. Good move, Mayor.

And a big round of applause for the Administration's dogged effort to preserve our anti-predatory lending ordinance against state pre-emption, which won an interim victory in a state appeals court last week. This fight is about more than protecting homeowners from financial victimization, though that's a plenty good enough reason to pursue it. It's also about protecting Cleveland's battered Home Rule rights from a legislature eager to eviscerate them, any time a corporate interest (in this case, the banking industry) asks them to. Once again -- good work, Mayor. Keep it up.

WIRELESS PHILADELPHIA STORY CONTINUED: Lots of discussion out there on the issues raised by Pennsylvania House Bill 30 and the municipal wifi/broadband movement exemplified by Wireless Philadelphia.

Steve Goldberg links to unhappy comments on the Pennsylvania legislation by Sasha Meinrath, who links in turn to MuniWireless.

Here's internet.com on the buzz at the WiFi Planet conference.

And here's the Philadelphia Inquirer's business columnist Andrew Cassell, who didn't like the idea of Wireless Philadelphia when the mayor proposed it, having some second thoughts in the light of Verizon's attempt to squash it.

Chris Seper, reacting to my post yesterday, says:

A source of mine at Case Western Reserve University once told me that a municipal network would never truly compete with a private provider like SBC. He compared it in some ways to bottled water versus water from the tap. A municipal Wi-Fi network (the tap water) would be slower, include a stringent filter to block a host of Web sites, and wouldn't quickly adjust for the number of users in an area (another issue that would effect Internet quality). Meanwhile, a private Internet service provider could guarantee faster and unfettered Internet use with additional services as well.

While I think the generalizations here about the quality of municipal wireless presume too much, the basic point -- that public and private network development aren't necessarily in conflict -- is accurate. After all, One Cleveland's nonprofit/public network may be costing SBC some business, but it's creating a market for Cisco and IBM. And there's a good chance that the planned Philadelphia system -- and others like it -- will be implemented in partnership with private wireless vendors.

So the argument in Pennsylvania isn't really about government vs. private. It's about whether local governments can act effectively to create alternatives to existing telecoms' market dominance, when their obsolete infrastructures -- and entrenched interests -- become obstacles to community innovation.

PHILLY WIRELESS OUTLOBBIES VERIZON, BUT WHAT ABOUT OTHER CITIES? The City of Philadelphia has cut a special deal to sidestep a legal veto of its planned citywide wi-fi system by Verizon. But the bill just signed by Pennsylvania's Governor gives private telecom firms "wi-fi veto power" over every other municipality in the state. Chris Seper links to a long Washington Post summary of the Pennsylvania outcome. Here's the Philadelphia Inquirer story.

I talked earlier with Ed Schwartz, the Wireless Philadelphia committee member who, along with city IT chief Dianah Neff, led the fight to save the city's plan from legislative extinction. Ed's read on the situation is that "the Philadelphia exception" will make it much more difficult for Verizon and other private telecoms to veto municipal initiatives throughout the state. After all, how do you tell Pittsburgh or Reading that you won't permit them to do what Philadelphia is doing?

Besides, the new legislation exempts municipal systems that are already up and running by January 1, 2006... so its immediate impact could be to make 2005 a very good year for wi-fi system architects and equipment vendors throughout Pennsylvania.

Two other results seem certain: First, Philadelphia's wi-fi system is going to happen; and second, legislation like Pennsylvania's will soon be moving through committee in dozens of state legislatures, including Ohio's.

Chris' piece, echoing a recent One Cleveland blog entry by Lev Gonick, says that community broadband in northeast Ohio may be sheltered from these attacks by One Cleveland's unique public/nonprofit partnership. Lev writes:

This brings me to the Philadelphia story. When the AP wire service first ran the story on that City's ambitious effort, David Caruso from AP contacted me. I outlined that OneCleveland, in contrast to a city-centered strategy like Philadelphia, was actually a community network. OneCleveland has subscribers, including a number of cities. This is only one of the major differences. In OneCleveland, many subscribers have, or are thinking about, enabling free wireless services to enable important public policy priorities within the unregulated spectrum known to support WiFi. This is very different than going into business to develop a revenue model for public wireless services.

