FW: Budget Update from our friend Joe Calabrese over at RTA

We just got this email from Joe Calabrese. I didn’t know he knew where to reach me; will wonders never cease?

Anyway, Joe informs us there is a shortfall in sales tax receipts, just at the same time we’re looking to finance a MedMart on the back of the sales tax. I wonder if this will give any of the MedMart cheerleaders pause?

Here’s an idea: Since the Medical MarijuanaMart will be self-sustaining and a low-cost startup—heck, you can deal out of a suitcase just about anywhere—we can reallocate the sales-tax increase originally earmarked for the old, tired idea of the MedMart to public transit. Given this sudden influx of funds, RTA can be free for all, just like public education, and the economy will flourish, except for the autoworkers and the banks that lend money to buy overpriced gas hogs.

From: e-news [mailto:e-news@gcrta.org]
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 3:22 PM
To: taferris@gmail.com
Subject: Budget Update

A message from Joe Calabrese, RTA CEO & General Manager

I want to update you on the current status of RTA's budget due to the current recession.

In light of a projected $12-15 million shortfall in sales tax receipts, we are aggressively taking steps to help balance our budget to preserve needed transportation services.

The Ohio House of Representatives recently passed House Bill 1, which includes a badly needed increase for public transit.

We urge you to contact your State Senators and the Governor's Office, and urge them to retain this increase and provide whatever other assistance possible in order to minimize any service reductions.

We will keep you informed as the process continues. Thank you for your assistance.

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I like living on a bus line

I just saw the 807 circulator go by in the rain and realized how much I liked living on a bus line. I see the lit buses go by in the early morning and in the late evening, symbols of our quiet neighborhood's connectivity to things more cosmopolitan. I see them whoosh by all day, reminders of the to hustle and bustle of the extended workday going on elsewhere. It's comforting to have them around. They're my connection to my local civilization.

If it weren't for the demolition of the Fulton Road Bridge, I might never have had the experience of having the buses run by my house. They used to run on Pearl and on Fulton, the spoke streets radiating from the downtown hub, but the older connectors, like Denison, were largely ignored. The emphasis was not so much on functionality among neighborhoods as it was on commuting through them, on bypassing them in an express fashion.

Denison originally had a trolley line running down its middle, and one lane either side of the trolley path for cars. We have a lot of storefronts on and adjacent to Denison, as Sandy Rozhon's chronicling at the Brooklyn Centre WIKI will attest. It is still a main connector to Newburgh Heights and the east side of the valley via Harvard, to the freeways (176 and 77), to Tremont and to the new developments down at Steelyard Commons. The bus line suits it well.

I'm thinking that with this next round of revisions of bus service, we need to become our own best advocates when it comes to requesting bus service as a critical driver for a thriving community.

cut the fares, increase the service

RTA leaders favor 25-cent fare increase, no drastic service cuts - Cleveland Metro News – The Latest Breaking News, Photos and Stories from The Plain Dealer -- Time to talk about RTA board composition and board pay. Why are we having people who did not do so well in their prior incarnations, like Jane Campbell, continuing to have a hand in things so critical to our productivity around here? What do we pay this board, and should we consider cutting back on that? How many on the board are serving just to have a crack at qualifying for PERS, and should that perquisite be eliminated, too? We need to examine these cosy, and ultimately costly, insider relationships.

We need a better board with better connections and with a better track record of getting difficult jobs done to get us the money it takes to cut fares back to nothing, and soon, and increase services to make this the best transit system in the nation. The basics are already there. An attractive transit system is a prime economic driver. Period.

Mass transit can make the world go 'round, all day and all night. We must get out of this 9 to 5 mentality and see a bigger picture. Also, we must consider that it's easier to retrofit a transit system to operate off electricity than it is to do the same with all the automobiles. See Andy Grove's recent piece on energy on Portfolio.com

Julia Child & The OSS: Oh, So Social

Julia Child, international spy - THE WEEK -- In the late '60s in Boston, I would see Julia on her way to and from work. She rode the bus.

