Opportunity, or Crime in Progress? A $350 Million Road

Cleveland Foundation and Gund Foundation push inequality again with two grants to the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) for a road to by-pass poverty. The game goes on. You pay because they say.

Let's zip by those poor folk and get them to pay for it.

The two foundations, which often work in tandem, are giving the Greater Cleveland Partnership $200,000 over two years for Opportunity Corridor uses.

It's a very, very expensive short road with a PR name to hide a deformed purpose. Can we credit Chris Roynane? I believe so.

They have labeled it fancifully “Opportunity Corridor.” Who could be against Opportunity? They don’t, however, tell you for whom it is inopportune.

Opportunity Corridor is a road that will slice through an East Side Cleveland poverty area to quickly route drivers through and past it. The lucky drivers won’t have to even glance at the unseemly sights. From the highway to University Circle in no time. Convenience has a pricy price tag, as we shall see.

Two grants of $100,000 from each the Cleveland and Gund foundations has been combined to hire former Mayor Michael White executive Terri Hamilton Brown. She is married to Mayor Frank Jackson’s chief operating officer Darnell Brown. And how convenient – she formerly headed up University Circle, Inc.

All tied up in pretty bows. As it always is when the Establishment types come to call.

It’s the kind of Establishment decision-making that produces what I’ve called the Deformed Society. We’re knee deep in it. Opportunity in the Deformed Society means just the opposite of what it says. It’s inequality posing as progress.

Within the Deformed Society they call it a public-private partnership. A win-win decision. Lots of that going around.

This Opportunity Corridor allows people to avoid unwholesome places where poverty resides. The cost is negligible to our leaders – a mere estimated $350 million investment. Of course, unless some things go wrong.

“… It represents one of the largest public projects ever undertaken in the core city.” Whoopee! That’s according to the GCP announcement of Brown as project chairman of Opportunity Corridor. It’s another opportunity for her, will attest to that.

The spin doctor, self-promoting quote makes it sound as if it benefits the Core City. It doesn’t. Is there any core left?

It doesn’t make it sound what it really is. A sneak around the poor.

Doesn’t it sound to you as if it’s a $350 million convenience for, say, the University Circle institutions or the Cleveland Clinic? The expensive but Establishment needy road goes from I-490 at E. 55th Street to E. 105th. That’s destination closes in on University Circle’s cultural institutions and the Clinic. I guess that’s somebody’s “core city.”

Here’s what Plain Dealer publisher Terry Egger says about the less-than-three-mile-$100-million-a-mile corridor: “It will resurrect a new vitality within this community and position our region for substantial economic growth. Everybody in Greater Cleveland is going to benefit from it. We must come together as a community and work to accelerate this project and make it a reality as soon as possible. It’s an aptly named project. It’s a great opportunity for Cleveland, and we’ve got to take advantage of it.”

God, do people believe this crap? “Come together as a community.” Really?

You might guess that the elated PD publisher Egger co-chairs the Opportunity Corridor Steering Committee with Jamie Ireland, managing director of Early Stage Partners, a venture capital firm. He’s a former Wall Streeter. Of course, he’s also chairman of University Circle, Inc.

It all fits together.

Egger’s gleeful pronouncement sounds as if the quotes come from a file marked for such “special” occasions.

“Say, Joe, this is Terry. Will you get me Civic Sucker Quote 207? We’re announcing another public-private partnership.”

The two foundations, via the Greater Cleveland Partnership, are putting up $200,000. That’s the private side of the public-private partnership, I guess.

Gov. Ted Strickland is balancing the public side. He has awarded $20 million thus far from federal stimulus money to the project, the GCP says, and Mayor Frank Jackson has pledged the city’s cooperation. So far that hasn’t been put in dollar signs. Frank will.

So the $20 million so far - that’s the public side. Seems fair to Egger. Not you?

“Few projects are as important to the city as Opportunity Corridor. Terri Hamilton Brown’s appointment together with the allocation of $20 million in federal stimulus funds gives us the impetus we needed to move this crucial economic development and transportation initiative forward,” says Mayor Jackson. He’s really on board.

So you see the Cleveland and the Gund provide $200,000 to balance the thus-far $20 million in public funds of the soon to be $350-million (without overruns or interest costs).

The co-chairs are a couple of rich white guys. The public can read the nice quotes in the paper, maybe. That’s what they call a public-private partnership.

That’s what I call a crime in progress.

When Propaganda is Propaganda By Propagandists

The Plain Dealer made another big story out of nothing with the spin that Cleveland is city on the verge of becoming… what… Hollywood?

All in the continuing effort to give Tower City a chance at the Medical Mart & Convention Center.

Will this shamelessness ever stop?

The interesting part of the story on the PD web site isn’t the story. It’s the comments from readers. They see right through the humbug.

Also, the story quotes Ivan Schwarz as executive director of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission. He’s of course all in favor of preserving the entire Cleveland Convention Center for movie-making. Leave it alone.

