if I ran the city, the series, #10: show us your guns

Cleveland files suit to uphold right to pass its own gun laws -- Good grief! I can't even get through a workday without having to stop to write about something inane going on in the city government. Here's Frank Jackson, again, making a big to-do about home rule, and how we in the CleveCentric universe can do just about anything we please, like continue to try to subvert the state and federal constitutions (instead of coming to grips with the real issues, the ones that call for tough solutions). He wants to dog-paddle against the current again and put us at further competitive disadvantage, and I just have one question: If we're such shit-hot home-rulers around here, then why are things so stalled out these past 15 years or so? What other cities have home rule? Do they lean on it so as a solution to a questionable yet authoritarian leadership style of "my way or the highway" or "it's my city, and I'll do with it as I please, because I'm in charge, and I can"?

I find Steve Leavitt's story about the Swiss more to the point in a community discussion (we need to have one here) about who will have guns, and who won't, and what kind of guns they will be, as well. It's stuck in the middle of chapter 4 of Freakonomics ("Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?"), around page 131. What it relates is that male Swiss of age to serve in the SwissMilitia are issued assault rifles and allowed to keep them at home. Switzerland has more firearms per capita than just about any other country, yet it's one of the safest places in the world--ample argument for the position that guns don't cause crime. Outsiders think Switzerland is safe, too, in a lot of ways, and entrust the Swiss with the custodial duty of safe-keeping lots of money there.

So, as counterpoint to the doofy idea of stripping us of still more of our protections, I want to suggest that we use our home rule to establish a city militia, issue each of our militia an assault rifle, and allow them to keep their rifles at the house. If I ran the city, this would be one of the first things I'd do, right after I scrapped all the traffic-camera equipment and sold it at pennies on the dollar to another, dumber emerging third-world country, if I could find one that retarded.

government & nonprofit reps now fly to the rescue of more banks

Banks have a confirmed commitment to the city--In yesterday's Letters to the Editor in the PD, two of our representatives, one from the government and the other from the nonprofit sector, flew to the rescue of still more banks, citing specific nice little things these other banks do and why they should have a bigger share of whatever City-of-Cleveland preferences shifted to KeyBank a few days ago. Joe Cimperman and Ann Zoller cite a few instances of bank beneficence, but then Joe goes on to begin to start to get around to getting to a key point:

This picture of those two banks is different from the one painted by an outdated city administration formula that doesn't tell the true story. Cleveland's needs change daily. So must its relationships with financial partners. To continue to grade on a scale that does not reflect the banks' support of community needs sends the wrong message. We must recognize when institutions serve our community in ways that mean real quality-of-life improvements for all Clevelanders.

First of all, is there a formula, is this preferential-treatment-of-banks thing actually quantified, and who has seen it lately? Does this formula have at the top of the list the amount that the institution expects to pay the city on the deposits? The term and liquidity of the deposits? The ratings of the institution to hold the deposits, and the default insurance available per account? The ability to provide multiple accounts and also good accountability? The percentage of employees who actually live in Cleveland proper (no municipal income tax recripocity) and the payroll specifically attributable to those employees? The dollar amount of mortgage loans let out, with an offset for sloppy lending practices evidenced by foreclosures? A benevolent practice of cashing government and payroll checks for ordinary people with small or no accounts, so they aren't forced to go to the high-fee check-cashing gouge joints?

Way after all these things, we can list the actual amounts the banks give to city politicians and to the nonprofits, to make sure nobody is buying the business, and the amount of fees they use as incentives for the nonprofits to promote their banking products. Anything over $50 should be accounted for, just like our former governor's golf perks.

We need lots of analysis and then transparency and accountability, so that we can proceed to talk intelligently about who gets what city-deposit business, and how much.

if I ran the city, the series, #8: plowing priorities

Downtown workers, visitors plow on--If I ran the city, I'd do just what Frank Jackson did the other day: make the main streets passable, and then make the neighborhood streets that feed into them passable. I, too, would serve the businesses, and then the residents.