It's hard to say how true this might be. Certainly One Cleveland has done a brilliant job of putting NEO "ahead of the curve", as Lev's title says,in deploying very big bandwidth for government and nonprofit users. (And let me stress that Lev deserves huge credit for conceiving and pulling this off.) It's also true that, to the extent One Cleveland customers including cities, schools and libraries use that bandwidth as backhaul for free wi-fi service to their constituents or neighbors -- as Case now does for its guests -- a law like Pennsylvania's wouldn't affect them.

But the issue gets more difficult when we start thinking about systems to get robust broadband (like 5 to 10 mbs standard 802.11(b) service, or the 50 mbs access now available on the Case campus) to lots of city households and small businesses on an affordable, sustainable basis. Under current law, for example, there's nothing stopping Cleveland Public Power from laying out a fiber network through its substations (actually, it already has one) and then providing wireless broadband service to the surrounding neighborhoods very cheaply. Ditto for the Cleveland Public Schools, or the library system. But such a system, including access to the Internet through One Cleveland or another carrier, might be too expensive to simply offer for free -- there might have to be either a small regular user charge or a significant subsidy from some other public funding pot. If there's a charge and the sponsor is a public entity, a Pennsylvania-style law would give a veto to SBC, whether the public entity gets its bandwidth from One Cleveland or elsewhere.

I think we might not be very far from considering this kind of option -- maybe even in the context of City elections next year. And certainly a role for City government in supporting neighborhood wi-fi initiatives will be on the table very soon. So the spread of Pennsylvania HB30-style legislation needs to be watched carefully by Clevelanders who don't want our city to be prevented from leapfrogging the digital divide, and moving aggressively -- and together -- into the new economy.

WOULD YOU HIRE THESE GUYS? It's now fairly evident that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections screwed up its responsibilities in the November election to the extent that hundreds, if not thousands, of legitimate votes were not included in the total certified yesterday to the Secretary of State.

At the two-hour hearing yesterday prior to certification, the Voter Registration Coalition documented nearly 500 voters who were properly registered, showed up at the polls, but were then forced to use provisional ballots and subsequently excluded from the final count.

Nonetheless, the Board certified the results unanimously. According to the PD story, they characterized the problems with the count as "minimal".

Minimal? If you ran a company where the people in charge took orders and money from five hundred customers that you knew about (and probably lots more you didn't), failed to ship their orders, and then failed to make good on them when challenged, would you consider that a "minimal" problem? If you were one of those customers -- one who had stood in line in the rain for an hour or two to place that order -- would you consider the company's failure to deliver or rectify your order a "minimal" problem?

Board of Elections Director Michael Vu got lots of media after Election Day bragging about how well his operation performed. The reporters who carried this BS now have an obligation to go out and find some of the 500 documented disenfranchised voters, and ask them for an assessment of Vu's performance.

My assessment? Either Vu and his Board members -- Republican county chairman Robert Bennett and three others, all appointed by Bush campaign honcho Ken Blackwell -- have deliberately conspired to sideline thousands of voters in Cuyahoga County, or (more likely) they're just incompetent and irresponsible. In either case, they're unfit for their jobs and should be fired before they do any more damage.

ONE CLEVELAND, THE CITY AND WIFI: After covering the City of Cleveland's official hookup with One Cleveland last week, Chris Seper blogs:

The concept of free, citywide Wi-Fi service has slowly been de-emphasized in the evolution of OneCleveland. At first, some members used to talk of creating a vast, free Wi-Fi network that would give home access to every Clevelander. Others said they wanted to build a Wi-Fi corridor stretching from Case Western Reserve University to downtown, sprinkling large swaths of Wi-Fi access throughout the region.

At the news conference Thursday, Mayor Campbell said Wi-Fi was something Cleveland would consider down the road. When I discussed Wi-Fi proliferation with Scott Rourke, OneCleveland's president, he said his organization enables municipalities by providing wired high-speed networks but that it's up to the municipalities to determine how to use them.

Hmmm. Well, if you want to see a city taking a serious look at community-wide wifi, Philadelphia is moving right along. The mayor's Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee held a town meeting on the subject two weeks ago and put the whole two hours up as a webcast. The setting, the participants and the discussion are different from what we're used to around here -- I strongly recommend taking a peek. (The guy on the panel doing all the talking is my old friend and former co-worker Ed Schwartz of Neighborhoods Online.)

To get back to One Cleveland and our City government, Chris' blog entry has one other piece of news:

The mayor also said the city would flow high-speed service into community tech centers, which, coupled with efforts to create a standard computer literacy certification, would help raise the tech IQ of the city.