Alone is about what it is. The one “film company” – promoted by Schwarz - at the center doesn’t pay a penny in rent. Must have been very heavy arm-twisting to get them to take a free lease.

Readers seem to understand propaganda when the Plain Dealer can’t smell it. Or won’t smell.

Here’s a link. Have a few laughs. We need them.

The following is a link to the Greater Cleveland Media Development Corp., which is the correct new name for the former film commission here.

It will give you some interesting information. For example, the “development corporation” gets about three-fourths of its more than $500,000 income from the government. Doesn’t everybody?

According to this filing of 2007, Schwarz as second in command then earned $100,594 with an $18,667 in benefits and Chris Carmody got $92,700 plus a $5,495 in benefits. So you see where your tax dollars go.

And you can understand – Carmody being a creature of the White administration, which was a subsidiary of Forest City Enterprises – why the story spin goes against the use of the Mall site for the unnecessary Medical Mart and new Convention Center.

Hint: Shouldn’t it be at Tower City?

You’ll also find some familiar wheeler-dealers on the board, including Terry Stewart of the Rock Hall, chief establishment boosters Dennis Roche and Dennis Eckart and the Dolans, Larry and his wife, Eva. Larry has been out propagandizing against the County Commissioners choice of the Mall site, too.

It’s propaganda upon propaganda originated by propagandists and passed on to us by the Plain Daily Propaganda.

Mayor Jackson: Commissioners Sitting on $55 Million for Medical Mart

Cuyahoga County taxpayers have now “contributed” $55,664,264 in sales taxes for the not-yet-settled Medical Mart and Convention Center.

Thank you, Tim Hagan, Jimmy Dimora and Peter Lawson Jones.

The tax was instituted with an added one-quarter percent in the sales tax by the County Commissioners in January, 2008. It raised the County sales tax to 7.75 percent, the highest in Ohio.

The additional tax raised $2.9 million in April, the latest figure available.

The money should also be raising earned interest for the County.

The $55.6 million plus interest puts a tasty pot of cash in the hands of the Commissioners. It could be an alluring lure for Mayor Frank Jackson. The city owns land the Commissioners want for its convention project.

It might be a signal to Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson that the County has plenty of money to pay a reasonable price for the Mall site and the present Convention Center and Public Hall. The land itself should be worth more than the $17.5 to $20 million the County wants to pay the city.

After all, the city has been subsidizing the convention business for Northeast Ohio going back to the 1920s. (Public Hall was constructed in 1922). That should mean something in the dealing between the city and county.

It would seem irresponsible for the city to give up that land for a pittance now that the County wants it not only for a convention center but for a private business, a medical mart run by a private company.

Maybe someone in the Cleveland finance department can total up what the city has shelled out for the convention business over these many decades. The cost has been borne by city residents.

Hagan now wants the land and properties for a paltry $17.5 million. He’s pressing for a fast decision from Jackson.

Jackson should not be rushed into a deal that gives the County and its favored developer the land on the cheap. The threat of going to the Playhouse site near University Circle is just that – a threat.

When Hagan and the boys have $55-million plus in the bank, I think it gives Mayor Jackson some room for hard bargaining.

In my continued monthly reporting on special taxes levied by the County Commissioners there follows other tax totals.

Along with the $55.6 million collected from taxpayers for the medical mart, the same taxpayers have anted up $51,858,391 for the Browns Stadium. That figure, as of April, 2009, includes collections since August 2005 from the previously levied taxes for Gateway. These so-called “sin” taxes are levied on cigarettes, beer, wine and liquor. Smokers and beer drinkers pay the most.

Taxpayers – really smokers – contributed another $1.6 million in April in taxes for the County Arts & Culture kitty. That tax now has cost cigarette smokers $42,791,900 since its inception in February 2007.

In all, these three taxes have cost County taxpayers $150.3 million in the various regressive sales taxes in the last few years.

If you add “sin” taxes (plus interest earned) that went for Gateway costs - $266.3 million - to the $150.3 million, the regressive taxes have cost County taxpayers $416.6 million.

That’s a lot of public money going primarily to subsidized private interests, particularly in sports.

That’s a lot of money for events – sporting and cultural – that are enjoyed by the entire Northeast Ohio area but paid primarily by Cuyahoga County residents and regressively by lower income people for the benefit most often by those with higher incomes.

The unfairness of it is obvious.

Something Mayor Jackson and Commissioners Hagan, Dimora and Lawson Jones should take into account in pricing the present and past value of the Mall site to Northeast Ohio residents.

The city should not allow the vast taxes collected to be shifted to a private company, MMPI (Merchandise Mart Properties Inc.), chosen by the County Commissioners to take over the convention business.

Indeed, the County Commissioners should be asking for financial contributions from counties adjacent to Cuyahoga. Their residents benefit from the heavy taxation in Cuyahoga.

They apparently enjoy these amenities free.

Remember Regionalism. Let’s start here.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATroadrunner.com

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