LeBron and Ratner and Bye, Bye?
By Roldo Bartimole
Can we speculate into the future?
LeBron James, the Cavs phenomenon, can sign with a new team for the 2008 season.
A member of a prominent Cleveland Family will build a new arena scheduled in 2008.
The arena will be in Brooklyn.
No, not that Brooklyn.
Brooklyn as in New York.
Bruce Ratner wants huge subsides to build the arena in Brooklyn, N. Y. It will be part of a $2.5 billion office, retail and residential complex known as Atlantic Yards. He is Forest City Enterprises family member. A Brooklyn council member noted, “It’s a great day for rich developers and a sad day for working families,” with 1,000 residents to be displaced.
Bruce Ratner owns New Jersey Nets, an NBA team that plays in East Rutherford, N. J., but headed for the spot once desired by Walter O’Malley, then owner of the historic Brooklyn Dodgers who headed west to Los Angeles.
What happens if (when) LeBron is signed away from the Cavaliers and taken to New York, the sports center of the world? (Doesn’t he already wear a New York sports cap and where would Nike want its sneakers to be on view - the NYC or Cleveland media market?).
Well, this town will go crazy. Forest City and all the Ratners become Art Modell redux. Persona non grata. Evil. Devils. Recipients of death threats.
So raw will the feelings be that Forest City Enterprises has its excuse, if it needs one, to get out of town.� Do a Rockefeller – move to New York also.
Bye, bye, Cleveland. We loved you once but… business is business.
Can There Be Any Reprieve From Our Elites?
Well, we're seeing a lot more bizarre behavior, the normal from our local politicians.
They are proposing and pushing a $90 million glass dome for the yet unpaid for $350-million Browns Stadium. We are told it could get us a Super Bowl game if we let loose with our hard-earned money. The Pee Dee cites figures that indicate the football date could bring untold millions of dollars into Cleveland for one big weekend. Tell me, what do we do with the glass-domed Stadium for the weekends of the next 18 to 20 years without a Super Bowl? Oh, little details for little minds, I expect to be cautioned. Don’t be negative, they tell me.
Should I, we, turn off our thoughts?
Then the Cavaliers – really the team’s well-healed owners – are given subsidies to move out of Cleveland to a new, luxurious practice complex with mini-golf course, I’m told.
Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have given untold millions in subsidies to the owners. George and Gordon Gund, who retains a minority share, bought the team for some $20 million from Ted Stepien and sold it for some $375 million to Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans. The fancy price was in great part of the largess of Cuyahoga County taxpayers. We built the billionaire brothers a new downtown luxury arena with a $2-million plus restaurant, luxury loges and a $600,000 apartment (paid for by Gund only after it became public). Taxpayers paid the $150-million, not counting land and construction preparation, for the Gund/Q arena that was originally priced at $75-million.
The County let $120-million in bonds, extra beyond the sin taxes of $240 million, to pay for the extra cost for Gund Arena. We are still paying for the bonds and interest. We give the team money annually as compensation for parking no longer used in Richfield (where the team once played). We give the team free parking at Gateway (and the city loses literally millions of dollar a year on that deal). We allow the Arena to pay no property taxes – ever - meaning the County, city and schools in particular lose millions in revenue each year as long as it exists.
Yet, Mayor Frank Jackson silently allows the Cavs to move its practice facilities out of Cleveland – and with it millions of dollars in income tax revenue. Apparently, he doesn’t know that the Arena has built in practice facilities, gratis the taxpayers.
Then the most generous Cleveland-Cuyahoga Port Authority finances the deal for the move to Independence. Then we find out that not only do they finance the deal but make $750,000 in sales tax revenue – that you and I pay – available to multi-millionaire owner Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans. How? By exempting all sales taxes on its construction material, which, according to the Plain Dealer. The construction material cost is half of the cost of the facilities in Independence. The state will lose revenue of $550,000, Cuyahoga County, $100,000, and RTA, which just raised its rates, $100,000 to some of the wealthiest Clevelanders.
John Carney – member of the potent Carney family, which has milked politics for money for seven or eight decades here – chairs the Port Authority. A developer sitting on a honey/money pot. His mouth must water.
