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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > February
February 2009
Scott Elliott: Publishers get kid humor even if parents don’t
Last week I got sucked in by the classic film “Casablanca” while channel surfing. At the end of the famous scene in which everyone in Rick’s club drowns out the Germans by singing the French anthem “La Marseillaise,” Louis is ordered to find a reason to shut the place down. So he tells Rick he is “shocked, shocked” to learn gambling was going on. Just then, a waiter hands Louis a wad of bills, “Your winnings, sir.”
My 8-year-old began cracking up. Quizzically, I asked her what was funny, not convinced she really understood all that was happening in this 65-year-old movie about the desperate and displaced in wartime North Africa.
“He said he was shocked that gambling was going on, but he was gambling!” second-grader Kate shot back.
Adult humor, we adults like to think, is complicated, and it is. When you get beyond pure slapstick, humor is such a sophisticated mix of exaggeration, understatement, irony and unexpected juxtapositions that it’s easy to believe kids can’t appreciate it.
But the truth is, they get it, they like it and it’s good for them. Book publishers have figured this out. Parents should follow their lead.
Two summers ago, I noticed something curious going on at home. My wife and oldest daughter were reading the same book — “Marley & Me,” the dog-themed best-seller that has since been made into a movie. Every night, dinner conversation revolved around the hilarious exploits of Marley, described in the book as the troublesome “worst dog in the world.”
But there was something different about the version my daughter was reading. It was specifically for kids. I hadn’t noticed an adult book with a youth version before, so when “Marley & Me” author John Grogan came to Kettering last year, I asked how the kids’ version came about.
Grogan said he never intended for kids to read the book. He wrote it for an adult audience and was surprised to find children as young as fourth and fifth grade showing up at book signings. The kids said they loved the hilarity of Marley’s escapades. The thought, though, of young children reading a book that had a few R-rated scenes in it made Grogan uncomfortable.
He suggested to his publisher that maybe they should issue a new version of the book rewritten for kids. It was a lucrative idea. There is now a Marley elementary-age book, a Marley board book for pre-schoolers and a Marley Christmas book. A couple of weeks ago, an author even more popular with kids came to town: Jeff Kinney, author of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. Haven’t heard of him? Two of Kinney’s books were among the 25 best sellers for 2008.
I was fascinated to learn that “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” also was not written for children.
Kinney is a wannabe cartoonist who couldn’t get anyone to hire him because his artwork was so bad, he says. So eventually he turned a comic strip idea into a graphic novel in the form of the diary of a middle-schooler he calls Greg Heffley.
Kinney thought of the book more as a tribute to childhood, aimed at making sentimental adults chuckle. It was only as the book was headed to print that the publisher suggested targeting it to the youth market.
Among the biggest fans of the series, interestingly, are elementary school teachers. Why? Because it is one of the few books that appeals to a particularly hard-to-reach subset of struggling readers — elementary school boys.
Young boys sometimes get a bad rap. You’ve heard it before. They won’t touch a book, but instead rot their brains for hours blowing up video game aliens. But spend a few minutes in any elementary school and you will quickly discover something else the boys love — humor. Wimpy Kid has shown they love it enough to put down the joystick.
Kinney told me he sometimes catches himself aiming too low when he writes a joke for a Wimpy Kid book. He asks himself whether the joke is only funny to a middle-schooler; if the answer is yes, he takes it out.
I think it’s the fact that the humor of the books aims a little higher that appeals to kids, especially boys. They love learning to take a joke to a new level.
For parents, the lesson is simple. Already lots of research shows that, for kids, learning language is enhanced by engaging in conversation with adults. The more you talk to kids — not baby talk, but real two-way conversations — the better it is for their developing brains.
Just remember that this also extends to humor. Try not to brush off the little ones when they want to know what’s funny in that book you’re reading or movie you’re watching. Let them in on the joke.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: It’s time for Ohio to end the death penalty
Ohio should just do what needs to be done and outlaw the death penalty.
How much more evidence do we need that the process of executing criminals is so fraught with error, and so unfair in its application, that it should be abolished?
On Feb. 22 and 23, Dayton Daily News reporters Tom Beyerlein and Laura Bischoff chronicled the problems with Ohio’s death penalty. The process of putting a convicted killer to death is long and arduous, and, even so, there’s no guarantee that only the most deserving face the ultimate penalty.
In fact, since 1981 a huge number of inmates who have left death row — 71 of 119 — were either granted clemency or had their death sentences thrown out by a court. A much smaller 23 percent were actually executed.
It is not always the worst killers and criminals who make their way to the death chamber. Rather, those most likely to face execution are the ones who happened to commit their crimes in the counties that are wealthy and have aggressive prosecutors. That’s because the staggering cost of prosecuting a death penalty case, and defending the verdict on appeal, have persuaded many county prosecutors to choose the cheaper option of seeking a life sentence without parole.
It isn’t just a few prosecutors who are seeking other options. Since 1996, when Ohio allowed juries to choose life without parole over death sentences, prosecutors have increasingly picked that option. Just 7 percent of capital indictments end up with death sentences.
Why is the death penalty on the decline? Probably because Ohioans, like Americans generally, are losing faith in capital punishment. With the emergence of DNA testing, a growing number of those sentenced to die have instead been released when they were proven innocent or troubling doubts were raised in their cases.
DNA testing and other new investigatory methods have exposed the death penalty’s terrifying flaw — it’s unnerving tendency to place the undeserving in the path of state-sponsored death. Falsely accused former Xenia resident Dale Johnston has changed his mind about the death penalty. He used to favor it before he spent five years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
A strong majority of Americans still favors the death penalty as a law enforcement tool. But that support is eroding fast. One survey shows the percentage that backs capital punishment is down 15 points since 1988.
In practical terms, the death penalty is mostly a relic of muscular “law and order” politics now confined almost exclusively to the South. But, even with dramatically fewer executions than in the past, Ohio still was the only northern state to put inmates to death in 2008.
It’s time to end this shame and prevent injustices. A lifetime sitting in a small cell without hope for parole is a stiff penalty, too. Cases that end in life sentences typically are resolved more quickly, bringing closure sooner for victims’ families and avoiding decades of costly appeals. And if a mistake happens, it isn’t a deadly one.
Ohio can be tough on crime and still be sensible. Ending the death penalty is the best way to achieve both.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetC-ville school board defends itself in ‘Cookie Caper’
We got this letter to the editor from the Centerville School Board late Friday afternoon laying out why the school board is fighting in court to keep Dillon Kelley from wrestling after high officials said he stole cookies from the cafeteria.
The letter (which has been slightly edited) was sent by e-mail after two judges, James Brogan and Mary Donovan, on the 2nd District Court of Appeals, said Kelley must be allowed to wrestle at the district meet. Here it is:
We have remained silent out of respect for the student involved and the ongoing judicial process. We do not, under normal circumstances, ever publicly discuss the details of student discipline matters.
But, in this case, the family involved, the Kelley family, has chosen to make the matter very public. That was their choice. The media have made our school district look very bad, in large part because all that has been available to report has been the statements of the student, his mother, and the family’s attorney.
We cannot remain silent any longer.
We have rules in our schools, rules which apply to all of our students. The student in this case knew the rules, and he broke one of them.
He stole food from the cafeteria. Much has been made of the fact that the item stolen was $1.30 worth of cookies, as if, had something of greater value been taken, it would have been appropriate to punish the student, but since it was “only cookies,” he should not have been punished.
We cannot enforce rules in that way, and we think that we would be sending the wrong message to all of our students if we did. The rules are the rules. Whether you violate them in a major way or a minor way, a violation is a violation.
It has also been implied or stated by many that the punishment in this case was too great for the crime.
Let us explain how it came to be that this student was suspended for a wrestling match.
Centerville, as do most school districts, has an Athletic Code of Conduct. All of our athletes are bound by it. They all sign the code and the student in this case did.
When a student earns a spot on one of our athletic teams, he or she agrees that, in addition to the regular rules which apply to all of our students, the athlete will abide by additional rules and be subject to additional penalties.
Our Athletic Code of Conduct was significantly revised several years ago. At the time of that revision, we decided to get student input.
Our principal and our athletic director gathered athletes from every sports team, including students who had been disciplined under the athletic code of conduct previously, as well as others who had not.
The result was the code we have today. What was surprising, but perhaps should not have been, was the fact that these student athletes had higher standards for themselves, and recommended stiffer consequences for athletes who break the rules than the adults did.
They were less willing to make excuses for, and were less forgiving of, violations. They wanted athletes to understand that in life as in sports, there are consequences for your decisions.
One such consequence established in the code, is loss of playing privileges in a game, match, meet, etc., in addition to any other penalty that they receive. Commonly, this means that the athlete is suspended from playing in the next contest after an infraction.
That was the conduct punishment established for cases of theft, and thus the one handed down to the student in this case. In light of his having stolen food from the cafeteria, he was suspended from school for one day, as have many other students, and he was suspended from his next wrestling match, because he is an athlete and had agreed to be bound by the Athletic Code of Conduct.
In this case, that next match was in the Sectional Wrestling Tournament.
That was very unfortunate and no one associated with Centerville City Schools took any pleasure in that fact. We do not, and cannot, change our penalties based on where an athlete who has broken the rules is in his or her season.
We do not have one set of rules and penalties for athletes in their regular season and one for athletes in the playoffs or a tournament. The rules are the rules, not to be arbitrarily enforced, but to be fairly applied to encourage the development of the high standards of personal conduct that our athletes expect from their teammates and that we expect from all of our students.
That is always our position and that was our position in this case.
We have been criticized for spending public money on a frivolous legal matter.
Again, the truth is quite far from what is being said. First, we carry insurance, the same as every one of the 614 school districts in Ohio.
That insurance is paying for our legal costs. We are not spending the public’s money for legal fees.
Second, and more important, we did not sue the family. We did not “go to court to stop Dillon Kelley from wrestling.” The family filed a lawsuit against us.
They sued the City of Centerville, the Centerville Board of Education, Centerville City Schools, and they sued four of our employees, personally, for doing their jobs. They did not sue simply to have the student be allowed to wrestle. They sued for “an amount in excess of $25,000” for regular damages, plus, “an amount in excess of $7,500” for their attorney fees, and, “punitive damages.”
They also asked for a temporary restraining order preventing the school district from enforcing the one-match suspension.
We responded when the family sued us. We answered their lawsuit. That is what every party does when they are sued.
If we had failed to respond, the family would have taken a default judgment against the district. What kind of stewards of the community’s tax dollars would we have been if we had allowed that to happen and paid thousands of dollars of public money to the family, as they asked the court to order?
We answered the family’s lawsuit and told the court that it was without merit and should be dismissed, because our employees had done their jobs, done them properly and we had followed our own rules, and the law to the letter.
We also asked that the court dissolve the temporary restraining order.
This entire sequence of events is very unfortunate, for all concerned. It takes the attention of the public away from the outstanding performance of the students and staff of Centerville City Schools and from the outstanding athletes who represent our high school, and has people talking about cookies, lawsuits and he-said-this-and-she-said-that.
We wish Dillon nothing but the best in school and in his wrestling career, which we have no doubt will be very successful. We hope that everyone concerned can put this matter behind them and move on to more positive pursuits.
Karen Myers, President
Dr. David Roer
Brad Evers
John Doll
Jeff Shroyer
Permalink | Comments (35) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Ellen Belcher, Suburban Communities
TweetNew blog feature calls on community figures
With this post, the editorial page blog is launching a new feature. We’ll be asking members of the Dayton community — including some with very recognizable names — to respond to specific syndicated columns. Sometimes they’ll agree with the columnists, sometimes not.
First up is Paul Leonard, the mayor of Dayton in the 1980s who became Democratic Gov. Dick Celeste’s lieutenant governor. He now teaches at Wright State University, among other activities. He is responding to a Clarence Page column that you can find here. The Leonard column can be found here. Tell us what you think about either column by posting in the comments under Leonard’s column.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns
TweetPaul Leonard: Republicans seek presidency strangely
Below is former Dayton Mayor Paul Leonard’s response to this Clarence Page column. Mr. Leonard writes:
President Obama has told Americans that every crisis presents an opportunity. The Republican “grumpy receivers” (as syndicated columnist Clarence Page described GOP governors who have threatened to turn-down stimulus money) may very well demonstrate the opposite — that every opportunity risks a crisis.
The higher-profile three who are prepared to say, “thanks, but no thanks”; are an interesting trio: Sanford of South Carolina, Palin of Alaska, and Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s Harvard-educated, 37-year-old governor who was tapped to deliver the Republican response to Obama’s address to Congress, and hasn’t been seen in public since. And these are the three GOP governors who are often mentioned as the future of the Republican quest to recapture the White House. Obama can only hope!
Jindal, the so-called rising star in Republican circles, is especially hard to figure. As if the less fortunate of his state have not suffered enough in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, now the unemployed of Louisiana can look forward to fewer benefits than out-of-work people in other American states. That ought to go over well with the governor’s own constituents. When he was a congressman he had no problem supporting foreign aid in the federal budget. But give him a chance to support an American president who wants to help Americans at home and he becomes “Doctor No.” Strange way to run for president!
At the other end of the Republican spectrum are Governor Charlie Crist of Florida and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. With a 40 billion dollar deficit in California’s budget, Schwarzenegger wants all the help he can get from the President — and more. Charlie Crist told Floridians that McCain was his man in 2008, and the Republican Party’s nominee will be his man in 2012. But for now the president is his man. He also will take all the help that Obama wants to give him and his constituents. Schwarzenegger can’t run for president (he wasn’t born in the U.S.) and Mr. Crist is being verbally crucified by the far right of the Republican Party.
Barack Obama is the first Washington politician (member of the House or Senate) to be elected president since JFK in 1960. The job of governor has become the pathway to the White House. As Clarence Page rightly points out, it’s America’s governors who must manage scarce resources, provide for peoples’ basic needs, and balance budgets.
So if the minor league for presidential politics is the states’ chief executives, the 2012 Republican lineup includes a governor who was born oversees, a governor who has already been dismissed by the Republican base (despite 67 per cent approval ratings in Florida), the governor of South Carolina who virtually no one knows, the governor of Alaska, who unfortunately for her, too many people do know, and Mr. Jindal. Now that’s a crisis.
When I was a kid, my mom taught me some very basic lessons. One was “don’t cut-off your nose to spite your face.” That’s exactly what the “grumpy receivers” are doing. No question about it. They’re allowing their constituents’ needs to be trumped by personal political philosophy, or their belief that the best way to curry the favor of the Republican base is to “just say no”; to Obama’s spending plan. I wonder how many times these same governors have complained that they send more money to Washington in the form of taxes than they get back from the feds? But then those words were most likely uttered before they began thinking that the presidency was in reach.
No one knows if the president’s stimulus plan will do what he wants it to do. But everyone knows that Americans are hurting. One thing is certain. We’re going to find out if the bottom-up approach to an improved economy does better than the top-down, trickle-down, theory of the Republican Party. This is a unique opportunity for governors and mayors to get back from the federal government more than they send to Washington.
It will be interesting to see how the early presidential yearnings of Ms. Palin, Mr. Sanford, and Mr. Jindal are affected by the decision to say no to a rare gift of unexpected monies. Right now it looks like the loss of an opportunity being offered to these governors by a Democratic president could very well exacerbate further economic crisis in their constituents’ lives. And that, my friends, will likely put a major crimp in their own presidential plans — long before the 2012 campaign begins
Permalink | Comments (23) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Guest Columns, National Politics
TweetKevin Riley: Why give the Bombers an arena?
Now that Montgomery County has backed off putting a hockey arena/events center at the Austin Pike interchange, the debate turns to whether downtown is the right place for an ice rink, or if we need one at all.
The proposed arena at Austin Pike — which was being pushed by RG Properties, the developer that controls the land surrounding the interchange — irked downtown supporters. When Dayton Bombers owner Costa Papista floated the idea of a downtown arena — complete with drawings featuring the Bombers’ logo on the building — downtown supporters lined up behind that less expensive plan.
This week, after the county said there wasn’t financing for an arena at Austin Pike, downtown advocates celebrated, believing, among other things, that they had preserved Dayton’s place as the region’s center for entertainment and the arts.
Papista’s plan tapped the passion of a lot of well-meaning people. Many, including Dr. Mike Ervin, who is overseeing the development of a new plan for downtown, fell in line quickly with the concept of a downtown destination complex that would have many uses besides minor league hockey.
It’s time for everyone to catch their breath.
First, we ought to consider whether a downtown arena makes the cut as the best thing the community can put its limited resources into.
Much of the opposition to the Austin Pike arena stemmed from the county’s plan to increase the hotel room tax to help pay for it. Opponents argued against raising taxes at all, using public money for an arena, and subsidizing what they perceive as sprawl at the expense of Dayton.
But, of course, public money would be needed to build a downtown arena, too. That’s really the only way minor league teams agree to such deals.
Even major league teams almost always want the public to pay for — or help pay for — their stadiums. Hamilton County raised its sales tax rate to pay for stadiums for the Reds and Bengals.
And let’s not forget how the Dayton Dragons deal worked. Taxpayers basically built the stadium, and turned it over to the team. The Dragons are considered over-the-top successful, but they probably wouldn’t have come to town if we hadn’t given them a stadium.
Minor league teams say they want to completely control the “fan experience.” Stadiums that are owned or operated by other entities (like a city or county) make it hard to do that. But, even more important, minor league teams tend to go to places that give them free stadiums.
Even if we assume that we should build an arena, there’s another important question to ask: Are the Bombers the right team to be an anchor?
By revealing a plan during the Austin Pike controversy, the Bombers made the downtown arena proposal something that serves that franchise. And Papista has turned well-meaning advocates for downtown into boosters for the Bombers. But the Bombers’ interests aren’t necessarily Dayton’s or the region’s interests.
If the plan for a downtown arena for minor league hockey and other events passes muster, then let’s build it. The team that we turn it over to (or agree to a long-term lease with) should be the highest caliber organization we can find.
The Bombers have had their problems.
When the team first cut a deal to move to the Nutter Center, the Bombers owners (not Papista at that time) borrowed about $1.4 million to put ice into Nutter. Greene County backed the loan. The Bombers have had a number of owners, and one (again, not Papista) defaulted on the loan.
Now Greene County is on the hook for the balance, which county officials put at about $400,000.
The Bombers have also struggled with attendance. Papista said the team has fewer than 1,000 season ticket-holders, and the team also loses money.
Meanwhile, the formula for success in minor league hockey is more challenging than in baseball.
The Dragons enjoy a strong affiliation with the Reds. Fans know that they are getting an early look at players they might see in the big leagues some day. The Dragons aren’t shy about pushing that fact. Also, the Reds sign the players, hire the manager — and pay them. The Dragons just market the team, sell tickets and run the stadium.
Minor league hockey has greater organizational demands. Owners have to sign and pay players and coaches. The team negotiates contracts and makes trades. There is much less support from the National Hockey League affiliates.
Another challenge for the Bombers has been playing at the Nutter Center. The facility is too big, and the best dates — particularly Saturday nights — go to basketball and other events. Papista argues that the Bombers would be successful in the right building. Maybe.
But if we build an arena, the Bombers shouldn’t assume we’d give it to them. Before the Dragons came to town, several ownership groups were considered. Business plans were vetted. The books of the company behind the Dragons, Mandalay Sports, were scrutinized. The Dragons’; owners were picked based on the company’s track record and financial wherewithal.
If the Bombers want our money for a downtown arena, the team has to prove that it’s worth investing in.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Kevin Riley, Montgomery County, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Ohio must stop foreclosure spiral
The fire finally has been lit.
Whether because the number of foreclosures just keeps growing, or because more people are frightened, change is coming with regard to mortgage lending and the foreclosure process.
It’s so overdue. Nobody disagrees that the foreclosure crisis is hurting families, ruining neighborhoods and discouraging people from investing in their communities and homes. The spiral has to stop.
Even knowing this, the mortgage industry is petrified of change. It should be more petrified of the status quo.
With the exception of Miami’s Leonard Abess Jr. — the banker who President Barack Obama celebrated in his speech Feb. 24 for sharing his $60 million bonus with almost 500 current and former employees — lenders are not exactly beloved right now. They are seen as a major contributor to the economic collapse, and they’re being accused of preventing the country’s comeback by refusing to provide credit.
They should want rogue lenders reined in, and they should favor regulation that fosters public confidence in them and their balance sheets.
Ohio should be in the forefront of change. In 2008, the state reported 85,773 new foreclosure filings. That’s the 13th consecutive annual increase. Pause for a minute about that statistic: for 13 years — almost half a generation — this problem has been bubbling to a boil.
Montgomery County is among the hardest-hit counties.
Meanwhile, the mortgage industry says that nearly one in four Ohio homeowners — 420,000 families — are “under water,” meaning they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
In response to this more-than-decade-old crisis, state Rep. Mike Foley, a Democrat from the Cleveland area (and also Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley’s brother), is proposing legislation that would make foreclosing on a property more difficult.
It would:
• Impose a six-month moratorium on foreclosures.
• Give judges explicit authority to reduce the amount a borrower owes or to revise the terms of a loan to avoid foreclosure if that’s to the benefit of the lender and the borrower.
• Allow owners to stay in their home during the foreclosure process and pay fair-market rent until the property sells.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Predatory lending
TweetWhy bailout your neighbor?
Marketplace (on American Public Radio) had an interesting discussion the other night about the ethics of the housing bailout.
Should you be ticked that your tax money is going to help strapped people keep their homes and avoid foreclosure?
Randy Cohen, an ethics columnist for The New York Times, says no:
“It’s an understandable feeling, but it’s a poor guide to public policy. Once you start conjuring up this Victorian notion of the undeserving poor. Look, we help people who make mistakes all the time. When someone goes to the emergency room, the doctors don’t question their moral worth, they make a medical decision.
“We send the fire department to someone’s house without asking why did their house catch fire? What it is to live in a community is to shoulder the burden of responding to the needs of those around you, without making moral judgments.”
