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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 > March
March 2009
Editorial: AT&T’s answers regarding 911 are poor
AT&T owes Montgomery County better answers than it had Tuesday when its representative tried to explain why its 911 equipment didn’t work last week. An 81-year-old woman’s home burned while neighbors tried to report the fire.
The most important question that AT&T isn’t answering — and that Sheriff Phil Plummer and County Administrator Deborah Feldman have not been able to wring out of the company — is:
What level of call volume did the company’s engineers test before they gave the OK for the $1.5 million system to begin operating?
Michael Kehoe, vice president of AT&T Ohio, was asked that question again Tuesday. He said he didn’t have a technical manual with him. In fact, it should not be hard to say how hard AT&T technicians were stressing the system during their simulations.
The fear is that the test wasn’t intense enough. On opening day of the county’s dispatching operation, an estimated eight calls coming in rapid succession stopped emergency calls from getting through.
Mr. Kehoe insisted Tuesday that AT&T operates 911 systems across the country and that thousands of calls are routed successfully every day. But, surely, when the company pitches its products, it tells potential buyers what kind of testing they can expect.
And, not to let Sheriff Plummer off the hook: As the operator of the dispatch center and effectively the project manager for bringing the new center up, Sheriff Plummer needed to know the answer to this question before the old center was turned off and became the back-up.
Yes, he should be able to rely on AT&T’s professionals. But when so much is riding on a product, his job is to make sure vendors are delivering what they promise. Meanwhile, there is this new wrinkle: The problem last week took hours to discover. Dispatchers learned about 3:30 p.m. March 26 from the media that calls from the Harrison Twp. fire were going unanswered.
But it wasn’t until 11:30 that night that Sgt. Matt Haines (the son of former Sheriff Gary Haines) discovered that calls were randomly, and at other times because of high volume, not getting through.
That time lag is horrifying.
A programming error in the device that routes calls was not the only problem that has been discovered. Some AT&T lines also weren’t working, though that malfunction didn’t result in any missed calls.
Finally, the Emergency Communication Policy Committee — a board of mostly elected officials that makes decisions about how the dispatch center is run — has twice recently not been able to get a quorum at its quarterly meetings. What do you want to bet that there will be a full house at the next one?
Given all the fuss by local governments that wanted a say in the center’s operations when former Sheriff Dave Vore was promoting the value of a regional dispatch center, this is amazing. If people don’t have time to serve, they shouldn’t commit.
If it’s staffers who should be there making decisions, then change the group’s make-up.
So far, there’s little that’s inspiring about Montgomery County’s move to consolidating 911 services.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Montgomery County, Suburban Communities
TweetMartin Gottlieb: New generation to have less than parents in school sports?
American pollsters like to ask people if they think their children will have a better life than theirs. The question supposedly gets at something fundamental. Americans are typically optimistic about the country. Any time they are not so optimistic, that’s presented as a sea change, and as an indication that they are about to demand a change in government.
And yet, more and more these days, concrete examples arise of material things getting worse from one generation to another. One such realm is school sports.
People of a certain generation took school sports for granted. You “went out” for a sport without thinking twice about the expense. There was no expense, no downside to having fun, forming a circle of friends, getting exercise and staying out of trouble.
Maybe you went to a school that didn’t have a sport you wanted. But if it was there, it was free.
That day is gone in, by some estimates, about 40 percent of Ohio high schools. It has been gone in some places through much of this decade, but the number of schools is increasing. So are the fees.
State circumstances vary widely. About half the high schools in the country charge fees for extracurricular activities. In New Jersey, only about 15 percent of schools charge.
Some states ban such fees. But that sometimes ends up meaning that, when budget troubles hit, a school system considers ending sports programs entirely.
In Ohio, when fees are instituted or raised — or when programs are shut down — the immediate reason always seems to be the defeat of tax levies.
In Springboro, where trying to pass a levy is not a fun sport, the school board has announced that its $200 per-athlete fee will go to $475 for high school sports if the district’s May 5 levy fails. A family could end up spending a total of $1,900.
The five-year levy is for 4.11 mills, or about $126 per $100,000 of assessed value of a home.
The Sugarcreek school district also has a levy on the May 5 ballot, a renewal for 9 mills. If it fails, sports and music programs are among those in jeopardy, say school officials. Families are already slated to pay $100-a-sport next year.
At a school in Licking County, all middle- and high-school sports have been canceled for this spring. In Reynoldsburg, outside Columbus, they’re talking about $800 per sport.
Typically, sports only account for about 2 percent of a school’s budget, give or take a percent. So administrators can’t perform any miracles for the academic side by cutting sports or charging for them.
But schools are under so much pressure to do more academically that ultimately attention does turn to sports budgets.
The situation isn’t likely to improve. Gov. Ted Strickland has a plan for somewhat redistributing the burden of funding schools. But he wants to do much on the academic side. With money tight, it would be foolish to expect a new day for sports.
In many places, boosters have stepped in to help defray expenses. Outside help would appear to be the future, if sports are to be maintained at their old level and students are not to be excluded because of family income.
All over the Dayton area — including in Springboro — Premier Health Partners (a hospital company) has bought naming rights to high school stadiums by putting up money for capital improvements and more.
Surely there are enough businesses that would see some public relations value to chipping in on sports, in return for tasteful promotions of their names. It’s hardly a new idea: promoting a company through youth sports.
Pressure ought to be put on professional sports leagues to cough up something. They have benefited from generations of help from schools at all levels.
If school sports had never been free to children, the idea of making them free now would be denounced as a radical socialist scheme. (The same is true about public libraries. Can you imagine somebody proposing that the government lend books to people for free? Horrors!)
But the question now is whether we want our children and grandchildren to have less than we had.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Martin Gottlieb, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial Wagoner not so bad, but wrong symbol; should Obama have this power?
Maybe Rick Wagoner should blame AIG for the loss of his job as the head of General Motors.
Auto industry insiders and close observers like to critique the performances of specific executives, and to, implicitly at least, credit or blame them for what happens on their watches. It’s a natural enough tendency. And yet, to the outsider, the problems seem to transcend personalities.
After all, the personalities keep changing.
GM, for example, has gone through multiple chairmen and CEOs in its decades of decline. Every time there’s a change, the outgoing executive sees his record widely portrayed as a series of mistakes and missed opportunities. And the new guy sees his resume presented as evidence that he has the answers.
But the decline just continues and continues, albeit with an uptick here and there. So it’s a little difficult to get excited about President Barack Obama’s decision to oust Mr. Wagoner as GM’s chairman and CEO.
True, Mr. Wagoner has had the kind of bottom-line record that often leads to being fired. The company is in collapse, and its stock price has gone through several floors.
But GM did get hit in the last few years by brutal blows for an auto company already in decline: the explosion in gas prices and the collapse of the auto market.
Yes, Mr. Wagoner made mistakes in his tenure. He got too excited at a certain stage about gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles.
But he has done most of what the long-term critics of the auto industry have called for: downsized (repeatedly), negotiated lower salaries for new employees, reduced the company’s overwhelming health care costs for employees and retirees, pushed for an electric car scheduled for the market next year.
Little of that matters. The case against him isn’t just about merits. It’s about symbolism. President Obama has to prove that he is not coddling CEOs if he wants to sustain public and congressional support for federal aid to the auto companies.
This whole coddling-of-executives issue is pretty hot at the moment, thanks to AIG.
The best substantive case for dumping Mr. Wagoner is that his successor will be particularly empowered to make major changes. After all, everybody will see more clearly than ever that Mr. Obama is serious. And he is the man with the money.
President Obama complains that GM’s pending plan is not aggressive enough to justify more government money. He asked for a new plan even as he was asking Mr. Wagoner to step aside.
As part of the plan, the White House wants GM bondholders and the union to accept GM stock instead of money the company owes them. Tough sell, given the value of the stock now. The White House wants a CEO to make all this happen, while also cutting GM’s operations more than Mr. Wagoner proposes.
The right of the president to pressure Mr. Wagoner out cannot be doubted, given the role of taxpayer money in GM’s fate. Moreover, few are likely to fault the president’s decision, given that GM management regularly gets bashed from all sides.
Ultimately, though, the president will be judged by results, not symbolism. Getting the right results at GM will require a lot more than getting rid of a CEO.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Martin Gottlieb
TweetCheck out before and after photos of ‘Flyover’
Looking for the photo gallery of the Flyover sculpture that we mention in Tuesday’s editorial? Click here to view the pictures.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local History
TweetWright sculpture made right
What else is there to say but better late than never.
Downtown Dayton’s outdoor sculpture representing the Wright brothers’ 1903 historic fly at Kitty Hawk is being fixed. The ugly, drooping, cracking blue tiles on the base of the artwork on South Main Street have been taken off.
The steel structure, which has been subject to much debate (critics never took the time to “get it”) commemorates Orville’s Wright’s 12-second flight, during which he flew 120 feet.
It’s a lovely piece of public art — but for the pedestal, which was as distracting as it was dysfunctional. As soon as the grasses around it are green and growing again — bringing to mind the dunes at Kitty Hawk — the median will be eye-catching, not an eyesore.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment |
TweetWatch Obama sign bill for Oakwood’s Hawthorn Hill
Amanda Wright Lane, the great-grandniece of Orville and Wilbur Wright, is in Washington, D.C. today — by invitation of the White House — to be there when President Barack Obama signs legislation adding the Wrights’ Hawthorn Hill home in Oakwood and the Wright factory buildings to Dayton’s national park.
The signing is being live streamed, starting at 3 p.m.
Click here to view it.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Ellen Belcher, Local History
TweetCity finally fixing Wright flight sculpture
Last summer, we wrote about an embarrassing situation for the city of Dayton. With the Dayton Air Show going on and an Aviation Hall of Fame event downtown, the showcase sculpture in the center of downtown had fallen into disrepair. Instead of inviting out-of-town guests here celebrating flight to enjoy the sculpture, which represents the Wright’s 1903 first flight, everyone was hoping nobody would notice it.
The problem was a design flaw. Tiles along the base kept falling off because of moisture buildup, and efforts to repair it had failed to solve the problem. City officials, with lots of major headaches going on, were a bit exasperated that we were asking so many questions about this seemingly minor issue. But, at the time, the editorial board argued a fix was needed because of the symbolic importance of the statue and the message its disrepair sent about Dayton’s attitude toward its past and future.
Well, good news. The city has repaired the scuplture with a sensible fix — they removed the tiles. To read last summer’s editorial, follow the “continued” link.
Our July 19, 2008 editorial:
This weekend 80,000 people are expected to attend the two-day Vectren Dayton Air Show at the Dayton International Airport.
The event, in its 34th year, attracts aviation enthusiasts from across the country to Dayton, the city where the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Some of them will visit our other aviation attractions — the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, the National Aviation Hall of Fame and monuments like Huffman Prairie and the Wright Cycle bike shop, which are part of Dayton’s national park.
Let’s just hope out-of-towners passing through downtown on the way to visit these places don’t stop to get too close a look at the “Flyover” sculpture on South Main Street.
The sculpture, a 120-foot abstract representation of the Wright brothers’ historic first flight, has fallen into an embarrassing state of disrepair. Installed in 1996 by the city Public Arts Commission, the sculpture is suppsed to be a celebration of Dayton’s heritage as a leader in flight. If its patchy appearance today represents how the city feels about aviation, we’re in a world of hurt.