At the link is an eye-opening recounting of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services and precursor of the CIA. Follow the links in the article itself. Go deep. Here's a taste:

Julia Child: celebrity chef by day, superspy by night,” said Judy Berman in Salon’s Broadsheet blog. She was already a national treasure for having “pretty much single-handedly introduced fresh, high-quality ingredients to midcentury American tables,” but a “mind-blowingly cool” double life, too? “You can’t get more awesome than that, right?”

True, she was “secretly more awesome than you already thought,” said Ryan Tate in Gawker, but actually her work in an “administrative capacity” at the OSS was already known. It’s “interesting to get confirmation,” though, and there are some great new details, like that she said on her OSS application that “her weakness was that she was ‘impulsive,’ because she quit a department store job once.”

Certainly “there was nothing covert about Julia,” said Robert Stein in his blog Connecting.the.Dots. In fact she “reveled” in telling confidantes about “her most dramatic exploit,” cooking up a shark repellant for underwater mines aimed at German U-boats. Her delight in that makes you wistful for “that innocent time when secretly working for your country was a source of pride.”

Child isn’t the only high-profile OSS member already identified as an operative, said Nick Gillespie in Reason’s Hit & Run blog. The “main takeaway” from these new documents appears to be the sheer size of the OSS. People previously thought maybe there were 13,000 employees.

The number of “notables” was also kind of surprising, said Andrea Stone and Emily Bazar in USA Today. The list of OSS agents “resembles a cocktail party guest list rather than a spy network.” With so many “actors, financiers, and socialites,” the internal joke was that OSS stood for “Oh So Social.”

Claudia pens a beautiful devotional piece

CoolCleveland.com - CityScape - Reflections on the Award-Winning RTA --Here's a nice PR piece for the GCRTA, and it's erudite, and historical, and makes everything seem so peachy-keen. We need a little more of a dose of reality, though, in that the free trolley car service disappears on the weekends and at night (where it goes and what it does with its weekends, we just don't know), and the in-town buses run so infrequently after normal business hours as to be practically unuseable.

Gloria and I have given an honest try to bus- and rapid-riding these past two years, and it's well nigh impossible to use the system efficiently unless you have a set routine during the normal business day. It's not geared to 24-hour usage, it's not geared to using for going clubbing at night or exploring on the weekends, it's not constructed so anybody can use it intuitively or on the fly, hopping from one route to another with the expectation of not being stranded for an hour or two.

As long as there's this uncertainty that flows from service where the time intervals are just way too huge, ridership demographics will not improve, ridership numbers will not increase.

I'd be interested to find out who on the RTA board or among the executives actually uses the system successfully at night and on the weekends.

the 3-ounce solution

TSA Rules, TSA Security, TSA Regulations, 311 Rules -- I had no idea we now had to limit our travel-bag toiletries to 3 ounces per container, in the interest of national security, compliments of yet another bureaucratic layer called the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). I wonder how much we pay to have this extra layer of employees in place, to confound us and amaze us? I do know that I have the option of paying somewhere between $24.95 and $44.95 to mitigate the impact of this bureaucratic imposition on my mobility.

Take note that solid stick deodorant, that can have a consistency and composition similar to that of C-4 or plastique, can be packed anywhere in your luggage. Don't you just feel safer already, now that we have 311 in place?

I don't think I'll be traveling much by commercial air in the near future; there's too much of a chance I'll come unstuck prior to boarding and wind up in a holding cell, until I calm down and become a good, docile citizen again. Do they put you in the tank if you object to these insane processes, or do you just disappear?

from our Ingenuity Festival experience: things we'd like to see

We're having a good experience with the Ingenuity Festival, but it brings to the fore things we'd like to see around Cleveland.

First of all, the bus service has not been very good. Thursday, the first day of the festival, Gloria and I took the 79 in at different times of the afternoon. Each of us had to walk from Public Square out to Playhouse Square. The 6 and the E-Line did not accommodate us at any time in our 15-block trek. That means, to me, that they're running too infrequently to be useful, unless you have all the time in the world and can hang out around a bus stop until something shows up.

In the evenings, we've had to cut short our time at Ingenuity to catch the last bus home. They should run all night. They should be something you can count on.

They run way too infrequently. We have had far too many hour-long waits. They should run at quarter-hour to half-hour intervals. The routes should interconnect, on a timed basis, and you should be able to leapfrog your way across town in any number of combinations. For this to happen, I would think the routes have to be shorter.