But beyond the morality of to help or not to help, there’s this:
Foreclosures are bad for everyone. When there’s a sheriff’s sale, invariably everybody loses — the homeowner, the lender, the neighbors, the local governments and schools, the businesses that the homeowner once patronized, and on and on.
When there are tens of thousands of foreclosures — the situation in Ohio for more than a decade — a spiral sets in.
What’s really immoral about this debate is the stereotyping of people who are caught up in the mess.
Many families who are behind on their mortgages, or who are in foreclosure, played by the rules. They’re in financial trouble because they lost their jobs or got hit with a medical crisis.
Many, many other people have lived in their homes for decades and, when they borrowed on the equity in their homes, they never could have foreseen how the real estate market was going to tank. How were they supposed to see what Wall Street didn’t see coming? (Be honest: you didn’t see it coming either or you would have taken your retirement savings out of the market, right? Anybody do that?)
Plenty of people who bought homes in places like Phoenix were just paying market rate for homes in an expensive locale; now their home values have dropped by 30-50 percent and not because of anything they did.
Were they wrong to buy homes in places where housing isn’t as affordable as Dayton’s? Were people just supposed to turn down jobs in boom towns?
We all want someone to blame for what’s happened, and, of course, some individuals did make horribly risky and ignorant decisions. But it’s too easy — too mean — to write off everybody who might lose their home as a slacker or a leech.
The demonizing of them is ugly and unthinking.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Ellen Belcher, Predatory lending
TweetEditorial: Obama boldly takes liberal plunge
Liberalism is back.
After an era in which Democratic presidents stayed near the political center, President Barack Obama on Tuesday laid out a blueprint for moving the political center. When you add the stimulus plan that he has already won to his other proposals, the total is decidedly bold.
He made clear he will be proposing new spending to end the recession, including money for banks, however unpopular that might be. He made clear there will be new federal regulatory power, ending an era of (bipartisan) deregulation.
He called for making health care more affordable and accessible within a year (though he didn’t commit to universal coverage).
He committed himself to a “retooled, re-imagined auto industry,” with the federal government playing the role of enforcer.
He called for a return to higher tax rates for people earning more than $250,000 a year, but nobody else.
His energy plan calls for “thousands of miles of power lines,” a law capping total carbon pollution for the country, and more.
He wants an expanded federal role in education at all levels.
And more.
He didn’t price all this. He did say that it will be accomplished even as the deficit is cut in half during the next four years. That would be quite a trick.
The president laid aside a recent point he had made about the need to attack “all” the country’s problems. He specifically said that’s not possible. (He also laid aside past statements that the American decline might be permanent if not handled properly.) But he continued upon his general course of boldness, putting to rest the complaints of some during the 2008 campaign that he was overly cautious.
In defending his stimulus package — and implicitly his overall plan — he said he offered it, “Not because I believe in bigger government. I don’t.” Like many liberals before him, he sees himself as driven by a belief in pragmatic action, not government.
The president indicated that he knows the downsides of his course and the criticisms that will be made. He harped on his determination that money be spent carefully. He put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of ensuring that stimulus spending can stand inspection. That selection won’t comfort Republicans. But Mr. Biden knows that the political well-being of the Obama administration requires keeping horror stories about waste to a minimum.
Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland had a seat of honor for the speech, in the section set aside for the first lady and company. That was apparently meant to show something about the healing of Democratic divisions since Gov. Strickland supported Hillary Clinton for president. Gov. Strickland also played a role in shaping the stimulus, pushing the president early for a bailout for the states.
Like the president, the governor knows the political risks in being seen as a big spender. He has tried to avoid the label for himself. He needs to be particularly eager now to make sure that what is spent in Ohio is spent well.
The liberal movement floundered as early as the 1970s. One problem then was the widespread sense that billions were wasted in Great Society programs, and that too much money was aimed at undeserving people.
Since then, while two Democrats have won the presidency and the party has held Congress for stretches, the era has generally been considered conservative.
Apparently what the liberals needed was a historic economic meltdown on a Republican watch — again, as in the early 1930s.
The Democratic New Deal of the 1930s worked to the satisfaction of the people. It fostered major growth in overall national wealth in the 1930s, and it helped people through hard times, even if it didn’t lower unemployment to single-digit levels.
But, as some commentators have noted, President Roosevelt had one advantage over President Obama: The Great Depression had reached its depths by the time he took office. With unemployment at 25 percent, things could only get better. As President Obama took office, the great decline was just picking up speed.
He has, quite reasonably, decided that the American people would not forgive him if he did not take dramatic action, whatever the obvious hazards.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetCity/county stats put Dayton in tough spot
David McDonald sent in an interesting response to the Martin Gottlieb column about Dayton’s boundaries (see a post below). Mr. McDonald ran some numbers I didn’t run myself. Here’s his note:
I have been involved with downtown and market analysis for over thirty years. I have also done my own demographic work for this same period of time.
I recently had an article published in the Dayton Business Journal entitled “The Good News About the Dayton Region”.
I am forever looking for good news about this region (and there is plenty of it)but I also want to uncover all the bad news, so I know what we are truly faced with.
Unfortunately Forbes is in the ballpark of being right.
HOWEVER,your concept about Dayton only including 29% of the county and how that affects the city’s statistics and their ability to raise tax revenue is is absolutely right. I had never looked at it this way, and I should have, and so should everyone else.
On this score, Dayton is at a huge disadvantage compared with other cities in Ohio as well as several other cities we tend to compare ourselves to. For Louisville, KY, 36% of the county population is within the city limits. This 7% difference is likely very significant as the suburbs you pick up are very likely made up of moderate to high income earners which would significantly impact any city to the positive side.
For Chattanooga, TN, 49% of the county population is within the city limits. For Cincinnati, 37 % of the county population is within the city limits. For Cleveland, the number is 34% For Columbus, the number is 67%. For Indianapolis, the number is 92%
I doubt we can change any of this, but it should be helpful to all of us to understand an inherent disadvantage that our city faces (versus all of the other cities listed here) that no individual is truly responsible for.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Local History, Martin Gottlieb
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Dayton’s Rankings hurt by how city boundaries are drawn
This column appeared in the Feb. 25 Dayton Daily News. It was written under the impression that the Forbes.com article it refers to is about cities, rather than metropolitan areas. Turns out, it’s about metro areas. Sorry about the mistake. The mistake doesn’t obviate the point of the column, but it does obviate the timing, since the column was sparked by the Forbes piece. We decided to leave the column posted here partly because it sparked a comment that is useful and is not at all obviated. (See the post “City/county stats….”)
The column:
Seems like every time you see Dayton ranked with other cities on urban ills — crime and poverty, especially, but any subset of crime or poverty, like welfare rolls — the city comes out badly: the worst or second worst in Ohio, or one of the worst in the country.
And yet, to people who are familiar with other cities of similar size and similar location, Dayton really doesn’t seem any worse. Right now is an awkward time to be making this point, given very recent deterioration relating to home foreclosures and job loss.
But over the long term, Dayton has seemed to the naked eye a pretty typical city,
maybe even better than average. Lots of problems that suburbs and most small towns don’t have so visibly, of course. But the schools seem pretty typical urban schools. The streets seem pretty typical. The housing stock actually seems pretty good. The poverty doesn’t smack you in the face. The town never had the menacing high-rise public housing developments associated with bigger cities.
So why are the stats so bad, relatively speaking?
One factor figures in again and again: Dayton is strangely configured. It doesn’t go south from downtown. If it had a normal southern extension — including Oakwood and Kettering, or even half of Kettering — the stats would look very different.
After all, the stats are presented as percentages. Well, the percentage of people in poverty or dropping out of school or being hit by crime goes down when you add stable, affluent neighborhoods to the mix.
Many observers have noted that, unlike a lot of other cities, Dayton doesn’t have much of a stable middle class; some, but not much. (If it did, that would help in ways way beyond making the stats look better. It would change the tax base and the pool of people and businesses available to focus on city’s problems.)
Oakwood was incorporated in 1906, but Kettering not until 1955. So it’s not hard to imagine the city being defined a great deal differently than it is. (Incorporation undercuts a neighbor’s hopes for expansion.)
Columbus might be considered the opposite extreme from Dayton. There the city boundaries go on and on. Dayton’s 155,000 people are only 29 percent of the Montgomery County population. (Even that understates the percentage of local residents living in the close-in suburbs, because the eastern suburbs aren’t in Montgomery County.) Columbus’ 748,000 people are 67 percent of Franklin County’s population.
Poverty and crime comparisons between the two cities are largely pointless. So now we come to Forbes.com’s ranking of Dayton as the fifth emptiest city in the country. This is the second time in a few months that Dayton has looked bad in a Forbes ranking. Some people seem to think Forbes has something against Dayton. Unlikely.
The emptiness measurement is innovative and useful, relating as it does to the recent epidemic of foreclosures. Forbes’ specific measurement techniques and findings have been questioned, especially in cities where the outcome is unpopular. But that’s inevitable.
Strikingly, the “emptiest” city is Las Vegas, with Atlanta third. Dayton might not mind trading problems and prospects with those.
The emptiness measure combines vacancies in rentals and in homes for ownership. (The highest home-vacancy rate is in Orlando.)
Says Forbes, “Cities like Detroit (second on the overall list) and Dayton are casualties of America’s lengthy industrial decline. Others, like Las Vegas and Orlando, are mostly victims of the recent housing bust.”
But, of course, locals know that for Dayton the problem is a combination of both.
It’s also more, including a special degree of sprawl, because the region is unbounded by natural barriers and because commuting remains easy no matter how far we sprawl.
Families have been leaving the city for decades for all the reasons that families have left cities elsewhere. They haven’t been replaced by young people and empty-nesters, the way they have in some cities.
Dayton officials have been fretting about the city having more than its share of empty houses for at least 25 years.
Unlike Forbes’ earlier insistence that some vaguely defined place called Dayton is somehow “dying” (fast), this ranking doesn’t say much we didn’t know before. About the city per se. As defined. Narrowly.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Economy, Local History, Martin Gottlieb, Suburban Communities
TweetCountrywide offers moratorium on home foreclosures
Countrywide Home Loans has offered a voluntary moratorium on at least some home foreclosures, according to documents it has filed in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court.
Specifically, the mortgage company wants to cancel a March 6 sheriff’s sale for some properties it has loans on in Montgomery County and that are in foreclosure. The court filing says “additional time is needed for the vigorous attempts ” it’s making to work with borrowers.
A spokeswoman for Countrywide said the move is part of a “voluntary national moratorium.”
Jim McCarthy, head of the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center, welcomed the offer, but suspects it’s part of a broader strategy by lenders to prevent a mandatory moratorium.
State Rep. Mike Foley, a Cleveland Democrat and the brother of Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley, is introducing legislation that would mandate a moratorium on foreclosures in the state.
There’s also sentiment building in Congress for a time-out on foreclosures.
McCarthy said that if Countrywide is serious about renegotiating loan terms with borrowers, the move is good news. But, in the past, he said subprime lenders have said they want to keep homeowners in their homes, but have continued to press ahead with foreclosure proceedings.
Testimony is being heard in Columbus today on Foley’s legislation.
President Barack Obama signaled in his speech Tuesday night, and last week when he unveiled his housing plan, that he wanted to take strong action to stop the crush of foreclosures that is behind the global economic crisis.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Ellen Belcher, National Politics, Predatory lending
TweetEditorial: As a short-timer, Stanic can be bold leader
Usually when a school district decides it has the right superintendent, it does everything it can to lock up that person. That typically means a multi-year contract and a pay raise.
Kurt Stanic, until recently Dayton’s “interim superintendent,” went for one of two. He got more money, but he didn’t want a long-term agreement. Negotiating with him was a good move by the school board.
Mr. Stanic came to Dayton in July, thinking he would fill in for a year following Percy Mack’s departure for Columbia, S.C. That arrangement would give the board a year to conduct what it said it wanted — a “national search” for Mr. Mack’s permanent replacement.
Immediately, the board liked Mr. Stanic. He is experienced, with 20 years as a Cleveland-area superintendent, and he has not been shy about making decisions, including some that would have spelled trouble for a less seasoned person.
Moreover, as an “interim,” he has been freer to make hard choices than someone who wanted to keep people happy because he or she was bucking for a permanent position.
Mr. Stanic’s first big task — passing a tax levy — was a major success. He also has made strides in refocusing the district on academics and student learning, after the cutbacks stemming from the May 2007 levy defeat.
Not everything he’s done has worked perfectly. Mr. Stanic irked the Five Oaks neighborhood with his blunt talk about razing most of Julienne High School to make way for a new school. An unimpressed city plan board was not persuaded and has recommended that the city commission block the district’s plan.
Some complained about his move in January — his first after the levy passed — to restore athletic teams rather than academic programs. Shortly thereafter, he entered into a $108,000 contract with a Cleveland firm for “branding and communications” help.
Mostly, Mr. Stanic’s tenure has been marked by tough — and correct — decisions. He, for instance, was quick with administrative cuts after the 2007 levy defeat, and he insisted that the district ask for a much smaller levy last fall. More recently, he recommended closing three schools ahead of schedule to save money.
So if the board believes Mr. Stanic is the right guy for the job, why not sign him to a longer deal?
Mr. Stanic said the 18-month contract was his idea. At 57, he is coming out of retirement for the third time. He and his wife own homes in suburban Cleveland and Florida. He commutes home on weekends from his Dayton apartment.
He says he likes the job here because it’s important work. If, in 18 months, the board is interested in him continuing, he’ll worry about that then. Clearly, though, the board expects him to prepare the district for his eventual departure.
Board President Jeff Mims said one of Mr. Stanic’s strengths is his track record of grooming strong replacements. Lieutenants who succeeded him are still on the job at his last two stops. The hope is someone will be ready to fill his shoes, whether he leaves at the end of this deal in mid-2010 or beyond.
Mr. Mims also said a $20,000 raise — bringing Mr. Stanic’s salary to $160,000 — was needed to stave off other offers. Mr. Stanic said he has had one attractive overture since he came to Dayton that he turned down.
Mr. Stanic is a good bridge to the future. But the board must know who is being groomed to take his place and make sure that person gets leadership opportunities.
The eventual hand-off — because the transition has been so long — needs to be seamless.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetWhere were the girls?
The Obama girls reportedly have a strict bed time, but I am the only one who wished they had been there tonight?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, National Politics
TweetObama saved the best for last
Three things I liked about President Obama’s speech tonight:
— How about that explanation for the stimulus package? It was one of the clearest and most concise pitches for why the government can’t sit on its hands. Obama has to frame the debate on spending, not let the critics do it for him.
— I don’t remember one of these speeches where the president spoke so directly to young people. That passage about quitting school is “quitting your country” wasn’t directed at mom and dad, but at the kids who were watching. He’s assuming more than a few young people are tuning in, and you want to hope he’s right.
— I’m still waiting for the memorable complete sentence — “I get it” doesn’t count — that inspires and that will be quoted by future presidents in a time of crisis. But even though I didn’t hear it tonight, he still had an incredible finish. Inspiration can come in paragraphs, not just pithy sentences.
There’s an orator in the White House.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, National Politics
TweetInstant analysis, fwiw
The Nixon administration used to have a derogatory phrase for the activity of the people who came on immediately after a presidential speech and analyzed. “Instant analysis”? I don’t know. Something like that.
They would not have liked our new age.
Actually, I have certain qualms myself, as, I suppose, anybody old enough to remember Nixon does.
But let’s try. I guess my overall impression is skepticism that Obama can accomplish most of the things he talked about, most specifically cutting the deficit in half while enacting spending programs in health care, education, energy, further stimulation and more.
I was comforted that he said his plan “does not attempt to solve every problem,” after being quoted the other day as saying — quite oddly — that we can’t attack any of our problems without attacking them all. That struck me as lacking the sobriety that so many of us saw in him and admired during the campaign.
I will be interested in seeing this $3 trillion in spending (over the next decade) that he says he has already identified that can be cut.
But I really don’t understand how he can start trying to cut the deficit now, when he has just enacted an $800 billion program that is precisely designed, not just to address problems, but precisely to spend money, because money has to be spent to stimulate the economy. To cut back would be to undermine the point. Clearly, any cuts are well off in the future, which has to make one wonder.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Martin Gottlieb
TweetNot the kind of speech we’re used to
Obama’s speech tonight was another reminder of just how much Washington changed on Nov. 4. His proposals were very Democratic. Education, energy (which also means environment) and health care were the big policy pieces. Those are Democratic issues. He was fairly blunt in criticizing the prior administration, laying blame for the financial crisis and the deficit at George Bush’s feet.
Even so, Obama extended some olive branches to the other party. He emphasized that everyone in government loved this country and made another bi-partisan pitch for working together with Republicans in the future. Overall, the tone of the speech was very upbeat and reassuring.
It’s interesting how he is trying to seize the issue of deficit reduction as his own and proposing that we must junk the Bush tax cuts to achieve a smaller deficit. He got a mock cheer from Republicans when he talked about the need to pay attention to the deficit.
What did you think of the speech? Let us know in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: National Politics, Scott Elliott
TweetObama: Everyone must get more schooling
Obama makes a huge push for higher education in tonight’s speech. He says he wants everyone to graduate high school and complete at least one year of additional training — college or technical school — and says that he wants the U.S. to regain its place as the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. It’s a goal we can meet, he says.
He also hits on parental responsibility, as he did often on the campaign trail. Obama’s keeping education out front here. Interesting, since a lot of people who care about education questioned his level of commitment and interest in the issue during the campaign.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, National Politics, Scott Elliott
TweetDid the GOP even show up?
I haven’t noticed a recognizable Republican leader yet in the chamber for Obama’s speech. I know the caucus is smaller since Jan. 1, but still. It’s gotta hurt for committed GOPers to see this Democratic lovefest with Obama, Biden and Pelosi in the frame.
UPDATE: At 9:29 they just showed Boehner. He was even clapping.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: National Politics, Scott Elliott
TweetBlogging Obama’s speech
We’ll be doing some blogging tonight during President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of congress. He’s just been announced and is making his way toward the podium now. Please post your thoughts and reactions during and after the speech in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: National Politics, Scott Elliott
TweetBunning Throws High and Hard at Republican Senator
Political unrest south of the Ohio.
U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning is seen by some fellow Republicans in Washington a weak candidate in 2010. The old fastball wasn’t working wonders in 2004, when he only won by 23,000 votes, a bad performance for a Republican incumbent in a Red state. And he hasn’t raised any big money yet.
So there’s been talk in the media of Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the head of the committee to elect Republican senators, wanting Bunning to step aside. Bunning takes offense. Today, amazingly, he is quoted as saying he will sue the Cornyn committee — the National Republican Senatorial Committee — if it puts up a candidate against him in the primary.
Bunning says putting up a candidate would violate the committee’s by-laws, which say it is supposed to support Republican candidates.
Not often you see intra-party fights playing out in the media like this, especially when there isn’t even a primary yet.
On top of the threat, Bunning is saying, in the Louisville Courier-Journal, “I don’t believe anything John Cornyn says. I’ve had miscommunications with John Cornyn from, I guess, the first week of this current session of the Senate. He either doesn’t understand English or he doesn’t understand direct: ‘I’m going to run,’ which I said to him in the cloakroom of our chamber.”
Cornyn is only saying he’ll support Bunning if he runs, which he appears to be doing “so far.”
For a party that likes to bash trial lawyers for trying to make a court case out of everything, the Republicans are looking might litigious.
This comes on top of Bunning’s publicly offered medical prognosis last weekend for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He said she has a kind of cancer from which people don’t recover. (He apologized.)
If he’s trying to avoid a primary, he’s not doing it well.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Strahorn ‘wins’ without an election
Democracy skips the Ohio Senate. Pretty much.
Theoretically, elections are supposed to show something about moods and views of voters; sometimes they actually do. During the last couple of elections, for example, the mood has been tough on Republicans. But you don’t see that in Ohio Senate outcomes.
While the state has gone from Republican dominance in statewide offices, in congressional districts and in state House districts to Democratic control, the 33-member Senate has remained roughly 2-1 Republican, as it was before the housecleaning. There are just 12 Democrats.
This despite term limits. Over two elections, half the senators are forced out.
Nor did the Democrats even come close to making major gains. During the 2006 and 2008 campaigns, all the news coverage was on other races, where there were actually hot contests.
This is all because of the way the legislative districts are drawn. In drawing them after the 2000 Census, the Republicans tried to maintain their party’s dominance. They didn’t succeed in getting their U.S. House and Ohio House majorities through the absolute worst of political times. But on the Senate districts, they nailed it.
Making most Senate districts Republican required making others very solidly Democratic. The 5th District, held by Tom Roberts, is centered in Dayton and Jefferson and Harrison townships. It is made up of two overwhelmingly Democratic House districts and one that’s overwhelmingly Republican (mainly Miami County).
At hand now is yet another selection of a senator in which democracy is muted. Sen. Roberts — term-limited next year — is getting a nice appointment from the Strickland administration. He’ll be on the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. That’s the outfit that each year fields thousands of complaints of discrimination related to race, gender, age, etc. Most often, the commission finds nothing illegal. (The most common complaints are about racial discrimination.)
Sen. Roberts has paid his dues. He hasn’t burned up the league in Columbus, though he’s had years to do so in both houses. But he’s been responsible and constructive and has stayed out of trouble. He’s a legitimate appointee, under the rules of the game.
In line to replace him is his former aide, Fred Strahorn, who replaced him in the House. Mr. Strahorn has a similar record. Ironically, he always said the reason his name was not associated with major legislation was that he was in the Democratic minority, and the House was terribly partisan. In the Senate, he’d be in an even smaller minority (although this time with the Democrats in control elsewhere).
Democrats in the Senate get to vote on who replaces Sen. Roberts. Not exactly the most democratic way imaginable: two handsful of people from nowhere near Dayton picking a legislator for Dayton. But those are the rules.
Even within that not very democratic process there is apparently to be even less democracy than there might be. Sen. Roberts has said he would propose Mr. Strahorn to the Senate, and Montgomery County Democratic Party Chairman Mark Owens said last week that no other Democrat had even expressed interest.
