DOWNTOWN POVERTY DEVELOPMENT: I'm going to propose a new term now. The term is poverty development. I define "poverty development" as the deliberate application of public resources and policies to create jobs at poverty wages.

Please note that poverty development is not what happens when people are thrown out of work, or out of their homes, as the result of public policy. These activities may create poverty -- lots of it -- but that's not usually their goal, it's a side effect of some other goal. In poverty development, on the other hand, the poverty-wage jobs are a stated goal, the poverty-level wages are built into participants' long-range business plans, and ensuring a labor supply at those wage levels is part of the public development activity.

An example of poverty development would be the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds into a public convention center, in order to create business for hotels and restaurants that pay most of their employees less than living wages.

In this connection, I've posted a page of excerpts from CSU Urban Studies Dean Mark Rosentraub's pro-convention center "study" on my Cleveland Wages Pages website. The most relevant passages are highlighted in red, but the rest of the excerpt is there for context. What it says, in short, is:

A big part of Cleveland's workforce is uneducated and therefore unemployable in the better jobs we hope to create in the technology and financial sectors, so we need to keep growing the "hospitality sector" to provide jobs for them.

I had a long talk a couple of years ago with a young woman who worked as a housekeeper at the Ritz-Carlton, cleaning up after guests who paid up to $300 a night. She described a very demanding job where pay started at about $7 an hour and rose to $9 only at the top of a competitive "incentive" scale. The workers were virtually all Black, Hispanic or recent immigrants; many did not speak English. She had family members and friends at the Marriott who were working in the same circumstances.

These two hotels were flagship projects of the '80s, built with heavy tax abatements to "revitalize the hospitality industry" and "create good jobs for residents". What they created was dead-end jobs at $14-15,000 a year -- less than the City's definition of a Living Wage that's acceptable for subsidized projects --with no prospect of improvement. (Of the 2,500 hotel rooms built downtown since 1980, a grand total of 140 are cleaned by workers with union representation.)

When we talk about preserving and creating "hospitality sector" jobs for uneducated Cleveland residents, these hotels -- and the restaurants around them -- are what we're talking about. That's downtown poverty development. We've had lots of it in the past twenty years, during which the City has become -- predictably -- poorer.

If we're going to spend a lot of public money to benefit uneducated Cleveland workers, as Dean Rosentraub argues, there is another possible strategy: We could spend it to help them get educated and qualified for all those better jobs in technology, finance and health care.

But for some reason, nobody is calling for "leadership" in that direction.

WEIRD SCIENCE (ECONOMICS DIVISION): As I read yesterday's PD article about organized labor pushing a new convention center initiative, the following sentence caught my eye:

In the 1990s, employment gains in Northeast Ohio's hospitality sector - which includes, retail, museums and hotels - almost equaled lost manufacturing jobs, according to CSU analysis.

Read that sentence again. See anything strange? Here's a hint: Do you think of shopping malls as part of the "hospitality sector"? Probably not... but it seems that's the way CSU's study was counting in order to make its highly political point.

The study, by Levin College of Urban Affairs Dean Mark Rosentraub, is available here in PDF format. Published last May, it was waved around a lot during the Summer by Convention Center Tax advocates, but I never looked at it until this morning. The sentence from the PD quoted above is based on a passage that starts on page 14 and continues on page 15, referring to "changes in job levels throughout Northeast Ohio during the 1990s":

There was a loss of more than 22,000 manufacturing jobs... The number of new jobs in the retail, amusement services, museum, and lodging sectors -- which when grouped constitute the hospitality sector -- was almost equal to the loss of manufacturing jobs.

A chart follows which shows the following sectoral job gains (among others) for 1989-2000: 17,314 jobs in retail trade, 191 jobs in hotels and lodging, 4,115 jobs in amusement and recreation, and 478 jobs in museums. The total of these lines -- 22,098 jobs -- is apparently the "hospitality sector" gain that is supposed to almost offset the manufacturing loss. "Retail trade" is three-quarters of that total.

Now I don't know how these things work in the economics biz. Maybe there's some good reason for Dean Rosentraub and his colleagues to have a construct called "the hospitality sector" that includes Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Topps, Builders Square, the corner gas station, the video store, the Dollar Store and some apple stand in Hinckley. But it's hard to see how the performance of such a "sector" tells us anything useful about the economic impact of Cleveland's downtown convention and tourist business.

But who cares?. It's a statistic. It comes from the Dean of a college at CSU. And it appears to document the vital economic potential of conventions and hotels for a desperate Cleveland economy... at least until you give it a second glance. So put it in the paper and let the yokels try to figure out if it actually means anything.

Well, fellow yokels, it doesn't. It's junk science... a pre-judged conclusion in search of some data to support it.