The sculpture has “fallen off” the city’s regular maintenance cycle. Several of the tiles have slipped loose from the base, leaving ugly bare spots.
From the beginning, the “Flyover” has required more maintenance than expected. A 2003 fix made things better, but has not stopped the problem of falling tiles. City officials say a repair job is planned for next year, and, given the city’s tight budgets, “It’s the best we can do,” spokesman Tom Biedenharn said.
The city has to do better. Aviation is important to Dayton, and not just because of what the Wright brothers did 100 years ago.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the many high-tech businesses that serve it have always been important to the regional economy. But in a more high-tech future and with ever fewer local manufacturing jobs, growing this key local asset is a high-stakes economic priority.
Safeguarding the symbols of Dayton’s aviation strength matters. That’s why the air show, for instance, needed to understand the factors that led to its first fatal crash last year and reassure spectators that the event is safe. The whole region has a stake in the air show’s success.
Which is why Dayton should be pushing to build on its heritage.
The air show was once known as the United States Air and Trade show, bringing vendors, buyers and national attention to Dayton, until the trade show side of the event fell victim to competition from bigger air shows. An effort to restore the trade show in the future by focusing on niche products took some steps in the right direction last year, but still has a way to go.
Compared to a big play like restoring a national trade show, sprucing up the “Flyover” might not seem like a big deal. But it is.
One of the air show-related activities this weekend will bring 750 people to the downtown Crowne Plaza Hotel for the 2008 National Aviation Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. The Crowne Plaza is directly adjacent to the “Flyover” sculpture.
Daytonians shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of visitors by the very representation of the moment when the city’s future as a leader in flight took hold.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Local History, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Compromise best for both Centerville and Sugarcreek
It appears Centerville and Sugarcreek Twp. have finally declared a truce that resolves a bunch of problems surrounding the disputed annexation of the former Dille family farm near the intersection of Interstate 675 and Wilmington Pike.
That’s a big relief and long overdue. If both sides follow through on their promises, part of the dispute will be over by the summer. That is a very good thing.
Still, a legal game of chicken already has played out far enough in court to force Centerville to press ahead with appeals, which still could complicate development for this project and even those in other cities.
Under the truce, the Dille land will unquestionably become part of Centerville, as Sugarcreek has said it will not fight a court ruling to that effect. That would potentially clear the way for development to begin.
As part of the deal, Centerville has agreed to an extension of Clyo Road east of Wilmington Pike. That gives the township’s fire department much quicker access to many more neighborhoods.
Additionally, the extended part of Clyo Road will be adjacent to existing shopping centers, creating the opportunity for development in the township, which would benefit taxpayers there.
Ending this war will hopefully promote better cooperation between Centerville and Sugarcreek Twp. These two neighbors should be partners who work together on economic development, public safety and other issues. Everyone needs to move past hard feelings and embrace cooperation going forward.
Even if that happens, a big issue remains unsettled: Centerville’s desire to use “tax increment financing,” which would allow the city to spend future tax revenues from the developed property to help make the improvements to the land today.
Sugarcreek opposed using its future tax revenues to help finance the project. Efforts to negotiate a settlement failed and led to a lawsuit by the township. The township won when a Greene County court ruled TIF funding was not permitted on an annexation of this type.
Centerville says development of the Dille land cannot be effectively executed without TIF funding. Moreover, other cities have urged Centerville to fight the ruling, which could be used to prevent similar projects elsewhere. City Manager Greg Horn said Centerville is willing to appeal its case to the Ohio Supreme Court, if needed.
This is a cautionary tale for other intergovernmental disputes. Both sides benefit from the resolution worked out on the Clyo Road expansion. It would have been better for both if they could have done the same with the TIF issue. Instead, the TIF court rulings take on higher stakes with every appeal. If the ruling stands, dozens of TIF agreements for places like The Greene in Beavercreek or Union Centre in West Chester might be threatened.
In the end, either cities or townships across Ohio could lose big from the resolution of the court case. Somebody will end up sorry they didn’t settle before going to court.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Sheriff has to own up to 911 debacle
Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer tried to explain why, on the first business day for the regional dispatch center, it took 13 minutes before emergency personnel got to a fire and why calls reporting the blaze went unanswered.
But the details he released Friday didn’t change the frightening facts: The fire at 2449 Wheeler Ave. in Harrison Twp. was roaring by the time trucks arrived. An 81-year-old woman was taken to the hospital.
Though she is expected to recover, what if she had not been able to get out?
First of all, technical glitches — with unanswered phone calls to 911 ringing up to 22 times — resulted in the loss of four to five minutes for that reason alone. In addition, one dispatcher was as confused as a terrified neighbor reporting the blaze.
In fact, confusion reigned.
Harrison Twp. firefighters initially went to a wrong address; one caller was bounced from one dispatch center to another and then back again.
The buck has to stop with Sheriff Plummer. He, however, oddly says he is only accountable for a particular dispatcher who didn’t follow protocol. He argues that the 911 operation is “not totally” his responsibility, that the center’s board shares in the responsibility for operations.
Is he serious? If that’s really what he believes, then he shouldn’t have day-to-day management responsibility for this service.
A regional center was supposed to prevent just this sort of nightmare from happening. The consolidated operation, for example, is supposed to have technically superior equipment to what most police and fire departments have or will be able to afford in the future. To that point, Sheriff Plummer says the switching apparatus that hung on to calls, rather than sending them to dispatchers, is a “$1 million piece of equipment.”
Yes, but — it didn’t work.
The debacle has embarrassed more than Sheriff Plummer. The regional dispatching operation at 460 Vantage Point in Miamisburg was supposed to be this region’s shining example of how, if governments cooperated, citizens would be served better for less money.
Now those communities that didn’t join in — mostly because of objections from their police and firefighters who didn’t want jobs being transferred to the sheriff’s domain — can point to this incident as justification for sticking with what they have and know.
And they will have a legitimate, unforgettable horror story.
Awful as the situation is, it does not discredit the concept of pooling money to buy the best equipment and to jointly operate an essential component of every community’s fire and police operations. Plenty of places across the country have joint dispatching, and the operations work smoothly and efficiently.
Many of those local governments insist they’re also saving money. (Cost, though, is another thing that local proponents have had to back down on. Some governments are going to be paying substantially more per emergency call than they bargained for, at least for now.)
What has been most severely compromised is Sheriff Plummer’s ability to bring this operation on line. Though he insists the Nortel manufacturing testing guidelines were followed and that he believes that Nortel, AT&T and his staff took all the necessary precautions before they flipped the switch, something major went wrong.
Thank goodness no one was killed.
Permalink | Comments (56) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Montgomery County, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Ohio, Dayton politicos must fight ugly times
Dayton and other cities have elections this year, and Ohio is seeing the beginning of the 2010 campaigns. All this comes at a bad time, politically speaking.
It’s not just that things have been going poorly for the nation, the state and the Dayton community. It’s the way a lot of people are reacting.
Doesn’t it seem like the worse things get, the dumber people get?
Certainly the politicians are proceeding on that assumption. This newspaper has received e-mail from Congressman Dave Camp (he’s from Michigan) with the subject line: “End the Pelosi Recession.”
Maybe the sense that political “discourse” is getting dumber results from the fact that, in a time like this, thoughtful people think more and talk less, knowing they don’t have all the answers. Only the less thoughtful get heard.
So we see a president who is trying to revive American capitalism being regularly, ritually and insistently damned as a socialist, with perfect certitude; and, of course, as an incompetent and a hypocrite.
His critics have apparently given up on the “liberal” charge. They have upped the rhetorical ante.
On what might be considered the other side of the political spectrum, last week there was the reaction of the U.S. House of Representatives to the outrageous bonuses at taxpayer-funded AIG.
Trying to tax the money back reflects and understandable urge. But for observers, the suspicion is difficult to avoid that the politicians felt they could not slow down and ponder, because too many people would react angrily to the appearance of calm at a time like this. (The Senate, however, has slowed things down.)
To some, perhaps, the first appearance of a president of the United States on “The Tonight Show” was another example of the decline of discourse. In fact, though, he did some good for discourse.
He talked sanely about the need to think about long-term solutions, rather than quick fixes, about the need for a different kind of economy, built around engineers and the like, not financial manipulators (and not government).
He set a tone that Dayton and Ohio could use in the upcoming elections.
People around here have been hit harder than most by the nation’s decline. Whereas other places have seen dramatic deterioration in their economies after a period of relative stability or small growth, Dayton and Ohio have seen decline coming in the wake of decline.
Ohio politics is inevitably infected by viruses in the national political system. Local and state elections will bring out the haters and dummies and people who are certain they know everything important, never mind that much of what they “know” is wrong. They are already relentlessly active on the Internet and elsewhere.
Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin (who’s facing a newcomer in Gary Leitzell in her re-election bid), and Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher and former Congressman Rob Portman (who could face each other for the U.S. Senate next year) have establish their reputations. They are not polarizers, not spreaders of hatred. This time, though, they should do more than avoid bad behavior.
They should, for example, foster a series of debates in their races — whether primaries or general elections. Last year’s presidential debates helped bring the campaign down to earth, helped people see the real differences, not those shouted about at campaign rallies and elsewhere.
Last year’s election actually brought a moment of uplift to the nation, despite the background noise coming from the people for whom politics and hatred are inseparable. The candidates of this year and next cannot be expected to be Barack Obamas. But if they can borrow some of his style — from his campaign and his presidency — they will be doing well.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Trains a needed travel option
When this newspaper editorialized in favor of Ohio pursuing federal stimulus money for the 3C passenger rail project (Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati, via Dayton) earlier this month, the response was, as usual, mixed.
Some readers responded with objections and qualms. They posted comments on the editorial page blog (DaytonDailyNews.com/opinionblog), sent letters to the editor and contributed Speak Up comments. Here are some of the points they raised and some responses:
Will enough people use the trains?
Most commonly, they simply doubted whether enough people would use the trains to make them worth the expense. They pointed out the limited appeal of bus travel. Some said the appeal of trains would be limited by the fact that they would go mainly from downtowns to downtowns, thus raising questions about connections at the other end.
Train service would not replace automobiles for most people. Trains will appeal to a niche. Just as cars, planes and buses work for particular people in particular circumstances, so would trains.
Some people do need to go from downtown to downtown. That’s probably less true of Daytonians than people in bigger cities, given how few people are downtown to begin with. On the other hand, though, getting to and from downtown is a less off-putting exercise in Dayton than elsewhere because traffic is so light.
At any rate, it should not be assumed that the only stops would be in downtowns. Existing Amtrak systems do make other stops. Such stops take almost no time.
Ideally, the Ohio State University campus in Columbus would be a stop (or at least have a shuttle bus between the depot and campus).
Trains are not being promoted as necessarily faster than cars. They’d just be another way to travel for people who can’t drive or don’t want to, or who want to conserve energy or get some work done on the trip, or whatever.
Are there just too many unknowns?
The previous editorial admitted that nobody can know how much a passenger system might have to be subsidized, because, for example, nobody knows how much gasoline will cost. That factor would affect the usage of trains. Some people responded that there are too many unknowns at this stage, including not only usage, but the cost of building the system and of maintenance.