Mr. Strahorn does have better qualifications than other Democratic politicians who might come to mind. But, as if winning in that Democratic district in 2010 wouldn’t be easy enough if the seat were open, he gets a year-and-a-half of incumbency going in — even as his friend and predecessor gets a job out of the deal.
Nice work if you can get it.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetCynthia Ruccia: Isn’t it time Ohio sent a woman to the U.S. Senate?
Ohioans have a rare opportunity to elect their first female U.S. senator. Now that Sen. George V. Voinovich is retiring, the jockeying in both parties has begun. Two women with track records of statewide support and a history of good service should be serious contenders to run.
Republican state Auditor Mary Taylor has performed ably in her position. She was also the only Republican to win in the Democratic tsunami of 2006. Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner can claim the same assets: highly competent, qualified and a record of winning statewide.
Why should it matter if we have a woman representing Ohio in the Senate?
Consider these statistics: According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the United States ranks 69th in the world (out of 189 countries) in female representation when comparing the number of women in our U.S. House of Representatives against others’ lower or single house of parliament. Spain, the country that brought us the concept of machismo, ranks 10th, and Afghanistan and Iraq (28th and 35th, respectively), are far ahead of us.
A second set of statistics hits closer to home. The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University ranks Ohio 34th out of 50 states for female representation in government. Although women represent more than 50 percent of the population in Ohio, they hold only 20.5 percent of the political offices. Colorado ranks first with 39 percent representation, and South Carolina is last with 10 percent.
Julie Graber of the Institute on Women, Gender and Public Policy at Ohio State University says that the high point for women in Ohio in terms of representation was after the 1992 elections and the Anita Hill hearings, when women were fired up about the appalling lack of women on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which heard testimony about Hill’s allegations that she had been harassed by then-pending Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
That “Year of the Woman” marshaled women into 25 percent of the elected positions in the Buckeye State by 1994. Women lost a serious amount of ground after that, bottoming out at 16 percent in 2007, and only now are starting to climb back at 20.5 percent.
Jill Miller Zimon, a noted political blogger and commentator from Cleveland, makes one of the strongest cases for more elected women: “No clearer evidence exists that having women in our state and federal legislatures matters than the passage … of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. In the U.S. Senate, there are only 17 women — 13 Democrats and four Republicans. It was the support by the four Republican female senators (and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.,) that made the bill filibuster-proof and led to its passage by a 61-36 vote.”
As Ohio’s economy continues to suffer, there is also a powerful economic case to be made for tapping the talent of 52 percent of our population. States that do not fully capitalize on more than half their human resources run the risk of undermining their competitive potential. A World Economic Forum report found a strong correlation between the economic performance of countries and the proportion of women in leadership positions. There is an economic incentive behind empowering women that Ohio just can’t afford to ignore.
We tell our daughters that they can be anything and do anything, and that anything is possible in the United States. Isn’t it time to show them, as Ohioans, that we can elect a woman to the U.S. Senate?
Cynthia Ruccia of Bexley is co-founder of The New Agenda, a national nonpartisan women’s-rights group.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Girls basketball coaches need even playing field
If there is one sport that is a living monument to the value of equal opportunity for girls and women, it’s basketball.
Before Title IX, the 1972 federal law that forced schools to offer equal sports opportunities to girls and boys, high-school girls basketball was a small-time sideshow. There wasn’t even a state tournament for girls basketball until 1976.
But as girls’ sports have grown, basketball has ascended as the showcase. Look around the Dayton region and it’s easy to see how the sport provides real opportunity for women in the way that the men’s game did decades earlier.
The Dayton area has a top-flight reputation for girls basketball, making it a hotbed for recruiting for major college basketball teams. Two high schools, Beavercreek and Chaminade Julienne, have national reputations. Girls from those teams, like Alison Bales and Tamika Williams, have gone on to play on national television for major colleges and then in the women’s professional basketball league, the WNBA. In 1972, local girls would have had a hard time imagining those opportunities.
Despite that progress, it’s curious that the girls’ success on the court has not translated to more job opportunities. In a story Feb. 15, Staff Writer Greg Billing wrote that men still dominate the head coaching ranks in girls basketball, and, while many men cross over to coach girls, only one woman — Doris Black at Dayton’s Colonel White High School in 1977-78 — has ever coached a local boys basketball team.
In the southwest Ohio district, the numbers are stark — 35 women coaching girls basketball and 136 men. Meanwhile, another popular but lower-profile girls’ sport, volleyball, has women coaching 68 percent of local prep teams.
The situation is troubling if only because the teacher ranks are dominated by women, and most high-school sports are coached by teachers on supplemental contracts.
Ironically, state athletic groups believe the numbers are actually worse today for the percentage of women coaches than they were before Title IX. One theory is that some women have shied away from head coaching because the pressure and commitment associated with the positions have grown along with the sport’s prestige. For women struggling to balance work and family, the jobs may not be attractive.
Unfortunately, this means fewer women are benefitting professionally from their sport at a time when head coaching jobs in girls basketball command both more respect and more money. Then there’s the wall that seems to prevent women from crossing over into coaching boys, where the respect and money are greater still.
Coaching is often described as a “fraternity.” Experienced coaches mentor and advocate for their assistants. Head coaches pride themselves on their “family trees,” the network of former assistants who go on to run their own programs.
Maybe women coaches haven’t developed that process as effectively. The few women in the coaching game should be as active as the men in grooming young talent.
But the dearth of female coaches also begs a question about those doing the hiring. Are the typically male athletic directors and superintendents, consciously or otherwise, leaning toward men? It’s not unusual for those doing the hiring to be former coaches themselves and be connected to the “fraternity.”
At a minimum, an education campaign is in order. The Ohio High School Athletic Association should take pro-active steps to get schools to consider more women candidates.
If that doesn’t grow the ranks, the association should consider more aggressive tactics. The National Football League’s rules requiring teams to at least interview one minority candidate for every open head coaching job was widely panned when it was instituted. Now it’s credited with increasing the number of minority head coaches.
That option should not be out of the question for Ohio girls basketball if other nudges don’t pay off.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Fairborn council is out of control
Following a tiff in Fairborn in September about the city manager’s evaluation, a Cleveland-area attorney was brought in to investigate. His recently released report — which cost taxpayers $10,000 — is shocking.
It is a tale of score-settling and amateurishness that makes you wonder whether city council is capable of managing Fairborn’s affairs.
The mayor, who destroyed documents relating to the city manager’s review, looks bad, but other council members come off even worse.
Last year’s evaluation of City Manager Deborah McDonnell is at the center of the story. But problems really began in December 2007, the city manager’s first year on the job. Susan Cervone, a city employee and the wife of Councilman Frank Cervone, was disciplined and demoted for working on the political campaign of Councilman James Hapner during work hours.
Attorney Michael Murman, who also investigated that potential violation of the charter and the law, wrote in his latest report that Mr. Cervone and Mr. Hapner seem to be engaged in an effort to retaliate against City Manager McDonnell.
Mr. Murman says they could be violating Ohio ethics laws for public officials if that could be proved.
Mr. Murman also found that Fairborn’s council repeatedly violated Ohio’s “sunshine” laws requiring that the public’s business be conducted in open meetings and that all formal action be taken in public.
Here’s what Mr. Murman chronicles:
The council skipped the process for evaluating Ms. McDonnell that is spelled out in her contract and instead embarked on a secret — and illegal, he says — effort to review her work. Mayor Gary Woodward collected performance reviews from each council member, written in response to an e-mail questionnaire. Then council members discussed their top executive’s evaluation outside of council meetings in separate conversations.
Mayor Woodward, who supports Ms. McDonnell, never gave her a written evaluation, and instead gave her a verbal review. (She’s been criticized for using personal funds to buy beer for city workers as a reward.) He then destroyed all records of council’s comments about her. Later, some council members say they voted in a closed session (which is illegal) to fire Ms. McDonnell unless she agreed to resign.
This under-the-table maneuvering by Ms. McDonnell’s supporters and critics is outrageous. Council members don’t get to make these sorts of important judgments behind closed doors and then destroy the paper trail. Voters pay their salaries and are entitled to know what the council is doing in their name.
Oddly — and wrongly — Mr. Murman concluded Mayor Woodward’s destruction of records was not out of line. He argues that because the council’s meetings and discussions about Ms. McDonnell were not permissible, the documents created as part of her review weren’t public records.
What sort of twisted logic says that elected officials can evaluate a public employee, vote privately to fire the employee, and then dispose of the evidence —which constitutes the rationale for their decision — without violating the law that says personnel evaluations are public?
Those reviews belonged in Ms. McDonnell’s file and should have been available to her and for public inspection.
Fairborn’s elected officials are embarrassing themselves and the city. Meanwhile, they’re also hurting that community’s ability to attract talent. Right now, the city is looking for an assistant city manager, but how many smart people are going to apply when the council is so divided and so ignorant of, or disrespectful of, both the law and the contract they signed with their city manager?
City council has much to do to earn back the public’s trust. That effort is not looking good.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetWhat a heartless ‘justice’ system
I got this piece from Jim McCarthy, the head of the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center. First, you’ll get mad, then you’ll cry.
State Rep. Mike Foley, from the Cleveland area and the brother of Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley, is unveiling legislation next week that is designed to give common pleas judges more authority in foreclosure cases.
Why wouldn’t we want that?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, Predatory lending
TweetAbandoning Detroit is abandoning stimulus
The federal government faces a choice between letting General Motors and Chrysler go bankrupt or bailing them out. Presented that way, the two courses look like polar opposites. But they have much in common.
Under bankruptcy proceedings that are designed to get a company out from under its debt, a court can force a business to restructure and even shrink. But that’s happening now — without GM filing for bankruptcy — as the company makes cuts designed to convince Washington that it deserves a second loan.
The company is — in a story that sounds very old to an old GM town like Dayton — closing plants and reducing to four its number of brands. It’s letting go of Saturn, for example.
The bailout is expensive for taxpayers, at least pending GM paying back the government, but bankruptcy would be, too. Consumers would presumably stop buying the cars of a company in bankruptcy. So somebody would have to put up money to pay the company’s creditors. After all, if GM were to stop paying its bills, that would victimize suppliers and put a lot more people out of work.
Where that money would come from is not clear, perhaps the government. Some have suggested this sort of rescue could cost the government even more than the money GM and Chrylser are seeking. And it wouldn’t be a loan.
Even if the government doesn’t put up that money, under bankruptcy, the demise or partial demise of the American-based auto industry would cost the government. The government would have to pay out more in unemployment, welfare and Medicaid benefits. States would be calling on Washington for still more aid.
All of which is not to say there is no difference between bankruptcy and bailout. But a lot depends upon how each option might be carried out. What’s clear is that there are no good solutions here.
That the automakers have come back for more help — $14 billion more — is a surprise to nobody. The economy hasn’t improved since the Bush administration decided to cough up the first installment. Things have just gotten worse.
President Barack Obama has decided not to create a “car czar” to oversee the whole auto-industry issue; rather, he and his top economic officials will make the decisions that the whole world is watching.
From the beginning, the president has made clear that if Detroit wants his help, it needs to change dramatically. That seems to put an awful lot of power in the hands of an elected official, rather than professional car people. In truth, though, change is coming, one way or another.
For the president, part of the issue is this: does it make sense to let the auto industry go under (or any more of it than is absolutely necessary) when he has just agreed to spend almost $800 billion to stimulate the economy? Wouldn’t turning his back on Detroit put him at cross purposes with himself?
Some would like to deny Detroit any more money as a lesson to the industry for past failures. But for the president to think in those terms would be to take his eye off the ball. His top concern has to be the economy.
If the new president puts up any money beyond what the old president put up, he is taking upon himself the task of fostering a rebirth for the American auto industry. In so doing, he is in a better position than his predecessor to squeeze concessions from unions, being seen as a friend. He also has the power to squeeze concessions from management.
But all of it will come to nothing if he doesn’t get the economy going.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Transportation
TweetEllen Belcher: Foreclosure crisis still far from over
Jim McCarthy knows a thing or two about predatory lending and the foreclosure epidemic. As the head of the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center, every day he sees people who can’t pay their mortgages.
But McCarthy, 43, can speak from experience as well. He had a predatory mortgage before high-cost loans had a nickname and before they precipitated a global economic crisis.
In 1987, McCarthy dropped out of Wright State University, where he was studying theater. Saddled with loans, he and a friend bought a house, taking out a mortgage that had a high interest rate, steep up-front fees and a prepayment penalty.
He was lucky, though. He landed a good job that allowed him to refinance and quickly get a conventional loan.
McCarthy was a victim in the sense that he paid through the nose to have a chance to own a home. But he also got credit that he wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. Not until years later did he read all the paperwork associated with his closing.
The appraisal of the house was inflated, and among the documents was a letter saying that credit-card debt attributed to him was a mistake. Though the letter purported to be from McCarthy, it was bogus.
McCarthy wasn’t trying to cheat. Once he was approved for his loan, he never checked the appraisal, and it never occurred to him that someone would falsify documents so he could get something he might not have been entitled to.
McCarthy says that many of the people he sees at the housing center have not tried to game or beat the system either. Rather, the typical situation is that they tapped as much equity in their house as they could; too often that equity didn’t really exist because the appraisal they received at the time of purchase or when they refinanced was inflated.
Another common situation is that borrowers bought “more house” than they should have, counting on their paychecks to grow or never imagining they’d lose their jobs. (Once upon a time, buying more house than you could afford was good advice; it’s expensive to buy and sell houses, and most people’s incomes do go up. Stretching yourself — to a reasonable point — made financial sense.)
McCarthy is still digesting the details of the Obama administration’s newly released plan to stem foreclosures. He is hopeful, but has concerns.
For instance, some people will be shut out because assistance can be given only to those whose first mortgage is less than 105 percent of today’s appraised value of their home. Even if a borrower’s home value hasn’t fallen precipitously, if their appraisal was inflated, the borrower might owe much more than the home is worth. In that case, they’re not eligible.
Some assistance is limited to those whose loans were bought by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but about half of all mortgages are in the hands of private investors.
McCarthy — and other housing advocates — like the president’s incentives for lenders. But nobody knows if a $4,500 reward will be enough to get lenders to identify people who need to have their loan restructured because they’re at risk of falling into foreclosure.
Under the Obama plan, a lender can collect $1,500 for seeking out a homeowner who’s behind and then writing a more manageable loan. If the buyer stays current, the lender can get $1,000 each year for up to three years.
The goal is to get lenders to prevent foreclosures by finding the people who really do have a chance of paying their bills.
Pretty much everyone who is familiar with the foreclosure crisis insists that there are lots of reasons that lenders, not just borrowers, should want to avoid foreclosure. The procedural costs are expensive, and oftentimes mortgage companies could make more money by keeping a borrower in a home, rather than taking a huge loss on a property at a sheriff’s auction.
Despite this fact, the current rules are stacked to encourage clearing out people rather than saving loans.
McCarthy and Montgomery County Recorder Willis Blackshear think that the wave of foreclosures locally isn’t over. A whole new batch of adjustable-rate mortgages that were taken out in 2007 and 2008 are scheduled to start re-setting this year. (Low “teaser” rates typically go up dramatically after two or three years, often resulting in 30 percent increases in monthly mortgage payments.)
The Obama plan is a starting point for trying to slow the foreclosure onslaught. It’s not a reason for states and local communities to think the problem has been beaten.
Contact Ellen Belcher at 225-2286 or by e-mail at ebelcher@DaytonDailyNews.com.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: Schools don’t have to hit kids to control them
Tucked in Gov. Ted Strickland’s $54.7 billion proposed budget is a provision that won’t cost Ohioans a dime, but could help put the state back in the mainstream and end a rare, but wrong, practice.
The governor wants to stop government-sanctioned striking of children — an idea that’s way overdue.
Corporal punishment — the practice of school officials paddling or spanking students — is banned in nearly all states in the northern half of the country. In the few northern states that still allow paddling — Ohio, Indiana, Wyoming and Idaho — the practice is rare.
It’s in the South where paddling is disturbingly common, especially in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas. But the trend has been moving strongly in the right direction. In 1985, only five states banned schools from paddling. Today, 29 states prohibit it.
Ohio’s track record on paddling also has improved during the past 25 years. In 1984, 68,000 schoolchildren were paddled. Last year, the number was just 110.
The decline was helped along by a 1994 law that didn’t ban corporal punishment, but discouraged it. Districts had to form citizen committees, review data and procedures and make a recommendation to the school board in order to keep paddling. At least 80 districts jumped through those hoops.
In practice, it is unlikely your child will be punished in this way at school. Just six Ohio school districts had any cases of corporal punishment last school year — five districts in southern Ohio and Canton City Schools. The closest paddling district is Lynchburg-Clay of Highland County, on the other side of Wilmington.
So why bother to ban a practice that is rare? Because it’s the right thing to do.
If parents want to discipline by spanking in their homes, that’s their right if the punishment is administered within reason. But the evidence that paddling is an effective disciplinary tool at school is scant.
Plus, paddling is a lawsuit waiting to happen. In a day when some schools limit kids from playing tag on the playground for fear of a lawsuit-inducing injury, school boards are asking for trouble to sanction a practice that is intended to inflict pain.
Perhaps a ban would force those districts clinging to paddling to re-evaluate their approach and find better solutions to disciplinary problems. The biggest “hitter” in Ohio was South Point school district in Lawrence County. With 68 incidents, that one district was responsible for more than half of the state’s paddling cases last year.
How will South Point possibly maintain order without the paddle? For ideas, it could start by asking any one of the 604 other Ohio districts that do it every day.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Montgomery County is Humpty Dumpty for the Democrats
Any guesses as to whether Barack Obama carried Congressman Mike Turner’s 3rd Congressional District, the most closely balanced district this side of Cincinnati?
In the wake of big elections, some politicos break down the outcomes by congressional districts. It takes a little time, because districts don’t conform to county or city lines. Sometimes they don’t even conform to precinct lines.
But political junkies like to be able to say that such and such a congressperson comes from a district that was carried by the other party’s president, as way of getting a feel for just how jeopardized that legislator might feel.
You might remember that the 3rd District was modified after the 2000 Census by the then-dominant Republicans. It had basically been Montgomery County. After 2000 it had to be extended, because Montgomery County was no longer big enough to constitute a district. And Ohio was losing two districts.
But the Republicans started by actually cutting out a part of the county. They extended the district halfway down very Republican Warren County and southeast through Wilmington to Highland County. That brought the once compact district to a point actually south(east) of Cincinnati.
At the time, the Republicans said they hadn’t made the district all that Republican. They said they suspected that then-Rep. Tony Hall would be able to hold it for the Democrats. But they hoped to get it upon his retirement. They did, and Turner has kept it easily.
In 2004, President George W. Bush carried the district 54 percent to 46 percent. In 2008, the Democrats changed a national3-percentage-point loss in ’04 to a 7-point win. Was it enough to carry the 3rd?
No. John McCain carried the district 167,897 to 155,610, or by 4 percentage points, according to the Swing State Project, a blog that has been gradually reporting district-by-district outcomes around the country.
The numbers tell the Democrats something about their chances for regaining the district if Turner ever leaves: It’d be tough.
Their best hope is probably that the district will be changed after the 2010 Census. Maybe all the governor’s men can put Montgomery County back together again.
How much difference would that make? Well, Obama carried Montgomery County 52.3 percent to 46.1 percent. (That’s a bit shy of Obama’s 52.9 percent nationally, which is interesting, given that Montgomery County is often described as leaning Democratic.)
The part of Montgomery County that is no longer in the 3rd (including parts of East Dayton and Huber Heights) saw 37,000 people vote in the 2008 congressional race; a remarkable 44 percent of that vote went to Democrat Nicholas vonStein, an invisible candidate, against Rep. John Boehner. That’s a very promising area for Democrats.
The Democrats will not have full control of the district-drawing process after 2010. Congressional districts (unlike districts in the state Legislature) are drawn by the Legislature in a bill signed by the governor. The Republicans will be in control of the Senate, at least.
Even if the Democrats did control the process, they couldn’t create a securely Democratic district. A district, as of now, requires almost 650,000 people, about 100,000 more than Montgomery County has. Stretching the district out from Montgomery County in any direction brings in Republican territory. (There are lots of Democrats around Springfield, but Clark County as a whole went slightly for McCain.)
If the districts were designed by nonpartisans (which is a possibility, if reform is enacted), Montgomery County would almost certainly be kept intact. Nonpartisans value compactness and county lines.
As of now, Boehner’s 8th District is as odd as Turner’s. It starts southwest of Dayton at the border of Butler and Hamilton counties, makes three-fourths of a circle around Montgomery County and dips into that county from the northeast, of all places.
At the time of the drawing, Republican state Chairman Robert Bennett defended the map as bringing Boehner into contact with urban issues. But Boehner’s district is still so safe for him (Obama got 38 percent there) that the impact is minimal.
Pending a new map, if anybody has been wondering if Turner can hew to a basically Republican line even though his core county is basically friendly to Obama, the district-wide outcome of the 2008 election suggests an answer.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetDowntowns are up; Midwest is down
First, the good news for the Daytons and downtowns that are struggling:
Here’s an interesting piece that Theresa Gasper forwarded about companies favoring downtown areas because that’s where their younger employees want to be. “Place” matters when you’re recruiting, it says.
Now for the bad news:
Check out this article by Richard Florida, of “creative class” fame for his views on what areas of the country are likely to come back when we pull out of the economic downturn.
Florida, who knows Dayton and the Midwest, is not telling anyone, “Go Midwest, young man” — or “Get Midwest. (The latter is the Dayton Development Coalition’s goofy slogan.)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: No one was California Dreamin’ this week
Let’s feel superior, at least for a minute.
As tough as it is in Ohio, you’re not in California, where the state government narrowly averted a melt-down. Ditto for Kansas, which, at the start of the week, was in danger of not making payroll.
Problematic as Ohio’s budget problem is, it’s nothing like California’s.