Now that's what I'm talkin about...

PUBLIC POWER PRICE DROPS... FOR NOW: My latest bill from Cleveland Public Power held a pleasant surprise. Our average kilowatt-hour cost was under ten cents... the lowest it's been since December 2000!

The bill would normally have been a little lower this month because we're back in Winter rate season. But the unexpected change was a drop in the "energy adjustment charge" -- the part of the bill that fluctuates monthly with CPP's cost of purchased power -- from four and a half cents per kwh, where it's been all Summer, to 2.7 cents. Sha-zam! My bill for about 500 kwh got $8 cheaper, and I owe CPP about 10% less than a CEI customer with the same usage.

The "EAC", which is broken out on the bill, is a very big factor in CPP's monthly charges because the system gets virtually all of its power supply from other utilities, generating only a thin margin of its own peak usage with some gas turbines. To get an idea of the scale of this cut in Public Power's EAC, take a look at this chart:


The red dot dangling at the right end of the graph line is the EAC for October. A big dropoff, yes? Sort of like the price of unleaded regular going back to $1.40 a gallon.

But just as the price of gasoline is only part of the cost of running your car, the cost of purchased power is only part of CPP's rates. Taking a cent and a half off the EAC still leaves Public Power customers paying a Winter rate of 9.7 cents a kilowatt-hour (10.9 cents in the Summer). While that's noticeably cheaper than CEI and its First Energy partners, Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, it's still more expensive than any other private or municipal electric company in Ohio.

And it probably won't last very long.

I called Public Power yesterday and asked to speak with someone who could explain why their October EAC was so much lower, and what consumers can look forward to. I ended up leaving a message for James Quayle, whose title (I think) is CPP's Deputy Commissioner for Finance. A few minutes later the phone rang. On the other end was Julius Ciaccia, the City's Public Utilities Director, along with Quayle and his boss, CPP Commissioner James Majer. I guess getting quoted in Crain's raises your profile. (Actually they seem to have asked around and were told I'm not a nut case, which is gratifying.)

I learned several things from the call, which I'll try to follow up and share, but here are the main things Quayle and Majer told me about the October price cut:

1) CPP gets its purchased power from established contracts with nine other utilities, one of which is American Electric Power. (They don't buy power on short term "spot" contracts.)

2) During the last few months, their average power cost was pushed up because electricity sales were lower than expected. Power contracts involve fixed as well as variable charges. CPP's summer contract with AEP, for example, obligates the City to pay for a certain minimum power load whether it's fully used or not. Because the summer wasn't very hot, CPP sold less electricity than it projected, so those fixed charges were distributed among fewer kilowatt-hours and had a bigger price impact than they expected. When the summer season ended in October, contract obligations lined up better with sales, CPP was able to use its cheapest sources, and the average cost came down a lot -- hence a much lower EAC on my November bill.

(Of course this doesn't explain why the EAC has been rising steadily for years -- see the "12 month running average" line on the chart above. That's a question for future discussion.)

3) The big reduction in averaqe power costs on the current bill probably won't last very long -- at least Majer and Quayle aren't willing to predict that it will. Majer said the current low EAC may last until December. After that, expect bills to rise again, though not necessarily to the record levels of the last few months.

Bottom line: My "low" Public Power bill for October probably represents the bottom end of what CPP can charge me under the current rate structure. It's going to trend up again soon. But even at the low end, while CPP is a little cheaper than CEI/First Energy, it remains one of the most expensive sources of home electricity in Ohio.

The CPP managers promised to meet with me soon to talk more about the system's rates and other issues, short and long term. I'll let you know what else I learn.

BOARD OF ELECTIONS WEBSITE: NEW CLEVELAND JOKE?

A couple of days ago I wrote something nice about the improved Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website and its rapid posting of last Tuesday's results. Well, be careful what you praise around here! Uberblogger Atrios took a look at the CCBoE's main results page, did a little math and got really confused, which has led to all kinds of mutterings about fraud, Diebold, suspect javacripts, etc. among his commenters. The word is clearly going out across blogland that the Ohio smoking gun has been found... or at least a thread that will unravel the scandal we're all looking for.

What got Atrios so confused? Well, it's the same thing that made me think that over 214,000 votes had been cast in the city of Cleveland, when I saw those results last Thursday. You see, the website says that over 214,000 ballots were cast in the city. It's only when you add up the numbers for the city wards, and find that the total is about 40,000 votes short of that 214,000, that it occurs to you that something is screwy.