Some of these unknowns must be addressed before any final decision can be made. But some unknowns will always remain. That’s the nature of decision-making in government, as well as business. When you decide to go to the moon or invade Iraq, there are inevitably things you don’t know.
Among the “knowns” at this stage are these: the money in the president’s stimulus package set aside for passenger trains is only 1 percent of the $800 billion; highway costs are enormous, too; trains — especially freight trains — can greatly lessen the wear and tear on roads caused by trucks, thus reducing highway upkeep costs, which are also enormous.
Isn’t freight service more important?
One reader expressed disappointment that all the talk is about passenger trains, saying the freight issue is far more important.
This is probably true. Freight trains are still crucial in the American economy, but the lines aren’t as efficient (and fast) as in Europe. Besides the wear-and-tear issue, trains save huge amounts of energy. So this country should not fall far behind other modern economies.
However, improvements in freight service can result from new passenger lines, because the two kinds of systems share corridors.
The time is at hand for a certain decision. Under Ohio law, a two-year state budget for transportation must be adopted now. The pending bill includes the bid for stimulus funds for trains.
Democrats and Republicans have been at odds over whether the Legislature should make future decisions about actually spending money on 3C. That issue should not derail the project. All sides should agree that Ohio has an opportunity now that won’t come along often.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Transportation
TweetEditorial: Stimulus money is a one-shot opportunity
The Dayton area is set to begin receiving tens of millions in federal stimulus money for which Congress has one overriding goal: spend the money fast.
The national and local economies do need a kick-start. But for local governments, there is a second corollary to the big goal: spend the money smartly.
Doing so will require coordination among cities, counties and smaller communities. It’s a shame past efforts at promoting regionalism have failed to create a workable and reliable structure to help do that.
The arduous process for doling out $787 billion across the country already is making even seemingly easy decisions hard.
Dayton, for instance, wants to put more police on the streets. It could tap $5.3 million in stimulus money to hire 24 new officers. This should be a no-brainer. Public safety is Dayton’s highest priority, and the federal aid would expire at just the time when the city expects to lose officers to retirement, giving the city ready-made replacements.
So why is City Manager Rashad Young hesitating?
Whether Dayton can afford to participate in this part of the stimulus depends on how the final rules are written. The goal of the funding program is creating new jobs, and language in the bill bars cities from using the money to hire officers who replace or displace other people even after the program ends. Whether that includes retirees is not clear.
What the city knows is that it can’t commit to a budget that can’t be sustained after the federal money runs out.
Meanwhile, there will be opportunities for overlapping priorities to happen sooner than they otherwise might have. Consider the city-owned Dayton International Airport, where development plans call for connecting rail to the airport so companies locating there can ship by air, highway or train.
Dayton is in talks with Montgomery County and Vandalia about using transportation-focused stimulus funds for what amounts to an economic development project that is a priority for all three governments.
At the Greater Dayton RTA, stimulus aid is expected to speed up the purchase of 50 buses that are more fuel efficient and use a “dual exhaust” system that dramatically lowers emissions. In this way, the money meets the system’s capital needs and environmental goals at the same time.
Similarly, the county is requesting funding for 12 trucks that run on cleaner burning natural gas and a new gas dispensing system for one of its facilities.
For the City of Dayton, Montgomery County and the RTA, coordinating stimulus funds may be hard work. But at least money is flowing in familiar ways, through agencies they interact with often.
Getting stimulus money to suburbs and small communities is tougher. Eric Smith, city manager in Englewood, said tracking the bill was a challenge for his staff.
“We feel like we’re shooting at a moving target,” he said. “We don’t know what all the rules are, and the rules seem to change on a continual basis.”
Mr. Smith said he worries about even smaller communities. They may not have project plans on the books that they can offer up fast enough.
“It gets complicated, and there’s not a lot of lead time to prepare,” he said. “If they don’t have staff, they can be completely lost.”
Joe Tuss, deputy Montgomery County administrator, said some stimulus money will be added to programs that small communities are familiar with, such as community development block grants. That should help them.
But direct coordination — having everyone on the same page, looking to match their projects and federal money to the region’s priorities — would increase the chances of this onetime pot of millions having a lasting impact.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetGuest column: If charter schools go down, expect chaos
We’re being inundated by folks going to bat for charter schools, which would lose up to a third of their funding under Gov. Ted Strickland’s proposed budget.
Here’s a take from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which has been a big backer of charter schools in the state and in Dayton. One interesting statistic the authors point to that I haven’t seen before is how many Dayton teachers and support personnel would be affected if the local charters go under.
Charters are a big business in Dayton.
From: Terry Ryan and Kathryn Mullen Upton:
It’s common knowledge that the current budget bill (H.B. 1) proposed by Gov. Ted Strickland would cut charter school funding to levels that would likely kill off a sizeable percentage of the state’s charters.
Ohio has more than 330 charters that serve more than 82,000 children. The sudden demise of 150, 200 or more schools would likely result in chaos for the children involved, their families, the teachers and administrators in the schools, and in the communities they serve.
First, let’s say H.B. 1 becomes effective this July, and the proposed funding cuts render financial viability for charter schools impossible for 50 percent of them in August.
This would mean roughly 41,000 children and their families statewide would suddenly be looking for new schools for the 2009-2010 school year. As most children in charters are in cities, the impact would be extreme in places like Dayton (6,200 charter students), Cleveland (10,000 charter students), Columbus (8,000 charter students) and Cincinnati (6,800 charter students).
In Dayton, if half of the 6,200 children in charters were tossed out of their schools, this would result in roughly 3,100 students looking for new schools. Many, if not all, would likely flood the Dayton Public Schools.
Imagine the challenge for Dayton, with a student enrollment of about 15,500 students, facing a sudden influx of more than 3,000 new students.
Simply registering and placing these students into classrooms would be a monumental challenge. A nearly 20 percent influx of new students would require the district to find classroom space for all these students. Teachers also would have to be identified and hired in a matter of a couple of weeks.
The district also would have to, among other things, figure out how to provide lunches to all these new students, and quickly arrange how to transport them around town to their new schools.
All this, remember, would be happening in a school district that has struggled mightily to educate the current group of kids under its charge. Consider that 75 percent of district students in Dayton last year attended a school rated “academic emergency” (an F) or “academic watch” (a D) by the state.
Second, there are about 4,500 teachers working statewide in Ohio’s charter schools.
In Dayton, there are roughly 465 teachers working in charters, and another 435 support staffers and administrators. These folks, and the thousands of other adults statewide who service charter schools, would be tossed into a brutal job market.
Some would end up in traditional district schools, but many would simply swell Ohio’s unemployment rate of 9.5 percent.
Third, closing Ohio’s charter schools en masse would further litter the state’s already blighted urban landscape.
In Dayton, the nicest and most modern buildings in neighborhoods like Dayton View are charter schools. Does Dayton, a city Forbes magazine recently rated as being the “fifth emptiest city” in America, really need more empty buildings, especially in its poorest neighborhoods?
Finally, abruptly closing hundreds of charter schools would involve so much extra work, the operations of the Ohio Department of Education, the state auditor’s office, and the attorney general’s office would likely grind to a halt.
They’d be overwhelmed trying to figure out things like tracking and confirming student records (for example, how many high school credits do various students actually have?); figuring out who is responsible for unemployment payments for laid-off teachers; and determining the status of millions of dollars in federal grants, federal special education dollars, and federal food program dollars for charter schools.
Additionally, there would surely be dozens, if not hundreds, of lawsuits filed by angry parents, disgruntled employees, upset landlords, and vendors. It would be a legal mess of massive proportions.
It is true that Ohio, and Dayton, still have too many academically underperforming charter schools. State lawmakers have dealt with this in recent years by putting into place an academic death penalty for the most chronically underperforming schools.
Two schools were forced to close in 2008 and 23 more are at risk of closure in 2009 because of poor academic performance. More can and should be done, however, and proposals to tighten up the academic performance requirements for charters should be supported.
But, seeking to go after a significant proportion of all charter schools (the good, bad and ugly alike) — by starving them of money — in one year would create serious problems for children, families, communities and the state.
At times like these, let’s hope that cooler heads will prevail and that the focus is on supporting those schools that work.
Permalink | Comments (26) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Education, Guest Columns, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Dunbar House too precious to lock up
The Ohio Historical Society is becoming a shell of itself because of state budget cuts.
This fact matters to people who care about Ohio history and the sites the organization cares for, including the Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce and the Piqua Historical Area.
It also matters to Dayton because the historical society owns the Paul Laurence Dunbar House. Mr. Dunbar was the first African-American poet to win critical national acclaim. The home where he was living when he died at age 33 has many of his personal items and family furnishings. It is the first state memorial to honor an African-American.
As part of the efforts in 2003 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of powered flight by the Wright brothers, the home got a terrific makeover. It now has an interpretive center, and the historical society and the National Park Service, from its Wright Brothers-Dunbar Interpretive Center, direct visitors there. But visiting hours and tours are erratic.
Currently the site is closed for the “winter months.” (That decision is all about saving money; the house, of course, has heating and the exhibits are indoors.)
Trying to make lemonade out of continuing sour budget cuts, Dayton History and the Ohio Historical Society are trying to work out a deal whereby Dayton History would provide programming and tours at Dunbar’s home, while the historical society — the state, that is — would own and maintain the home.
The advantage would be that a local entity — one devoted to telling Dayton’s stories — would step up efforts to get people to the home, while the state wouldn’t have to give up owning a treasure that it might have to mothball for lack of money.
The questions for Dayton History are does it have the resources to do this well or, if not, where is it going to get the financial support? In truth, though, if Dayton History doesn’t have a great answer, the public isn’t going to get a more satisfying one from the historical society.
Sixty percent of the historical society’s $20 million budget comes from the state, and Gov. Ted Strickland wants to cut the state’s contribution from $12 million to $10.7 million for its 58 sites. (The Columbus Dispatch reports that Ohio has the largest network of state historical sites in the country.)
Besides the fact that Mr. Dunbar’s remarkable literary gifts need to be remembered, there’s another reason the Dayton community has a special interest in making sure that a partnership agreement is reached.
When Dayton was asking for a national park honoring the Wright brothers from Congress, it helped sell that idea using Paul Laurence Dunbar’s legacy. A classmate of Orville Wright, Mr. Dunbar and the Wrights were friends in an era when racial boundaries were hard to cross.
Nonetheless, the Wright brothers helped Mr. Dunbar publish his newsletter the Dayton Tattler; his mother Matilda supported herself by taking in people’s laundry, including the Wright family’s. (Bishop Milton Wright, the Wrights’ father, was an abolitionist.)
At a time when the National Park Service was not eager to add to its sites — because its budget was tight — backers of Dayton’s park pointed out that the Wright brothers’ history was culturally rich, not just scientifically significant. They highlighted the Dunbar association and committed to incorporating it into the Wright brothers’ history that would be told at the park.
Indeed, Mr. Dunbar is lovingly celebrated at the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center in West Dayton today.
Dayton’s promise, however, would be incomplete if school children, older students, out-of-town visitors, historians and Daytonians themselves found a permanently locked door at the Dunbar House.
The historical society and Dayton History are doing the right thing by trying to work together.
