How Much Can This Community Stand as Corporatized Pols Nourish Elite?

If Dennis Kucinich were County Commissioner instead of Tim Hagan, the Pee Dee would be flooded with screeching headlines about the debacle of the downtown administration building.

He’d be tarred and feathered editorially.

I’m talking about the proposed consolidation site at E. 9th & Euclid for new County administration offices that the present three stooges at the County Commission have now abandoned, deciding instead to put up for sale.

The County paid some $22 million for the complex, which had been empty for years. No one really knows how much the County has spent to maintain and improve it. Nevertheless, it is in the millions of dollars.

The Pee Dee reported that the commissioners estimated the costs are at $35 million, including apparently the $22 million purchase price for Dick Jacobs’s white elephant.

There has not been an editorial word in the Pee Dee about this disgraceful situation.

Who is protecting Tim Hagan?

Hagan, pal of editorial boss Brent Larkin - pal of Dick Jacobs - is the stooge who seems to be “running” things.

Hagan has bought the Politician Protection Plan at the Pee Dee. Much better than a Witness Protection Plan. You don’t have to move to be covered.

The old Cleveland Trust (Ameritrust) property deal stinks, plain and simple.

However, there are no questions being asked by our daily monitor.

Hagan’s Politician Protection Plan apparently extends to eternity with Larkin and the gang.

The Pee Dee accepted Hagan’s typical braggadocio. “We’re not going to give the site away without getting what we’ve got in it – period,” he said in typical Hagan bullcrap.

Wow! Tough talk.

The article quotes Barbara Shergalis, the complex project director, saying that the move for bids was a shock to her.

It shouldn’t have been. However, I’d like to know why.

In a Sept. 5 column here I wrote: “I picked up chatter this week that ‘the fourth floor,’ meaning the County Commissioners and their staff - now considers it possible that it will not be able to pursue construction of the new County Administration Building at E. 9th & Euclid.” (See County Spending Us Into The Poorhouse here ).

If this old man, who doesn’t cover the County Commissioners, was hearing this talk, why the hell wouldn’t the director of the project - and the Pee Dee - know about it? Actually, Crain’s Cleveland published something a few days later that also indicated the new administration building was a “NO GO.”

What is really disturbing is that this astounding turnabout draws no serious question in this community. No hungry politician takes the Commissioners to task?

Where is the Republican Party? Doesn’t it have a live body that sees an opportunity in this all-Democratic fiasco?

Are we so dead politically in this town that there isn’t one enterprising politician who will call this scummy deal what it is.

Commissioners Hagan and Jimmy Dimora deserve to be throttled at dawn on Public Square.

An aside to reveal how debauched our politics have become:

I read in Crain’s Cleveland Business a comment by downtown council member Joe Cimperman that tells all we need to know about Joe and about our politics in town today. He dejectedly complained that a Los Angeles developer of the former Ryerson building at 5300 Lakeside didn’t ask for city subsidies. How dare they!

Cimperman stated that a council member by the mere signature of his name could have dropped $250,000 in the lap of this dumb developer who was too busy renovating a building to ask Joe for a favor.

Just Ask Joe for $250,000! By the way, where’s your business card, Mr. Businessman, because there must be some election coming up and I can send you a reminder of where to send the contribution.

Back to the County’s non-administration building.

First, this site and buildings never should have been bought.

Second, E. 9th & Euclid never should be a site for a public building. The $200-million plus RTA Euclid Corridor project along Euclid Ave. makes it ideal for a new private office construction. A County administrative building belongs logically in historic government building district, originally outlined in the Group Plan of 1903, not isolated up on Euclid Avenue.

Third, and most important, the administration building debacle has its origins in the rush for the phony push for a Medical Mart as a means to construct a new convention center.

Hagan and Dimora voted us a quarter percent increase in the sales tax, the largest they were able to assess without a public vote, for the mart and convention center. This need for public financing helped kill the County’s ability to borrow for its administration building.

Screw the public, is their motto.

The commission had limited Cuyahoga County to two sites for the new administration building – Jacobs’s E. 9th corner and the old Public Square’s Higbee’s department store building, owned by the Forest City Enterprise gang.

Since the Forest City gang lost out on the original site deal, it appears they will be rewarded with a Medical Mart and a Convention Center adjacent or attached to the company’s Tower City retail outlet at Public Square.

Now we must keep in mind that Hagan pushed the Medical Mart for his Kennedy family friend Christopher Kennedy, president of Merchandize Mart Properties. Shamefully, he is the son of the late Robert Kennedy. (See Should Hagan Have Recused Himself from Vote? here)

We should also keep in mind that Hagan was a prime mover in Gateway, which provided Jacobs with a new baseball field but more important the ability (because of the new stadium) to sell the Cleveland Indians for some $320 million after having paid some $45 million for the team.

Further, Ch. 8’s I-Team has examined the deal for asbestos removal from the Breuer building, part of the E. 9th property sold by Jacobs to Hagan and us as county taxpayers. There’s a lawsuit by a St. Louis company, which was rejected on the contract though it was the low bidder.

Bill Sheil of the I-Team reported talking with people who have been questioned by the FBI about the contract.

The FBI needs to look at the entire deal.

The contract went to Precision Environmental Company though it bid $915,000 more than the St. Louis firm did.

As I wrote before, Precision is a part of the DiGeronimo/Independence Excavating Co. family.

Dimora lists Robert DiGeronimo of the excavating company as a gift-giver. His Ohio Ethics report doesn’t say what the gift was from DiGeronimo.

Hagan and Dimora both list Dick Jacobs as having given gifts to each of them in 2006. The nature of the gifts went unmentioned.

How cozy it gets.

What we have now is a bunch of corporatized politicians eager to feed those who give gifts, take them to lunch, and provide them with playoff series tickets, private jet rides to New York. In other words, pols who daily break their oath of office to curry favor with Cleveland’s elite establishment.

The Pee Dee already has reported that a number of major Cleveland firms could be seeking new headquarters’ office spaces, including Squire Sanders, Baker Hostetler, Eaton Corp., Ernst & Young, and Huntington National Bank.

The office space market certain would be interested in the East 9th & Euclid prime location at the crossroad housing of Cleveland’s major banks.

It would be especially enticing should the County offer a cleaned-up site and – as you might expect – a price far below the standard cited by Hagan.

Can you say, “Fire Sale?”

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATroadrunner.com
(:divend:)