Specific to the Ingenuity Festival, it seems the buses don't come near it. We found we had to walk from East 14th Street down to East Ninth Street before we had access to the E-Line. It should be routed onto 14th Street for the Festival, to bring people in and take people out of the area. This is a major happening, and it deserves better public-transit support.

Another thing we'd like to see are more restaurants and coffee shops in the downtown area that are open later at night. The Town Fryer is not open for late food any more. There are no 24-hour places until you get to West 117th Street, or Memphis, and I don't really count the Rapid Stop on East 55th as a place where anyone would want to hang out.

This is still sort of a little hick town where they roll up the streets and shut down the buses before midnight; this is not anything that could be termed "cosmopolitan." I would hope this can change. You can build all the convention centers and the merchandise marts you want, but if you don't have the amenities of a big city, nothing flies.

You have to build traffic and usage first. People have to feel safe, they have to have mobility options, and they have to have round-the-clock havens and destinations.

priorities for in-town living

90.3 WCPN News: The Downtown Comeback: "Alan Ehrenhalt: This is one of the last pieces to fall in place before this comeback. First you need the streets to be safe. Then you [sic] commerce: stores, restaurants, coffee houses, theaters. Then you need public transit to get them to work. Then some adventurous families will move in if all goes well enough of them to improve the schools. That's how it'll work, not the other way around."

I agree that safety is the primary concern for people who live in cities. That's one reason that Cleveland elected and appointed officials have compromised us: they have cut our safety budget to the bone, laid off police, and embarrassed us with sellouts like the "Ladder 42" debacle. Since the days of Ben Franklin, we have known that safety is the first priority for city dwellers, yet we here in Cleveland allow our representatives to circumvent the wisdom of fully staffed and functional safety forces and spend the money instead on consultants, studies, abatements, demolitions, and street projects. Our largest budget expenditure should be for safety; safety costs for adequate staffing should be fully satisfied, and then we should pay for all other expenses after that. We need to take care of ourselves first at the most basic level. We need to be able to walk the streets, all of them, and ride the buses, at all hours, with relative impunity.

Second, we should improve the transit system. I differ with Alan Ehrenhalt on this piece of the revitalization equation. If the transit system doesn't run frequently and way beyond normal business hours, there's no point in building commerce in town. If you build commerce first, the businesses can starve to death waiting on safety services and transit services. The basic structure must be there before business can survive, and then prosper. Also, if you build public transit first, it makes it possible to demolish less for automobile parking, as you build our your "commerce."

Also, to improve transit is relatively simple and doesn't take a massive civic upset like the Euclid Corridor to make things more viable immediately--the main purpose of the corridor is to put $300 million in motion, not to improve our mobility. We already had a lot of buses running up and down Euclid Avenue before the corridor "improvement" began. All you have to do is increase the frequency of the runs, so that people can transfer from one route to another with very little down time. This would cost way less than $300 million, to get us functional. One of the reasons middle-class and upper-class people don't use public transit is because they can't afford to wait an hour--or more--for the next bus to appear. We have to have the expectation that a bus will come along in 10-15 minutes, so we can be on our way timely, and safely. There's no point in wasting time or putting yourself at undue risk of harm or robbery. Anybody who has spent an hour or more waiting at night on the 79 to come through public square knows that there are no police maintaining order, either in patrol cars or on foot, and that you are at the mercy of the crazies and the drug dealers, and these latter ply their trade freely at the bus stops.

Adventurous families have already moved in, some as many as 35 years ago; we have the people here right now, and these planners from the ivory towers of academia are looking around for new people to lure in, new progams to start, new grants to receive, and new palaver to get them an audience. They ought to be playing to their base of core urban dwellers, yet we've had to fight with our government, our nonprofits, the department of transportation, and our planning departments to protect our interests since the early 1980s. The younger "wealthy" can see what our lives have been like, how we've had to protect our neighborhoods against the depradations of the people who should supposedly work for the public good, and these younger "wealthy" have no problem with not joining the fray, when you can't trust the planners who want to entice you to move into an abusive situation, where you can spend half your time protecting a teetering status quo. Our kids know how much time we've spent trying to keep our community stable; they know it's time the other kids' parents spent working for themselves and their families solely, building their own wealth, living in a safer suburban setting.