Of course there's always a lot of this stuff floating around Cleveland -- remember the 25,000 good jobs Gateway was going to produce? But it sure would be nice if PD reporters had better smell detectors... or if CSU, which reportedly wants to be regarded as a real research institution, would start asking its faculty (and even its Deans) to act more like scientists and less like shills.

PLAIN DEALER REPEATS BOGUS CITY JOBS CLAIM: In an editorial today, the PD joins Crain's and Roldo in calling for layoffs of City workers -- as early as January -- to head off a projected $52 million deficit in 2004. And like Crain's and Roldo, the PD undergirds its hasty attack on City workers' livelihoods with a claim that thousands of jobs were added to City payrolls in the 1990s:

No one should be cheered by the prospect of public employees losing their jobs, and the administration must be careful to preserve essential services. But since the city added nearly 2,000 employees during the 1990s, careful reductions need not prove crippling.

As I pointed out here on October 7, this claim is wildly wrong. Here, again, are the facts:

I went to the library and got the actual employment figures for General Fund departments (not just General fund employees) for the last ten years, and here's what I found:
... The City added a total of about 600 full-time-equivalent positions from 1992 to 2002.
... About 150 of these FTE positions were in Muny Court.
... About 600 FTE positions were added in the Public Safety Department... including 200 police patrol officers, 60 firefighters, and 95 "institutional guards".
... All the other General Fund departments combined lost about 170 FTE positions from 1992 to 2002.

I'll be sending the full spreadsheet with these numbers to the PD tomorrow... after which I'll confidently await their correction. Anybody else want to see it?

CLEVELAND CONNECTION: Since I sort of gave Wal-Mart a free plug the other day, and since we all like "Cleveland connections" so much, I want to take note of the fact that North Olmsted was one of the 61 Wal-Marts where Federal authorities arrested contract cleaning workers as illegal immigrants on Thursday.

The PD had a good front-page article Friday, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be on line. (If you missed it, here's USA Today for the overall story.) It seems the feds believe that the workers were being paid as little as $2 a day, and that top Wal-Mart execs were well aware of the situation.

Naturally, it's the victimized workers who are in custody. At least so far.

MAYBE YOU ALL ALREADY KNEW THIS... but I just discovered that Walmart.com is selling new PCs for $200. Two new PCs, actually: the Microtel SYSMAR417 with a Lycoris (Linux) OS on it, and the Microtel SYSMAR550 with no OS loaded. They're both Duron 1.2s with modest hard drives (20 gig), no modem and no floppy... but shit, it's $200!

(Don't go to your WalMart store looking for these systems -- they're available on-line only.)

Microtel is a California company and seems to do actual assembly there, though I'm sure they buy their boards from Asia. Lycoris is a Linux distribution from a fairly new company in Redmond, WA of all places (maybe that's why its front page looks so much like Windows XP.) Both companies seem to be looking for other resellers.

Now I'm sure that there's a market to be made in NE Ohio -- heck, in my neighborhood! -- for a sub-$250 new PC with a user-friendly Linux system. Is some Cleveland entrepreneur already checking this out? Is anyone out there trying to figure out how Microtel does it? How about the guys from the Open Source Society?

Or is this one more piece of northeast Ohio's consumer market that WalMart wll get to keep all to itself?

WIRELESS WAFFLES: Belgian waffles and wi-fi... all for $5 !

This Sunday from 9 to 2 at Tremont Scoops -- it's a benefit pancake breakfast for Tremont Wi-Fi. Your money will help buy access points and wireless cards for more community hotspots like the one at at Scoops.

See you there.

THIRD FRONTIER... NEW STATE ROLE IN BUSINESS? I know there was a PD article about this, but if it didn't lead you to take a look at the new Policy Matters analysis of State Issue 1 and what it means, go do so now. Don't just look at the Executive Summary, download the whole thing -- it's worth the effort.

The press spokesman for the report (thus, I assume, a major contributor) is Zach Schiller, the former PD and Business Week reporter, now Policy Matters Research Director. (If I recall correctly, Zach's byline was on the PD's very first "Quiet Crisis" article).

The report is neutral on passing Issue 1 this November, but points out that this constitutional amendment involves a lot more than some bond money for high-tech research and development -- for example, it would allow the state (and maybe local governments as well) to own shares in private corporations for the first time in a century and a half.