Some observers say that California, which is among the 10 largest economies in the world, will continue to pay a price for this week’s paralysis over how to balance its budget. Bond holders and bond rating companies can’t just forget that the government edged up to the brink. The result may be that the state pays a premium for a long time to come when borrowing money.
Meanwhile, there’s the disruption from laying off thousands of people and mandating unpaid furloughs for thousands of others, and the stopping of all state-funded construction projects. And the state has even been at war with its local governments, some of which were threatening to sue Sacramento for not paying them money they’re owed.
California is peculiar in that it requires two-thirds of each house of its legislature to approve the state’s budgets and any tax increase. Most states require a simple majority. The two-thirds rule is a high bar in a state where the political spectrum is decidedly wide, with concentrations of politicians at each of the two ideological ends. The absence of a sensible middle is a real problem.
California has an annual budget of $143 billion; the deficit it was trying to fill was $41 billion. In the end, the compromise was a combination of budget cuts, tax increases and borrowing.
Much of the financial world, and, of course, the people and businesses in California, watched in amazement at what lawmakers were allowing to happen. People were worrying whether prisons would be emptied, teachers would be paid, how much it would (and may yet) cost to get out of contracts, and on and on it goes.
In contrast, Ohio, which operates under a two-year budget, is arguing about a $55 billion spending plan that some say is as much as 10 percent out of balance.
Republicans are critical that Gov. Ted Strickland wants to rely on one-time money that will be available only in this budget cycle. The governor’s critics are right that this is a reckless way to proceed, especially in an economy where even conservative revenue estimates may be too rosy.
The National Conference of State Legislatures doesn’t see any let-up ahead for the states. Last month in a report about the budget deficits across the country, it said: “…(A)s bad as they are, these gaps could pale in comparison to what looms ahead. The current recession is already 15 months old and is on track to be the second-longest business cycle downturn since 1933. Because state fiscal recovery tends to lag the end of a recession, states could be facing budget problems for some time.”
There is a lot that’s worth arguing about in politics. But when a crisis is at hand, bad choices have to be confronted. California is the model of what not to do. Ohio has be smarter as it feels its way ahead.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetWeatherman Jamie Simpson NOT running for mayor
Jamie Simpson
It turns out the Jamie Simpson who local activist/blogger David Esrati reported on his blog is running for mayor is NOT the Channel 7 weatherman but just somebody with the same name.
Too bad. McLin vs. Simpson. Now THAT would have been an interesting race.
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Elections, Scott Elliott
TweetNPR plugs Youngstown and its business incubator
Check out this NPR report about a business incubator in Youngstown. It’s a reminder that you never know what’s going to be developed in the state’s old warehouses — and that start-ups really do grow up and create jobs in the process.
Turning Technologies, which makes those fun key pads that allow audiences to give immediate feedback, is among Youngstown’s incubator success stories. In 2007, Inc. Magazine called the firm one of the country’s fastest growing privately held software companies.
Who says the Rust Belt can’t innovate?
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: Brunner has to prove she’s ready for Senate
When Jennifer Brunner became secretary of state two years ago, the Ohio political establishment treated her election with relief. Here was somebody who actually wanted the job.
People in both parties said that. They contrasted her with outgoing Republican Secretary Kenneth Blackwell, for whom the job was a steppingstone and not even his desired one. (At one stage, he wanted to go back to being state treasurer.) Ms. Brunner also actually had experience as a staffer in the secretary of state’s office.
Now, halfway through one term, she announces her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
Perhaps people shouldn’t be surprised. The former common pleas judge has shown a taste for the big, bold move before. She proposed scrapping the ATM-like voting machines that are common in the state, and doing it so quickly the Legislature was dizzy just thinking about it. She fired the entire elections board in Cuyahoga County, including Republican state Chairman Robert Bennett, who hadn’t done anything wrong, thus making an enemy she didn’t need.
When she didn’t get her way on scrapping the high-tech voting machines, she ordered counties to offer paper ballots, too, despite a lot of local objections about the extra work and cost.
Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher was the first name to come to most Democratic minds for the 2010 Senate race when Republican Sen. George Voinovich announced his retirement. He’s been attorney general. He’s been on the statewide ballot several times (losing twice in the 1990s). He has a job now that really doesn’t amount to much unless its occupant has special energy, ability and influence (with the governor).
As lieutenant governor, he has imbued the position with as much heft as it can hold, by becoming a point man for the state on economic development. But there’s still a lack of autonomy. Moreover, pushing economic development these days is a job you wouldn’t want if, instead, they’d just let you try to push a peanut up a hill with your nose.
On top of all that, the Democrats can easily spare him, politically speaking.
Secretary Brunner, though, holds a job the Democrats particularly celebrated winning, because it comes with membership on the commission that will draw new legislative districts after the 2010 Census. Democrats want to keep their bare majority edge on it.
A woman Democratic candidate has a special edge these days, getting the automatic support in primary elections most particularly of Emily’s List, a national fundraising operation that helps ensure female candidates have money. And there are those who believe that just being a woman gets a candidate some votes when voters don’t see much else that distinguishes the candidates. So, as the only Democratic woman in statewide office, Ms. Brunner faced a temptation.
But she also faces an uphill task in making the case that she is as ready for the Senate as Mr. Fisher. And she must undertake that duty even as she performs as secretary of state, a tough job.
The Democrats will survive the race intact, whether it just pits these two candidates or there are others. Primaries aren’t particularly threatening to party unity unless they reflect deep underlying division, which this one wouldn’t.
The Republicans have a strong candidate in former congressman and Bush administration official Rob Portman. He unites his party, and his qualifications can’t be doubted.
Ms. Brunner is trying to pre-empt the kind of rallying around a candidate that the Republican establishment has done around Mr. Portman. Fine. Let Mr. Fisher fight for it. But he does have a strong hand to play.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
TweetDowntown development not enough
At Wednesday’s meeting about the Austin Pike development, Montgomery County officials answered questions and shared their views with about 100 attendees at downtown’s Swisher’s Too Cafe.
Most of those who spoke were downtown supporters - and skeptical of Montgomery County’s plans and motives.
Many of the questions were about the proposed ice arena at Austin. County Administrator Deborah Feldman said the county was studying the viability of an Austin Road facility. She said the county will understand its options better within two weeks or so.
A few things were clear:
—Boosters of Dayton and downtown see Austin Road as a big threat to downtown.
—County officials, who emphasized that Montgomery County has invested many millions in downtown, lacks a “Plan B,” on an “amenity” at Austin Pike if an ice arena/entertainment complex doesn’t fly.
—County officials are frustrated with local tax structures and the competing interests of local communities - and say they’re caught in the middle when it comes to economic development.
For the moment, development at Austin Pike and downtown are being pitted against each other. That’s a mistake. For the sake of the region, we have to do both.
What do you think?
—Kevin Riley
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Kevin Riley, Montgomery County
TweetEditorial: Socialism? No. Will it work? Unknown
To say that Gov. Ted Strickland didn’t get what he hoped for when Congress passed President Barack Obama’s stimulus package last week doesn’t quite cover the situation.
The governor didn’t get what he was certain was coming.
In a talk with people at this newspaper the previous week, the governor was pressed on whether he was certain that the federal aid to Ohio would come through in the amount he had budgeted for. He answered emphatically yes.
There was no Plan B. That’s being worked out now. His budget has a hole amounting to at least 1 percent, just from this problem alone.
Even if the stimulus money had turned out to be as much as hoped, it would not improve the Ohio economy quickly and visibly.
Too much is still going wrong. The American economy is tied in with the world economy, and the international scene is bleak.
President Obama said last week his plan could generate 3 million jobs. Sometimes the number one hears is 4 million. The middle of that range is roughly the net loss of American jobs in the last year. In January alone, 600,000 were lost.
The White House says Ohio would end up with about 133,000 jobs. The Dayton region’s share of that, based on population, would be about 10,000, depending on how you define the region. Montgomery County alone might reasonably look for something like 5,000.
That could be enough to make a noticeable difference, but, of course, these calculations are the crudest and roughest of estimates. And how many more jobs will be lost as the economy deteriorates can’t be known.
Ultimately, the real question about the stimulus is whether it helps restore confidence in the economy, thus restoring normal behavior in the private sector. That’s the only hope.
The extreme critics of the stimulus have been throwing around the word “socialism.”
But, in truth, the stimulus is all about capitalism. It’s about getting the capitalists back in the game, about getting people to spend their disposable dollars the way they normally do in a modern, affluent, enthusiastically capitalistic society.
The word “socialist” was also thrown at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal. His defenders responded that he was saving capitalism. They turned out to be right.
Ever since, the word socialist has been bandied about every time the government makes a new advance in protecting people, such as making sure that the elderly and the children of poor people have health care.
But, after 70 years of claims that socialism was being adopted, if this is socialism, the word has lost the core of its meaning (as in the recent Newsweek cover story “We’re All Socialists Now.”) Today the rich are colossally rich; the poor are abundant in numbers. The gap between the two is growing.
Entrepreneurism is fashionable. Americans by the scores of millions are profoundly invested in the stock market.
People are being laid off by the thousands by businesses focused on the bottom line.
President Obama said at his first presidential press conference last week that a huge leap into deficit spending was not the way he wanted to start his presidency. That’s utterly believable. But he came face-to-face with an emergency. His desire to act boldly — his view that the country simply demanded that of a president in this situation — trumped even his strong desire for bipartisan support.
That’s not socialism. That’s pragmatism.
The question now is not whether the stimulus will change the nation’s economic system, but whether it will help to make the system work.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Aykroyd elevates Boehner, though not very gently
Stuff you might have missed:
John Boehner was impersonated on “Saturday Night Live” by Dan Aykroyd. It is some sort of honor.
(But not because “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Despite a common misconception, surely that saying doesn’t refer to comedians doing imitations. Would a comedian be flattering Hitler with an imitation? The saying refers to, say, a politician copying the ways of another politician.)
Local-boy Boehner is officially a national political celebrity now. SNL has spoken. Before this, Boehner, the top Republican in the House, must have been deeply jealous of Barney Frank, a mere committee chairman.
Aykroyd would probably not be the dapper, often-tanned Boehner’s first choice for an imitator. Aykroyd doesn’t have what you would call leading man looks. Some viewers probably remember his plumber whose pants don’t quite do the job.
But then Boehner wouldn’t be a comedian’s first choice for a politician to imitate. His ways aren’t easily caricatured. (He doesn’t do his smoking on camera. The show didn’t try to do anything with his tan.)
Aykroyd’s imitation won’t replace his Richard Nixon in anybody’s memory. Those who remember the Nixon will see some of it in this Boehner. Make of that what you will.
But Aykroyd gets the gruff voice pretty well. He obviously studied. His use of the phrase “at the end of the day” got a laugh from reporters who cover Boehner, if not from the public.
Here’s the skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFLQTHqiARA
In the skit, Boehner and his fellow Republicans are presented as smug political idiots, plotting impeachment of the president and political attacks on his daughters, while arguing about who’s the “smartest man in America:” Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Boehner might not be pleased. But, hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Brown versus Obama
Remember that pending clash between Sen. Sherrod Brown and President Barack Obama? Brown was a prime pusher of a “Buy American” passage in the stimulus bill. It required officials dispensing government contracts to use American steel, iron and manufactured goods. It sparked complaints from abroad that, among other things, Washington was reneging on trade treaties.
Asked about all this, Obama said he didn’t want to do anything “protectionist,” which the measure clearly was doing.
And yet, the proposal had overwhelming support in Congress, certainly among Democrats. At least one House Democrat said flatly that he wouldn’t vote for the stimulus without the provision.
In the end, the Democrats worked something out among friends. Brown and two other senators proposed an amendment saying that nothing in the “Buy American” provision should be interpreted to allow treaties to be violated. The final bill also said the “Buy American” provision couldn’t boost costs of any project by more than 25 percent and couldn’t be enforced in a way that is “inconsistent with the public interest.”
What remains looks a lot like an instruction to bureaucrats to keep American producers in mind and to be ready to answer to Congress.
But the episode does offer a clue as to Brown’s future role: He’ll be trying to pull the White House in a direction that some would call protectionist, while compromising in a way that allows the White House to say it is rejecting protection.
Austria and Keynes
Bloggers and assorted others had fun last week when U.S. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, erroneously announced that President Franklin D. Roosevelt caused the Great Depression. However, I didn’t see any other outlet comment on Austria’s uncertainty (in the same audio clip) about the name John Maynard Keynes.
The lack of commentary is understandable. Nobody wants to be seen as a judgmental elitist pouncing at every opportunity.
And yet, let us pause.
On Keynes, Austria said, “What’s the name of the theory we’re talking about. I gotta pronounce it right. (Others chime in.) Keynesian approach.”
(A link to the audio referred to in this editorial.)
Now, it is surely true that huge numbers of perfectly intelligent people don’t have a good fix on Keynes or on how to pronounce his name (Canes, usually.)
But if you follow debates about economic policy for many years, you do know his name. It comes up all the time. It’s in the political magazines, in the op-ed columns, in the Wall Street Journal (perhaps of interest to a former financial planner, Austria), on C-SPAN, on talk radio, wherever.
He was the leading liberal economist of the last century. He invented the use of government spending (and tax cuts) to stimulate an economy. He is generally seen as the antithesis of Milton Friedman, the leading name in modern conservative economics.
Now, here we have, in Austria, a thoroughly political person. He was in the state Legislature for a decade. He was always seen as aiming for Congress.
And yet he didn’t follow debates over national economic policy until now?
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetBoehner Makes the Non-Prime Time
Here’s Dan Aykroyd playing John Boehner in the first sketch on the most recent Saturday Night Live.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
TweetThe case for hockey downtown
Bill Pote, an IT consultant who created Dayton Most Metro, has a great conversation going about the proposed hockey arenas for downtown and at Austin Pike.
You can read all the comments (from the mostly pro-Dayton crowd) by clicking here.
But Bill has put together a nice summary that will save you the trouble:
Downtown Arena Advantages Over Austin Landing Location
—Takes full advantage of existing infrastructure, parking facilities, hotel and several nearby established restaurants and bars; none of this exists at Austin Landing and would have to be built from scratch.
—Has the potential to provide a much-needed shot of vibrancy to downtown by providing a destination for thousands of people to come to from across the region.
—Because this arena would be a true multi-use facility, it would be active every day and at all hours of the day and night. Area hockey leagues (youth and adult) are known to rent ice time as early as 6 a.m. and as late as midnight.
Other uses include:
—Skating clinics
—League, high school and university hockey - practice, games and tournaments (regional and state)
—Figure skating clubs - practice, shows and competitions
—Professional figure skating, Stars on Ice, etc.
—Dayton Public School daytime programming / learn to skate
—Family shows (Disney on Ice, Sesame Street, etc.)
—Mid-level concerts and shows (large need for a facility this size; does not currently exist in the region)
—High school and league basketball games and tournaments
—Events like high school and college graduations, etc.
—Connected to the Crown Plaza Hotel, this downtown arena could attract larger state-wide tournaments that would bring thousands of out-of-town visitors that would stay at the hotel and frequent nearby restaurants
—Connected to the Dayton Convention Center, this arena could provide extra floor space/capacity that would help attract larger events, trade shows, etc.
—Within walking distance to the proposed streetcar rail line - connecting this proposed arena to the UD area
—Could be connected to 3C rail station at Transportation Center if that does get implemented.
—Hotel tax increase could be revisited; unlike the Austin Landing proposal where there are no existing hotels and would thus not help existing hotels, the proposed downtown arena would be connected to Crown Plaza, walking distance to Double Tree and a short drive to the Dayton Marriott and Courtyard Marriott UD. A downtown arena would directly benefit all of these hotels.
—Cheaper estimated price ($30 million vs. $60-$100 million)
Examples of other downtown hockey arenas in similar-sized Ohio cities: —Toledo - Lucas County Arena —Youngstown - Chevrolet Centre
Concerns about the project:
—Loss of a downtown park (Dave Hall Plaza)
—Fear of the final design turning into a big box with blank walls
—Will the benefits outweigh whatever public money is necessary
—Arena should be located closer to Fifth Third Field
Survey at Dayton Most Metro
87.5% said they would attend more Bomber games than they currently do if this arena was built downtown, with 67.5% saying that they rarely go to Bomber games now but would go more often downtown.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: Can Obama find Republican for Commerce here?
Needed, one U.S. Commerce secretary, preferably Republican.
Let’s see.
How about George Voinovich? He’s not quite as conservative as Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who decided that he’s too conservative for the Obama administration.
Sen. Voinovich knows a lot of about Commerce Department issues. In withdrawing, Sen. Gregg cited the pending 2010 Census as an issue dividing him and the White House. The Census is perhaps Commerce’s biggest job. Democrats worry about minorities being undercounted; the Obama White House said it wanted to have the Census director report to it, as well as the Commerce secretary.
As a former mayor of Cleveland, Sen. Voinovich is fully aware, not only of the difficulties of taking a census in a distrustful urban environment, but of the price a city and state pay for being undercounted. And yet he wouldn’t be likely to lie down prostrate in front of Democratic interest groups.
Is he too old? Sen. Voinovich is only six weeks older than Sen. John McCain.
There would be downsides, of course. It’s been decades since George Voinovich has worked for anybody else. He prides himself on his independence. The whole thing might not work.
How about Bob Taft? He’d be a better pick if he hadn’t ended his governorship with such bad poll numbers, and if he hadn’t gotten in legal trouble. But in the 2006 election to succeed him, he was treated better by Democrat Ted Strickland than by Republican Kenneth Blackwell. He’s taken so many lumps from the most conservative Republicans that he’d surely have fewer qualms than Sen. Gregg about crossing the Republicans.
OK, there’d be problems with either pick. But thinking about them sheds light on this whole bipartisanship thing. Specifically, pondering only the big-name Republicans in only one state suggests that finding a Republican is a difficult task, but probably not impossible.
Sen. Gregg might have been a bridge too far. President Barack Obama is right to hold open the possibility of reaching accommodation with conservatives like him on a fair number of issues. But working together on a day-to-day basis?
President Obama has taken flak from Democrats for coddling the Republicans too much. But he should keep trying, just for his own political well-being. He has to overcome the political damage done by the stimulus package.
Typically, when one party’s centerpiece thrust has the other completely up in arms and united, there’s trouble ahead. Think of President Bill Clinton pushing universal health care against united Republican opposition. He not only failed to get it enacted, he experienced a political calamity in the next election, 1994.
Think about President
George W. Bush promoting the partial privatization of Social Security after his second election. Democrats got so much traction that he was never the same again. He, too, had a calamitous next election.
Or think about the time in the early 1980s when newly elected Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste rammed a tax increase through the Ohio Legislature. The Republicans took over the state Senate in 1984 and have never lost it since.
Some Democrats and Republican think the lesson is don’t raise taxes. But it’s really don’t take your legislative majorities as proof that the public is locked into your view of the world.
The president had to push the stimulus, even without the Republicans, because his first need was to establish himself as an activist president who does not dither in handling the country’s most urgent problems. But if hyperpartisanship continues to prevail, he’s got a problem.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Pre-determining winners cheats voters
Ohio still has to reform the way it draws legislative districts. The current system results in absurdities. Montgomery County is Exhibit A.
Jon Husted’s senate district — rather than grouping together people who live near each other, makes a circle around Dayton, bringing together the south suburbs and the northwest suburbs, but skipping over Dayton. Also, Montgomery County — which is roughly equally balanced between the parties — has five Ohio House districts, all of which are lopsided in favor of one party or the other.
That regularly results in lifeless, go-through-the-motions elections. Parties don’t have to put up their best candidates to win; officials hang on to jobs that they don’t deserve to keep.
In 2005, some Democrats tried to reform the system. They had some good ideas, but failed. In 2006, some Republicans tried to reform it. They had some good ideas, but failed. It’s tough, partly because of partisan distrust.
The time has come for a bipartisan effort, a genuine meeting of the leaders and mainstreams of the two parties. That’s the one approach that hasn’t been tried.
Sen. Husted was a leader of the 2006 effort by Republicans, when he was House speaker. Now he’s taking up the issue again. His 2006 ally, then-state Rep. Kevin DeWine, is now chairman of the Ohio Republican Party.
Sen. Husted isn’t ready to push a specific proposal. He’s looking for Democrats and others to embrace the general idea of reform. He’s contacted Democratic Chairman Chris Redfern. He’s talking about talking to Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, who said she would focus on redistricting reform after the 2008 election.
One possible reform: have a nonpartisan commission draw the maps.
If the parties can agree on something, the Legislature can put that idea before voters in November. (Voter approval is necessary, because reform requires changing the state constitution.)
The political situation is enormously complicated. For one thing, Sen. Husted is packaging this issue with his call for redesigning the secretary of state’s office, eliminating its role in running elections. (That responsibility, too, would then fall to a bipartisan board.)
For another, he has an interest in running for secretary of state. For another, the current secretary of state has an interest in running for the U.S. Senate.
Moreover, if the rules remain unchanged, nobody knows for sure which party would control the next round of redistricting, which happens after the 2010 Census. As of now, the Democrats hold two of the three positions that are crucial in deciding what the maps would look like: governor and secretary of state, but not auditor.
Some of these complexities might actually work to the advantage of the reformers. If reform happens — or is a possibility — Secretary Brunner will not be under as much pressure from Democrats to stay in her current job, because that job won’t be as important to them. That gives her a reason to favor reform.
One possible problem for reformers is the outcome of the last couple of elections. Democrats made major gains, taking control of the Ohio House of Representatives. That could cause some people to think that who draws the maps isn’t so important. After all, Republicans drew the maps that Democrats have done well under lately.
But, as Sen. Husted notes, it took a historic pair of elections, the longest down slide by a party in anybody’s memory, for the House to switch; and it’s still quite close. Meanwhile, the Ohio Senate today has the same rough 2-1 margin in favor of the Republicans that it had in 2005, as if nothing had happened. That shows how stacked the rules are.