Share your thoughts about Dunbar House
Attend a public meeting April 7 at 5 p.m. at 219 Paul Laurence Dunbar St.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local History
TweetCan $30 million save the Arcade?
Bill Pote at Dayton MostMetro has a challenge for Dayton and Montgomery County regarding helping the new owners of the Arcade.
Gunther Berg and Wendell Strutz say they want to put $30 million into the project. Is that enough?
Check out Bill’s piece. What do you think?
Permalink | Comments (21) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Local History, Montgomery County
TweetEditorial: ‘Cap and trade’ is problem for Ohio
President Barack Obama has adopted a version of “cap and trade” that should worry Ohioans.
“Cap and trade” is the phrase Washington uses for a system for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and, thereby, combating global warming. The idea is to set a national limit on emissions, and to achieve it by allowing companies that can’t get their emissions down enough to buy credits from other companies that aren’t “spending” their allotted amount.
The general idea has been widely embraced in Washington as more appealing politically than, say, a tax on emissions. In the 2008 campaign, both Sens. Obama and John McCain embraced the idea. But a specific proposal has never passed Congress.
There are various approaches. The president proposes that all allowances be auctioned off, with the government getting the money. The auction would put the biggest burden on states like Ohio, which gets 84 percent of its electricity from coal. Coal utilities are big producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Their costs would go up, and those costs would be passed on to other businesses and to consumers.
The president says that allowing the government to get the money would allow the government to give it — via tax breaks — to those regions most burdened. But the outlines of this proposal are just emerging.
If you’re representing Ohioans, you have to be skeptical. Accordingly, the administration does not have the support of Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, much less Republican George Voinovich.
Sen. Voinovich has been hostile to the whole “cap and trade” idea, at least for now. He proposed enacting it in 2030 if other alternatives he proposes prove faulty. But Sen. Brown has said he and others are still trying to work out something with the administration. More than a dozen other Democratic senators are also skeptical of the administration’s plan.
Proponents of the auction system say that Europe has adopted a “cap and trade” approach without an auction, and it doesn’t work.
Nevertheless, the administration needs to hear the skeptics. Sen. Brown has been popular with environmentalists. (He has supported higher gas mileage standards for American cars, despite the unpopularity of those standards with important companies in Ohio.)
Sen. Voinovich does not deny the need for cutting carbon emissions, and he does not deny man-made global warning.
True, he is seen as sympathetic to businesses and utilities, just as Sen. Brown is seen as an organized-labor guy. But that covers a lot of Ohio ground.
Another voice worth hearing is Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy Corp., the utility for parts of Butler and Warren counties. He supported President Obama in the election. He’s part of a group of utilities and environmental groups that support a version of “cap and trade.” But he says the Obama approach could send Duke bills up 25 percent or more.
He says allowances should be given free to utilities that have already invested billions in pursuit of clean coal, as Duke has. He says that was the approach used in the federal government’s successful fight against “acid rain.”
Advocates of a tough law argue that, even if it might have some short-term economic downsides for Ohio, it would also do some economic good: sparking businesses that deal in cleaner, cheaper energy. That’s certainly true, but it’s not much comfort if the downsides are overwhelming.
“Cap and trade” has a lot to be said for it. It gives businesses options in responding to a governmental goal. It sets a specific national goal, rather than something as vague as “reduction.” It addresses a real problem, and, done right, it does that as gently as possible. But it has to be done right.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Local Business, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetTina Osso: You can’t eat that expensive house
There has been a firestorm of media attention given to a family that allegedly has more than $400,000 in assets and savings, is receiving unemployment, disability payments and food stamps. Warren County commissioners and the county administrator have expressed outrage at what appears to be an abuse of the system.
I, however, am outraged at the number of people in Warren County who are apparently eligible for food assistance, but are not receiving that help. There are 13,000 people living in Warren County who meet the criteria for assistance, with incomes that are 130 percent of the poverty level. Yet, fewer than 6,000 people are receiving those benefits.
Why doesn’t this fact anger the county commissioners?
A low-income working mom, earning $7.30 an hour, recently appeared on CNN, being interviewed about this story, and she, too, expressed outrage when she has to fight every month to keep her food stamps. So why is it that this mom has to fight each month for her food stamps in Warren County, and why aren’t the commissioners as troubled by this?
The “categorical eligibility” rule in question is not a loophole, as described by the commissioners. It is a law designed to streamline the process of applying for food assistance. Especially in these economic times, many laid-off people who may have nice homes and cars now find themselves stuck with “assets” not worth the money they owe on them and no way to pay for them. They may need help just to provide the basics for their families.
I have news for Warren County commissioners: I don’t care how nice your home or car is. You can’t eat them. And good luck selling them right now.
Since we don’t know this individual’s situation, it’s ridiculous to speculate on whether he or she needs government help. And, frankly, it is not the county commissioners’ job to determine who needs help and who doesn’t. That’s why the food assistance program is a federally funded and mandated program — so eligibility criteria are applied equally. Receipt of benefits is not based on political whim or headline-grabbing, one-sided stories.
However, there does appear to be a serious breach of confidentiality at the county level, and steps should be taken to ensure that client confidentiality is sacrosanct.
Do commissioners have such a short memory? Weren’t they outraged when the director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services left her job in disgrace because someone in the department searched confidential databases looking for information about “Joe the Plumber”? How is this breach of confidentiality any different? Or is this just another way for the commissioners and administrator to discourage county residents who need help from seeking help?
This is the perfect example of why the state and county Job and Family Services agencies need adequate funding to hire and train professional caseworkers to do the required reviews and investigations, honor client confidentiality and apply the law fairly and compassionately. You never know when it might be you, your mom or son or a friend who is standing in that line applying for help.
Making that decision is hard enough without also having to worry whether your life story will be turned into headline news the next day.
Tina Osso is executive director of Shared Harvest Foodbank.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Social Services
TweetEditorial: Rich people are not running off with food stamps
A Warren County situation has exposed a complicated problem, not a scam.
A television station reported that an unnamed woman driving a Mercedes and living in a $300,000 house with $80,000 in the bank was collecting $500 a month in food stamps. Of course, this is not the sort of individual food stamps are supposed to go to. Of course, it’s not the profile of very many people getting food stamps.
Here’s how the situation came to be: Following federal guidance designed to get newly laid-off workers benefits faster, the state in October made food stamps available to anyone receiving unemployment benefits and whose income qualified them for the help.
Applicants are no longer required to go through an interview and review process that delve into their assets beyond their actual income.
Those reviews served an important purpose. They screened out people who, though they were out of work, had substantial assets. Previously, people couldn’t get food stamps if their financial assets — not counting their home — totaled more than $2,000.
Even though the state was trying to do the right thing, officials should have anticipated that a few people would take advantage of the system.
That said, Warren County commissioners have grossly overreacted. After a couple of cases were brought to their attention, they threatened to stop participating in the food stamp program.
“The policy is just stupid,” Commissioner Don Young complained.
The commissioners told the state they wanted to exclude applicants who have more than $400,000 in assets — including the value of an applicant’s equity in a home, cars, savings, retirement funds and so on. That’s actually a generous limit.
The commissioners have calmed down about the idea of quitting the food stamp program. Their decision undoubtedly was helped by the fact that they probably can’t pull out of the federally funded and state-administered program.
Moreover, there’s also the fact that the number of Warren County households receiving food stamps in January was 2,489, up 38.2 percent from January 2008.
The number of people exploiting the change in policy is certainly a tiny percentage of the 1.1 million Ohioans receiving food stamps. Most people with substantial money in the bank wouldn’t even think of applying for the assistance.
There has to be a reasonable middle ground here. Requiring laid-off people to spend everything they’ve ever tucked away until they’re down to just $2,000 is stingy. At the same time, having no limit on assets is wrong, too.
Rep. Shannon Jones, R-Springboro, wants a law to address the problem. With input from county commissioners from around the state, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and anti-poverty groups, sensible rules surely can be worked out, although, in the end, solving the problem likely will require cooperation from the federal government.
A few isolated outrage stories do not discredit a program that assures that many genuinely poor people — especially children — have food on the table.
Permalink | Comments (32) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Social Services
TweetEditorial: You can help Ohio change politics
Maybe you’ve heard about the people who draw legislative districts and how they only care about gaining partisan advantage. Well, now you can become one of them — sort of — and show them a better way.
You only need a garden-variety computer. You do not need to be a computer programmer.
It’s just a matter of working a program that the state will provide, along with training. You probably don’t even have to load the program, just go to a Web site.
Some groups that have long pushed for reform of Ohio’s indefensible system for drawing districts are inviting people — anybody — to propose a map distributing Ohio’s current 18 congressional seats according to nonpartisan criteria.
The secretary of state’s office says one person working alone could accomplish the task. It would require something of a commitment, not just a session or two. A group of sessions over a couple of weeks might be enough.
The winning map will not be adopted, of course. Redistricting won’t officially happen again until after the 2010 Census. In this contest, people will have to use the 2000 Census, it being the latest at hand.
The role of the best maps will be to enlighten the state as to what might have been.
The Ohio League of Women Voters — long a leader on this issue — has joined forces with Ohio Citizen Action, Common Cause, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, state Rep. Dan Stewart, D-Columbus, who chairs a relevant legislative committee, and others.
The list of supporters is too heavy on Democrats and liberals. Reform will eventually have to be bipartisan. But the group hasn’t yet proposed a specific reform, just this contest.
Contestants will be told to try to (1) keep the districts compact, as opposed to sprawling and squiggly; (2) avoid splitting cities and counties; (3) create districts that each party has a reasonable chance of winning; and (4) foster a congressional lineup that more or less reflects the statewide vote for the two parties’ candidates.
All these goals cannot be accomplished completely. The idea is more modest: to discourage, for example, things like Rep. Mike Turner’s 3rd Congressional District, now held by Rep. Mike Turner. Republican mapmakers cut out a piece of northeast Montgomery County, thus requiring the district to be extended into the heavily Republican countryside. The result looks ridiculous.
When applied to state legislative districts, the criteria would also presumably discourage shapes like that of Sen. Jon Husted’s Ohio Senate District, which makes a circle around Dayton to avoid Democratic voters. And Montgomery County would presumably no longer have five completely uncompetitive state House districts, despite the county being competitive between the Republicans and Democrats when taken as a whole.
Reform now might prevent the Democrats from playing the same games after 2010 that the Republicans played after 1990 and 2000. As of now, the power to design state legislative districts goes to whichever party controls two of these three offices: governor, secretary of state and auditor. (Congressional districts are designed by the Legislature and governor.)
The reformers have in mind a constitutional amendment that would involve just such a public contest as they are holding now and would require the state to adopt, if not the winning map, then one of the top entries.
Meanwhile, Sen. Husted, of Kettering, has been floating his own reform proposal. It calls for a nonpartisan redistricting commission.
His idea would be a definite improvement over the status quo, but could still basically leave the politicians in charge, allowing them to, for example, protect the incumbents in both parties who are seeking re-election.
Sen. Husted met with the contest promoters last week. They found some common ground. Continuing that search may be even more important than the contest.
A genuinely bipartisan effort is necessary to bring reform, because a constitutional amendment is probably necessary, and that would require going through the Legislature and a vote of the people.