EMERGENT BUDGET DEMOCRACY? BFD has a recent post on "emergent democracy" that might be worth considering in connection with the Cleveland Budget Perplex. The author BFD links to is talking about a new variety of self-organizing Web participation in the civic process, exemplified by the Howard Dean campaign. Since the majority of Cleveland residents are probably still without home computers, let alone good Internet skills, the relevance here may seem farfetched. But the fact is that an awful lot of Cleveland voters have crossed that divide in the past couple of years. Suppose the Campbell Administration actually put the numbers on the Net, where everyone can see them, and urged its constituents to start a serious conversation about them. Where might that lead?

Emergent democracy is about leadership through giving up control, activating the people to engage through deliberation and action, and allowing emergent order to grow from the grass roots.

Maybe we could use a helping of that in Cleveland.

CLEVELAND BUDGET PERPLEX 2: More thoughts:

1) There's a big hand-lettered sign on a fence on Scranton Road that says "Cut the fat, not the firefighters. Call Jane Campbell." One more sign of a long, hard budget season, that will only get longer and harder if the Mayor tries to finesse her problems with quiet deals and last-minute rabbits pulled out of Finance Director Baker's hat.

The Mayor says she has told all the department directors to show her how their budgets can be cut by 10%. Just remember -- this is a General Fund shortfall we're discussing. Three-fifths of the General Fund is spent by the Department of Public Safety. Therefore, three-fifths of a 10% across-the-board budget cut will be borne by that department. More than 90% of General Fund dollars in the Public Safety budget go directly to the Police and Fire divisions. So if there's going to be "fat" to cut, that's where the Mayor has to look.

Cut $20 to $25 million from Police and Fire, without cutting patrol officers and firefighters? Lotsa luck. But without some way to get revenue up, that's the quandary the City faces... which is why friends of the firefighters' union are already putting up signs.

2) My rumor mill tells me that at least two Members of Council are already raising money for mayoral runs. Whether this is true or not, it reflects the certainty that political and journalistic behavior on the 2004 budget issue will assume it's all about November 2005.

No potential candidate for Mayor should get a free ride on this. Reporters and citizens need to make all the players come clean on their budget positions, long before this turns into a posture-fest at the Council committee table. If you think people need to be laid off, who goes first? If there's "fat" to be cut, where is it specifically? If you don't have some useful leadership to offer now, don't come to us talking about leadership in 2005. No Schwartzeneggers need apply.

Of course, this can't happen if all the numbers aren't public.

3) I said this in passing a couple of posts back but I want to repeat it emphatically: The 2004 General Fund projections (and the 2003 numbers to date) -- all the projections -- should be posted prominently on the City's website right now, and updated as the Administration's information changes. This issue, far more than lakefront design or even the Convention Center, cries out for an open transparent public process: "We will have a lot less money than we need next year. What should we do about it?"

CLEVELAND BUDGET PERPLEX: In response to my last entry, Mark Schumann comments:

But then you've got the old raising-taxes-in-a-recession problem. That's not good either. You can't push the payroll tax any higher, can you?

I think the answer is "Maybe yes, a little bit, temporarily, as an absolute last resort, if the alternative is laying off cops and firefighters". Which, Mark will note, is a highly political frame for the issue... but one which I think reflects reality.

Let me try walking through this step by step:

1) The huge increases in City workforce cited by Crain's and Roldo are mostly fictitious. I went to the library and got the actual employment figures for General Fund departments (not just General fund employees) for the last ten years, and here's what I found:
... The City added a total of about 600 full-time-equivalent positions from 1992 to 2002.
... About 150 of these FTE positions were in Muny Court.
... About 600 FTE positions were added in the Public Safety Department... including 200 police patrol officers, 60 firefighters, and 95 "institutional guards".
... All the other General Fund departments combined lost about 170 FTE positions from 1992 to 2002.

I don't have a clue what the extra Muny Court workers are doing or for how much, but for the sake of argument let's just say they're expendable. At $50,000 per slot, firing them all would save the City $7.5 million. That still leaves more than $42 million in projected deficit to be dealt with (and 150 newly unemployed people on the street).

Now what?

2) The Mayor and her staffers all just took voluntary pay cuts. Let's assume they can get all the non-civil service managers to do this. And that they find unnoticed cash lying around in a few more corners. And that they manage to get the firefighters to back down on overtime. Let's be wildly optimistic and say this all adds up to $6 or $7 million.

Now we're only short $35 million. What's next?

3) What's next is... cutting uniformed safety personnel, and/or a whole lot of part-time recreation and service workers. Which means, in turn -- no swimming pools or rec leagues next summer. No vacant lots mowed. Slower police response. Maybe a fire station or two shut down.

And... hundreds more laid-off City workers on the street.

4) City residents will recognize the scenario outlined above as a sure-fire recipe for starting "the war of all against all"... angry unions, angry residents, furious Councilmen, municipal paralysis from now till November 2005. At which point we get a new Mayor -- probably just in time for recovering revenues to make him or her look like a genius.