His uncle, James, was head of the Democratic Party, ran for Cleveland Mayor in 1971, partnered in politics with George Forbes when it was profitable and took Forbes in as a partner in at least one business. Carney was a big landowner, developer, banker and, business and cable partners with officers of Scripps-Howard, which controlled the Press and Ch. 5. He also had a small ownership position once in the Plain Dealer. Moreover – believe it or not – James also chairman of the Port Authority years ago. The younger John Carney’s dad, John, had been a judge and county auditor. The two brothers together became a powerful Cleveland institution.
Laughably, Jim Carney once said, “Being in both business and politics hasn’t been good for us. If anything it’s been detrimental.” Such an altruist.
When you know levers of power, you pass it on to your kin, don’t you know?
Quiet Frank Jackson is being too silent.
He apparently lost his tongue to Cleveland elites. Most likely, he’s taking advice from Arnold Pinkney who helped get him elected. Pinkney is the last person Jackson should listen to about how to govern as a Mayor. Pinkney is a businessman who has made a career since the Carl Stokes administration of feeding off politics.
Jackson seems so intent upon soothing the business establishment that he appears to have forgotten (in only six months) who put him in office. It was not Pinkney, Carney or National City banks’ David Daberko. The many working people trusted Jackson should be his constituency.
City Council, under Marty Sweeney, otherwise described as Jackson’s puppet, has thus far been puppeteer himself, marching his Council, including some bright new members, as a shepherd does his sheep.
A perfect example is the voted increased water rate. The significant rate jump has been linked, at least in Mayor Jackson’s and the Pee Dee’s mind, to Regionalization. As I understand it, the considerable rate hike somehow is linked to a yet officially unacknowledged promise from suburbs to refrain from raiding the city of business.
How suburban governments can keep businesses from moving into their province is a mystery to me. If there is any kind of freedom left hereabouts, business has it. They can move anywhere they can afford and some places they cannot.
Council, with only one negative vote by Mike Polensek, voted the water rate hike WITHOUT any deal on the quid pro quo that suburbs would not raid the city. That’s belief on faith alone.
I’m not sure at this point whether the increased water rates are really a regionalism strategy by Jackson, or whether it’s his idea of jobs program for the city. As a make-work program, maybe it has some merit. Cleveland residents, however, will be paying the highest rate hike.
The problem is that ordinary people at a time of rising costs in gasoline and other essentials will be tapped for much higher water bill with one of the largest fresh water body in the world sitting at its edge.
Why not start the City of Cleveland bottled water division and sell it at retail, making the city some money?
Some people have noticed that the Port Authority has become a government of its own making. It is an unelected, but powerful body, as secretive as it can be. It does this very well.
With attorney/developer John Carney and a development-minded board and staff, the Port Authority has become what I cautioned about 30 years ago. An unelected body with vast power. Now, however, it has even more powers than when it originated in the 1970s when Mayor Ralph Perk was Mayor Give-Away, unloading the port, parks, transit system, among other city assets.
Because of the transfer to an un-elected board, the city retained power to name six of the nine members, the county the other three. However, it does not make much difference because the city makes no attempt to monitor its members. Council members probably do not even know the names of city appointees. The three County Commissioners – Jimmy Dimora, Tim Hagan and Peter Lawson Jones – might better be known as the hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil trio. In other words, useless.
Back in 2001, I wrote, “The Port Authority tries hard to be as inconspicuous as it can despite its vast powers. It has significant ability to let revenue bonds, which means the capacity to flush cash into almost anything that can be built, even outside Cuyahoga County.”
The Port Authority helped ruin the lakefront by backing the dominate facilities there – the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Browns Stadium. The Port Authority likely will be the financial mechanism for a new convention center, too.
It’s out of control. The Port soon will be looking for more tax support. Any levy should be defeated.
We all should be tired of business leeching off the public treasury with promises of jobs and wealth for the ordinary guy. Yet, they continue to sell us on just such Music Man pitches.
I’d like to ban the word “entrepreneur” from our public vocabulary. Not all good emanates from being entrepreneurial. These days leaders convince us that all life has to be lived as entrepreneurship. It’s killing our culture and us.
Continually, the public good is sacrificed to a greedy private privilege based on private profit.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldo@adelphia.net (:divend:)