Reform is the right thing to do, and a lot of leaders of both parties know it.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Nonpartisans offer needed credibility on elections
In Ohio, the chief elections official — the one who has the most responsibility for actually running elections — carries a party label and is an elected official: the secretary of state.
The fact is not quite as strange as it seems because, really, elections are run primarily at the local level, by elections boards with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. Moreover, all manner of laws restrict what the secretary of state can do. And the office functions under a microscope. People who see actions that don’t comport with the law can take the secretary to court, which happens a lot.
Still, things can go wrong.
In the hotly contested 2004 presidential election, Ohio was at the center of the political universe. All eyes were on it. The secretary of state was J. Kenneth Blackwell, distrusted by Democrats as an official leader of George W. Bush’s campaign in Ohio, as the leading advocate for the anti-gay marriage proposal on the ballot and as a fighting, ambitious conservative.
He had to make a lot of decisions about the election. He acted correctly most of the time. But he sometimes gave fodder to his detractors, as with a (short-lived) decision that voters could not use registration forms printed in newspapers because they were not thick enough to go through the state’s machines.
After the election, some hyperpartisan Democrats erroneously and strenuously insisted that Mr. Blackwell and others had stolen Ohio for the Republicans.
After all that fuss, a bunch of Democrats came forth with a proposal to strip the secretary of state’s office of a role in elections, giving the responsibility to a bipartisan commission. When that idea was put on that ballot (along with others from the same group called Reform Ohio Now), it was overwhelmingly defeated.
At the time, the proposal seemed like an over-reaction to one election. The secretary of state system had functioned reasonably well in Ohio and elsewhere for decades. Changing it because of one election looked rash.
However, the 2008 election in Ohio was similar to 2004, this time with Democrat Jennifer Brunner as secretary of state. She, too, proceeded responsibly in the main. But she, too, gave skeptics reason to distrust her, as when she rejected some registration forms delivered by Republicans because of a technicality that a court later ruled was too small.
She was second-guessed on everything she did, and just about every decision went to court. At one stage, Republican presidential candidate John McCain even raised the possibility that the Democrats might steal the election in Ohio. (They didn’t.)
As a result of all this, Ohio has developed a national reputation, not for contention over how elections are run (which it deserves), but for running elections badly (which it doesn’t deserve).
Now perhaps the time has come to reconsider the role of the secretary of state, not because of the state’s reputation, but because of the incessant partisan squabbling that inundates the courts with unnecessary lawsuits and raises undo suspicions about the integrity of the election process.
Perhaps Ohio has entered a period when the old system doesn’t work anymore.
State Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, is seeking Democratic support for a plan to put the secretary of state’s current elections role in the hands of a bipartisan commission. He’d like the Legislature to put the issue on the ballot in November, along with another one that would make the process of drawing legislative districts less political.
(Ironically, he is also widely considered to be running for secretary of state, a job that would not have a high profile without its elections role. It’d be about paperwork relating to corporations and other records.)
Sen. Husted has criticized Secretary Brunner. Inevitably, his proposal will be seen in that light by some. But both Democrats and Republicans in Ohio have plenty of reasons to think there must be a better way than the current system.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: No roughing allowed in hockey debate
The debate about whether the Dayton community needs a hockey arena is about more than building an ice rink.
The discussion exposes:
—A rift about where to invest.
—Disagreements about how to best promote economic development.
—Concerns about downtown’s place in the region.
—Questions about the community’s willingness to go “green.”
These are hard questions. The good news is that they’re on the table. If anyone wanted to avoid them (not a good choice), that’s not going to happen.
Think about what’s occurred in the last few weeks.
Right before the holidays, Montgomery County asked the legislature to allow it to increase the hotel/motel tax, so it could use the money to help build an events center and possibly a hockey arena at the Austin Pike interchange.
City of Dayton officials threw a fit, thinking that an event center would threaten the convention center and efforts to make downtown the region’s cultural and entertainment center. (Hotels and people who oppose raising taxes weren’t happy, either.)
Barely two months later, advocates of downtown (and the Dayton Bombers) are proposing a hockey arena for downtown. That seemingly competing proposal made the Dayton Daily News’ front page on the morning the mayor gave her State of the City speech.
Montgomery County’s commissioners, who were in the audience and are supposedly tight with Mayor Rhine McLin, had to feel more than a little awkward.
Even though the hotel/motel tax increase is all but officially nixed, tension is in the air.
Montgomery County and R.G. Properties, which is developing Austin Pike, are pretty much resigned to going back to the drawing board to come up with something other than an arena that will distinguish the interchange. They think they need more than snazzy office space and convenient access to, and visibility from, I-75.
Montgomery County is passionately committed to Austin Pike and to R.G. because it wants to capitalize on the growth that’s occurring on the I-75 corridor that has leaned heavily south toward Cincinnati.
Dayton agrees that is a big problem, but it doesn’t want Montgomery County to consciously or unconsciously compromise the niche it’s been trying to create for itself.
With millions of public dollars going into Austin Pike, and with millions of public dollars having gone into making downtown a destination, conflict was inevitable. Reconciling two legitimate but competing views can’t happen if one side thinks it’s being steamrolled.
Of course, Dayton shouldn’t get to veto development elsewhere. But Montgomery County has to be sensitive to the investments Dayton and the county itself have made downtown.
There’s always going to be a chicken-and-egg nature to development. People go where jobs are, but jobs go to places where people want to be. Finding the balance between creating a climate that attracts businesses, while also creating the kind of community that workers want to live in, can be a contentious process.
Often, there aren’t right and wrong answers, just compromises. When public dollars are in play, the trade-offs need to be decided in public and acknowledged in public.
Downtown’s place as a hub in the region isn’t guaranteed. It has to compete with the suburbs for jobs and for people. That city officials feel that Dayton is under siege isn’t shocking.
The city’s real attributes — and there are many for certain businesses and people with certain likes — shouldn’t be minimized. After all, anyone who has lived very long knows tastes come and go, and there’s a healthy body of research saying that young people today and start-up businesses are gravitating toward the places others before them fled.
Moreover, a region without a core — or with a devastated core — is lifeless and endangered.
Some advocates for a hockey arena downtown argue that it can be built more cheaply and it would be “greener” if it used existing downtown parking garages, sewers, sidewalks and whatnot. Nobody has put numbers to paper, but the very fact that there are forces raising that argument is positive.
The build-it-green movement is here, and it’s becoming more, not less, powerful.
What’s surprised some people about the hockey arena debate is how much pent-up passion there is for a sports complex that is something more than a venue for the Bombers. Even in these tough times, people still want to have fun, they still want their kids to have a place to work off their energy, and they recognize some businesses make a lot of money catering to youth sports.
There’s a healthy debate happening about Dayton’s next big thing. It should continue.
To read what folks at Dayton Most Metro are saying, click here.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher
TweetKevin Riley: ‘Young creatives’ most powerful people in town
If you looked behind the scenes last week, you could see that the DaytonCREATE initiative is getting traction.
The initiative was launched last year with the help of economist and best-selling author Richard Florida. He urges communities that want to thrive economically to recruit and cultivate a “creative class” — artists, musicians, engineers and high-tech workers, all people who think and create for a living.
A number of projects have grown out of the work of Dayton’s creative “catalysts.”
For example:
—Film Dayton, created to support and grow a regional film industry, will partner with HBO Films to premiere an award-winning documentary here about Dayton native Sister Dorothy Stang. “They Killed Sister Dorothy” examines the murder of the 73-year-old Catholic nun, who advocated for the poor of Brazil and was trying to preserve the rain forest there.
—One of the public meetings on the Greater Dayton Downtown Plan took place at c{space, a 5,000-square-foot gathering spot at 20 N. Jefferson St. C{space grew out of the catalysts’ effort to promote street-level art, music and independent business downtown. A similar project in Providence, Rhode Island, is about 20 years old, and the fallout is credited with adding to that city’s vitality.
Watch a 4-minute video of graffiti artists painting the interior of c{space, 20 N. Jefferson St.
—Updayton, another of the DaytonCREATE groups, hosted a session at an Oregon District bar that drew about 50 young professionals. The group talked about the importance of entertainment and nightlife to attracting the “creative class.” This session was one of several “Pints and Perspective” gatherings the group is conducting in advance of its Young Creatives Summit on April 18.
We have something important going on here.
At the Oregon District session, the participants’ passion and interest were impressive. The meeting was informal and just barely moderated. But people grabbed the microphone and spoke candidly. And they weren’t intimidated by Dayton’s current economic problems or how hard it might be to make new things happen or to change things.
Updayton’s survey of about 500 young professionals shows that most of them are satisfied living in Dayton, although only 30 percent say it is a “better than average” place for young people. Seventy percent say they are satisfied with their job, but they are worried about new job opportunities (something they also consider very important). And one worrisome trend, according to the research: many expect to move away from Dayton.
It’s telling that the creative catalysts have gotten the attention of Gov. Ted Strickland; the state, not just Dayton, is trying to court young talent. The catalysts have invited him and other community leaders to their summit.
And it’s also telling that leaders of the new downtown initiative have come to this group for input.
As you sat at that Oregon District bar, it became clear that these people have power — maybe much more than they realize. The community’s many stakeholders need them, and no one stakeholder — not governments, businesses or colleges — can address their needs on their own.
The region’s young creatives can mold plans for downtown, riverfront development and other plans. They can demand regional cooperation for the greater good. After all, they are the people the region is supposed to be building for.
So let’s give them that power. And let’s urge them to put it to use.
Kevin Riley is the editor of the DaytonDaily News. Contact him at (937) 225-2161 or kriley@coxohio.com.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Dayton Creative Class Initiative, Kevin Riley
TweetMartin Gottlieb: What can a pragmatic deficit hawk like Voinovich do?
Look at the stimulus fight from the point of view of a senator, Ohio Republican George Voinovich, who likes to consider himself a “deficit hawk,” somebody focused on the evils of piling debt on future generations.
In Washington, a “deficit hawk” is somebody who isn’t necessarily on board with Republicans when they push tax cuts, or the Democrats when they push spending, but is focused on how both exacerbate the deficits.
Voinovich has been sounding the alarm about deficits for years. Once, on taxes, he was a decisive vote and forced President George W. Bush to accept a cut of shorter duration than he wanted.
Of course, he also has the pragmatic side of a born centrist. He has supported the biggest-ticket spending items: adding prescription drugs to Medicare, the Iraq war and the $700 billion bailout of financial institutions.
But all those were presented — and largely received — as urgent needs that had to be met despite their impact on the deficit.
The stimulus is different. This is spending for the sake of spending, to stimulate an economy when nobody else is spending. Sure, the Democrats defend the projects as worthy. But the first decision they made was that a lot of money had to be spent.
The decision, in other words, was to put the concerns of the “deficit hawks” on hold.
President Barack Obama wouldn’t say he is unconcerned about deficits. He’d say that, if the economy continues to plummet, deficits will increase dramatically, anyway, because revenues will drop. He’d also say that the long-term battle against the deficit requires a strong economy (an argument that Ronald Reagan and his people used to make when they increased the deficit).
So what does a pragmatic deficit hawk do?
Voinovich doesn’t have to worry any more about the hard-core conservative Republicans in Ohio who already think he’s too liberal. He’s retiring at the end of his term. He’s on his own.
He is one Republican whose vote the Democrats had high hopes for. He talked early on as if he was looking forward to supporting the stimulus. He acknowledged the need to help out individual victims of the recession, and he granted the need for spending to help the economy generally.
Voinovich was one of the last five Republicans in Senate negotiations. By then, it was generally understood that the Senate bill wouldn’t be much smaller than the House’s $800 billion. Indeed, the Senate had added an expensive cut in something called the alternative minimum tax.
He was the last Republican to give up on the Senate negotiations. He left the room last Wednesday; the Senate deal — bringing three Republicans on board — was struck on Friday.
Upon leaving, he said the emerging deal didn’t meet his criteria for spending, which should be “timely, targeted and temporary.” He also said the items funded should be legitimate federal responsibilities, should be “shovel ready” and should not be programs that ought to go through the “regular appropriations process.”
True to form, he was focused on the details.
Unlike some Republicans, he was not complaining that too much of the bill is focused on “welfare.”
Ironically, the item he singled out as objectionable when he left the negotiations was removed by the time the Senate deal was reached: school construction. The House plan had $19.5 billion for that. Voinovich insists it’s a state responsibility.
Voinovich called for more money for “federal responsibilities like highways, transit and sewers, which would put people back to work quickly.”
When the package went back to House-Senate negotiations this week, more money was, indeed, added for such infrastructure projects. The emerging total for highway, bridge and rail programs was $49.6 billion, $3.5 billion more than the Senate had put up, even though the overall package was lower.
The House-Senate deal was struck this Tuesday. On Wednesday, people were still analyzing the details. When the media speculated about whether the last-minute changes might bring in any new Republican votes, Voinovich was the first Senate name to come up.
He had asked House-Senate negotiators to “ensure that each and every dollar in this bill is focused on creating jobs, jump-starting the economy and responding to … human needs.” Taken literally, those are tough standards, particularly given that what creates jobs and jump-starts an economy is in debate.
Getting a deficit hawk to vote for $800 billion of spending for the sake of spending was destined not to be easy.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetLawrence Briskin: U.S. can bring back 5 million jobs with fair rules on trade
The Dayton Daily News editorial “Buy American is protectionist, could backfire,” Feb. 5, rehashes all the old thinking about international trade. The chief issue was a “buy American” provision in the stimulus bill, since removed. Far more than a “buy American” provision is called for.
Americans must understand that our trade deficit is running about $700 billion per year. This $700 billion deficit is equivalent to 5 million lost jobs.
The cumulative trade deficit is more than $7 trillion. This didn’t happen by accident.
Most of our trading partners impose a Value Added Tax (VAT) averaging 15 percent on American exports. This includes China, Japan, Canada, Mexico and all members of the European Union. In turn, they rebate the VAT to their exporters at an average of 15 percent. This places American products at a 15 percent disadvantage both on imports and exports.
In addition some nations, particularly the Chinese, undervalue their currency. The Chinese yuan is undervalued at about 20 percent. This is the equivalent of a 20 percent import tax on American products and an export subsidy of 20 percent. This undervaluation of the yuan is done unilaterally.
We have two options if we want to correct the situation. First, we might impose a countervailing VAT. In other words, place a 15 percent import tax on any nation having a VAT. Second, we might impose a Trade Balancing Tariff (TBT).
The TBT is an across-the-board tariff. When our trade is 5 percent or more in deficit, raise the TBT by 5 percent on nations with which we are in deficit. If our trade is in surplus of 5 percent or more, lower the TBT by 5 percent on nations with which we are in surplus. The TBT would be reviewed annually and the necessary adjustments made. This would bring American trade into a balance of ±5 percent.
Either a countervailing VAT or the TBT would do the job. The charge of unilateralism from our trading partners rings hollow. They will never consent to any change, which will impede their exports to the United States and their gigantic trade surpluses and the attendant jobs that represents.
We have been importing about two-thirds more than we export. In a trade war, our trading partners would lose $3 worth of exports to our $2. They cannot win.
Their best option would be to accept the fact that trade rules will no longer be uneven and unfair.
Some economists will immediately dredge up the American Smoot-Hawley tariff, which is supposed to have caused or lengthened the Great Depression. This is a false analogy. The United States ran trade surpluses throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Now the opposite is true. We have had 34 years of mounting trade deficits.
If we really want a job stimulation package, it is ours for the taking. Some 5 million jobs are at stake.
Centerville resident Lawrence Briskin is a retired engineer formerly employed as a civilian at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Guest Columns
TweetEditorial: Just saying no isn’t smart bargaining in Dayton
The city of Dayton says it’s close to having a balanced budget for the fiscal year that starts in July. Getting there was not pretty.
Lessons from this budget, if learned, could help make the process easier next time, when things most likely will be even uglier.
Late last year, City Manager Rashad Young announced that the city had a $13.5 million deficit to close. The city began taking steps — selling assets, freezing managers’ pay, raising parking meter prices — to try to reduce the gap.
One move that didn’t work was asking members of the city’s biggest unions, representing police, firefighters and service workers, to give up their 3 percent raise for 2009. Mr. Young, who visited union halls to make the city’s pitch directly to the rank-and-file, was told “no thanks.”
That decision by workers could hurt building attendants who are part of the public service workers’ union. When a wage freeze was rejected, city leaders began exploring contracting out for those services, putting 20 or so jobs in jeopardy. When the service workers’ union got wind of that possibility, it rushed to offer an alternative.
Before that, the lack of communication and cooperation didn’t exactly promote smart problem solving.
Marcia Knox, regional director in charge of the Dayton service workers’ union, declined to give details of the union’s plan, but said it would result in savings similar to what outsourcing would net. The union is waiting for Dayton’s response.
The exchange of ideas — belated though it was — between the union and city leaders is a good development. This sort of give-and-take needs to continue. The city’s finances aren’t going to get better any time soon.
Already, Mr. Young has exercised a rarely used contract provision that triggers reconsideration of next year’s scheduled raises. He hasn’t minced words about what he hopes to achieve at the bargaining table: he’ll be asking again for a wage freeze.
A complicating factor in those talks will be hard feelings about past grievances. Union leaders say their members distrust, or flat out refuse to believe, what city leaders say about the budget, even though some incidents they bring up date back years.
It’s in everybody’s interest to look forward, rather than backward. Mr. Young needs ideas and advice from employees in crafting tight future budgets. If workers just say no to cuts without offering alternatives that save money, they’re telling Mr. Young to solve his very real budget problems without them.
They may not like his decisions. That’s what the service workers could yet learn the hard way.
Mr. Young and his boss, the city commission, must continue to reach out, even when the other side is signaling it won’t be cooperative.
Managers and workers have to get beyond the past and move to a future that’s not going to look like the old days.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Scott Elliott
TweetOlbermann Finds Austria
If you haven’t heard, U.S. Rep. Steve Austria, R-7th District, was MSNBC’s “Worst Person in the Woooorld” the other night, for the congressman’s bogus history lesson.
This newspaper’s editorial on the Austria flap is lower, on this page.
The Olbermann segment is here:
It’s a matter of opinion, of course, but, for the record, “worst person in the world” is not the editorial board’s take on Austria. Seems like a nice enough guy.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetEditorial: Strickland’s budget just doesn’t hold up
You can’t blame Gov. Ted Strickland for wanting to spend some money. After all:
— His first budget two years ago was a low-growth one.
— Economists of all stripes are insisting that the economy needs to be stimulated through government spending.
— The federal government is close to giving states some amount of money to help their ailing economies, which, in theory, should create opportunities to support initiatives that otherwise might not be affordable.
— He has staked his success as governor on improving the state’s schools. Everyone has always assumed that would require some new spending. Give him these considerations, but the more analysis his $55 billion spending plan is subjected to, the worse it looks.
For example:
One-time money
There’s almost $5.3 billion in his plan that won’t be available in two years when the next budget has to be written. That represents 10 percent of the proposed spending. It’s reckless to set the state up for a bad fall in two short years when this money will have evaporated.
Relying on Congress
Most of the one-time money comes from the federal stimulus that Congress is considering. Specifically, the governor has been counting on $3.4 billion from Washington. The Senate pared back what the House wanted to give the states — reducing the pot from $70 billion to $39 billion.
If the agreement that was reached Wednesday, Feb. 11 holds, the governor could be short a billion dollars or more — hardly a small number. In the last year, the governor has agonized about how to trim almost $724 million from the current budget. He would never say that effort has been a cake walk.
Spinning the numbers
The governor says he’s going to increase spending on schools by $925 million. But year-over-year, he’s hiking school districts’ funding by only about two-thirds of that amount. Understanding that is important because his new initiatives — all-day kindergarten, a longer school day and school year, for example — are costly. Districts wouldn’t have as much money to pay for these reforms as they might think they’ll be getting.
Dropping revenues
In January, state tax revenues were 3.2 percent below what had been projected. Even granting that estimating revenue in the current climate is difficult, that doesn’t change the fact that the state’s best estimates have been wrong consistently.
Unions may not be buying
The budget assumes savings of $170 million to $200 million in payroll and benefit cuts. But the state’s unions have to agree to taking home less and to contributing more toward their benefits to realize this amount.
The question is not whether this is a good idea — the governor hasn’t really laid out his case except to say that everyone needs to sacrifice — but whether he will have this money at his disposal.
Republicans are having a heyday picking apart his assumptions and plans that they think are dubious. In so doing, they are not just pointing out where the governor is overpromising and beating him up for doing so. After all, they control the Senate, and they, too, will have an identifiable hand in making the changes that will be required to write a more realistic financial plan.
What’s obvious at this point is that Ohio isn’t even close to having a spending plan that makes sense for the long term or that meets the constitutional requirement of being balanced.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Professor Austria’s history lesson goes awry
(NOTE: Here’s a link to the audio referred to in this editorial.)
Some people complain that politicians don’t know as much about history as they should. But that’s only part of the problem. The larger problem is that so much of what they do know is wrong.
They often get their information from partisan sources, with results that are catastrophic to truth. Exhibit A for the week is Congressman Steve Austria, the freshman who represents Greene and Clark counties and points east.
The other day he was speaking with journalists at the Columbus Dispatch. He was going down a list of conservative talking points about President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan. He ventured into Japanese history, giving the sound-bite conservative take on that country’s efforts to get itself out of economic doldrums a while back. He talked up the allegedly positive effects of tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy.
And he spoke of the Great Depression of the 1930s. If you’ve been following this debate, you know that conservatives like to say that President Franklin Roosevelt’s big-goverment approach did not succeed in ending the Depression. That has some truth.
But Rep. Austria took the point a step further, saying FDR actually caused the Depression.
“The last time this was done,” he said, speaking of borrowing and spending so much, “was under Franklin Roosevelt, and when Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a great depression, to be honest with you.”
Rep. Austria was given a chance to make clear whether he was really blaming FDR. He repeated his point, saying, “That’s just history.”