As a City resident who prefers my local government to be functional, I'd rather avoid this municipal hellmouth, especially since nobody in Cleveland is really to blame for lower tax revenue. I don't care all that much if Campbell gets a second term, but I don't want the rest of her first term to be a total waste. That might be convenient for prospective opponents, but it would be very inconvenient for the rest of us.

5) So here's what I think Campbell should try:

First, go ahead and shake down every department for maximum non-personnel savings for next year. Be tough about it. Go after the fire overtime. Trim trim trim.

When that's done, and everyone has a good idea what the remaining deficit is gonna be, propose the following deal to the City unions, Council and the voters:

-- No layoffs, but...

-- All City employees, across the board, take a small pay reduction from April through December, enough to cover half the deficit. But this is conditional on...

-- Voter approval of a temporary income tax increase in March, lasting until the end of the year and sufficient to cover the other half. (A quarter-percent increase, for example, would raise $20-25 million over nine months.)

The deal would be a package. If any part of it failed, layoffs would ensue as needed, beginning April 1.

Also part of the deal would be measures to give back some of the tax hike through reductions in other City charges that don't affect the General Fund. First on my list would be an immediate 10% reduction in Cleveland Public Power rates. The City should also look for ways to reduce downtown workers' costs, e.g. cheaper parking options.

6) What would this accomplish? It would be a way to avoid wholesale layoffs, service cuts, and disfunctional government for what might well be the last year of really depressed tax collections. Everyone cooperates, nobody gets hurt too badly, city life doesn't collapse, and we're all still friends. If things are just as bad the following year (which is totally unpredictable) "we'll climb that hill... when we get up to it."

7) Would a tax increase of this kind hurt the local economy? No. It's temporary, it's small, it buys civic peace and cooperation, it's accompanied by some cost savings, it would be great for the city's reputation if Campbell could pull it off. The alternative is more disarray, more political warfare, and more unemployment.

8) Could she pull it off? That's a whole other question. It would be the performance of a lifetime, with a very high risk of failure -- lots of agendas to juggle, very complicated. Layoffs and service cuts would be simpler... but IMHO, a lot more destructive to both the Administration and the city.

9) One final non-pragmatic point: I think most Cleveland residents, being blue-collar, think private employers should make an effort to keep their employees working through temporary slumps, if at all possible. That's one mark of a "good place to work." We respect bosses who temper their desire to maximize profit and minimize loss with a sense of loyalty and fairness to their employees. We know this kind of boss is going to have a more loyal, more productive workforce in the long run.

Well, in this case, we're the boss. What kind of boss are we going to be?

WEIRD CONVERGENCE: Two weeks ago Crain's had an editorial blaming the projected Cleveland City deficit on continued increases in City Hall employment (sorry, can't link, it's subscription only). This week Roldo in the City News says virtually the same thing. That's right, Roldo and Brian Tucker... together for the first time anywhere!

I have two comments about this line of attack:

1) If the Campbell Administration really wants to promote e-government, now's the time to start posting all the current finance and job numbers on the City website -- the same numbers Finance Director Baker is giving to City Council. I don't know if Roldo's numbers, or Crains' for that matter, are right or wrong. I don't know, for example, how many of the jobs they say were added in recent years were uniformed safety forces. But as a citizen I'd like to be able to find out for myself, without taking time off work to go hang around City Hall. That's what the Web is good for, and since we're about to have a really nasty municipal melee over numbers, this would be a great time for our City to put the numbers where everyone can see them.

2) The logical inference from the Crain's/Bartimole analysis is that they want City workers laid off, quickly. Let's do the math.

Optimistically, the City might be able to average $50,000 in saved salary and fringes for each worker laid off. (That assumes a fair number of police and/or firefighters in the mix, since those are the only General Fund workforces that have hundreds of people making over $40,000 a year.) So to get rid of a $50 million shortfall we'd have to get rid of a thousand jobs... one-seventh to one-eighth of all General Fund employees.

Leave aside, for now, the question of what this would do to services. What would it do to Cleveland's staggering economy? These are all Cleveland residents we're talking about. Since layoffs would start with the last hired, they'd certainly include large numbers of Black, Hispanic and female workers. Lots of younger residents with families, lots of new homebuyers two payments away from foreclosure. And they'd be going into a job market with (as Roldo points out) 13%-plus unemployment and no end in sight.

What a great scenario. Does this make it a little easier to understand why Campbell and Jackson "gambled on the Cleveland economy climbing out of the recession when preparing the 2003 city budget" instead of cutting the workforce last year, as Crain's and Roldo says they should have?