The PD story's angle is interesting, because its primary perspective comes from a woman in sales for a bank (Why do we need to sell a bank's services? Banks should attract, I would think.) who drives (alone, we presume) in an SUV (conspicuous consumption of resources) all the way in from Strongsville (sprawl near the Medina county line) to find her reserved space in the company lot (the lot of that parasitic banking concern from Scotland, probably on the site of torn-down legacy office space) usurped by others of her ilk, her inconsiderate, disrestpectful fellow employees.

Is the PD holding this woman up to make her the object of sympathy, or ridicule?

Anyway, thanks for the service, Frank, and I just wish more people would get their cars off the street earlier in snowstorms to make the plowing on the neighborhood streets that much more effective.

if I ran the city, the series, #7: shoveled walks

I was out shoveling snow this morning and decided to do a little more than I had to and proceeded to clear the walk in front of the boardup next door. The pre-dawn Denison neighborhood looked great, as though everything were occupied again by people who were neat and industrious and considerate, people who had values and pride and self-respect, just like back in 1983. I also made it possible for my neighbors to use the sidewalk without slipping or sliding or struggling with an irregular frozen surface.

One of my main complaints for the past few years of my taking early morning walks around the city is that the public walkways are nearly impassable. Sidewalks on bridges have huge piles of snow and ice, and I feel like a mountain goat getting across. The sidewalk in front of and to the side of the church at 33rd and Denison is usually very unwelcoming because they shovel only from the parking lot to the church door, and I feel there sometimes like Don Ho or Dick Blake (sans clack stick, of course), doing slick dance routines with both feet firmly planted just to keep my balance.

I also was thinking about the recent TIWIDT move by Wendell Robinson, prompted by Jeff Hess and Henery Hawk, to do good deeds to raise the level of good karmic vibrations around these parts. Then I started thinking about how it's really never too late for anything, even to become a Boy Scout, and help people--as a pre-teen, I'd always been too terrified of their rumored circle activities to join.

Now, if I ran this city, I'd do what they do out in Bedford, for instance, and have a guy run around the whole city on some sort of little scooter/plow and keep all the sidewalks passable. But since I don't live in a city that puts the functionality of its own citizens first and doesn't seem to care too much about its own appearance, all I can do is to fill the gap until help shows up. And, I can do this by keeping my own space clear and also helping clear the areas that probably won't get cleared--in front of the boardups, in front of older peoples' homes, in front of the properties of the benighted investors who have been to Carleton Sheets seminars and taken them seriously.

I feel better already, and my arms are getting some tone back, and the neighborhood looks great.

Next on the agenda: overnight parking

where's Miss Jane?

New Scanners for Tracking City Workers - New York Times--If we had invested as New York is investing in managing it's human resources, we could have answered the question quite easily during the last administration. Using technology to monitor Cleveland city workers might be a better investment than using cameras at intersections to feed off citizens just passing through. Let's crank up another deep and meaningful Red Room Dialogue, and while we're scrapping the red-light district entrapment cameras, the omnipresent reminder of the sad, sad legacy of the Campbell administration, let's look into managing our human resources better at the city level. I think it's quite possible to do way better with way less, or way fewer, but we'll never know until we try. Let's start with monitoring the burgeoning employment pools at the Water Department and then at Muni Light. Let's also consider doing away with the protectionism of the civil-service system. We can't afford the overhead of public-employee refuge centers any more.

And since we're on the topic, where's Frank? Any sightings? Does his really low profile somehow give new meaning to the terms "invisible hand" or "transparent leadership"?

marring the streetscape, for three administrations

Once again, I'm asking if anybody knows who is responsible for the omnipresent Omni Media advertising kiosks which have been marring the metropolitan Cleveland streetscape since Mike White contracted for their installation as one of his final cruel pranks. The PD article at the link has a date of 01/04/2001, nearly 6 years ago. Now that yet another year is passing, we should have some report of the revenue the City of Cleveland garners from these design monstrosities. I've seen nothing lately.

Can anybody tell us who controls these kiosks, who books the advertising, and how much the city gets for allowing its streets to be used so poorly? Who benefits? Is it some French company, perhaps the same one that currently controls the ads at the airport?