Actually, it’s just nonsense. President Roosevelt inherited an unemployment rate of 25 percent in 1933. By 1937, it had dropped to 14.3 percent, an extraordinarily fast drop in percentage terms. Then there was what some economists call a “mini-depression,” and the rate went back as high as 19 percent. But overall, from 1933 to 1940, it dropped from 25.2 percent to 14.6 percent.
Meanwhile, the national economy grew by a third in his first term — a growth rate that would look pretty good right about now — and by half over two terms.
Apparently, Rep. Austria, after listening to some conservative thinkers talk with unrelenting disparagement of FDR, assumed that the case against that president must be overwhelming, rather than that the partisans simply left out the parts they don’t like.
The day after Rep. Austria distorted history so seriously (twice), he withdrew his statements, saying he never intended to blame President Roosevelt for the Depression.
So he learned by talking and getting feedback. But there’s a certain flaw in that sequence. People who learn that way don’t change their mind, just their pitch. He’s already committed to the position he took.
That a member of Congress doesn’t know basic, relevant history is sad. (For more sadness, check out the audio excerpts of the interview for the congressman’s difficulty with the name of the most important liberal economist of the 20th century.) But sadder still are the pretense of knowledge and the assumption that one can talk knowledgeably about history after hearing about it from partisan sources.
If Rep. Austria got from all this a history lesson about FDR, good. Hopefully, though, he got another lesson, too, about whom to listen to, and how carefully to listen.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetHockey and tax breaks — a solution for downtown?
Looks like the big news of out of Mayor Rhine McLin’s state of the city address this morning was a huge new tax break for companies that agree to locate or create new jobs downtown. Couple that with the other big news from today’s paper that the Dayton bombers want to build a $30 million hockey arena downtown and you have quite a surge of sudden interest in improving downtown.
Some quick thoughts on these two developments:
—Tax breaks. Dayton feels it needs something extra to tilt board in its favor for companies weighing the advantages of being downtown vs. those of moving to a grassy suburban commercial site. The city is holding a press conference with more details this afternoon, but one question is whether its a good idea to exempt new jobs from payroll taxes when those revenues are an important source of income for the city. And the really big question: does this idea create enough of an advantage for downtown to get CEOs to take the idea of moving or expanding there seriously?
—Hockey arena. This move creates a big rift between the city and the county, which has been trying to help developers of the Austin Road interchange find a way to build a hockey arena there. While the idea of a $30 million development downtown has to be attractive to the city it is not at all clear this would be a worthwhile investment of resources. Bombers hockey is not UD basketball or Dragons baseball. Even in a nice venue, would the Bombers ever draw enough interest to generate an economic ripple effect.
Share your thought about this ideas in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Miami Valley Politics, Scott Elliott, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Programs for addicts especially needed in hard times
Madison Anne Barr was a beautiful, involved, popular 19-year-old from a small town. She died after being abandoned by her friends in an unfamiliar apartment far from home after a heroin overdose.
Ms. Barr was just one of many local stories about the swift and destructive effects of heroin addiction chronicled this week by Dayton Daily News reporter Joanne Huist Smith. After nearly disappearing as a problem in the drug culture in the 1980s, heroin is back because it’s cheap, available and deeply addicting to those who make the mistake of experimenting with it. The drug’s damage extends into all neighborhoods, all income brackets and all racial and ethnic groups.
So what can be done about it? On an individual level, people need to know that there’s a problem. Schools, families and circles of friends can discourage those who might consider trying the drug from ever taking that first hit.
But for those who already have fallen victim to heroin’s allure, intervention is their only hope. Getting that help is another story.
In Montgomery County, Project Cure’s clinic in Dayton is crammed into a tiny, inadequate space where it serves hundreds of recovering addicts each day. Visitors to the clinic jumped by 140 a day between 2007 and 2008.
In Greene County, Xenia’s TCN Behavioral Health Services Inc. offers addicts services ranging from counseling to inpatient detox. But its efforts also are threatened. A mental health levy that supports the program failed last year and could expire at the end of this year if it is not renewed. The accompanying $1.6 million budget cut for TCN if the levy is defeated again could cause all the services it provides to disappear.
A mental health levy can sound expendable to a cash-strapped voter. But do the math. When addicts don’t get treatment, they get increasingly more desperate, often going into an unstoppable downward spiral. Bad decisions that aren’t good for anyone are likely to follow.
Heroin is, perhaps, an unexpected threat once again to the community. That requires changing strategies and reallocating resources. So far, those moves haven’t gone far enough.
Voters and policy makers can’t let that happen. Hard as it may be when every state, county and city budget is being squeezed, support for these programs is money well spent.
For Ms. Barr of Urbana, and 23-year-old Zachary Fitzmaurice of Bevercreek, it’s too late for intervention. But for others across the Dayton region, there’s still time. They can be helped. It’s a challenge, but with cooperation and renewed focus, it can happen.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Social Services
TweetMartin Gottlieb: How much does Limbaugh scare Boehner and McConnell?
Rush Limbaugh does not think much of the leadership being provided the Republican Party by the Ohio Valley.
Limbaugh says President Barack Obama is “obviously more frightened of me than he is (of) Mitch McConnell. He’s more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party.”
Kentuckian McConnell is the party leader in the Senate. Boehner — from the suburbs between Cincinnati and Dayton, with a district stretching into Dayton — leads the party in the House.
What Limbaugh thinks is worth pausing over these days, given that, after all, the president brought him up. Obama had told congressional Republicans, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”
Obama took some flak for lowering himself to take on an over-the-top talk show host, and, thereby, promoting him. But the president was confronting, in a remarkably honest way, what might be his biggest problem in trying to foster the bipartisanship he talks about:
There’s a divisiveness industry in this country. Talented people polarize for profit, and get rich. That Rush Limbaugh will demonize any Democratic president is a given, a matter of business.
Some Democrats have suggested that Obama is naive in his hopes for bipartisanship. Maybe. But he’s not so naive as to believe that there’s any point in reaching out to the Limbaughs of the world, the political warmongers. All he could do was suggest to the Republicans that they not be guided by them.
Good luck even on that. One very conservative legislator, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., made the mistake of coming to the defense of McConnell and Boehner against Limbaugh. He said, “It’s easy, if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich, to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows, and … you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base.”
The result of those comments was a deluge of phone calls from Limbaugh listeners. The result of that was a Gingrey apology. “I regret those stupid comments,” he said. He made sure that everybody understood that he listens to Limbaugh all the time, cherishes him and agrees with him.
And yet, the “stupid comments” were the simple, obvious truth. Now Gingrey’s constituents know they should never expect him to go there again.
Some people try to tell you that Limbaugh is just an entertainer, just fun, that listeners don’t take him seriously. Those people ought to see the mail of anybody who crosses Limbaugh, in the media or otherwise. The truth is a lot of politicians are afraid of him. That’s power.
The notion that he is somehow the most important Republican now — as he portrays himself — is a Democratic dream. It might mean the death of bipartisanship, but, given the limits of his appeal, there might be so few Republicans it wouldn’t matter.
Anybody who reads these pages knows that Obama is taking a lot of flak from people on the left who see the whole bipartisanship schtick as a bad idea, people like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. They point to lockstep Republican opposition to a stimulus bill that the Republicans considered too big but was probably too small all along.
The truth, though, is that this was the wrong issue on which to expect bipartisanship. Obama decided at some point between the election and the inauguration that he needed to be bold. His talks with economists (left and right, he says) convinced him that the package had to be about $800 billion to make a real difference.
That was the end of prospects for much Republican support. The bill wraps together everything that Republicans complain about in public spending. Sure, they have risen above their anti-spending rhetoric in the past, but typically in supporting Republican presidents, not Democrats.
A vote for this bill threatened great troubles for Republicans with their famously conservative, famously partisan base.
It’s a shame this issue had to come first on Obama’s watch. It brought the likes of Limbaugh to the fore. It put people on guard. It seemed to confirm the caricature of Obama that the conservatives promoted during the campaign.
But there’ll be plenty of other issues on which the differences between the parties are at least a little blurrier.
If McConnell and Boehner have not proceeded as if their job is to “scare” Obama, that’s a good thing. The question now is how scared are they.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Obama bipartisan pitch still has life post-stimulus
Rush Limbaugh does not think much of the leadership being provided the Republican Party by the Ohio Valley.
Limbaugh says President Barack Obama is “obviously more frightened of me than he is (of) Mitch McConnell. He’s more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party.”
Kentuckian McConnell is the party leader in the Senate. Boehner — from the suburbs between Cincinnati and Dayton, with a district stretching into Dayton — leads the party in the House.
What Limbaugh thinks is worth pausing over these days, given that, after all, the president brought him up. Obama had told congressional Republicans, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”
Obama took some flak for lowering himself to take on an over-the-top talk show host, and, thereby, promoting him. But the president was confronting, in a remarkably honest way, what might be his biggest problem in trying to foster the bipartisanship he talks about:
There’s a divisiveness industry in this country. Talented people polarize for profit, and get rich. That Rush Limbaugh will demonize any Democratic president is a given, a matter of business.
Some Democrats have suggested that Obama is naive in his hopes for bipartisanship. Maybe. But he’s not so naive as to believe that there’s any point in reaching out to the Limbaughs of the world, the political warmongers. All he could do was suggest to the Republicans that they not be guided by them.
Good luck even on that. One very conservative legislator, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., made the mistake of coming to the defense of McConnell and Boehner against Limbaugh.
He said, “It’s easy, if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich, to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows, and … you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base.”
The result of those comments was a deluge of phone calls from Limbaugh listeners. The result of that was a Gingrey apology. “I regret those stupid comments,” he said. He made sure that everybody understood that he listens to Limbaugh all the time, cherishes him and agrees with him.
And yet, the “stupid comments” were the simple, obvious truth. Now Gingrey’s constituents know they should never expect him to go there again.
Some people try to tell you that Limbaugh is just an entertainer, just fun, that listeners don’t take him seriously. Those people ought to see the mail of anybody who crosses Limbaugh, in the media or otherwise. The truth is a lot of politicians are afraid of him. That’s power.
The notion that he is somehow the most important Republican now — as he portrays himself — is a Democratic dream. It might mean the death of bipartisanship, but, given the limits of his appeal, there might be so few Republicans it wouldn’t matter.
Anybody who reads these pages knows that Obama is taking a lot of flak from people on the left who see the whole bipartisanship schtick as a bad idea, people like Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. They point to lockstep Republican opposition to a stimulus bill that the Republicans considered too big but was probably too small all along.
The truth, though, is that this was the wrong issue on which to expect bipartisanship. Obama decided at some point between the election and the inauguration that he needed to be bold. His talks with economists (left and right, he says) convinced him that the package had to be about $800 billion to make a real difference.
That was the end of prospects for much Republican support. The bill wraps together everything that Republicans complain about in public spending. Sure, they have risen above their anti-spending rhetoric in the past, but typically in supporting Republican presidents, not Democrats.
A vote for this bill threatened great troubles for Republicans with their famously conservative, famously partisan base.
It’s a shame this issue had to come first on Obama’s watch. It brought the likes of Limbaugh to the fore. It put people on guard. It seemed to confirm the caricature of Obama that the conservatives promoted during the campaign.
But there’ll be plenty of other issues on which the differences between the parties are at least a little blurrier.
If McConnell and Boehner have not proceeded as if their job is to “scare” Obama, that’s a good thing. The question now is how scared are they.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Faith-based groups must help Obama
In the 1990s, faith-based community groups were deeply involved in government-funded programs that, for example, helped drug addicts or offenders leaving prisons or tried to rehabilitate stricken neighborhoods. Dayton organizations were among those getting federal money.
When George W. Bush became president, one of his first acts was to call for making federal money more accessible to faith-based groups. His legislative proposal died in the face of much opposition from Democrats. The hottest fight was about whether the groups should be allowed to take religion into account in hiring people. The White House said yes. Most Democrats said no.
Rep. Tony Hall, D-Dayton, was an exception. He had long been an unusual Democrat when it came to religion. His deep faith pushed him to conservative positions on abortion and gay rights. But it also pushed him to be passionate about helping the poor in this country and abroad. He wanted government to be involved and to bring religious organizations into the effort as much as possible.
When President Bush failed to get his proposal through Congress, he issued an executive order that achieved some of his goals. He created a White House office of faith-based programs and fostered a network of offices around the country.
Since then, some writers and thinkers have pushed the Democrats to increase their attention to religiously motivated voters, saying the Democrats were forfeiting votes pointlessly. In 2008, Barack Obama accepted the advice. He thought he could win the votes of members of conservative churches who were not focused exclusively on abortion and gay rights.
He said he favored government funding of faith-based groups. However, in a speech in Ohio, he said such groups shouldn’t “proselytize” with federal money or “discriminate” on the basis of religion in employment. He bought into the notion that such behavior violates the constitutional ban on the government establishing religion.
Now President Obama has created his own White House office of faith-based programs. He’s added neighborhood-based programs to its agenda, and he’s created a large advisory board, including some people from conservative religious groups that make some Democrats nervous. His director is a fellow who worked on religious issues during his campaign, Joshua DuBois, 26.
But the president has not issued a ban on proselytizing and employment discrimination. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have treated this as a breach of faith. But the White House says it will deal with charges of proselytizing and discrimination on a case-by-case basis. The hope, clearly, is to find some common ground in practice, even if that’s difficult in the abstract.
As of now, the president can’t reasonably be accused of breaking his promise. He’s relying on his board and staff to remember his promise and to keep him out of the trouble with the hard-liners on separation of church and state.
He’s apparently also relying on faith-based groups to structure their proposals in ways that don’t raise alarms.
It’s worth a try.
The country needs a search for common ground in the effort to involve as many organizations as possible in attacking social problems. It does not need a constitutional showdown.
In the midst of a hyper-partisan showdown about his economic stimulus, President Obama is trying to give life to his insistence that the two parties can find much to cooperate on. He’s going to need skill, luck and help to make faith-based spending an example.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Religion and Faith
TweetThe Catholic Church brings back indulgences?
I had to read this New York Times story to actually believe the headline. Indulgences, the corrupting currency of official forgiveness that helped enrage Martin Luther into launching the protestant movement, are officially back.
Thankfully, you can’t buy them anymore. Now you can “earn” the equivalent of credit for good behavior on a future purgatory sentence in this life by racking up prayers and charitable contributions after confession.
As a Catholic, it is bizarre to me that the church would reach back in time to revive this outdated concept. It’s a tilt back in the direction of what you might call “checklist Catholicism.” Mark enough checks on your score card (rosary prayers, Mass attendance, etc.) and hope you earn enough “points” to get into heaven.
Personally, I’d like to see the church focus more on its better traditions that reinforce the value of living a good life and serving others in ways that make the world a better place.
What do you make of the revival of “indulgences?” Let us know in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Religion and Faith, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Gates’ complaints reach Wright-Patt
Because hundreds of new jobs are coming to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, local discussion about the base’s future has been mostly upbeat.
But all is not rosy. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in congressional testimony that is excerpted below, military spending is entering a new era.
The Pentagon’s inflation-adjusted budget has grown by more than 80 percent in eight years. Not all of that has been spent in Iraq. It’s been a good time for Defense Department contractors. Last year, the inspector general of the Pentagon said defense acquisitions had been growing so fast that his auditors couldn’t keep up.
Going forward, Secretary Gates only hopes that the Pentagon’s budget will keep up with inflation. Even that isn’t guaranteed. The country tends to turn away from military spending after a war. And the economy is pushing policymakers in that direction.
Some people have argued for more military spending as a part of the pending stimulus plan. But they haven’t gotten far. The president has long seen the winding down of the Iraq war as a chance to make major savings in defense spending. And he thinks domestic needs have gone unmet.
Moreover, there’s debate about how useful military spending is in spurring the economy. (It doesn’t seem to have done much lately.) And there’s doubt about the wisdom of funding more military programs when the Pentagon already faces criticism about its handling of existing projects.
Those problems are the gist of the secretary’s comments about acquisitions. The department will be answering a lot of questions from Gates, long a tough taskmaster, even before Congress pipes up with its own.
Gates notes problems with several Air Force programs that Wright-Patt has had a role in managing: the tanker for refueling planes in midair, which has been fought over for years; the CSAR-X search-and-rescue helicopter; and the Joint Strike Fighter,
The Pentagon is not alone in coming in for scrutiny for its acquisitions record. There’s also the Department of Homeland Security, among others, as a result of a general explosion in the number of government contracts in this decade.
And it’s certainly not only the Democrats and Secretary Gates who are focused on the issue. An unnamed adviser of Sen. John McCain is quoted by the Washington Times as saying the senator “feels very strongly that the whole procurement process is totally dysfunctional. … He believes that putting order, discipline and accountability back in the process will stop the gold-plating and bring costs down.”
Some problems are inevitable. The Pentagon and Congress keep changing signals as to how many copies they want of a given system and its exact specs. That inevitably leads to cost overruns, which then get blamed on people running the program.
And, as Secretary Gates notes, a big problem now is that the acquisitions field is understaffed, with a whopping 43 percent vacancy in key spots.
(Wright-Patt said last fall that it was seeking 220 financial and contract-management people. Said John Day, of the Aeronautical Systems Center, “Over several years of work-force reduction, mainly through hiring restrictions, ASC got a bit out of balance.”)
Who is to blame for the national personnel shortage is debated. The Clinton administration tried to eliminate “bureaucrats” in its “reinvention of government.” But the explosion in contracts in this decade has produced new personnel needs, but not new personnel.
What’s clear is that the purchasing process needs help from Washington as much as oversight.
Wright-Patterson and the military are entering a new era under a secretary who knows what he must do to keep Congress from changing directions too sharply on spending.
Defense chief wants big change on acquistions front
In Senate testimony at the end of January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made comments about military acquisitions, an activity central to the role of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The comments are excerpted and slightly rearranged here to minimize the use of words not familiar to nonspecialists.
Secretary Gates said:
Chief among institutional challenges facing the department is acquisitions — broadly speaking, how we acquire goods and services and manage the taxpayers’ money. The Congress (has) rightly been focused on this issue for some time. The economic crisis makes the problem even more acute.
Allow me to share a few general thoughts.
There are a host of issues that have led us to where we are, starting with long-standing systemic problems:
• Entrenched attitudes throughout the government are particularly pronounced in the area of acquisition: a risk-averse culture, a litigious process, parochial interests, excessive and changing requirements, budget churn and instability, and sometimes adversarial relationships within the Department of Defense and between DoD and other parts of the government.
• At the same time, acquisition priorities have changed from defense secretary to defense secretary, administration to administration, and Congress to Congress — making any sort of long-term procurement strategy on which we can accurately base costs next to impossible.
• Add to all of this the difficulty in bringing in qualified senior acquisition officials. Over the past eight years, for example, the Department of Defense has operated with an average percentage of vacancies in the key acquisition positions ranging from 13 percent in the Army to 43 percent in the Air Force.
Thus the situation we face today, where a small set of expensive weapons programs has had repeated — and unacceptable — problems with requirements, schedule, cost and performance.
While the number of overturned procurements as a result of protests remains low in absolute numbers — 13 out of more than 3.5 million contract actions in FY 2008 — highly publicized issues persist in a few of the largest programs.
The same is true of cost overruns, where five programs account for more than half of total cost growth. The list of big-ticket weapons systems that have experienced contract or program performance problems spans the services: the Air Force tanker, CSAR-X (combat search and rescue helicopter), VH-71 (Marine helicopter), Osprey, Future Combat Systems, Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, Littoral Combat Ship, Joint Strike Fighter, and so on.
Since the end of World War II, there have been nearly 130 studies on these problems — to little avail. I mention all this because I do not believe there is a silver bullet, and I do not think the system can be reformed in a short period of time — especially since the kinds of problems we face date all the way back to our first secretary of war, whose navy took three times longer to build than was originally planned, at more than double the cost.
That said, I do believe we can make headway, and I have already begun addressing these issues:
• First, I believe that the FY 2010 budget must make hard choices. Any necessary changes should avoid across-the-board adjustments, which inefficiently extend all programs.
• We have begun to purchase systems at more efficient rates for the production lines.
• I will pursue greater quantities of systems that represent the “75 percent” solution instead of smaller quantities of “99 percent,” exquisite systems. (Our procurement and preparation must be driven more by the actual capabilities of potential adversaries, and less by what is technologically feasible given unlimited time and resources.)
• While the military’s operations have become very joint — and impressively so — budget and procurement decisions remain overwhelmingly service-centric. To address a given risk, we may have to invest more in the future-oriented program of one service and less in that of another service — particularly when both programs were conceived with the same threat in mind.
• I believe the Department should seek increased competition.
• Finally, we must restore the Department’s acquisition team.
Efforts to put the bureaucracy on a war footing have, in my view, revealed underlying flaws in the institutional priorities, cultural preferences, and reward structures of America’s defense establishment — a set of institutions largely arranged to plan for future wars, to prepare for a short war, but not to wage a protracted war.
The spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing. With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department.
The president and I need your help as all of us together do what is best for America as a whole.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEllen Belcher: Dayton’s comeback will happen
Here’s a contrarian thought: It could be worse in Dayton.
As awful as it has been to lose so many manufacturing jobs, and to get hit so hard by predatory lenders, Dayton and the region are still standing, still fighting, still picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off, as President Barack Obama might say.
Long before the rest of the country started getting hammered, this community was showing remarkable resilience in the face of wrenching economic news that only lately has gone national and global. The job losses that the national media are writing about every day are not new here. We’ve been feeling the drip, drip, drip, gush, gush, gush of bad news of disappearing jobs for years.
The problems are, of course, still coming, but isn’t it a fact worth noting that Dayton has weathered an economic storm that hasn’t really quit in a very long time?
In spite of the battering, think about the good things that have happened in the last two decades:
• A fabulous ball park got built.
• An even more fabulous — a world-class — performing arts center was constructed.
• A community college that is the envy of anyone who understands the importance of helping people of all ages and all educational abilities to better themselves has grown phenomenally in size and quality.