Launching the contest is a step in the right direction, not only because it fosters reform, but because it lets the public into a process that was once handled entirely beyond heavily locked doors. The next step is up to the people.
Find out how to enter contest
The Ohio Redistricting Competition will run from April 6 through May 11. For more details and for information on how to enter, go to www.ohioredistricting.org.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEllen Belcher: ‘Cinderella’ goes to mock trial and wins
Sixteen-year-old Charles Wilkes was trying to explain how students from Dayton Early College Academy advanced to the regional mock trial competition after knocking off powerhouse Centerville High School, one of whose teams was second in the state last year:
“It was a Cinderella story, and this year the slipper fit,” said the soft-spoken senior, who plans to attend Miami University or Morehouse College next year.
A Cinderella story it is, except that there are no mean stepsisters or stepmother, just three twenty-somethings who used the law to teach 12 kids the satisfaction — and glory — of hard work.
DECA is the celebrated local charter school and early college academy that exists mainly because of the commitment of the University of Dayton. Its 300 students, most of whom are black, most of whose parents never went to college, are taking classes at UD or Sinclair Community College while they also attend high school.
Teacher Michelle Szucs, 28, and attorneys Cori Stirling, 29, and Trey Pauley, 25, of the law firm Faruki Ireland and Cox, are unlikely good fairies, but they do believe in the magic of telling kids they can be as exceptional as they choose to be. Since school started, Szucs, who competed in mock trial in college, taught the students the basics. Stirling and Pauley punched up the preparation beginning in October when the kids got their “case.”
“We put the boot to each other,” said Louise “Lue” Barr, 18, commenting about the practice schedule that included three to four hours on Saturday mornings, in addition to every day at school.
The students were required to compete in two trials: once arguing for, and once against, a fictional soccer player who wanted to play on his high school team even though he couldn’t prove that he was living in the United States legally. The boy’s parents, who brought him to this country when he was a baby, had left him with friends while they took a trip home to Brazil. They were killed in an accident there, so the player couldn’t show (in time for soccer season) what his immigration status was.
He filed for a preliminary injunction to prevent the school board from enforcing its requirement that students couldn’t be involved in extracurriculars without the right paperwork.
The first trial competition was Jan. 30, a day that’s etched in the students’ memories. Only those teams that won both of their trials could advance to regional competition. DECA Team Black was announced a winner first, then Northmont High School, and then, after what seemed liked an eternity, DECA Team Red was called.
The students and coaches “erupted,” said Wilkes, who still can’t get over DECA Principal Judy Hennessey’s tears. Stirling said she told the kids that, win or lose, they had to show respect in the courtroom, but when both teams made the cut, “even I jumped out of my seat.”
At regional competition three weeks later, neither team won both rounds. They came home disappointed. Everybody — coaches included — felt Team Red had bested its opponents, and they were feeling, well, robbed.
Several days later, Szucs got a call. There had been a scoring error. Team Red was going to state after all.
“I was excited for 24 hours straight,” said senior Margaret Idiake.
Two weeks ago — thanks to a donor who picked up the tab — the students went to Columbus and spent the night. It was always understood that both teams would go even though just one was competing; Team Red would never have done so well without its sparring partner.
At state, where just 34 teams remained, DECA was eliminated on the first day. But nobody’s complaining. Just two years into a competitive exercise that other schools have practiced for years, the students said their opponents were excellent.
Still, Wilkes thinks that their underdog status was an asset.
“After we tasted it (winning) at district, we got really hungry,” he said.
And win they did. DECA won seven of eight awards in their rounds at district for best attorney and best witness; three of eight awards at regional; and two of four at state. Shannon Herbert, a sophomore, said bringing home those awards was important because she and others heard the whispers from their opponents that DECA students are from the inner city, that they were in over their heads, that they didn’t have the look.
“They seem to forget that we have as much potential as they do,” Herbert said.
Szucs and the students are in awe of Stirling and Pauley. The two of them have a “good-cop-bad-cop” routine that kept the team pumped, yet focused. The fiercely competitive Stirling confessed that, yes, she was known for asking, “Are you going to waste my time today?”
And there was also the constant reminder: “Remember, you eat to win.”
Only four of 12 of the team members will be back next year; seven are graduating and one student will be attending DECA and Sinclair full time. Nobody is quitting, including the attorneys.
Herbert is one of those who’s returning. Though accomplished at pretty much everything but trash talk, she still put down what sounded like a challenge:
“We are the new heavy-hitters in the region.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Education, Ellen Belcher, Higher Ed
TweetEditorial: Sister Dorothy belongs to Dayton, Amazon
There was no red carpet at the Thursday premiere of “They Killed Sister Dorothy” — an acclaimed documentary about the heroic life and death of Dayton’s Sister Dorothy Stang, who was shot in the head for helping Brazilian peasants and trying to preserve the Amazon rain forest.
Had there been glitz, Sister Dorothy would have glowered from heaven. Celebrate her cause and mission, she would have insisted, but send the money for any trappings to the state of Para — where people are threatened and killed by loggers and ranchers who are raping an irreplaceable ecological treasure that Brazil and indeed the world should be protecting.
Sister Dorothy, 73, was murdered in February, 2005. Though the trigger men and a middleman are in prison, the wealthy ranchers who many believe paid to silence her are free. Brazil’s corrupt and legally primitive justice system has so far been incapable of unraveling the complete circumstances of the murder or even giving Sister Dorothy’s family and those around the world who have learned of her story any sense that it’s dedicated to doing so.
Thursday night, however, was an opportunity to celebrate an incredible life and to be inspired. Director Daniel Junge sensitively and unsparingly captures the beautiful and the horrific. For those who didn’t make the showing, the film will air on HBO2 on Wednesday, March 25, at 8 p.m.
Mr. Junge and HBO were adamant that the film had to premiere in Dayton. That was a remarkable show of respect to the Stang family, Sister Dorothy’s order, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and Dayton itself.
Though he no longer lives here, David Stang, Dorothy’s younger brother, couldn’t say enough about the Dayton community and how the city’s people and institutions had molded and formed Sister Dorothy, him and their siblings. Maybe some Daytonians don’t always think they’re living in a special place, but Sister Dorothy believed otherwise. The community couldn’t hope for better champions for Dayton than Sister Dorothy and David.
Though there are no scenes from Dayton in the movie — something Director Junge was almost apologetic about — Sister Dorothy’s story, as it rockets around the world, always comes back to Dayton. This is where her love of her religion and nature took root; this is where her fire for social justice was sparked.
One thing you might not think about when watching the movie, and won’t learn about from it, is that Sister Dorothy is especially appreciated in the scientific community.
David said that her work promoting sustainable development in the Amazon is revered by many scientists who are fearful about where the world would be without the Amazon’s biodiversity, the oxygen its plants exhale and its species that exist nowhere else and that medical researchers rely on. In an unexpected way, Sister Dorothy was promoting her religion — that requires showing respect for the poor — and environmental stewardship at the same time. It is an unusual, but not impossible, marriage.
Someone consoled the mourners at Sister Dorothy’s funeral by saying that she was not being buried, but planted. After seeing the film, it’s not hard to imagine Sister Dorothy loving that image.
And to think that the seeds of her being began in Dayton.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: Team, Flyer Faithful connected big time
When London Warren joined the University of Dayton’s basketball team in 2006, he was so identified with his Florida hometown that it was his nickname — the Jacksonville Jet.
It may be time to rethink the moniker. Along with the other 15 players on the Flyers’ roster, he belongs to this city now.
Part of the fun of following any school-based sports team is the feeling that these are “our kids.” That’s especially true when local high school teams like Centerville, Dunbar, Beavercreek or Alter make a postseason run. In a real sense, those are our kids — their parents, grandparents, siblings and friends make up much of the crowd for most of their games.
But major college basketball is different. The kids aren’t all from here. This Dayton team has only three genuinely local players — Chris Wright from Trotwood, Kurt Hulseman from St. Henry and Josh Benson from Dunbar. The crowds are different, too. Dayton broke a record for total attendance this season — 229,768 — averaging 12,765 per game. That’s a lot of people coming out to watch.
When Dayton takes the floor in Minneapolis at 3 p.m. today to face West Virginia in the first round of the NCAA tournament, thousands across the Dayton region will be rooting as hard for the Flyers as if they knew the players personally. The connection this year between the team and the fans reached a special level. When he asked fans to stick around for a few minutes at the end of Dayton’s final home game, Coach Brian Gregory said the team felt that.
This team, he pointed out, was the first in 39 seasons to finish without a loss at home at UD Arena, and he credited the wild support of the rafter-rocking crowds with helping to lift the team to 18 arena wins and a school record of 25 overall in the regular season.
Coach Gregory noted the team’s motto for the year — “Our Town, Our Team” — fit perfectly as the Flyers played with the personality of the city that embraced them. UD reached its milestones this year thanks, in Coach Gregory’s words, to a lot of “blue collar” hard work, by getting everyone involved and by just pushing harder when times got tough.
Nobody embodied that transformation better than Mr. Warren. As a freshman, he brought a ton of energy every time he stepped on the floor, but sometimes it was too much. The reckless abandon of his play was too often just reckless, leading to mistakes and turnovers.
But watching Mr. Warren this year has been to see a young man grow up and blossom into a team leader. He improved and cut his turnovers, to be sure, but the real difference this year was the way he took charge and pushed his teammates to raise their play.
After he was robbed of backcourt mate Rob Lowery by a season-ending injury, Mr. Warren’s statistics got better in nearly every important category even while shouldering more responsibility.
On Sunday, it was Mr. Warren that Coach Gregory invited to speak to the delirious crowd gathered for the official announcement that Dayton would be counted among the 65 best college basketball teams picked for the national tournament, calling him the “heart and soul” of the team.
The “Dayton Jet” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as Mr. Warren’s usual nickname, but there’s no doubt he and his team are “our kids.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Can new owners bring Arcade back?
It’s too soon to say whether it’s a good thing that a buyer stepped forward to pick up the Arcade at a sheriff’s sale March 12.
Wendell J. Strutz and Gunther Berg haven’t yet finalized the deal. So far, they’ve just put down $1,046; they have 30 days to pay the rest of the price — more than $600,000 in back taxes and other charges.
Mr. Strutz, who’s from Plymouth, Wisc., and his partner Mr. Berg could yet decide that they’re in over their heads; or, because they rushed in at the last minute, they may find that financing for such a complex project is harder to come by than they imagined from reading about the Arcade on eBay. As compared to their previous development efforts, the Arcade is in a tougher and bigger league.
Mr. Strutz and Mr. Berg also must be befuddled that Dayton leaders aren’t rushing to offer them assistance — cash, loans, advice on possible tenants, moral support, something.
The explanation is simple: Governmental leaders and especially bankers are afraid to be seen near the place. They don’t want to create expectations they can’t fulfill (because they don’t have money or credit to offer for a project that simply won’t work without a public subsidy). And they don’t want to be associated with more dashed hopes for what is both an architectural jewel and a developer’s black hole.
It’s also possible that Tony Staub — of Brownfield Charities and the Arcade’s former owner who defaulted on his taxes — may have unintentionally created a false impression. Up until the night before the sheriff’s sale, Mr. Strutz and Mr. Berg have said they were in negotiations with Mr. Staub to buy the complex. For the longest time, Mr. Staub has wanted $3 million.