So maybe the firefighters are exploiting overtime. Maybe the City should have foregone the last class of police recruits. And maybe there are one or two dozen unnecessary staffers on the second floor of City Hall. But none of this comes close to fifty million bucks. That's a revenue problem, caused mostly by national economic failure and state budget politics, and there's no "tough decision" Campbell and Jackson can make to fix it in the next two years.

Taxes or layoffs, that's the choice. Or not, I guess, since everyone seems to agree that a tax hike for municipal services (unlike, say, a convention center and "the arts") is unimaginable... and that struggling to keep Cleveland residents employed by the City in the midst of a horrible private job market is indefensible.

Roldo and Crain's, united at last. Weird.

MY CLEVELAND CULTURE FOR THE WEEKEND: Hearing Daniel Thompson read a poem he wrote in a Parchman, Mississippi jail in 1961 -- and then two more -- to a cheering, SRO crowd of immigrant workers and their supporters at Sagrada Familia church Sunday evening.

The event was the Cleveland stop of the national Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. In the hall to greet the bus riders from Chicago and points west were over a hundred folks from the Dover, Ohio area -- Latin American workers in a poultry factory in Kidron who are campaigning for representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 880. Not to mention lots of people from Sagrada Familia parish, the West Side Hispanic community and the labor movement.

And... Afi-Odelia Scruggs, my favorite former Plain Dealer columnist, who sat down at the keyboard to belt out "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Set On Freedom", followed by "Jesus Is On the Mainline" in English and Spanish.

Whoo-eee!

Here's Thompson's Parchman jail poem, reprinted from Art Crimes #3 courtesy of Agent of Chaos:

Freedom Rider Graffiti
by Daniel Thompson

Poem scraped with contraband
Fifty-cent piece on the prison wall
In Parchman, Mississippi
Summer, 1961

Know now
No hero here
No how
If ever
Hung
On tree
The way
They done
JC
I'd be
Cross
I guess
Hell
Yes

DIGITAL VISION BLOG: I've been resisting the urge to write about "digital divide" issues here, because I work on those issues for Cleveland Digital Vision... so it's an area of professional responsibility rather than personal opinion. However, I will break my rule long enough to announce that there's now a Digital Vision weblog associated with the newly rewritten DV website.

I invite you to check it out.

George Nemeth at Brewed Fresh Daily responds to the Mayoral Leadership Poll posted here yesterday. George says the Mayor needs a Klingon tactical officer.

MORE ON CLEVELAND PUBLIC POWER RATES: Public Power Magazine publishes a big statistical directory every Winter with info on municipal electric systems across the U.S. It's not on line, but yesterday I was at the Library and decided to take a look at the 2003 issue. Turns out it lists the total retail kilowatt-hour sales and the total retail revenue from said sales, for each municipal electric utility in 2001. So I did the math...

The average kilowatt-hour sold by Cleveland Public Power in 2001 cost 9.4 cents. (Remember, this averages all sales to customers of all sizes).

There are eleven other municipal electric utilities in the counties surrounding Cleveland. The average price price per kilowatt-hour to customers of the Painesville and Orrville systems was 5.8 cents. Amherst and Wellington charged 6.5 cents; Lodi, 6.7 cents; Wadworth, 6.8 cents; Seville, 7.0 cents; Oberlin, 7.3 cents; Grafton, 7.9 cents; Cuyahoga Falls, 8.0 cents.

Only Hudson came within a penny of Cleveland's price, at 8.6 cents -- still 8% cheaper than CPP.

The City of Columbus, the only other big-city public power system in Ohio, sold its average retail kilowatt-hour in 2001 for 6.6 cents... 30% less than Cleveland Public Power.

Same product. Same kind of ownership (Ohio cities). Same legal requirements. Hell, they're all part of the same state association and go to conferences together! So why does Cleveland Public Power charge so much more than all these other "muny lights"?

KNIVES COMING OUT AT CITY HALL: So now Cleveland's looking at a $12 million General Fund shortfall this fiscal year, and another $50 million shortage for 2004-05. Funny that no one mentioned this in August when the sales tax hike was on the table. Gee, what do you think this news would have done to a Convention Center ballot issue?

In point of fact, there's nothing at all surprising about the awful state of City revenue. Income tax collections started losing ground in the national 2001 downturn, after almost a decade of steady growth. Two years later our employment base and our taxes are still slipping. George Zeller of the Council on Economic Opportunities points out that new unemployment claims in Cuyahoga County, which were slowing a little earlier this year, have started accelerating again, with over 13,000 new claims filed in July and August -- a 7% increase over the same months in 2002. (See George's data for all Ohio counties here.) The national "jobless recovery" looks a lot like a deepening recession here, which is the worst possible news for a City Hall that gets over half of its operating income from a tax that jobless people don't pay. Add millions in unfunded costs of "homeland security", along with less money in the Local Government Fund (courtesy of Statehouse tax-cut zealots), and Cleveland's budget is in deep doo-doo.