In its presentation of "ballots cast" in the county's cities, villages, townships and wards, the Board has done a very strange and misleading thing -- it's posted municipal totals that are just plain wrong. And then it put a warning at the top of the page that's meant to tell you the numbers are wrong and you need to look elsewhere for the right numbers, but the warning doesn't actually say that. Here's the full text of the warning:

In even-numbered years, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections tallies absentee ballots by Congressional, House, and Senate district combinations. Because of this, the ballots cast totals for municipalities on this web page and on the summary report needs to be derived by using the following technique: For municipalities with wards, find the ballots cast total for each ward and total them. For municipalities without wards, please refer to the contest of interest on the canvass report. Absentee ballots cast totals appear separately at the end of each contest on the canvass report. If you have any questions, please contact the Board of Election’s Ballot Department Manager at (216) 443-6454.

Okay, do you have any idea what that they're talking about?

And does that "explanation" give you any clue why the Board hasn't just taken out the misleading numbers and put in the correct numbers?

Well, for whatever reason, they haven't. So when people all over the world come to our Board of Election's website for local results -- and believe me, lots of people are looking at that site -- what they find is bad information preceded by a gibberish cautionary note that says, deep down in its code, The information presented below is not to be taken seriously.

Welcome to Cleveland, Election Confusion Central. Have you heard about the time our river caught on fire?

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE... HOW THE SCHOOL LEVY LOST: The man who managed the campaign to pass Issue 112, the Cleveland school operating levy, has said some strange things to reporters since the issue's 55%-45% defeat last Tuesday. Here's how Arnold Pinkney was quoted in separate PD articles on Thursday and Saturday:

Pinkney, who ran successful school tax campaigns in 1996 and 2001, said in hindsight he would not have done anything differently. "We felt we had a strong message to the people of Cleveland," he said. "Unfortunately, they did not buy our message." (PD Nov. 4)

Pinkney had hoped a large voter turnout would help his cause, but he now thinks West Siders who came out to support a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage also opposed the school tax.

Pinkney also believes that police and firefighters in the West Park neighborhood, who faced layoffs in the last year, secretly campaigned against the tax. (PD Nov. 6)

He would not have done anything differently -- even though the campaign he ran lost. A big turnout should have helped, but those extra West Side voters turned out to be anti-gay bigots who don't like school taxes either. And there was a secret campaign against him!

Do you think this guy may be in denial?

I don't claim to know why Issue 112 failed, but the numbers make it abundantly clear how it failed. The key was not the big West Side turnout, which was on the same scale as the big East Side turnout, overwhelming supported John Kerry, and gave Issue 1 less support than the East Side. (Wards 1-10 favored the anti-gay amendment 58% to 42%, while Wards 14-21 split on it 51% to 49%, and Wards 17, 18 and 21 voted it down.)

I don't doubt that lots of police and firefighters voted against the school levy, but if they were running a secret West Side campaign it didn't have that much impact. The falloff in the Ward 14-21 "yes" percentage, compared to the 2001 school bond levy, was only about 5% -- not good for the levy, but not decisive.

What was decisive was the falloff in support on the East Side -- specifically Wards 1 through 10, which are 75% to 98% African-American and typically cast almost half the votes in Cleveland elections. In 2001 these wards supported the school bond levy, on average, by better than 80%. This year their average support for Issue 112 was only 55%. Ward 1, the biggest and highest-income, actually voted against the issue 53% to 47%.

It was this East Side retrenchment, not some unexpected outpouring of West Side anti-gays and cops, that ambushed Pinkney's campaign plan and killed the school levy.

The important question, of course, is why. As I said earlier, I don't claim to know. The easy answer is "Times are tough, voters just feel they can't afford it." And that's certainly an easy answer to believe.

Personally, I think there's more to it. But I'll save that for another day.

UNITED WE STAND: One of the few procedural improvements of this campaign season in Cleveland is the growing functionality of the Board of Elections website.

The detailed unofficial results of Tuesday's election, not yet including overseas and provisional ballots (the so-called "canvass report"), were posted yesterday. I'm going to take a look at the city and county votes from several angles over the two weeks, as we get closer to a final count (there are 25,000 provisional ballots not yet counted.) But here's a simple yet compelling fact about the city results as posted so far:

Out of 429 precincts in the City of Cleveland, not one single precinct went for George W. Bush.