No one in Dayton, however, believed he would ever get that kind of money, especially not in this climate. Considering the risk associated with developing the building and the expensive carrying costs for a structure that’s deteriorating, Mr. Staub was asking for the moon.
His insistence, though, to out-of-towners might have created the appearance that Mr. Staub had a hotter property than is really the case.
Since former Montgomery Country Treasurer Hugh Quill sold the delinquent tax lien on the Arcade in 2006, that paper has passed through two hands. The first company sold the right to collect back taxes to yet a second company. If Mr. Strutz and Mr. Berg hadn’t made an offer, that second company would be the owner of the Arcade today. It is a hedge fund out of New York that never had any intention of being a property owner. At least Mr. Strutz and Mr. Berg signed up to own the land and the buildings.
The task, though, of actually doing something with a Dayton landmark remains herculean.
Looking back now, not yet three years after Mr. Quill’s decision, what’s clear is that he set in motion a process by which the Arcade has become the equivalent of a foster child, arguably an abused one.
The sad thing is that the property may yet still be bouncing among people who want to help, but just may not be equipped.
Permalink | Comments (30) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local History
TweetObama will never win Ohio again
President Barack Obama made an extraordinary gaffe Wednesday that I predict will be held against him when Ohio voters consider his re-election in 2012. His crime? He picked all five Ohio schools in the NCAA tournament to lose early.
That’s right, Obama picked his bracket this morning for all the nation to see on ESPN and here’s the damage:
—Dayton. Out in the first round. (Does he not know Montgomery County is a swing county in a swing state?)
—Akron. Out in the first round.
—Cleveland State. Out in the first round.
—Xavier. Out in the second round.
—Ohio State. Out in the second round.
Are you kidding me?
For starters, the president is just flat wrong. OK, so Dayton has a tough matchup against a good team, and Akron and Cleveland State are from small conferences. But come on. All three are good teams. I guarantee ONE of those three will advance.
Then Xavier and OSU both go out before the Sweet 16? This is insane. Ohio State is as hot as any team in the country. In the second round, it will face the most over-rated No. 1 seed of all time in Lousville, which less than a month ago got blown out by 30 by NIT-bound Notre Dame. Xavier should face a good Florida State team in the second round, but it is rested and ready.
There is a reason, by the way, that past presidents did their best to stay neutral when it came to championship games and tournaments. There can be a political downside to being seen as “against” teams and their fans.
For Ohio, it’s hard to feel like the president is “for” us on this score.
Here’s a bit of free advice, Mr. President — come fall, don’t make any predictions about Ohio State football.
UPDATE: It seems perhaps Ohioans had a premonition that Obama was about to pick against the state.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: National Politics, Scott Elliott, Sports and Recreation
TweetStrickland must do the work for Obama on education
President Barack Obama and Gov. Ted Strickland want many of the same things in education. So why has Gov. Strickland’s plan faced so much criticism, while Mr. Obama has been widely praised?
A big part of the explanation is that the president can stick to what amounts to guidance and inspiration. The governor, on the other hand, has to deliver money and actually execute ideas.
Still, for President Obama to make any real gains on the education front, he needs governors to push his agenda. Ohio’s experience isn’t encouraging for him.
In his speech last week to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama laid out five national priorities — better early education; more innovation; higher state standards; improved colleges; and better teacher quality.
So how aligned is Gov. Strickland?
• Early education. In a major overlap with the Obama plan, Gov. Strickland is proposing universal all-day kindergarten and expanded preschool.
• Innovation. Strickland might appear to be doing what the president wants by pushing a plan to extend the school year by 20 days and add time to the school day. But President Obama also called for more charter schools, while the governor is hostile to the publicly funded, privately run schools.
• State standards. Ohio already has standards that generally are well-regarded, and Gov. Strickland has pushed for several ideas on the president’s agenda, such as teaching new skills and finding better ways to test students.
• Colleges. Gov. Strickland has been out in front here, having launched an overhaul of Ohio’s colleges, including putting down measurable goals for them individually and as a group.
• Teacher quality. Revamping the way teachers are trained — a Strickland proposal — fits with President Obama’s plan, but the president goes further, calling for merit pay.
What’s politically shrewd about the president’s “five pillars” for education reform — besides his limited direct responsibility — is his careful language. He leaves a lot open for interpretation.
The federal education department, for instance, cannot dictate the standards for student success, nor can it demand a longer school year. The best the feds can offer on those fronts is guidance and goal-setting.
Then there is the potentially sticky issue of merit pay. President Obama is for it, he says. Why aren’t teachers’ unions blasting him? Well, under the right circumstances they favor merit pay, too.
One approach to merit pay would entail a new pile of cash being brought to the table to reward high achievers, while struggling teachers get mentoring. However, many supporters of merit pay prefer to redistribute pay from low performers to high performers and push for quick firing of teachers who don’t measure up.
President Obama has left the impression he could be in either camp. Of course, he also won’t be in the room when districts and unions negotiate about merit plans.
Gov. Strickland can’t just take to the bully pulpit. He has to make reform happen within the constraints of a state budget squeezed by recession. That’s where his critics say he is falling most short, relying on one-time federal money and the state’s “rainy day” fund to fuel new spending for his education ideas. Critics say his math does not add up and his reform will eventually collapse without new taxes, deep cuts elsewhere or a miraculous economic rebirth.
President Obama can talk about education reform, but if bold plans put forward by allies like Gov. Strickland can’t make it into state budgets, big changes won’t really happen.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, National Politics, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Dayton leads nation in boring politics
A new study has found that Dayton has the dullest politics of all cities in all democracies on all planets — ever.
This study has not received much attention because of all the other studies about Dayton that have competed for public attention. There was the one about the city dying, the one about it emptying and the one about it being the hottest earthly site for new businesses developments, to name a recent few.
All such studies require the concoction of some metrics, that is, some statistics to show that the undertaking is serious. The dullness study starts by dividing the number of candidates for the city commission by the number of commission seats on the ballot in any year. The premise is that if that resulting metric is much under 2.0 — if a city can’t muster 4.0 candidates for 2.0 seats, say — the city’s politics are in the category of comatose.
But, of course, 2.0 is a rating Dayton can only aspire to.
(It’s important to keep in mind that we are talking about candidates who actually show up on the ballot, having gathered enough signatures. If anybody ever did a study on the number who announce their intentions to run for office, but then fail to qualify, Dayton might be among the national leaders.)
The dullness study — unlike the others mentioned above — happens to be entirely fictional. But the rest of this column is straight.
Dayton politics was not always so dull. As recently as 1997, seven candidates sought two commission seats. Several were substantial forces, including Mary Wiseman (now a judge), longtime commissioner Abner Orick and Lloyd Lewis, who was a state representative and former assistant city manager.
In 1993, current Commissioner Dean Lovelace — then referred to as an “independent Democrat” — had to beat the candidate of Democratic “boss” Joe Shump to win his seat. Nothing like that ever happens anymore.
Also in 1993: Mayor Clay Dixon was seeking re-election. The candidates who were challenging him — and who qualified for the ballot — literally filled a meeting room. A primary had to be held to whittle the field. Mike Turner won.
In this decade, by contrast, commission vacancies are filled by young people — Nan Whaley, Matt Joseph — who have paid their dues in helping other Democrats get elected. They get slated by the dominant party. They are earnest and capable. There’s no scandal as to qualifications.
But, once elected, they seem to be in for life. This year, for example, only one other candidate managed to get on the ballot to run with Whaley and Commissioner Joey Williams for the two seats on the ballot. And that candidate has never shown any political appeal in multiple tries.
As for the mayor’s spot, Rhine McLin has drawn only one challenger, a low-profile community activist, Gary Leitzell. The Republican Party, long absent from Dayton elections, is supporting him, hoping to recreate the Turner magic. The involvement of the party is good to see; the involvement of just about anybody is good to see. But the Republican label doesn’t exactly work wonders in city elections. (Turner in 1993 was not put forth by the party.)
So what accounts for the relative absence of candidates and, typically, energy and heat? In some times and places, when incumbents go unchallenged, it’s because people are pretty satisfied. But can Dayton voters really be satisfied when the city is shrinking and becoming poorer and more hollowed out?
Somewhat, perhaps. They can believe it’s nobody’s fault, or at least nobody who’s in local office right now.
City Hall has done a pretty good job of keeping projects front and center that indicate that the city isn’t going gently into the night. It has also maintained a team spirit, allowing each commissioner to point to a couple of areas of useful contributions. Meanwhile, of course, the practical absence of an opposition party helps the incumbents.
And yet, one has to wonder if some bigger forces aren’t at work: a certain resignation about the fate of the city; a growing feeling on the part of ambitious people that city politics isn’t where the action is; the continuing departure from the city of the kind of people who run for office confidently and well.
There are all kinds of ways for people to be involved in a community besides running for office, of course. Certainly, the absence of hot politics doesn’t equate to decline; lots of suburbs that are doing fine have boring political scenes.
But a leadership spot in Dayton can lead to all kinds of things: Congress, a judgeship, lieutenant governor (Paul Leonard). You might think more people would be interested.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment |
TweetEditorial: Casino backers, pay day lenders relentless
Voters are not potted plants.
Someone please tell that to track owners, the gaming industry and pay day lenders.
The Ohio State Racing Commission is arguing that the legislature can OK slot machines at the state’s seven horse race tracks. It’s making this pitch even though the Constitution outlaws gambling, except for the Lottery, and even though voters have four times turned down proposals to open casinos in the state.
If voters aren’t willing to support casinos, that’s a clue that they don’t support a back-door proposal to put in hundreds or even thousands of gambling machines at race tracks and pretend they’re something other than that.
Race tracks in Ohio are hanging on by a thread. The rise in gambling on the Internet is cutting into their business, and tracks in other states that have casino gambling can afford bigger purses. There is no question that these Ohio businesses are hurting, and no one sees an easy way out.
That said, their financial problems are not an invitation to thwart the Constitution or to just pretend that the people haven’t spoken.
Meanwhile, Penn National Gaming and Dan Gilbert, the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, aren’t taking no for an answer, either. Though Penn National opposed last year’s proposal to put a casino in Wilmington — too close to its Argosy in Indiana — it and Gilbert hope to gather signatures for a ballot proposal that would allow casinos in Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati and Columbus.
Maybe they can come up with a proposal that would protect communities and ensure that taxpayers will do as well as the casino owners, but that’s unlikely. Promoters of these ideas always stack the deck.
What’s interesting, though, is that the promises of sharing gambling proceeds with the state and local governments seem to just keep getting more generous over time. Every time proponents come back with another new and improved plan, they emphasize how eager they are to share the wealth.
One reasonable way of looking at their evolving generosity is that the industry has, in previous proposals, tried to take Ohioans for a ride.
That begs the question of whether these are the sort of people you can trust to write the rules for themselves.
Now to what looks like a change of subject, but isn’t: pay day lenders.
The legislature cut into the profits of pay day businesses by limiting the annual percentage rate on interest that they can charge for quick loans to 28 percent.
After that law was passed, the industry tried to undo the restrictions with a confusing ballot measure, but voters overwhelmingly endorsed lawmakers’ limits.