• The community has again and again stepped up to pay for a local safety net for down-and-out people. Though far from perfect, the system attracts others from around the country who ask, “How did you do it?”
• There’s been a huge investment in preserving the community’s internationally significant contributions to the history of aviation — in the form of a national park and other projects — that are an enduring statement about the community’s ingenuity.
• The local community invented a protection plan to make sure its drinking water will be safe for generations, and people around the world are modeling it.
• Though its work force is smaller, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s place in the military’s orbit has been protected (if not advanced), even as the military was closing a lot of other bases.
For sure, too few new jobs have replaced the ones that have been lost. But the point is: Like companies that have been forced to downsize, the area has adapted and held on to a quality of life that is amazing for a place of this size. And all of this occurred over a period when the economic forces have been nothing short of violent.
The Chinese have a saying that wealth only lasts for three generations. It’s meant to be a warning about how our children’s children can fritter away their advantages.
But economies, too, only last for so long, and Dayton and the Midwest did very well in an industrialized economy that continued for longer than three life cycles. While the days of prospering under that order are over and the transition to something more demanding has been ugly, the investments here haven’t stopped.
For example:
• The collection of universities Dayton has nurtured financially and in other ways has grown into a remarkable asset. Believing that R&D is the future, the University of Dayton is especially driving that train hard.
• Wright-Patterson’s place has never fallen off the radar, and the broad group of current and former military people who advocate for it — because they like Dayton — is a measure of something powerful and unusual.
• This region has kept arts groups alive that would have died elsewhere, all the while celebrating them with passion. It’s also kept up its parks, expanded its bikeways and cleaned up its rivers (though not developed them). Its museums (the Art Institute, the Boonshoft, Sunwatch, Dayton History, the Air Force museum) are amazing for a mid-sized community, and they have been heartily supported even as companies and individuals were buffeted.
• Not so noticed is an array of local public schools, some of which are turning out truly gifted young scholars. The energy that’s going into places like the new STEM high school at Wright State University, Stivers School for the Arts, the Dayton Early College Academy and others is all about changing lives one student at a time.
The Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, is working with cities in the Midwest trying to help them bounce back. It’s operating partly on the theory that everything is cyclical and that the Heartland’s comeback has to happen if only because investors always find opportunities in someone else’s misery. (My words, not theirs.)
When things do pick up, outsiders will see that Dayton has not sunk as far as we sometimes think.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: No need to ‘do the time’ for minor crimes
It’s hard to be against getting criminals off the street or requiring those who do the crime to “do the time.” But there is another factor to consider, one that nobody likes to think about when it comes to law enforcement — costs.
That’s not to suggest that Daytonians should have to accept policing on the cheap. They shouldn’t. But consider the controversy of the last couple weeks about Dayton Municipal Court’s new policy instructing police officers not to arrest people for warrants issued for very minor crimes.
Dayton’s municipal judges are seeking a middle road. Their argument makes sense, provided the rules don’t handcuff officers in the rare cases when arresting people for small crimes is the right thing to do. The new policy could save the city money, get more court fines paid and avoid jailing people unnecessarily. It’s an approach that already works well in other local courts.
We’re not talking about serious crimes here. Judges cannot, by law, order jail time for minor misdemeanors like jaywalking, littering and minor traffic violations. But when offenders skip out on paying their fines or don’t show up for court, judges routinely issue a warrant for their arrest, should an officer come in contact with them.
For the vast majority of those arrested on these warrants, their jail visit is brief. They are given the option to sign a waiver that ends their case if they agree to spend eight hours in the jail. Those who agree are not issued jail clothing or assigned a bed. Holding someone for a few hours costs less than putting them up for the night.
Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer said that the 3,450 such arrests in Dayton last year were not a problem for the county jail, which has been holding about 750 inmates a day. That census is well below just a couple years ago when the jail exceeded its 960-inmate capacity routinely and was paying other counties to take prisoners. But managing the jail population still requires work, so not keeping the few people arrested for these minor crimes every day has financial meaning.
The sheriff charged Dayton about $237,000 last year for holding minor offenders. That’s money the city could use for something else at a time when officials are still scrambling to close a multimillion-dollar deficit.
And this doesn’t mean the offenders will get off scot-free. Judges want officers to issue offenders a summons to court in lieu of making arrests. If the offenders don’t show up for court, a block will be placed on their driver’s licenses or state identification cards, preventing a renewal until fines are paid.
Dayton Court Administrator Jacquelyn Jackson said the hope is more fines will be paid.
Some suburban courts already do what Dayton is proposing. In Miamisburg, for instance, the municipal court issues a block on an offender’s driver’s license instead of an arrest warrant. If offenders don’t pay, the court turns their names over to collection agencies.
“We’d rather get the money to settle out the case,” said Cynthia Coffey, clerk of Miamisburg court. “It’s an important source of income.”
Of course, Dayton is not Miamisburg and the problems Dayton officers face are more challenging.
Lt. Randy Beane, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said urban officers need more tools. They stop a lot of suspicious characters at all hours who can’t explain why they are hanging around, he said. Taking them to jail for minor misdemeanor warrants can send a message.
“They learn to stay out of this neighborhood,” he said. “I’m sure burglaries have been averted.”
Lt. Beane has a point that exceptions have to be allowed. And the court is reconsidering ways to give officers flexibility.
In general, officers shouldn’t be wasting patrol time taking people to jail for the most minor crimes. Fewer of these arrests means fewer people in the jail, less city money spent and more fines collected. Dayton’s financial interests and law enforcement’s needs can overlap.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: ‘Truth-in-sentencing’ shouldn’t be fad
If Gov. Ted Strickland weren’t taking a special interest in prisons, that would be odd. He was for a while a prison psychologist.
One benefit of that personal experience is that he understands that prisons are hugely expensive enterprises. And no one needs to tell him that Ohio is not exactly rolling in money these days.
Purely and simply, saving money is behind the governor’s suggestion — in his proposed budget — to allow prisoners to earn early release for behaving.
Inmates would have to do more than stay out of fights; they’d also have to participate in educational or vocational or treatment programs (which, incidentally, there’s often a waiting list for). In return, they could earn up to seven days of credit each month.
If the idea is approved, Ohio will be resurrecting an old policy. The state did away with most “good time” credit when its “truth-in-sentencing” law took effect in July, 1996. The law was changed partly because criminals weren’t serving the sentences victims and the public thought were being imposed. “Good time” routinely cut a prisoner’s actual time behind bars by a third.
That practice existed not just to give prisoners an incentive to stay in line. Prisons then, as they still are today, were bulging.
When the law took effect, the Columbus Dispatch wrote:
“Both supporters and critics agree that the bill was driven by the state’s prison capacity, not a desire to get tough on crime. The new sentencing guidelines, while more definite, seek to channel only the most serious and violent felons into state institutions.
“Most people convicted of fourth- and fifth-degree felonies will be diverted into community-based correction programs, which include probation, community service, electronic monitoring, drug treatment, restitution and short sentences in county jails. The new sentence guidelines are supposed to reduce the prison growth rate from 10 percent to 5 percent annually, cutting the cost of constructing new penitentiaries.”
So much for those ambitions.
Many of the problems that the 1996 law was supposed to address are still with us. But even as there are still too few halfway houses, treatment programs and so on, if a judge does sentence someone to 10 years, the offender really will come close to being behind bars for a decade.
As smart and cost-effective as it would be to address — again — the lack of alternatives to prison, the governor needs to think long and hard about backing so much “earned time.” Instead, he could just say that some crimes carry sentences that are too stiff (if that’s what he believes).
Or he could keep working on resolving where to put offenders who aren’t dangerous and who are going to serve less than a year in prison anyway. An estimated 57 percent of inmates will be locked up for that short amount of time, even without getting “earned” credit.
Over and over proponents of Ohio’s truth-in-sentencing law said the justice system needed to be honest about what a sentence really amounted to. They said nothing less than the system’s credibility was at stake when a judge’s pronouncements didn’t match up with reality — and they were right.
Allowing for “good time” isn’t ridiculous. One goal of rehabilitation ought to be gaining an understanding of consequences — both bad and good.
At the same time, it’s also important that when judges, of all people, look defendants and victims in the eye, they are speaking the truth.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Ohio politics
TweetLet’s look at the politcs of Strickland’s education plan
Over at the DDN Education blog, Get on the Bus, it took me two posts to analyze all the elements of Gov. Ted Strickland’s big education proposal from the state of the state address. (See part one here and part two here.)
But lets get away from the merits of the ideas in terms of policy and consider a different question — is Strickland’s plan smart politics?
Presuming the majority of the plan makes it through the legislature and is approved, let’s look ahead to what might happen politically over the next few years. Strickland must run for re-election in 2010. By using the one-time federal stimulus money to launch a big education reform, he’s betting that people will like what they see from the plan over the next two years.
And if things go right, they should at least notice a difference. Strickland’s plan is supposed to mean more funding burden for schools on the state, which is then supposed to result in fewer local school levies. And parents should start seeing all sorts of extras in schools as part of the plan — full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes, even more school nurses.
So this gives Strickland the opportunity to run for re-election in 2010 arguing he’s the only governor in recent history to noticeably improve education and school funding in Ohio. If people buy that it should help his re-election chances. And the next budget crisis should hold off until early 2011 — possibly after he is re-elected in 2010. In 2011, however, there will be no federal stimulus funds to rescue the next two-year budget and it doesn’t seem like much time for a big economic recovery.
So then what happens? A newly-re-elected Strickland starts his next four year term with another big budget crisis in all likelihood. But he doesn’t have to run for re-election ever again. This seems like a time when he could potentially utter the dreaded “T” word — taxes. Strickland could use his political capital to propose a bargain to voters. “Like what’s happening in your school? The only way to keep it is if we raise taxes,” he could say. Otherwise, he’d tell people to prepare to see all his education changes dismantled.
Voters might not react well to this even a tax is approved. Would it kill Democrats’ chances in 2012 and 2014 if he pushed through a tax in early 2011? Maybe not. There would be two years before the 2012 election. Keep in mind that is three years from now. The Democrats could be greatly helped if the economy has started a turnaround. By the next governor’s race in 2014 — five years off from the worst of the economic crisis we expect to see this year in 2009 — if there has been enough economic recovery, the Democrats might be able to argue they fixed education while at the same time claiming credit for an improved economic climate.
But all this assumes a lot of things go Strickland and the Democrats’ way over the next several years. A lot could go wrong. The education plan could be viewed as a boondoggle. The statehouse could go all Republican in 2010. A Republican could win the governor’s race in 2012. The economy could get continuously worse over the next five years, hurting the party in power.
So you can see Strickland is making a few big bets. He is betting people will like the education plan and that the economy will recover. But if they do and if it does, there could be a lot of political gain.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Strickland determined to remain an activist
Ted Strickland is happy that he was the governor identified in the news media as pushing President Barack Obama first and hardest to bail out state governments through his stimulus package.
In a meeting Tuesday with editors and writers at this newspaper, the governor raised that subject himself. He was making a point of how tough times are for state governments, no matter how frugal they have been.
(He reiterated that in 2007 he submitted the lowest-growth budget the state had seen in a very long time. Since then, of course, he has only cut and cut from that budget, as the economy has worsened. He’s now submitting his second two-year budget.)
Strickland said that when he first spoke up to the president, his fellow governors didn’t join in, even though some told him privately that he was right. But eventually a bunch did make the same pitch to the administration. He listed several, all Democrats.
It’s not hard to see why Strickland was the first. He had a special problem. It was not simply that the Heartland has been hit especially long and hard by economic problems. It was also that he has long been publicly committed to unveiling his plan this year for overhauling the state’s approach to K-12 education and its funding. He knew it was going to be expensive.
It would entail the state taking over more of the burden for funding (thus reducing reliance on the local property tax). Besides that, he would have to do something to actually improve education.
What he has in mind is not the sort of proposal you normally see coming from governors in such difficult times. A lot of other governors (not all) are retrenching, with goals along the lines of stopping the bleeding. In California (an extreme case), the governor kept his state of the state speech to 11 minutes, saying there was not much to talk about until the state dealt with its monster deficit.
In New York, the word the governor used to describe his state’s circumstances was “perilous.” Strickland’s signature word was “steadfast.”
Where big proposals are being made by governors, they are, in some cases, like what’s being talked about in Washington: infrastructure projects to provide jobs.
Strickland’s determination not to be deterred from pre-recession goals has him talking about the expensive likes of all-day kindergarten, an expanded school year and school day, and flat tuition, not to mention providing health care for more children.
When former Congressman John Kasich, a Republican, first started talking about running against Strickland in 2010, he called the incumbent a “caretaker” governor. People who follow state government knew it was baloney.
Strickland had a property tax cut to his credit, plus an enacted stimulus plan and an overhaul of the state’s system for running higher education. Republicans who worked with him on those are proud of their own output.
But a candidate running against Strickland might reasonably hope that the public doesn’t see him as a dynamo. He’s done so much in a bipartisan way — minimizing conflict — that the headlines have been relatively few. And he’s a low-key guy.
Now, halfway through his term, he’s staking a particularly striking claim to the activist label, outdoing most of his peers in determination to push ahead. There are abundant excuses for inaction. He’s ignoring them.
Muhammad Ali used to say that the reason he predicted the round in which he would knock out his opponent was to put pressure on himself, to subject himself to a special degree of embarrassment if he failed to at least come close to the goal.
Strickland put himself under pressure by saying that he would come up with a genuine restructuring for elementary and high school education. He did that long before he had much of a clue about what he would propose. Now he has to perform. The pressure is on him. Obama felt some of it.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Pay cuts look good next to layoff notices
Gov. Ted Strickland isn’t settling for symbolism by asking state workers to take pay cuts of up to 6 percent. Even though he’s proposing a sliding scale — with lower paid workers giving up the least — he’s talking about real money.
He believes he can just impose the cuts on nonunion employees, but unionized workers would have to agree to a reduction.
A major union is balking, and who knows whether the Democratic governor — who campaigned with the support of organized labor — can bring people around.
(Other state elected officials may or may not follow his lead with regard to their workers; and if the governor wants to cut the pay of elected officials offices, he would have to change the law. Their salaries are set in statute.)
Mr. Strickland’s success may depend on how much worse the economy gets. It’s not inconceivable that pay cuts could look good to unions and their members if the economy keeps tanking.
“I expect some pushback,” Gov. Strickland said this week. “But I would hope that most groups and entities and individuals would recognize that we’re all in this together, and that there does need to be shared sacrifice.”
Get ready to hear a lot about “shared sacrifice.” In celebrating what could become increasingly common in both the public and private sectors, President Barack Obama, in his inauguration speech, talked about the “selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job….”
In the public sector — where profits aren’t a driver — pay cuts in this environment are designed purely to avert layoffs, a fact that’s worth keeping in mind when workers and union leaders are evaluating whether the governor is asking too much.
In truth, many public employees today are generally doing very well as compared to their private-sector peers with respect to job security, pay and benefits. Specifically, their defined-benefit pension plans — still the norm in public employment — are becoming rare to nonexistent in private industry. Moreover, their pension benefits are extremely generous by any yardstick, allowing many government workers to retire in their 50s and begin a second career.
All of this is financed with sizeable contributions from workers themselves, of course, but also from strapped taxpayers.
Meanwhile, workers outside of government who have been saving for their retirement through their employer-sponsored 401(k) plans have watched years of gains achieved through patient investing and saving go up in smoke. These people — taxpayers all — are going to have a hard time getting too bothered about 6 percent cuts for people in government, which — in all likelihood — probably would be temporary.
Too often government workers get a bad rap, even as many of them are doing important and indispensable work. They keep prisoners locked up; they make sure your water is safe to drink; they inspect bridges; they try to ensure that consumers aren’t scammed, and on and on.
When a Democratic governor is pleading for wage concessions — after he has spent his long political career taking up for workers — that’s a statement of how difficult things have become. Dismissing Mr. Strickland out of hand is denying a problem that very quickly could cost an awful lot of good people their very good jobs.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: ‘Buy American’ policy is protectionist and could backfire
“Saying he couldn’t understand why anyone would oppose it, Sen. Sherrod Brown defended a section of the stimulus bill that would require using American steel in all new projects financed by the measure.” — The Columbus Dispatch, Jan. 20
Couldn’t understand why, huh? How about this:
• Because that kind of provision would encourage other countries to put such provisions in any stimulus packages they might adopt, thus freezing out American businesses.
• Because if American firms face no international competition in landing government contracts, they feel less pressure to keep their prices down; making projects more expensive to taxpayers could reduce the number of projects that can be funded.
• Because the measure has already drawn headlines in foreign countries, from Australia to Canada to Europe, and has been denounced by international trade officials as representing a dangerous “protectionist” spirit and violating the spirit of previous American commitments.
Writes The Australian newspaper: “Fears that the world downturn will spark a trade war have been stoked by the inclusion of measures to protect the U.S. steel industry in Barack Obama’s … package to stimulate the economy.”
The House version has a “buy American” provision applied to iron and steel, some of which comes from Ohio. There are large stockpiles. The pending Senate version broadens the provision to cover all manufacturing materials.
The top leaders of the Ohio Legislature — one Democrat and one Republican — have pushed the Ohio delegation in Congress to support “buy American.”
They don’t have to push Sen. Brown. He has long been a skeptic of free trade. He shrinks from the label “protectionist,” though, preferring “fair trader.”
But this particular proposal is just flat protectionism.
Says Sen. Brown, “It is not a trade war for us to insist that products (the government uses) in this country are made in this country.”
“No one is advocating tariffs,” he notes. “No one is calling for quotas.”
But “buy American” as a government policy has a similar political and economic impact to tariffs (taxes on imported products) and quotas if the government is doing all the buying. That’s the situation now.
Washington may soon be spending hundreds of billions of dollars precisely because the private sector isn’t spending much. Shutting foreign companies out of a chance to compete for that government money — when other economies around the world are in dire straits, too — is a combative act of foreign policy, against our friends.
Says Sen. Brown of the domestic scene, “I’ve seen across-the-board support — with the exception of a few economists and a few newspaper publishers — for ‘made in America.’ “
Such measures do, indeed, seem to make sense to most people upon first hearing. But most people don’t bear a responsibility for looking below the surface and asking whether protectionism might backfire. Senators do.
This is the kind of time when trade wars are most likely to break out, because politicians are under a special level of pressure to protect their own constituents. Great care is needed.
President Barack Obama has rightly signalled concerns about the “buy American” provisions.
“We can’t send a protectionist message,” he said, something that will “trigger a trade war.”
During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama criticized some existing trade agreements as insufficiently protective of American workers. But for him to oppose a “buy-American” initiative is not to backtrack. It’s to recognize that the place to confront trade issues is over the bargaining table, not through unilateral actions that could be easily mimicked.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetOSU athletics going red
Anybody who’s been following the discussion here about athletic scholarships (Scholarships: Good idea or bad?) but doesn’t always see the sports pages might be interested in the latest news out of Columbus. OSU is saying its athletic department will be in the red this year for the first time in four years.
An NCAA study last year concluded that schools like OSU— in that they are likely get a lot of bowl invitations —; are among the very, very few that typically make any money off sports
Here’s the Associated Press story on OSU:
COLUMBUS— The scarlet and gray will soon be in the red.
Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith confirmed Sunday, Feb. 1, that for the first time in his four-year tenure, the Buckeyes’ athletic department is expected to lose money during the fiscal year ending June 30.
Smith said he didn’t know how much the department would fall short of projections, but revenues are down between $300,000 and $500,000 this year for the winning men’s basketball team.
“Maybe a couple hundred thousand,” he said of the possible total losses. “But it’s hard to tell.”
As part of a financial plan set three years ago, the athletic department will raise ticket prices $1 per game in football and men’s basketball across the board, except for students, Smith said.
The school is also paring down costs by allowing only essential personnel to travel to road games and cutting other personal expenses for employees, he said.
Ohio State, which has an annual athletic budget of more than $110 million, typically banks the excess earned from ticket sales, concessions, radio and TV contracts and other revenue sources in its athletic reserve fund.
“We’re behind a little bit on revenue in basketball — single-game tickets, concessions, revenue,” Smith said. “Once the economy started to shift, somewhere in October, we started to say, ‘Hey, this is going to hit us, and it’s hit us in this sport in particular.’ So we’re not hitting the single-game goals that we hoped to achieve.”
Smith, who took over as athletic director in 2005, said Ohio State would not cut any of its 36 sports, which is the highest number of teams at any school in the nation.
After the $1 increase, a football ticket would cost $63 next fall. Men’s basketball tickets will go up to $27 per game for the 2009-10 season. Tickets will go up another dollar starting in the fall of 2010, Smith said.
The vast majority of Ohio State’s athletic revenue comes from football. Smith said the Buckeyes must play a minimum of seven home games to support all of the school’s sports teams.
As for cutting sports teams, “we’re not even thinking about that,” Smith said. “I don’t anticipate that during my tenure. -END
Here’s more at the Columbus Dispatch.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Higher Ed, Martin Gottlieb, Sports and Recreation
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Strength with GOP base didn’t work for Blackwell — again
As seen from Ohio, the main news in the selection of a new chairman for the national Republican Party is that Ken Blackwell managed to lose even though it was the year for a black guy.
Two black men were seeking the chairmanship of a party that doesn’t have a single black member of Congress and hasn’t had for years. Blackwell and new-chairman Michael Steele must have constituted about half the black contingent at the GOP convention last summer, or so it seemed to the naked eye taking in things on television.
If the Republican rank-and-file has any doubt about whether the election of President Barack Obama really means change, surely that is resolved now.
Neither of these candidates for chairman came into the national race as any sort of conquering hero. One case for Steele over Blackwell was that his loss in a Maryland Senate race in 2006 was smaller than Blackwell’s loss of the Ohio governor’s race. And Steele can note that Maryland, unlike Ohio, is a clearly Democratic state.
Blackwell, the former secretary of state and treasurer, got into the chairmanship race later than Steele, the former lieutenant governor of his state. Blackwell apparently saw an opening on the right, because some diehard conservatives are skeptical of Steele’s commitment. Steele is a conservative, a commentator on Fox News and the author of the “Drill, baby, drill!” chant at the Republican convention.