You can take that spotlight off downtown Wi-Fi and arts funding, kids -- the big news in Cleveland politics this Fall and Winter will be cuts in basic services. Already the police and fire unions are saying "Hey, leave us out of this!" -- not so easy when the Safety Department uses about 60 cents of every General Fund dollar (Safety costs 100% of the city income tax, and then some). Campbell and Jackson are both swearing no tax hikes, probably because Byrd-Bennett is next in line for a levy this Spring. Cutting "political fat"? The Mayor could sacrifice a couple of press aides, a planner or two, maybe even a Tech Czar or CTO if things get really desperate... but that would just leave her facing the same awful arithmetic with a crippled staff operation. Saving $62 million will involve much bigger, more damaging sacrifices -- serious layoffs, closed rec centers or fire stations, stuff that makes voters and Councilmen mad.

So if you've missed the knife-fighting at City Hall since Mike White left, cheer up. The knives will be out soon... and not just for cutting budgets. The 2005 election starts now.

WHADDAYA MEAN, LEADERSHIP? Speaking of the 2005 election, I keep reading that the Mayor has lost it already -- two whole years before most voters will pay any attention at all. This seems a little premature, to say the least. But even stranger is the reasoning of the "one-term Jane" predictions, which always seem to come down to her "failure to provide strong leadership"... to not being a "big city mayor", in the words of the Free Times (a big-city newspaper if ever there was one).

Where, exactly, do these guys want to be led to?

You can't accuse Campbell of lacking programs or goals for the City -- look at the humongous laundry list in her State of the City speech.

You can say she bobbled the Convention Center process. But should she have sold it to unwilling voters (the PD), killed it in the cradle (Free Times), or just done whatever the "arts community" wanted? The bottom line is, she personally killed an unpopular tax proposal. I can hardly wait to see an opponent turn that into an issue.

Maybe Whiskey Island is being mishandled, maybe not -- but really, do you think most voters give a fart who buys Whiskey Island and what they do with it? Whiskey Island? Sober up.

On the plus side, no one disputes that Campbell has wrestled the City's books into some kind of order, made it less frightening to work at City Hall (and less depressing to visit), and brought the City's technology vision from around 1984 up to at least 1999. Her press operation needs some work, but the web site is a whole lot better. This all seemed important a year ago. Now I hear you yawning.

In truth, this is all inside baseball. Campbell will have two automatic advantages in the next election -- incumbency and name recognition -- offset by three big vulnerabilities: She's trying to govern a very poor city in very bad times (see above); she's white in a majority-black community; and she has no flair for drama, either in program or personal style. To me, these add up to a difficult re-election no matter what else happens.

But that's a handicapping observation, not a criticism. Handicapping is not civic debate. Honest civic debate starts with the question "What is important and possible for government to accomplish?", and then judges officeholders by whether they do what they should and can.

As Cleveland approaches the midpoint of this Mayor's first term, I think we need this kind of discussion. In fact, I think we owe it to the city, to Campbell, and to ourselves. Citizens, let's put our cards on the table!

CALLAHAN'S MAYORAL LEADERSHIP POLL

Cleveland voters: What will Jane Campbell have to accomplish in the next two years to get your vote for a second term?

Non-Cleveland voters: What will Jane Campbell have to accomplish in the next two years to get a campaign contribution from you toward her re-election?

You can list as many required accomplishments as you like, but please be very specific. Responses like "show more leadership" or "build more collaborations" will be unceremoniously deleted. Also remember to specify whether you vote in the City of Cleveland.

Post your response as a comment here. Or post it someplace else (like your own blog), let me know and I'll link to it.

NORTH OHIO 2: George Nemeth excerpted my last entry on Brewed Fresh Daily and got a string of comments from readers. I can't figure out how to link to George's comment page, but here's what's there now:

The concept is great in that it emphasizes the potential and power of the region. However, it ignores the reality that NEO is connected to the rest of Ohio, the Great Lakes, and the Mid West. Statehood is another way of running away from the fact that we are still dependent in some way with the rest of the world. In fact, from my observation, the creation of a duplicate state government by OUR powers-that-be would probably MORE THAN DOUBLE the overhead and bureacracy that we suffer with in Columbus.
steveg
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That's more people than many countries!

Finland with their high tech mobile phone business is just 5 million.

But we really should not be investigating the erection of new boundaries...
Valdis
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two words...west virginia
mike
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I understand the frustration. Having spent two years on a "task force" dedicated to statewide economic development, I've become suspicious of purported relationships between economy and 19th century political boundaries.