Why is our accountability so poor around here? Don't we deserve to know whether these things are delivering as advertised? There are 195 of them, according to the article, so who is responsible for them? I don't think this is asking too much, to know about assets with easements on our common city property. If they're not productive, then perhaps we should get them off the streets; to me, they are unwelcome visual clutter. If we are going to make a point of being a breeding ground of artists and other genteel, sensitive people who hold dear proportion and integration, we can't go around being so thoughtlessly tacky.

Burke Lakefront, and WORTH Magazine

WORTH Magazine and The Robb Report spend a lot of time and printspace talking about private personal and corporate aircraft. The January 2007 WORTH on page 78 addresses the issue of how "today's private jet owners seek to manage soaring costs by scrutinizing the maintenance and operation of their own aircraft." I'd link to the article if I could, but I can't.

It's been occurring to me that Burke Lakefront Airport (BKL) is an idea whose time has finally come. What other city has a jetport so close to its downtown with its best restaurants and classiest hotels? What better way could there be to do business, with your plane in such close proximity? I don't know that I'd fly in to negotiate any deals with any of the current leadership here, but I would make it a sort of "third place" for dealmakers, outside the major financial centers like NYC and San Francisco.

One problem may be the marketing. Going to the BKL page, there's really no mention of what sort of corporate jets may be accommodated, and clicking on the Cleveland Hotels link gives us a bunch of Baymonts and Days Inns. The city's continuing to fumble the ball on this one, and you wonder, after all these years, whether it's intentional, whether they systematically waste the opportunity, and the asset, by neglecting to do even minimal promotion. What are their other designs for the airport land? Who's supposed to get this unique asset when the city gives up on what it never really started?

How many outsiders know about the capacities or proximities or amenities of Burke?

perks for our public servants

The Taxpayers’ Chauffeurs - New York Times: This opinion piece has a novel idea: "public officials could take public transportation as a matter of public policy. "

I sat at a recent MeetTheBloggers session with Cleveland Ward 19 Councilman Jay Westbrook, and John McGovern began talking about how out of touch most people are around here with what public transportation offers, and how clueless most are about what it can do to be of better service. It should be an economic driver, and I don't think we see it as that around here any more. We have too strong a bias towards the car and tend to overuse it in the hopes of keeping our UAW friends rocking along.

Having all government people ride the public transit would shake out a lot of the bugs in the system and save us a lot on fleets of government cars.

Question: When a government employee takes a car home on a regular basis, isn't that a perk? Is it reported to the IRS as additional income? Are we losing tax revenue if it's not? Can we go back at the state and local levels and recapture these taxes? Isn't it the taxpayer ("we, the people") that pays for the car, the gas and oil, the maintenance and insurance? Can we have an audit, please, and a recapture for the public purse, if that's warranted?

All you have to do is to go to an ODOT meeting after hours to understand how many of these folks use government cars after hours. Do they take them back to the motor pool after the meetings? Drive down I-71 to Columbus any morning early and see all the commuters using government cars. Did they pick them up at the motor pool that morning, before 0500?

if I ran the city...the series, #2: midnight baseball

Three weeks ago, I began the series about what would happen if I ran the city, or the county, or the state. As with most city things, it's taken a long while to follow through with a second effort, but, what the heck, at least from me, you see a second effort. Today, I address the curious pastime of "midnight baseball."

Do you remember the hoopla over that benighted idea of Mike White's, the midnight basketball program? That's the program that was designed to keep the young people ages 18-25 off the streets at night, but which also had the effect of keeping them off the streets at 5 and 6 in the morning, when other people were getting up and going to jobs, or getting out looking for jobs. Well, the enterprising yoot (youth) of our neighborhood have done Mike one better with the concept of midnight baseball, and it seems to be picking up in popularity, from all I can see.

It's an interesting concept. The yoot merely roam the streets with baseball bats, looking aggressive, wearing their game faces, and see what all happens. I guess they're looking for some sort of pickup game, or something, and I don't recognize them as being from our neighborhood, so they must be the visiting team. What I can't figure out is what these enterprising yoot are going to do once they find a game, because none of them ever has a ball or a mitt, but maybe their other equipment is lurking somewhere in those baggy pants.