But he opposes capital punishment. (As a former Catholic seminarian, he sees it in a similar light as abortion). And he said that running as a Republican in 2006 was like wearing a scarlet letter. And he doesn’t please the right on affirmative action. (Actually, though, some people might be a little surprised by what Blackwell has to say on that last one.)
Blackwell, after running last in early votes, withdrew and threw his support to Steele over a more clearly conservative candidate. But that candidate, from South Carolina, has belonged to an all-white country club. The party was skittish about going there, especially after a flap about another candidate who had circulated a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro.”
Weak field.
The logic of Steele over Blackwell has to look pretty sound even to somebody interested in seeing Ohioans in positions of national power.
Blackwell pursued the chairmanship the same way he ran for governor. The idea was to first lock up the right-wing of the more conservative party, then go from there. In Ohio, after he won the primary over a candidate who had once seemed stronger, he lost the general election in a historic landslide, running well behind even other Republicans in that Democratic year.
So one can see why the prospect of an intra-party fight was attractive to Blackwell. It would play to his strength.
Clearly, though, the Republicans are better off with somebody whose ideological image is a bit softer. Blackwell’s hard-line reputation puts a lot of Republicans on guard immediately. He was deeply controversial within the party in Ohio. State Chairman Robert Bennett supported another candidate for national chairman. Blackwell does not seem like the person to reach out to purple states.
The death of the Republican Party has been often overstated. This talk about it becoming a party of white southern males is nonsense. In Ohio, the counties in which it’s strongest are precisely the ones that are growing fastest: the ex-urban places like Warren, south of Dayton, and Delaware, outside of Columbus. The places where the Republicans are weakest — the big cities and their counties — are the areas that are losing population. Meanwhile, the Republicans are dominant in vast stretches.
If they had won the last couple of elections, these facts would be pointed to as the reason. When a party has a losing streak, some people always come along and say the problem is fundamental, having to do with long-term trends. Typically, though, it’s a just a losing streak brought about by fleeting factors.
Still, a chairman’s job is to ignore that kind of analysis, to assume that bad trends are at work that the party needs to come to terms with, and to recognize that the party needs to get creative about winning in areas beyond its base.
In being all about the base, Ken Blackwell did not put himself in a good position to compete for that kind of job.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Strickland’s plans are far from locked in
Gov. Ted Strickland got some big things right in his proposed two-year budget that he presented this week. He deserves credit for thinking boldly in extraordinarily difficult economic times when he might be tempted to step backward.
But for all the good ideas Gov. Strickland has put forward — strengthening schools, providing health care to more uninsured children, insisting tuition be held down — what’s missing is a reality check.
This $54 billion proposal chases big dreams, but it is built on a lot of hopeful wishes.
For the budget to work over the next two years, Ohio must get $3.4 billion from the federal stimulus package. Though that deal is not done, it’s a reasonable guess that the state will get a one-time gift.
In addition to getting this cash, Gov. Strickland is counting on a large percentage of the state’s 60,000 workers — including 35,000 represented by the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association — accepting pay cuts of up to 6 percent. Union leaders are balking.
Moreover, the plan is to drain the rainy day fund and borrow some money using the tobacco settlement as collateral; together these two sources represent $1.5 billion in revenue that is here today, but won’t be available in two years when the next budget is put together.
Finally, the proposal requires deep cuts at multiple state agencies, and big jumps in state fees paid by hospitals, nursing homes, car owners and others.
And, of course, the governor’s plan will go nowhere without agreement from the Republican-controlled Ohio Senate.
All these financial gymnastics could possibly get Ohio to 2011, at which point Gov. Strickland’s almost decade-long plan for a huge expansion in education spending — including a longer school year, longer school day, universal all-day kindergarten and other costly initiatives — would be just barely under way.
How in the world can those new programs be maintained beyond 2011?
The only way that could happen is for the national and state economies to make a dramatic rebound — fast— flooding state coffers with new revenue. But every indicator suggests more economic pain for the state over the next several years. A modest rebound by 2011 is not out of the question, though the big turnaround in Ohio’s economic fortunes that Gov. Strickland’s budget plans would require can only be called a long shot.
A lot of states, not just Ohio, are looking for help from the Obama administration and Congress. In a recession, spending by states invariably goes up because they’re paying more for a bigger safety net for people who are out of work and without health insurance. Meanwhile, the tax revenue that states are pulling in is dropping or flat. In these circumstances, it may be only the federal government that — through borrowing — can help keep money circulating, in part, by aiding states.
If everything goes exactly as planned, maybe Gov. Strickland can make this budget work. But it’s hard to see how he isn’t setting the state up for a devastating shortfall in 2011. All his good ideas won’t help Ohio if they’re junked after just two years and before they’ve even been fully implemented.
Much of what Gov. Strickland wants to do is hard to argue with. And, in fact, he’s imposing those ideas slowly because he simply can’t afford to make them happen all at once. But he’s being asked — rightly — if all the changes can be adopted even in 10 years. The questions are more than fair.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetStrickland: Fisher “best qualified” for Senate
Gov. Ted Strickland said Tuesday afternoon that Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher is the “best qualified” Democrat among those considering a run for U.S. Senate in 2010.
Strickland was in Dayton promoting his budget and his education program. After a meeting at the Dayton Daily News, he was asked about Senate race.
Strickland said he had met with Fisher Monday, and they discussed the race for the vacancy being created by the retirement of Sen. George Voinovich. Strickland said he thought Fisher hadn’t made the decision to run yet, but was clearly considering it.
The governor also said he didn’t think Attorney General Richard Cordray would make the race, because he just took office. But he said that other Democrats are understood to be interested, including Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, Toledo.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetScott Elliott: Five Oaks needs a school, even if it’s not Julienne
This is going to be hard for some people to accept. Emotional attachments to our past run deep and whenever possible we shouldn’t give them up.
But sometimes we should, in order to look forward to the future. For those who live in Dayton’s Five Oaks neighborhood around the former Julienne High School, this is a time to mourn, but then to let go. To do otherwise jeopardizes an opportunity the neighborhood must not miss.
Some of the neighbors who want to save Julienne have a false sense of the choice before them. They don’t have a choice between having a new school on Homewood Avenue or having a renovated Julienne.
The real choice is a $14 million new school in their neighborhood or no school at all.
Dayton Public Schools owns Julienne, having bought it in 2004 after Dayton Christian High School relocated to Miami Twp. School district leaders wanted a place to house Stivers School for the Arts while its Fifth Street building was rebuilt.
But that wasn’t the only reason the district wanted the building. Five Oaks has more kids who attend Dayton Public Schools than most neighborhoods. The Julienne site was a natural place for a new elementary school, as part of the district’s 10-year construction program.
Built in 1926, Julienne has genuine significance for thousands of Daytonians. The school played an important role in shaping the lives of a sizeable chunk of the city.
But the district doesn’t want to renovate the building because of the expense. Officials estimate renovation would cost the district $6 million more than the price of a new building. (The district was stung by the cost of renovating Stivers, a project that ran close to $16 million above the $24 million usual price tag for a new high school.)
Critics say the district’s numbers are wrong. But the school board believes them. It isn’t going to change course.
I’m not saying Julienne is not worth saving. But it is hard to see how it could be saved now. There really aren’t any other options to improve the site besides a school district project.
It has been almost a year since the school board said it was willing to consider other ideas; there haven’t been any. Last March, I called the Archdiocese of Cincinnati to see if it could help.
“We have our own financial needs to look at,” spokesman Dan Andriacco said, calling any interest from the Catholic Church “unlikely.”
How about Clay Mathile, the wealthy Dayton-area philanthropist known to support Catholic schools? A Mathile Family Foundation spokeswoman would only say the group would consider making grants to community groups proposing projects that fit its mission.
Maybe Chaminade Julienne High School would like to buy back the building? CJ officials told the district they don’t have the money or the need for another building.
Here’s what will likely happen if the neighborhood convinces the Dayton City Commission to block the new school, which is the recommendation of the planning board. The school district will scrap its plan for the Julienne site and build the new school about a mile away at the former site of Colonel White High School. School officials have already talked to Colonel White neighbors and believe they will have their buy-in.
If that happens, it will be devastating for Five Oaks, a neighborhood that has been among the hardest hit by crime and by the predatory lending scandal. A $14 million investment would be a big boost.
Also, if the school goes to Colonel White and no buyer ever comes forward for Julienne, it is district policy not to have any empty buildings at the end of its construction program. So the Julienne site could end up an empty lot.
The neighborhood must not let that happen. The kids, property owners and residents of Five Oaks need a school.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Trains becoming better choice for Ohio cities
Gov. Ted Strickland, in his State of the State speech last week:
“We will work toward the restoration of passenger rail service between Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland … for the first time in 40 years. This will be a first step toward a rail system that links neighborhoods within a city, and cities within our state.”
Not long ago, all talk of ambitious passenger rail plans for Ohio was pretty much limited to a few stalwart dreamers. The state’s voters rejected a train proposal decades ago, and that pretty much settled things for the pragmatic classes in Columbus.
So that statement in Gov. Strickland’s speech Wednesday was big. No longer a dream, passenger rail service is now a government policy.
And the good news for train fans is not limited to that. Just last week, the Ohio Department of Transportation got a new director, and she’s big into trains. Jolene Molitoris has been the second-ranking person at ODOT, meanwhile serving as the chair of the Ohio Rail Development Commission. That commission was created by the state in 1994 “to plan, promote and implement the improved movement of goods and people faster and safer on a rail transportation network connecting Ohio to the nation and the world.”
Before she was at ODOT, Ms. Molitoris was in charge of the Federal Railroad Administration, which regulates rail safety, among other things.
Nor does the good news stop there. The Obama administration is seen as friendly to the idea of expanded rail service, whereas insiders say the Bush administration was bigger into buses. The recent effort of the city of Columbus to get an intra-city rail project in line for federal funds resulted in part from the perception of greater friendliness in Washington, even absent a federal stimulus package.
The federal government will be crucial in whatever happens on the “3-C” corridor the governor mentioned.
The good news about rail service is good news for Dayton, which is ideally situated to benefit. The 3-C project would not do much for most other cities of similar size. Toledo, for example, and Youngstown are likely to see the governor’s plan as just another project benefiting the big cities.
But the 3-C line is likely to go through Dayton, because the plans are to build the service along already existing train lines. Old lines connect Dayton and Springfield to Cincinnati and Columbus. Otherwise, some people might push for service up Interstate 71 from Cincinnati to Columbus, a more direct route than through Dayton.
Rail transportation is expensive to build and operate. Skeptics have long insisted that a 3-C corridor wouldn’t make enough money to pay operational expenses, much less capital expenses. But times are changing.
Gas prices are unpredictable at best. People are more aware of environmental issues. Families are wondering how many vehicles they’ll be able to afford in the future. More and more people live between the major cities.
Meanwhile, the construction of trains looms as a possible source of jobs.
A dramatic recession might seem like an odd time for a society to be moving ahead in a realm that was considered too expensive when times were much better. But the recession is causing the president to for more federal spending as a stimulus.
Passenger trains have proved useful in the most densely populated parts of the country, particularly the two coasts. Ohio is sort of the next step downward in density: it’s not the Washington-Boston axis, but it’s not Montana, either. It could be the next place.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Transportation
TweetState employees’ salaries all online
The conservative Buckeye Institute has unveiled an online data base listing all state employees’ salaries.
Just type in a name, and up comes the individual’s salary. A press release says you can also search by the highest to lowest paid.
I spent a few minutes typing in the names of several state employees I know, and the search was easy and quick. There’s a disclaimer that says that users should be certain to verify the information if they’re using the salary data for something “important.”
The release comes on the day Gov. Ted Strickland put out his proposed two-year budget, in which he’s asking state employees to take up to 6 percent pay cuts, depending on how much they earn.
The Buckeye Institute says Ohio has 60,480 employees.
Here’s a column I wrote last month about the Buckeye Institute’s efforts to promote transparency in government.
Permalink | Comments (42) | Post your comment | Categories: Ohio politics
TweetFees, wage cuts fuel Strickland’s budget
Early reports on the details of Gov. Ted Strickland’s budget proposal that was released today show him seeking to raise money through a 6 percent pay cut for state employees and new fees for everything from hospital franchises to $5.75 more to register a car.
These moves are designed in part to offset what Strickland says will be $925 million in new spending on education as part of a huge reform of the state’s school system that he proposed last week in his state of the state address.
Even with the new revenue sources Strickland suggests with the budget, it’s hard to see how he can cover the cost of all that new education spending. One possibility? He’s not exactly spending what he says he is spending on education. That’s what Akron Beacon Journal Columbus Bureau Chief Dennis Willard, a real expert in school funding, thinks is going on.
It also will be interesting to see how state workers react to the idea of a big wage cut. Six percent is quite a reduction in individual spending power. That would be tough for any family budget to absorb.
UPDATE: Here’s a longer AP story on the budget.
UPDATE 2: Here’s a handy list of 10 things you should know about Gov. Ted Strickland’s budget.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Strickland’s school changes would reduce local control
Gov. Ted Strickland has people talking about schools.
When he said last week that he wants to add a month to the school calendar, extend the school day and mandate all-day kindergarten, he was talking about things that parents and even those who don’t have children can relate to.
When he called for a four-year “residency program” for new teachers, likening them to doctors, you can bet that the state’s teachers were reacting, along with all the college students who are in the pipeline to join that profession.
These and other ideas could be good things.
But if the governor gets his way, his changes will come with price tags. One, of course, will be financial. The other will be a loss of local control. The governor, in multiple ways, is proposing to take significantly more ownership of how schools are run.
In exchange for increasing what the state pays toward operating schools — with the goal of reducing how often school districts need to ask for property tax levies — Gov. Strickland is insisting on a bigger role. On average, the state currently pays about 52 percent of the cost of educating a child; the governor, over a decade, would ramp up that figure to 59 percent.
That represents a huge commitment from the state. By suggesting a phased-in approach over 10 years, Gov. Strickland is limiting the spending choices of future governors and legislatures. They would be saddled with the full costs of his ideas, while he would only have to partially fund them. His calculation may be that all good and expensive things take time, but once the ball is rolling, there’s no turning back.
Imagine a candidate for governor in 2016 saying that having kids in school 200 days a year is too expensive, and that Ohio should cut back to the old days of just 180. Could be a big fight.
Gov. Strickland says that, in addition to measuring student achievement through new tests (he would junk the Ohio Graduation Test and the state’s current proficiency tests), districts themselves should be rated on how well they spend people’s money.
Presumably that means schools would be told in more precise ways what to spend on teachers (versus, say, administrators), for employee benefits, books, computers and so on. That will be serious pressure. How, for example, could a district with a “C” rating for its financial stewardship even think of going to voters for a levy?
Possibly Gov. Strickland has come to the conclusion that other countries that have a more centralized educational system are on to something. After two years of listening to briefings about the issue, apparently he has decided that having a more uniform approach to running schools would result in the quicker adoption of best practices, and that some important decisions simply have to come from the top.
If you like what the “top” wants, no problem. If you don’t, well, try fighting Capitol Square and the Ohio Department of Education. It won’t be easy.
Gov. Strickland, who was enthusiastically supported by teachers’ unions, offered up ideas that they will not like. Even if the school year is expanded slowly, it’s still hard to picture them getting a dollar-for-dollar adjustment for all those additional days.
He also complained about how hard it is to fire teachers and said he wants to change that. Coming from somebody who doesn’t take cheap shots at people just because they’re in a union, this criticism had to make teachers pause. How sincere he is about really fixing the situation isn’t clear yet.
Gov. Strickland’s speeches about schools have evolved. Where once he mainly emphasized making sure that schools had enough money, now he says he wants to add some money to the pot — but he wants to change how the vast sums are being spent. Understandably, there are plenty of skeptics about whether his math really adds up.
What is clear is that a debate about big changes for Ohio’s schools and educators has been opened.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
TweetA good time to reflect on Dayton’s black history
If you’re into Dayton history, you could lose whole days poking around at the Daytonology blog. Today, Jeffrey kicks off Black History Month by gathering up links to his past posts on Dayton’s black neighborhoods. Reading through them you can really learn about how the city was shaped by its racial politics.
I’d also recommend this 2007 post I wrote at Get on the Bus that relates to this topic.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Scott Elliott
TweetKevin Riley: In the end, teachers hold the key to good schools
Of all the bold education-reform proposals Gov. Ted Strickland made in his State of the State address last week, one stands out. It would have the biggest impact on how well our kids do in school.
And it isn’t adding 20 days to the school calendar, requiring all-day kindergarten or replacing the Ohio Graduation Test — ideas that are getting lots of attention and will be debated and analyzed to death in the coming months.
Strickland’s “High Quality Educator” proposal, which aims to get better teachers into classrooms, has the chance to create the biggest bang.
Education experts are notorious for falling in love with the hottest trends inspired by the latest research. One example is the phonics versus whole language debate in teaching reading. To us non-experts, it seems like every few years the theories change.
But there is one thing the experts do agree on: nothing has a more positive effect on how much kids learn than a good teacher.
So Strickland is going for the big play, hoping he can fundamentally change how Ohio’s teachers are taught, trained, tracked — and fired.
His proposal calls for:
• Four levels of teachers — resident, professional, senior and lead. Teachers would gain the next level based on credentials, experience and student progress.
• A teacher “residency” program that would last four years and mimic medical training. At the end, good teachers would move up and poor ones would leave the profession.
• Tighter control by the state on how teachers are trained and tracked.
The last point is no small matter. In Ohio, there are 50 public and private institutions that prepare teachers. While all have to meet certain requirements, there’s a large variation in what teachers learn and how good they are.
Also, Ohio produces more teachers than it needs. According to the state Department of Education, 7,830 teachers came out of Ohio colleges in 2006-07, but 5,688 teachers were hired to work here.
That makes Ohio an exporter of teachers. Wouldn’t it make more sense to create fewer, but better, teachers, and keep them here?
Several things could happen if Strickland gets his way:
• The quality of students who become teachers would improve. Teachers generally come from the group of students who score lower on the college entrance exams than their peers who go into, say, engineering or science.
• Getting into colleges’ schools of education would be harder as the state worked to develop high-quality programs that could accommodate fewer, more intensively trained students. Colleges compete for students to meet enrollment goals — and there are many education majors who help schools meet those goals. If the number of education majors is capped, some schools will suffer.
• Teachers would be accountable in new ways with the emphasis on student academic growth. The idea is simple: all students, wherever they begin, should achieve a year’s worth of improvement in a year’s time.
How can you tell if a teacher is good or not? The state has experimented with quantifying success, but there’s controversy ahead.
Currently, the state’s Ohio Graduation Test measures what students know at a moment in time. The governor’s proposal would track student progress to measure how much kids are learning over the school year. This value-added measurement can show the impact a teacher is having.
That value-added data will be essential if the state is really going to try to identify ineffective teachers. (You can find this value-added measurement on the state’s school “report cards,” but it isn’t part of the rating system.)
At one point in his speech, the governor said that students aren’t “widgets.” That was a way of signaling that he wants teachers and an educational system that respond to unique and changing student needs; preparing our kids for state tests is not enough.
His ideas aren’t new, and many have been tried elsewhere.
The question is: Can Ohio take the steps to really make its teachers better?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Kevin Riley
TweetEditorial: What will it take to grow NCR here?
NCR Corp. has Dayton and Ohio over a barrel. There’s growing uneasiness that the global company that began in Dayton isn’t vested in the state. Yet, when politicians from the governor’s people to local community leaders put that concern to company executives, they say not to worry.
Not to worry? Are they kidding?
First the company’s chief executive Bill Nuti is supposed to move to Dayton. Then his board decides he shouldn’t have to live here because of a personal situation. Next the company’s executive offices — and those 150 jobs — are moved to Manhattan. Then the company makes a major expansion in Georgia, an expansion that, had it happened here, would have resulted in the company’s presence increasing by 900 employees, up from about 1,300.
That move was made without even allowing Dayton and Ohio to compete for the positions.
Looking at this collection of decisions, a reasonable person has to ask what’s going on. To not worry, to not try to meet with Mr. Nuti, would be sheer negligence.
On Jan. 25, Staff Writer Thomas Gnau recounted this chronology of events in a news story headlined, “NCR, Dayton ties unravel.” It was a short history — all these things have happened in three brief years. A spokesman for NCR, however, says effectively that nothing has changed, “The company has said Dayton is our headquarters.”
OK, but there are gnawing questions about the future. And it’s hard to feel good about the coming years when people in Ohio hardly have a relationship with a company that dates back 120 years in Dayton.
NCR is exactly the sort of business — heavy into new technology, serious about research and development, global in its reach — that the Dayton region and Ohio need to attract and to keep. Landing companies that are scouting around for a place to do business is immensely harder than keeping what you already have. Losing an enterprise that already is in a community can mean that somebody is not doing his or her job.
Who specifically needs to be on this problem? For starters: Gov. Ted Strickland, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner and even Rep. John Boehner (who represents a slice of Montgomery County and is the House Minority leader), state Sen. Jon Husted (who has had good connections to the company) and the Dayton Development Coalition.
Dayton and Ohio can’t expect a company in an extremely competitive business to care about sentimentality. Mr. Nuti’s obligations are to the company’s shareholders, its customers and employees. That requires those who want to grow NCR’s presence in Ohio to know what the company’s future needs are and whether it has complaints about Dayton or the state.
Obviously, private companies can shut out people that they don’t want to get through their doors. But if they’re not approached, if they’re not courted aggressively, then executives have an excuse to take their jobs elsewhere.
If the day comes that NCR makes another expansion that’s not in Ohio, or if it moves more jobs, state and local public officials need to be able to lay out exactly how hard they tried to sell the company on Dayton. They need to be able to document precisely what they did to be proactive.
NCR’s ties to this community are too valuable to Dayton’s future to let it get away in increments without a fight.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business
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