We need to start telling our stories about the sellout in this town these past 35 years. We need to start telling the truth.

private transit catching on

Google’s Buses Help Its Workers Beat the Rush - New York Times -- Here, Google offers as a perk what we in Cleveland, East Cleveland, Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, and Lakewood take for granted--mass transit. Private, customized transit systems seem to be catching on. In addition to Google, Ebay is trying private systems. Around here, The Cleveland Clinic runs its own bus system despite the presence of RTA, and yesterday, we noticed the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority also has its own little private transit system.

Google and Ebay do business in the open market of for-profit corporations and contract their transit service through an outside provider. The Cleveland Clinic finances its transit, and its real estate, using dollars gleaned in the nonprofit market for health-care services, and the CMHA exists because of the tax dollar. The more I think about it, the more I come to the realization that the Clinic and the CMHA transit services may be redundant and need to be looked at very closely.

We don't have much choice about paying the "taxes" levied either by the health-care system or by the entities that finance the CMHA as well as the RTA. Bear in mind, too, that the Clinic does not pay into the tax pool that the rest of us do. What I'm getting to is that we are probably paying for way more transit than we need, and not maximizing the usage of what we pay for. We ought to consider having CMHA use the RTA for its needs, and we ought to ask the Clinic to contribute to the tax pool before it goes starting up its own bus system. Then, we ought to ask the Clinic to cut back on health-care costs by having its employees use what the rest of us use--unless of course, the employees are so special and hard to recruit that they need the same livery service perquisite that Google employees have on that other coast. Am I making sense?

Final thought: Do you suppose the perk, the shuttle-bus service, that the Clinic employees now receive is listed as such, as additional compensation, on their wage and earnings statements submitted to the IRS?

Eric Brewer, first elected official with second MTB interview

Meet the Bloggers » The Mayor of East Cleveland Eric Brewer--On February 16th, 2007, Eric Brewer, Mayor of East Cleveland, took a second shot at using the MTB platform to promote the community dialogue. George tells us he's the first elected government official to do this. His first session had been March 16, 2006. It's worth listening to both back-to-back. Things are definitely on the upswing in East Cleveland; they're taking their city back and achieving efficiencies in the process. On this podcast, you'll hear Norm Roulet, Sudhir Raghupethy, and Mike Gesing, in addition to the regulars. Brewer and his administration have many other well-wishers and fans, and I've made up my mind to be one of them. Personally, I'm going to do whatever I can to assist their succeeding--they're on the right track (there's a busline, too) and have the assets to work with. Go to the city's website for more, and see what John D. Rockefeller, the world's first billionaire, saw about East Cleveland.

Eric may be making history here, in what is a last-to-first sprint to the reclaiming of a grand city, and it would be great if we also had the transcripts of both podcasts in searchable-text form. George gives instructions here on how that can happen.

like a tumor

Clinic, city consider new Euclid Ave. traffic plan--Like a tumor, the Cleveland Clinic just continues to spread and to grow, now wanting to take out a chunk of Euclid Avenue itself. It's already been the urban renewal shill to take down a whole neighborhood, and now it wants to become a "campus" and sprawl across and overlay the existing grid of streets. ("A Clinic spokeswoman would not comment on specifics, but said the hospital wants to calm not only traffic but also the patients, employees and other pedestrians who now face an unfriendly swath of cars and concrete. "--how ghastly!)

I view this as the height of arrogance and a clear signal that they just have too much money. It's time for a redistribution. We want our money back.

The Clinic already has its own bus system (RTA's not good enough for its employees) to shuttle Clinic commuters who opt to drive to work from remote parking to their jobsite.

It already has constructed enclosed walkways from building to building (like those things we had for the kids' hamster habitat) so that Clinic commuters need never set foot on a Cleveland city street, yet alone be breathed upon by a native Clevelander, one of those quaint figures down on the sidewalk.

It's figurehead has the hyper-preppie name of Toby.

It just has too much money, and not enough sense not to press it's luck. It's grown fat on us, and now it wants to take yet more. Let's start saying "no" to any more incursions from the Clinic into our public spaces and our public purse, and let's start taking back our money, and our heritage. We've had our pockets picked long enough.

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.