That said, the problem is fractal: the more tightly you frame the geography, the more clearly you see finer economic fault lines.

My home state - Montana - has somewhat fewer than 1 million people spread across an area just slightly smaller than California. There are at least three distinct economies here. I wonder how many economies NEO has?
Dave Bayless
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A problem with this idea is it has no limits. What's to prevent a group of wealthy suburbs to insist they are their own state, and need not contribute to poorer areas? Seperatism is also pretty bad for any economy, witness the carnage in the Quebec economy as they flirted with seperation for the past few decades. It's one reason I didn't move to Montreal.
Jerry

Hmmm... let me think this over and get back to you all.

BIG OLE CRAZY IDEA DEPT... THE STATE OF NORTH OHIO: Travel is broadening, and not just because of the McDonald's at every interchange. In July we spent a couple of weeks at Yellowstone, admiring the teeming herds of mosquitoes and contemplating the cauldron of magma bubbling a couple of miles under our feet. It was fun. And on the way there and back, I got to see Wyoming.

Here are some interesting facts about Wyoming:

It has a total population of 493,000 -- just about 15,000 more than the City of Cleveland.

These half-million people have two United States Senators of their own. They have a state government of their own, too, with all the powers reserved to states by the Constitution: They get to choose their own tax structure, run their own schools and highways, and pass their own laws about everything from zoning to the death penalty, from utility rates to the drinking age.

Wyoming made me think: Why don't northeast Ohioans have our own state? I mean... what does being part of Ohio get us?

The 2000 Census shows twelve states with fewer residents than Cuyahoga County's 1.4 million. If you define "northeast Ohio" as Cuyahoga, plus all the counties touching Cuyahoga, plus all the counties touching them -- fifteen counties in all -- you've got a region of 4.1 million residents, which is more than 27 of the 50 states have. These NEO counties include the nation's fifteenth biggest consumer market and pay about a third of all of the state's taxes.

So why are we continuing to drive 140 miles down I-71, the world's most boring highway, to beg the likes of House Speaker Larry Householder (R-Perry County) and Senate President Doug White (R-Adams County) for the things this region needs? (In case you think this is just a Democrat thing, I'd say the same thing if it was still Vern Riffe (D-Scioto County)... but boy, that seems like a long time ago!) Why don't we keep our own tax money and decide how to spend it ourselves? Who really wants a Bicentennial Barn, anyway?

You want a "regional perspective" and a "regional strategy" for the future? Here's a nice, clear, Big Idea for the New Century... the northeast Ohio statehood movement.

North Carolina. North Dakota. North Ohio. Sounds good to me.

And it certainly makes as much sense as Wyoming.

LABOR DAY: I wrote what follows a year ago, for a blogging effort that didn't happen. It was all true then (except the people's names, which are aliases) and not much has changed since. So... here's my Labor Day story.

LABOR DAY 2002 -- When we moved into a house on West 54th Street in 1980, the guy across the street was a UAW member. Jim didn't work at one of the auto plants, though; he built towmotors at a small factory, just six blocks away on Denison Ave. But he was doing all right, until the towmotor plant closed in the manufacturing implosion of the mid-80s. He never found a real job after that, and finally Jim and his wife retired to Florida (I guess his pension was vested).

Jim's daughter Maryann now lives on West 56th. In the last five years she was among twenty thousand Cleveland women who went from welfare to work -- in her case willingly, via some computer training and an office job with a nonprofit that depends on county and private charity funding. (How'd she end up on welfare? The usual: got pregnant, got married, got pregnant again, husband went to prison, etc., etc.) Of course, after 9/11, the onset of Cleveland's recession, and a county budget crunch, the nonprofit had to lay her off. So now Maryann has gone from welfare to unemployment and has no idea what to do next.

Meanwhile Maryann's oldest child, Mark, graduated from a Cleveland public high school, which is a significant accomplishment in a system where only a third of the ninth graders will see a diploma. He's a big kid, a football player, very articulate and polite.. knows how to use a computer, how to talk on the phone, all those soft skills that job trainers get paid to teach the benighted job seekers. I saw him at the Pick-and-Pay two weeks ago and he told me the sad story: Got a minimum-wage counter job at a gas station. Left after a few weeks for a better-paying, long-term factory job; laid off two weeks later. Tried working as a salesman; didn t make the quota. I gave him the number of the hire locally program at a nonprofit organization of small West Side manufacturers where I used to be on the board. A few days later, I called his mom to let Mark know that the hospital where my wife works has a hiring notice out for porters. The July unemployment rate in Cleveland was 12%. Good luck, Mark.

