If you do not want to read the word GATEWAY stop right NOW.
However, if you want to know more about how power works here and how government is ready to tap into your pocket, read on.
The Cuyahoga County Commissioners are posed to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars – likely more than a billion dollars – for two projects. Yes, that is billion.
The smell of new taxes is heavy in the air. Taxes voted without taxpayer consent.
Taxing regressively is the way the system works. Public officials serve special interests by not seeking revenue from those who have money. They sell the public on what they call “progress and jobs.” Have you heard that before?
As has been said here before, the Commissioners are prepared to pass a one-fourth cent (.25 percent) sales tax for a new convention center. It may seem small. However, it could raise some $30-million each year for 25 to 30 years, possibly forever.
The sales tax, of course, is the most regressive tax the Commissioners – Tim Hagan, Peter Lawson Jones and Jimmy Dimora – can choose.
It hardly touches upper income pocketbooks but weighs heavily upon the poor and even the middle class.
At the last meeting of the Convention Facilities Authority (CFA) Bill Reidy - CFA chairperson and also the Gateway chairman - indicated that he expected the Commissioners to act this spring. He meant that they were expected to enact a tax without voter approval to finance the proposed project. (The CFA, in one of its occasional board meetings, began with a 35-minute private executive session. Those who trudged downtown were asked to leave at the start of the meeting. After Reidy chaired a less that 35 minute meeting, revealing almost nothing about its business).
The CFA’s desire for public funding could cost taxpayers nearly $500 million dollars. With interest, the cost will likely double.
The profligate County Commissioners also recently bought buildings from Dick Jacobs, already enriched by Gateway. The properties sit at Euclid and E. 9th Street. The County paid $22 million for the useless buildings
The County must now remove asbestos from these buildings. The cost will be millions of dollars. Then the County must knock down structures. Then they must carry the mess away.
Only then will the County be able to build a new County Administration Building.
Total cost here: I would not doubt $100,000,000, including borrowing costs.
Meaning taxpayers, paying too high a price for county government fat with patronage, will be asked pay more.
Every time Hagan and Company slice into your income with regressive taxes the Average Joe and Jane are clipped badly. Just add it to your rocketing gasoline costs.
These seemingly small raids on citizens’ pockets escape serious scrutiny by the news media.
Here’s some proof of the costs taxpayers pick up.
On January 15, Cuyahoga County sent a hefty check to bondholders of County bonds for Gateway. The check totaled $5,734,149. It’s an annual payment since 1994.
The payments result by vote of County Commissioners Hagan, Jim Petro (who wants to be your governor), and Mary Boyle. A decision they made when Gateway ran short of construction funds. The County borrowed $75-million and then $40-million.
Adding the cost of interest to the $115-million in principal, the total cost will be some $300-million, according to the original bond documents.
This latest $5.7-million check added to previous January payments since 1994 cost Cuyahoga County taxpayers $92,764,645. There’s no end in sight.
The $5.7-million, however, is not the real cost to the public. The actual total was $9,764,901 for 2005. However, other revenues were used to reduce it to $5.7-million. Yet, all of the funds come from tax revenues.
Admission taxes at the Q, formerly Gund, arena are shifted from the city of Cleveland to help pay the bonds. So that $2.3 million in 2005 was diverted from the city to bondholders. What the hell, the City of Cleveland doesn’t need its own revenues, does it?
Moreover, excess sin taxes that would have gone to the County went to reduce the bond payments. That was another $1.2-million fro 2005.
Over the life of the bonds thus far, $9.7-million in admission taxes and $8.8 million in excess sin taxes went to bondholders instead of Cuyahoga County and Cleveland.
Another $212,000 came from bed tax sources.
In addition to those Gateway payments, the County has paid $2,244,980 on Cleveland Foundation loans; $11.5 million of arena overrun payments; and $2,250,000 for loans from the state for other overruns.
The deal with the Indians and Cavs to meet operating costs - heralded by the Gateway board as saving it from bankruptcy - wasn’t meant to do that as much as something else. If the teams allowed Gateway to fall into bankruptcy, the county and city would own those facilities. This would have allowed the City and County to rework the deal, the last thing the team owners want.
Gateway will never be able to afford to pay one cent back.
KING’S CLEVELAND CONNECTIONS GETS SHORT SHRIFT
The lack of memory or apparently even the desire to recollect at the Plain Dealer astounds me. It adds to the void in coverage that anyone reading the daily paper must see. This was evident in the recent celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. day.
Editors who should be paying attention are off dreaming somewhere.
Carl Stokes’ book “Promises of Power” devotes a number of pages to King’s Cleveland connection during the 1967 mayor’s campaign. It was the year the late Carl Stokes became the nation’s first black big city mayor.
King’s assassination in 1968 also played a significant role in Cleveland politics. Stokes, along with others, walked the streets of Cleveland on April 4, 1968 to keep peace here after King’s death. Terrible and destructive rioting broke out in many American cites that night. Cleveland remained peaceful.
Stokes did not appreciate King coming to Cleveland. He felt that King was taking advantage of his political notoriety because the famed civil rights leader was unsuccessful in his forays into the North. “In 1967, Dr. King’s great career was at a low point,” Stokes wrote.
Stokes met with King to try to dissuade him from coming here. Stokes feared that King would interfere with a political strategy he had worked out carefully. He tried to convince King that he already had a winning plan and that “it could be lost if black pride started prodding white fears.” King, however, came with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) anyway.
As I remember it, King publicly said he would register thousands of black voters. It made headlines. Cleveland Democratic county chairman Albert Porter used this claim to warn that a Stokes victory would result in turning the city over to Dr. King.
There are still people around who know the stories behind these tensions between Stokes and King. With both men dead, some might now be willing to part with long-kept secrets.
A good newspaper would not allow this history to be lost to its reading public.
I covered King as a PD reporter in April 1967, when he spoke to 8,000 schoolchildren at various schools one day, asking them to “shun violence.”
“Our power does not lie in Molotov cocktails. Our power does not lie in bottles. Our power lies in the ability to unite around non-violent progress,” King said.
“Violence is self-defeating action and suicidal,” said King.
“Develop within yourself a deep sense of somebodiness. Don’t let anyone make you feel you are nobody. If you feel that way, it is impossible to rise to your full maturity as a person.
“Desegregate your mind. You are as good as any other children. You must never again be ashamed of yourself, or of the color of your skin,” King said.
The cadence of his remarks was familiar:
“You may murder a hater, but you haven’t destroyed hate; you can kill a liar, but the lie lives on,” he said.
King’s holiday, in too many respects, is just another day off from school and work.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole hidden-email:ebyqb@nqrycuvn.arg'? (:divend:)