Totals for votes cast at Cleveland polling places: 25,597 for Bush, 134,256 for Kerry. That's five and a half to one for Kerry, if you're keeping track.

P.S. Contrary to Wednesday's entry, I now think that the city turnout was somewhere between 190,000 and 200,000 depending on the distribution of those yet-to-be-counted provisional ballots. Cleveland ballots counted so far, including absentees, total about 180,000 -- not "more than 200,000", as earlier reports indicated. Of course this is still waaaaaay more than the 136,000 votes cast in the 2000 election... and still plenty of new voters to create a historic change in the city's political landscape.

P.P.S. There's a whole other issue about these numbers in Cuyahoga County and throughout the state: the issue of "spoiled ballots", why they don't get counted, and who would have won if they were. Read about it here.

THE DAY AFTER: About the events of the past twenty-four hours leading up to Kerry's concession, I have nothing much to add. I'm sure there's a lot more really bad news ahead for this city, the world and our country. But hey, that's why we have elections, and it sure looks like my side lost this one.

On another front, however, the Kerry/527 "epicenter campaign" has left in its wake an incredibly important change in Cleveland politics: Our voter base just grew by more than 50%.

In the 2000 Presidential election about 136,000 people voted in Cleveland.That was by far the biggest recent turnout -- until yesterday, when more than 200,000 may have cast ballots, according to the Board of Elections. (Yes, I checked this number with elections director Michael Vu personally.) That's an historic jump in the number of Clevelanders who are not just registered, but have actually voted.

How many are "likely voters" in next year's race for Mayor and Council? You can bet there are a lot of politicians and consultants pondering that question today.

GREAT EARLY TURNOUT: I'm taking a break from poll work at my neighborhood school (Denison Elementary in Cleveland Ward 15). This is normally a low to medium turnout place. This morning there was a line waiting at the door when it opened at 6:30. My own precinct had a twenty-minute wait... I was voter number 41 at 7:40, which is about twice the typical rate. And outside, I was asked at least twenty times in the first two hours, "Is this the right place to vote?" -- mostly by people who were carrying their cards from the Board of Elections.

All this despite rain. I think this is gonna be big.

P.S. Yes, there's a GOP "challenger" in the polling place (and two Dems). They're being very quiet.

KERRY AT THE TAPE? Gallup, which has been criticized for months for undercounting Democrats, released its final pre-election poll for CNN/USA Today yesterday, showing Kerry beating Bush in Ohio 50% to 46% among likely voters and 51% to 44% among all registered voters. And the Columbus Dispatch had the following:

After nearly 80 candidate visits to Ohio, untold millions spent in ads, 500 more Americans killed in Iraq and 13,300 additional jobs lost in the state, the presidential race is back to where it was seven months ago.

Dead even.

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are tied at just less than 50 percent in a new Dispatch Poll.

How close is this matchup? Kerry leads by a mere eight votes out of 2,880 ballots returned in the mail survey — the tightest margin ever in a final Dispatch Poll.

A similar survey in late March shortly after Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination put Bush ahead by 34 responses.

However, in the past four weeks Kerry has surged from a 7 percentage-point deficit into a tie with Bush. And several signs indicate the Massachusetts senator has gained the momentum in Ohio.

Kerry is ahead by 14 points among independent voters. He has a narrow lead in northwestern Ohio, the state’s most reliable bellwether media market. And he has brought black voters home, gaining 91 percent support among black respondents.

Meanwhile, the poll contains troubling signs for Bush. Only 44 percent say things in the nation are headed in the right direction. Fewer than half approve of his handling of Iraq and the economy. And his overall approval rating is 49 percent, a measure that many political experts say represents a ceiling on his support Tuesday.

But this election is so close in Ohio that the winner will be determined by which side gets its voters to the polls Tuesday, and by how the public perceives such late-breaking developments as the newly released video of Osama bin Laden. Perhaps the biggest question — aside from the effect of possible Election Day challenges at polling places — is how many of Ohio’s 1 million newly registered voters will cast ballots.

These newbies now represent one in eight Ohio voters, and they support Kerry by nearly a 2-1 margin in the poll.

One difference between the latest poll and the one published four weeks ago is the inclusion of more newly registered voters in the sample, whose names were in the latest available data from the secretary of state’s office. About 88 percent of the new voters — including those from Ohio’s largest counties — were among the potential poll participants.