The towmotor factory where Mark's grandfather had a UAW job just twenty years ago -- a modern, single-story factory building next to a major railroad, handy to highways, with lots of parking and a new electric substation installed by the city around 1990 -- is empty. It was sold to an automotive fastener company which fell on tough times and was bought out by Park-Ohio Industries, which specializes in buying, downsizing and saving small companies. Park-Ohio didn t want to use the building to make fasteners but apparently didn t want to sell it, either (maybe because they'd have to do some toxic cleanup first) so they've left it empty, except for occasional rental to a distribution or trucking business.

A few months ago Park-Ohio asked the City to subsidize a plan to move one of its other subsidiaries into the building -- an industrial bucket maker whose home plant in Cicero, Illinois burned down over a year ago, putting two hundred Spanish-speaking workers on the street. Park-Ohio offered to bring those $8-an-hour jobs (but not the Cicero workers) to its vacant plant in Cleveland, if the City would just kick in tax abatement and a big low-interest loan. But the City is bound by a new Living Wage law which requires companies that get public largesse to pay their workers $9 an hour and respect their union organizing rights. Park-Ohio boss Ed Crawford wasn't willing to make any such promises. So the City's economic developers had to take a reluctant pass on the subsidies, which probably killed the deal.

Too bad. If Park-Ohio had brought its bucket factory from Cicero to Denison Ave., then Maryann and Mark, who aren't looking at any other great prospects, might have applied for jobs there at $8 an hour, right in the same building where Jim was building towmotors for UAW wages when I moved into the neighborhood. And I would have had the perfect metaphor for twenty-two years of recovery in Cleveland.

Happy Labor Day, everybody.

PUBLIC POWER FAILURE: In the midst of the blackout frenzy, we got our August electric bill yesterday. It said we used 645 kilowatt-hours in the July billing period, for which we owe the utility $80 and change. That's 12.4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

If you read this blog on Monday you saw a link to the PUCO's Ohio Utility Rate Survey for July, wherein we learn that the average cost of a residential kwh in Dayton this Summer is about ten cents; in Columbus and Cincinnati, about nine cents; in Canton, about seven cents. Of course the private utility corporations serving those cities are selling the same product -- 110 volt AC power -- that we get here in Cleveland, and making a profit doing so. Somehow they manage to do it a lot cheaper.

But okay, you say, we already knew that First Energy bills are ridiculously high, especially CEI bills... what's your point?

Well, you see, my bill didn't come from CEI. My ridiculously high bill came from Cleveland Public Power. Good old "Muny Light".

That's right, children. Cleveland Public Power is now one of the highest-priced utilities in the state. In the summertime, Muny Light bills are right up there with Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, though still a little cheaper than CEI. CPP's Winter rates are a penny lower than its Summer rates, but averaged over the whole year the cost per kwh still tops eleven cents.

That's for a utility that generates none of its own power -- so when First Energy's surrounding grid went down Thursday, CPP's voltage went to zero in an instant, and stayed at zero until First Energy came back on line. That's for a city utility that wasn't even able to provide emergency power to the city's water system.

Over twenty years ago, Dennis Kucinich destroyed his mayoralty to preserve Muny Light as a competitor to CEI. Conscious of the large voter majority that supported Muny then, and continued to punish its enemies in subsequent City Council races, all mayors since Dennis have been vocal public power supporters. They renamed the system Cleveland Public Power, pushed a bond issue to expand it to the Southeast Side and the airport, sold its discount service to big commercial users as well as residents, and bragged about how much they were saving us. They also beefed up CPP's interconnection with "the grid", successfully pursuing a Federal case to force CEI to provide transmission services for power bought elsewhere -- from Niagara, from Kentucky, from downstate utilities and then from CEI/First Energy itself. CPP -- once the third rail of Cleveland politics -- became a consensus issue, a sacred cow.

There were flurries of controversy in the '90s over blackouts in CPP's decrepit West Side system, and some Councilmen made a stink about one modest increase in base rates. But for the most part, CPP receded from Cleveland's political consciousness. Which probably suited CPP's managers just fine -- because nobody was watching as their bills started climbing, and climbing, and climbing.

I'm proud to have been part of the fight to save and expand Muny/CPP many years ago, and I'm as committed as anyone in this city to the idea of a competitive public power system. But I think the time has come -- is, in fact, way overdue -- for a serious airing of CPP's operations and strategy. Why are the bills so high? Why is the system still totally dependent on expensive purchased power, with no baseload generating capacity of its own? Does this system have a plan for the future, and what is it? And how is it going to benefit the city's consumers, for whom the whole point of municipal power is to keep electric service reliable and affordable -- as opposed to vulnerable and expensive?