Anyway, if I ran the city, I would make sure these yoot had their balls or mitts in plain sight when they were cruising looking for a midnight baseball game. If these accoutrements weren't in plain sight, I would instruct my police to stop them and make sure their collective pants were loaded with enough equipment to last 9 innings and field a full two teams--police are always great for supporting yoot sports events. Even if they did have their game balls on display, sort of like they do their boxer shorts, I would have the police stop them and find out when and where the game was, so we could all come out of our houses again and begin walking our dogs again over to the midnight baseball field, where we would watch our yoot do something intrinsically American and sportsmanlike and constructive, and root, root, root for the home team, our own little home boys. I still don't know how they're going to round the bases without getting all tangled up in those pants, and most of their hats are too big to make it with them all the way down the first base line, but maybe they know something about wearing these new clothes that I don't.

We had about 80 yoot up the street here on Denison near Fulton last night and early this morning, and we really as a community have to get over to them and give them some special coaching. They're confused. They don't know the difference between midnight baseball and midnight track. Some of them must have thought they were at a track meet, because I heard their starter guns go off a good many times, and there must have been some false starts, because some of the reports of the starter pistols were really close together. The police coaches from the Second District came over to make sure they didn't have so many false starts, but then the police coaches left and the false starts cranked up again soon after. Perhaps they're uncoachable. I can't really say too much more, because none of the kids were from around here, and I don't know them. Also, they need to learn how to stay in their lanes, and how to point the starter pistols in the air and not at each other.

Another thing--I wonder where their parents were, and whether the kids weren't so tired they couldn't get up for church this morning. And where are all the priests and ministers and social workers when you need them? Seems like they preach and evangelize and prescribe but then go home at 5 every day and get a paycheck, too, while the yoot just seem to run around without direction, all confused, and we have to use the public dollar to get the police coaches to intervene. The clergy and the social workers should have been out helping clear the streets last night, so that the wayward yoot could get to church today.

So, if I ran the governments, my social workers would live in the middle of the people they ministered to, so they could take care of minor confusions 24 hours a day, my police-coaches would be instructed to stop and check confused yoot to make sure they had all the proper sports equipment for the big pickup game and to find out the ever-changing game schedule, and I would gradually change the midnight baseball and midnight basketball and nocturnal track schedules to make sure everybody would be able to get a good night's rest and get up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for work at 5 AM the next day, except on Saturday, when I would make sure they could make it to sunrise services.

I would do this all up close and personal, and I'd get to know each and every one of them. They are part of our community, they are a big part of our future, and we must become a big part of theirs--24 hours a day. This is no longer a situation where everybody goes home at 5 and considers the job done. Somebody has to be there in the neighborhoods to set the example, perpetually. That's what a healthy community's all about--integration of all levels, not separation by economic class.

if I ran the city...the series, #1

I'm not going to keep it all inside any longer; I'm not going to pester my wife with it; I'm not going to announce my latest revelation or pithy epiphany at the next social gathering; I'm going to dump it on the blog, and hope the process has a salutary effect, and for all. I'm going to tell you what I would do, if I ran the city, and the county, and the state.

Today, I would do away with the gas or electric blower as a maintenance tool for all government workers, and replace it with a broom and a shovel. I would then auction the collected blowers to some benighted, less progressive government entity as far away from here as possible--perhaps another third-world country.

The blower costs a lot and merely moves trash from one location to another, sort of like other cost shifting and responsibility shifting and wiping off the booger that goes on at all levels of government today. Nothing is ever really resolved, trash never gets picked up, containerized, and transported to a centrally located place where people deal with the issue of what is the highest and best use of trash. Trash "blowerized" becomes the neighbors' problem, and a blower, despite the costs, doesn't have a whole lot of alternative uses.

Brooms and shovels, on the other hand, are inexpensive, have no serial number, can be used any number of ways both indoors and out, and seem to sharpen eye-hand coordination while providing a modest aerobic workout.

To those efficiency experts who might talk of productivity and man-hours and such, using a blower may be more efficient in concept, but the practical executions I have seen allow the marginally supervised to run around, look busy for a brief moment, and then have more leisure time to smoke and joke.

Am I missing anything, as I run the city?

Hey, at least I'm doing something.