Now many of the very same outfits are back in business, setting up shop under different laws that allow them to charge an APR of 423 percent for a two-week loan, or in some cases, 680 percent.
These businesses are operating in 81 of Ohio’s 88 counties, according to the Housing Research and Advocacy Center. Among the 10 counties with the most storefronts, Montgomery County ranks 4th, with 62; Butler County (with three other counties) ranks 10th with 25 stores.
The common thread between the race track owners and the pay day lenders is that they just won’t give up; they keep looking for loopholes to subvert lawmakers, voters and the law. The gaming industry, meanwhile, just keeps repackaging old ideas, thinking that one day it’ll wear down voters.
It reminds you of kids who won’t take no for an answer — except, in this case, these people could eventually get their way.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics, Predatory lending
TweetEditorial: Case for trains just keeps getting better
The debate about passenger trains in Ohio has been transformed. More precisely, it has arrived. Even last year, passenger trains were hardly more than a glimmer in some eyes.
Now Republicans and Democrats in Columbus are at each other’s throats about the issue.
Maybe there is still some give in the various positions. Republicans are complaining about process almost as much as anything. They say Democrats are moving too quickly to embrace an expensive initiative for which public demand has been minimal.
They say too many questions haven’t been answered: How much would the project cost? What, exactly, would it look like? How many people would use the trains? How much of an ongoing subsidy would the trains require?
Democrats say they have to move quickly, because only 1 percent of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package is set aside for train projects — and plenty of other states already know they want it.
The idea of a “3C Corridor” passenger system connecting Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati via Dayton is part of Gov. Ted Strickland’s transportation budget that was just passed by the House. Only one Republican — Ross McGregor, of Springfield — voted in favor of the legislation.
If the Senate passes the bill, that would not guarantee the train project would happen. The bill says that spending on trains must still by approved by the Democratic-controlled Controlling Board. Republicans complain that the Legislature itself should decide the question, because the matter is so big.
The Obama administration is eager to put its stimulus money to work quickly. And yet the Strickland administration and the House Democrats should be eager to put their plan through the traditional legislative process of committee hearings and independent studies, to the maximum degree possible. Ohio needs a public debate.
The debate — as well as the studies that are already going on and might still be slated — will fail to answer some questions. There are no experts on the future. If gasoline costs $4 or $5 a gallon, trains have will have more passengers than if it costs $1.50 a gallon.
One recent study had hundreds of thousands of people using the 3C system in the first year. That sounds like a lot until you break it down to a per-day basis, when it becomes only a couple thousand or less. But another study projects many times that usage when the system is fully developed.
Much is known. The Strickland administration says Ohio is the most urban state without a passenger train system. Columbus is the second-biggest city in the country without train service. Fourteen states have Amtrak service, and 25 have some kind of state service. The idea of rail service is hot across the nation.
Also known is this: The nation wasn’t worried about energy when passenger-rail service died in Ohio in 1971.
Passenger trains aren’t for everybody, of course. But they should be able to find a niche, even absent an energy crisis, when they would presumably become very popular. They’d be great for people who don’t have a car, don’t like to drive (or don’t like to drive on an interstate), can’t drive, want to get some work done on a trip, want to conserve energy, are going from downtown to downtown or just like trains.
This society might be facing a time when more families need to try to get by with one car, rather than two, or with two rather than three. Trains could help.
Yes, a passenger system would have to be subsidized. But a sophisticated system — especially one that allows for faster freight delivery, because of better tracks and fewer bottlenecks — could reduce growth in the use of highways, thus keeping upkeep costs down. (Of course, auto and truck transportation is hugely subsidized by the construction and upkeep of highways.)
The more attention that quickly turns to these and other aspects of the train issue, the better. If 3C is going to happen, now appears to be the time, because of the stimulus money and memories of $4-a-gallon gas.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Transportation
TweetEditorial: Sexting teens are flirting with a felony
Lucky for us there weren’t cell phones, digital cameras and the Internet when we were kids. Every time another teen’s bad decision becomes an Internet-age news story, adults think, “There but for the grace of God — and age — go I.”
The sexiest national news story of the moment is the teen craze known as “sexting,” sending racy photographs via cell phone text message or over the Internet. The Montgomery County prosecutor’s office and juvenile court recently created a diversion program that gives sexting offenders the chance to avoid a criminal record.
That good move is a recognition that child pornography laws weren’t designed to nail kids who think they’re cool by disseminating titillating photos of themselves or others.
But it’d be even better if there were a way to persuade teenagers of the dangers of being cute in the cyber age.
Youthful indiscretion is timeless. For prior generations, however, embarrassing incidents were usually limited to a small circle.
That era is over. Today’s teen mistakes can go instantly global — and they can remain online forever.
Moreover, there can be legal consequences.
In Ohio, the law makes no distinction for age or circumstance when it comes to the transmission of child porn and “erotic” images of people who are underage. Offenders can get slapped with a felony and the label of “sex offender,” requiring them to register with the police for up to 20 years.
Though prosecutors do have latitude in the charges they bring, judges don’t always have the discretion to take into account adolescents’ willingness to flirt with danger, especially if someone ends up getting hurt.
Across the country, there are scores of examples of sexting gone awry.
In extreme cases, serious crimes may be connected to the practice, if victims are coerced or harassed.
Just last year at Cincinnati’s Sycamore High School, an 18-year-old girl killed herself after a nude picture of her was circulated electronically by an ex-boyfriend and she was bullied by schoolmates.
Frequently, “victims” actually have taken and sent the offending images themselves. But receivers can be in trouble, too, depending on what they do with the pictures.
Police departments from across the county have asked Prosecutor Mat Heck for guidance. Sometimes the issue comes up because an image is discovered in a lost cell phone. Or perhaps a phone is seized at school. Are these images criminal?
Mr. Heck’s office has gotten that question about a half dozen times — in cases involving both boys and girls.
The diversion program will not be used for offenders who are stockpiling and transmitting pornographic photos. But law enforcement will have another — better — option for dealing with teens who weren’t thinking.
To avoid a conviction, they’ll have to complete a six-month program of community service and education; lectures on practicing “safe text” — as Milwaukee has dubbed its public education campaign — is part of the program.
The legal process needed adjusting. Mr. Heck is reading sense into the law.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Boehner flounders for role other than ‘no’
Bob Schieffer, of CBS: “Why do you think that it’s a good idea to just simply freeze spending?”
John Boehner, R-West Chester, U.S. House Republican leader: “Well, because I think if you look around the country, our economy is struggling. American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.
“And I think that we can get through this year and lead by example and show the American people that government can go on a diet as well.”
One has to sympathize with Republican congressional leaders these days. They are constantly being compared with President Barack Obama or the late President Ronald Reagan — not to their advantage. They’ve seen Republican numbers shrink dramatically in Congress.
They are being lambasted by all manner of Republicans, including Rush Limbaugh. They are having to defend themselves against the charge that he is more important than they are. And they’re seeing their constant, rather extreme criticism of the president (an alleged “socialist”) have no measurable impact on his popularity, at least so far.
Mainly, they’re told they have to be different than they seem. They can’t just be the party of “no.” They have to come up with something, even if it’s only a way to re-cast their opposition.
And yet they know in their hearts that there’s a principle involved here. They honestly see their job as opposition, not because they’re in the opposition party, but because they believe in the opposition ideology.
Certainly Rep. Boehner is to be believed when he says his opposition is nothing personal. He has a reputation for getting along with House Democrats. In a body where things get quite personal, quite bitter, that’s nothing to sneeze at.
But when it comes to substance, he does seem to be floundering. Take this freeze thing. There really isn’t much more to his case than he presented in his answer to Mr. Schieffer, except this:
At hand is a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill for this year that Congress should have passed last year but didn’t. Two percent of the bill would go to “earmarks,” including a huge number sought by Republicans.
Rep. Boehner, on principle, opposes earmarks — locally focused projects that are typically unknown to anybody but a legislator or two or three.
The bill increases overall spending by $30 billion — almost four times more than the cost of the earmarks — over last year.
The proposal to freeze this spending at last year’s level comes from a man and a party that just proposed a stimulus bill of hundreds of billions of dollars. His plan was half the size of President Obama’s, but it would have created twice as many jobs, he insisted. Like the Democrats, he saw a need for much new debt.
So what’s this talk about “government tightening its belt”? A $400 billion stimulus is belt tightening?
More striking yet is the sheer oddness of the rationale: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.”
The fact that the American people — including those making business decisions — are tightening their belts is universally seen as the immediate problem to be addressed by a stimulus. Private belts are so tight that public belts had to be loosened, so spending is occurring somewhere.
To go from that, in no time, to “we’ve got to emulate the belt-tighteners,” that’s quite a trip.
Setting aside the matter of consistency, this question remains: Does anybody really believe that government belt-tightening will help get the country out of this mess? Maybe Herbert Hoover.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetKevin Riley: Downtown effort is rolling
The plan to recreate downtown Dayton is gathering momentum.
Led by Michael Ervin, a retired physician and health insurance executive, and supported by the city and the Downtown Dayton Partnership, the Greater Downtown Plan is being built after a series of public meetings.
Those meetings and other events provided plenty of public input. The goal is a business plan for downtown that will be, as Ervin likes to say, “actionable.”
At this point, the partnership is assembling the information that has been gathered from the public meetings and an online survey of about 1,000 people.
Hundreds of people attended three public meetings seeking ideas for downtown, a turnout that was a pleasant surprise. Attendees included a broad mix, including city and suburban residents, activists and people of all ages. That’s important because it shows that many of us understand that downtown concerns all of us.
“It was standing-room only,” Ervin said. “There was a lot of excitement.”
Several themes are emerging:
— Housing downtown is important. One way to make downtown more vibrant is to simply have more people live there. And if we want younger professionals (one of the best targets), the housing has to be in their price range.
— Downtown should be a better and more friendly “product.” In other words, improving the look and infrastructure would make it more attractive, from curbs to sidewalks and other basic things.
— Downtown has a number of bright spots, including the Oregon District, RiverScape, Fifth Third Field and its diverse architecture. These things need more of a connection to each other.
Ervin has assembled a number of committees that will recommend plans in key areas. Those areas include:
— Housing/neighborhood development
— Jobs
— The riverfront
— Amenities/entertainment
— Transportation
— Green and sustainable plans
He has been quietly enlisting people and organizations to support those committees and has patiently put key people together, emphasizing he wants action from them.
“We’re not interested in just theory,” he said. “We’re not going to create wish lists. It has to be real.”
A next step will be the release later this month of “creative re-use” drawings by local architecture firms. The architects took on a volunteer project to make some bold proposals for about 10 downtown buildings. The ideas will be available to developers, but the architects weren’t asked to prove the plans were financially viable.
The architects call for innovative housing units and a number of amenities to go along with their ideas.
Several have proposals that will be particularly attractive to cyclists. And one bold proposal calls for a pedestrian walkway that would go from Fourth Street to the river between Jefferson and St. Clair streets.
“We want to change the function of the streets … to be equally useful for cars and people,” Ervin said.
Challenges, of course, loom. At some point the downtown plan will have to be funded. And in these economic times, that won’t be easy.
For downtown to be successful, its job base has to be stabilized. And that is a key matter for the city because employment in the downtown area provides a huge chunk of income tax revenue to support the city at-large.
