more good work from Mark and Henry

Auditor says Rosemary Vinci's failure to disclose felony record broke no law - OPENERS - Ohio Politics Blog by The Plain Dealer -- Although this one comes without an accompanying audio clip, we appreciate it immensely. Mark Puente and Henry J. Gomez are doing some good reporting for the good of the community, and we hope they keep can keep it up.

We like the part about her lobbying for "developers." Perhaps this all Flats-centric real-estate engineering needs reexamining. It seems that it may not be "organic" or natural growth. It may even be cancerous, and it may need excising.

Claddagh Irish Pub Locations --minus Westlake

Claddagh Irish Pub - Claddagh Irish Pub Locations -- I was scheduled to attend a workshop at the Crocker Park Claddagh tomorrow.

Westlake
139 Crocker Park Boulevard
Westlake, OH 44145
(440) 250-8680

This afternoon, our sponsors left a message that the workshop would not occur as scheduled, since the Westlake Claddagh location was no longer doing business. Has anybody else heard anything else about Crocker Park's numbers or tenants? The link says the main office of this Claddagh Development Group is in Solon; I don't know if that's the only group that operates Claddagh Irish Pubs.

from Bill MacDermott: running the electricity meter backwards

Building power into new home - cleveland.com Our friend Bill MacDermott called our attention to this piece in the PD--

Dear Friends,

Just in case you missed it, there was a very nice article on the front page of the Business section in yesterdays (6/12) Plain Dealer. It was on a local Uni-Solar solar shingle installation done by a friend, Al Frasz.

Here is a link to the on-line article, but they didn't include the wonderful photo that was in the printed version :-(

http://www.cleveland.com/business/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/business-2/1181637654195360.xml&coll=2

Cheers,

Bill MacDermott

Note the estimated numbers; we need to see more of this, if people are going to begin to adapt and retrofit:

The calculator (go through tinyurl.com/ywg7rv) shows that a solar array in Greater Cleveland can be expected to generate about 75 percent of what one in San Diego typically generates. The system, including the backup battery power addition, was expensive - about $30,000. But a state grant of nearly $10,000, a federal tax credit of 30 percent of the total cost and accelerated state and federal depreciation schedules made the net cost about $5,000.

"We did not add this and mark up the price. We discounted the solar in the [$295,900] price of the house," Kornell said.

Pointing to the neighboring homes that have sold for as much as $308,000, Kornell argues that "the actual cost of solar could disappear very easily when competing in the real estate market."

At today's electric rates, it will take more than a dozen years for the system to pay for itself in lower electric bills. But if the state deregulates rates as scheduled in 2009, allowing utilities to charge whatever the market will bear, the payback time should quickly shrink.
Whoever buys the Hambden house won't be able to cut the wire to CEI, however, no matter what the rates are.

The annual sun power will be enough to replace a quarter to a third of the average residential consumption here, which is about 750 to 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month or 9,000 to 12,000 a year.

But then this home is average in only one sense, its size: 2,150 square feet. All the appliances, the furnace, air conditioning and lighting meet federal Energy Star specs, said Kornell. Combine those efficiencies with solar output and you get electric bills that should be about half what the neighbors in similar homes are paying, he said.

real-estate blinders

As Condos Rise in South Florida, Nervous Investors Try to Flee - New York Times -- There's a parallel here to Cleveland -- in both places, they keep building new, regardless of what the markets are telling them.

In Cleveland, they add the extra incentive of tax abatement. City Council recently voted 20 to 1 in favor of continuation of tax abatement, even though since 1997, the tax-abated properties have been directly offset by the number of unsold, vacant, abandoned, and foreclosed existing properties--the number is in the 10,000 to 12,000 range, and nobody has yet done a study that mentions this fact. It seems that the big picture is what we should focus on first but, hey, around here we ignore the numbers and focus on the hype, the feel-good proposition.

Our Ward 15 councilman Brian Cummins was the lone holdout, and we're proud of him for speaking out against an unfair imposition on long-time residents. But, to put him on notice, some sneaky little scuttling bureaucratic creep allowed a typically Cleveland+ "oops!" to happen, and a house Brian had lined up for renovation on Riverside Avenue was demolished, in a snafu, on a Saturday.

Anyway, here's the after-action report on the insanity in South Florida:

“I get two or three of these calls a day,” said James Ryan, a lawyer in Boca Raton who said he had 40 clients looking to get out of condo contracts. One, Mr. Ryan said, abandoned a $340,000 deposit rather than close on a $1.6 million unit that lost its appeal as the market faltered. The numbers suggest that it will only get worse. In Miami-Dade County alone, 8,000 new condo units will be completed this year and nearly 12,000 more in 2008. But demand has dropped markedly, and people who thought they could “flip” condos — buying, then selling for a steep profit before construction is done — are parting with that fantasy. After years of stunning price increases — 25 percent in the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton area, for example, from March 2005 to March 2006 — condo prices have started dropping.