Downtown must also overcome the perception that it’s unsafe, an inaccurate but deeply rooted fear.
The amount of office space downtown, currently being studied by a consultant, may be too great. That could mean tearing down some buildings and adding others.
And parking remains a difficult issue. The partnership has set up a Web site (easyparkdowntown.org) to offer help. But, in the end, our first and last experiences with each trip downtown are around parking. That experience must improve to draw people — and get them to come back.
But Ervin wants to take this step-by-step.
“That’s the only way it’s going to really work,” he said.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Kevin Riley
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Brunner has redistricting plan, too
I’m at a two-day conference in Columbus organized by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on elections administration issues.
Most of the attendees are professional elections officials, or members of county elections boards. People are here from Montgomery County, Greene, Miami, Preble and others.
Ellis Jacobs, the Dayton activist on voting rights and other issues, is here. So are some academics. A few journalists, off and on, but not many.
It’s mainly a sort of convention for people who run elections. They get to talk to each other about common problems, like how to recruit poll workers and train them, how to handle the “provisional ballots” that complicate things on Election Day, how to keep the state and federal governments from imposing too many unfunded mandates.
There have been occasional fireworks. When professors and activists worry about votes not being counted — as in the 40,000 people whose provisional ballots were rejected in 2008 for one reason or another — the elections people sometimes hear themselves being blamed (which I really don’t think is the intention of those raising the issue; they’re more critical of laws).
Some of the elections people — not all — think voters are being coddled too much and need to take more responsibility for getting themselves registered in the right place, with a competently filled out registration form.
Secretary Brunner made at least one effort to make news, unveiling a new project relating to the drawing of legislative districts.
She and some legislators and some long-time activists from the League of Women Voters and Common Cause are inviting organizations around the state to draw maps that are fair and nonpartisan, and submit them to the state. Those maps will be used to get the state authorities to adhere to certain principles of fairness, as opposed to their usual obsession with self interest in shaping districts.
Exactly how that would work has not been worked out entirely. But it looks as though Brunner has a plan to compete with that of state Sen. Jon Husted, who would like to create a commission that is not controlled by either party.
Brunner is running for the U.S. Senate. Husted is eyeing secretary of state. Stay tuned.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Montgomery County, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Sugarcreek, Centerville must end war
The battle between Centerville and Sugarcreek Twp. about the land that was once the Dille family farm is risky for both sides. The dispute begs for a settlement.
For one thing, it’s costing a ton. Between them, Centerville and Sugarcreek already have spent close to $500,000 making their legal arguments. The case is still in Greene County Common Pleas Court, but it could go to the next higher court.
Moreover, the case could establish new interpretations of state law for other cities and townships that could throw past and future financing arrangements up in the air.
At issue is the desire by Dille property owners and developers to be annexed by Centerville. A 2001 law was supposed to smooth the annexation process. Instead of having townships and cities fight about tax revenue, the law created an expedited process allowing property taxes from annexed land to stay with the affected township that was losing money, but income and other tax revenue would go to the city getting the new property. The goal was to prevent long, contentious fights that are common in annexation bids.
In this case, the developers also are asking for “tax increment financing” — spending future tax revenues from the developed property to help make the improvements to the land today.
Sugarcreek is balking at that idea. It opposes using its future tax revenues to help finance the project, but the deal may not work otherwise.
The two sides have tried to compromise. With the help of a mediator, they agreed to a framework to settle the dispute, but when they got into the details, negotiations fell apart.
“We just couldn’t get there,” said Barry Tiffany, administrator for Sugarcreek Twp. “Given the scenario and the obligations (Centerville) had made to the developer and the property owners, we just couldn’t get the numbers to work.”
Still, Greene County Magistrate George Reynolds’ recent decision shows the dangers for both sides of pressing a court case. Neither was happy with his ruling, and both are objecting.
Magistrate Reynolds found the Dille annexation was legal, but that Centerville could not use tax increment financing. Centerville City Manager Greg Horn said if the ruling on the financing stands, dozens of so-called TIF agreements for places like The Greene in Beavercreek or Union Centre in West Chester are threatened.
“The potential damage would be staggering statewide,” he said.
Any time a law is challenged in court, there’s a possibility it could be interpreted in ways the fighting parties don’t like. But once a court ruling is made and an appellate court weighs in, the appellate court decision becomes the standard for applying the rules for the area covered by that court.
A lot of interests are indirectly represented at the table in the Dille case. It will take creative thinking and new ideas to break the stalemate. But continuing to fight this case raises the possibility that developers and local governments could both lose an increasingly common financing tool.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Husted’s intentions not all that count
State Sen. Jon Husted, allegedly of Kettering, is not going to get kicked out of the Ohio Senate if Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner decides he might not really live there and, thus, might not be eligible to vote locally.
Once someone is elected, the Senate, under the state constitution, has wide latitude to decide whom to seat. Should someone complain about Sen. Husted’s residency, the Republican-dominated group would be easily persuaded that voters in a large portion of Montgomery County overwhelmingly elected him and that is that — regardless of where he sleeps.
Democratic Secretary Brunner, however, is required by law to break a tie vote by the Montgomery County Board of Elections — which has two Democrats and two Republicans — to settle the matter of whether he really lives in the community and, thus, is eligible to vote here and be a candidate again in the future.
(Briefs to Secretary Brunner were due just this week.)
She is in a ticklish spot. Sen. Husted is widely expected to run for secretary of state next year. Though Secretary Brunner has said she’s running to replace George Voinovich in the U.S. Senate, if she changes her mind, she could face Sen. Husted.
Even if she isn’t his opponent, Secretary Brunner can create a political problem for a legislator who unquestionably has been an aggressive advocate for Dayton. He needs to be registered to vote some place, and here’s a guy who apparently wants to be the state’s chief elections officer, though he’s the subject of an investigation challenging whether he is properly registered in his legislative district.
This is not a problem a secretary of state candidate-in-waiting relishes. Sen. Husted is unsympathetic to the fact that the Montgomery County Board of Elections had no choice but to investigate his residency status once it got a formal complaint. The board simply doesn’t have the option of ignoring these sorts of allegations.
Though it happens rarely, the board does get reports about voters voting in the wrong place or not being eligible; sometimes fraud is involved.
That was the case last year during the presidential campaign, when ineligible individuals were registering to vote in the state, and non-residents were falsely saying they lived in Ohio in an attempt to run up the votes for Barack Obama here. Of course, that sort of abuse of the system is wholly different than the criticism of Sen. Husted. But nobody should want local elections officials deciding they’ll ignore some laws, but not others.
In response to Democratic board members’ questions of him, Sen. Husted has not gone out of his way to offer compelling evidence that he spends substantial time at 148 Sherbrooke Drive.
Rather, his defense pretty much is “to the extent he left Montgomery County temporarily,” he was doing so in his capacity as a “state employee” and that he intends to return to the county.
His intentions — which he says the board must consider by law — come up again and again in his brief to elections board members.
Sen. Husted is unlike many legislators in that he married a woman who lives in Columbus, and he has a child from a previous marriage who lives in Columbus. Moreover, when he was House speaker, that job required him to spend a lot of time outside of Dayton.
That said, there is this pesky law that aims to ensure that elected lawmakers have more than a fleeting association with the voters who elect them. It is not a ridiculous law, and Sen. Husted — notwithstanding his professed intentions — has yet to demonstrate that he has been meeting the spirit of its intentions.
The board of elections doesn’t get to consider the intentions of the people who made the complaint against him. That is personally and politically inconvenient for Sen. Husted, and, yes, there are other politicians who undoubtedly could be similarly challenged.
Some of them may be worrying because of Sen. Husted’s unhappy experience. Of course, they have the option of saying the law is too strict and trying to loosen it.
In the end, Secretary Brunner may not want to be too much of a stickler, for fear of seeming partisan; for sure, the Senate will cut Sen. Husted a break if it gets involved.
But the truth is the truth; Sen. Husted hasn’t really been living here even part-time, and he’s asking Secretary Brunner to read the law in absolutely the most favorable light for him, while ignoring much that undercuts his case.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Ohio, Dayton tops in new job sites; really?
If Ohio wins any more of those sizable “Governor’s Cups” that Site Selection magazine gives to the state with the best economic development record, the government will have to find a place to store them. Good thing there are so many empty factories.
Every year at this time, Site Selection — a specialty magazine for people involved in decisions about business locations — names Ohio as the state that’s best at attracting new business developments and expansions. Well, not every year. But every year for the last three. And 2003. And 1993, 1994 and 1995. In between, the state came in usually second or third.
About the only state that has been remotely as impressive — with its own threepeat in the late 1990s — is that other miracle of economic vitality: Michigan.
This year is special for the region because this time the Dayton area ranked tops in the nation among urban areas in its size range (200,000 in population to 1 million). A total of 41 new sites or expansions are counted to its credit. Akron and Toledo are second and third.
And the Springfield area came in second in its range (under 200,000).
Take that, Forbes.com!
For those who haven’t kept up with all these rankings: Forbes.com has taken to publishing periodic obituaries for the Dayton area, announcing that it is one of the fastest dying places in the country or one of the emptiest or who-knows-what next.
So what is it with these rankings? How can one place be at the bottom and at the top? In 1994, this newspaper looked into how the Site Selection competition was run. It reported:
“Magazine editor Jack Lyne said he has seen other states move up or down in the ranking depending on the importance that state administrations attach to keeping tabs on business development.
“The (George) Voinovich administration honed its business tallying by more carefully scrutinizing press clippings to find expansion announcements, assigning staffers to keep closer tabs on new businesses, writing chambers of commerce more frequently and examining a new database to track building permits.”
When, in 2001, the state’s ranking suddenly fell to 14, it was like the New York Yankees not making postseason play.
But the Columbus Dispatch reported that the magazine had changed the rules of the game that year. Now it was measuring 10 factors, not one; and now it was adjusting the statistics to take a state’s size into account. If not for the changes, Ohio would have fallen only to fifth, the magazine editor said.
After that, the state apparently adjusted well.
In the magazine’s story about this year’s award (www.siteselection.com), much is made of all the things Ohio is doing to spur the economy. It’s certainly true that the Strickland administration has done a lot, from passing a stimulus to trying to upgrade higher education.
But if those actions explain the victory in 2008, what explains 2006 or 2007? If somebody, in looking at Ohio’s economy and Dayton’s economy, finds something to praise, some good news, that’s a good thing. It helps to balance what sometimes sounds like a deafening din of despair.
But the truth is that the Site Selection contest doesn’t measure plant closings or shrinkages. It also doesn’t rank the states as to start-ups and expansions of small businesses.
And as to measuring site selections: Best in the nation repeatedly? One of the best in the nation almost consistently over two decades? Really? Is anybody buying this?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Limbaugh playing badly; it doesn’t matter
I’m not sure anybody needs any more input from anybody about Rush Limbaugh and Obama and all that. But here’s the best you’re going to get:
1) Before Limbaugh ever said he hopes the president fails, and before Obama ever mentioned Limbaugh, I was thinking that the Limbaughs of the world were the biggest threat to the hopes for an era of bipartisanship. They make their money and their place in the world off polarization. If everybody’s just getting along — if fear and hatred subside — they are marginalized. They must exaggerate the conservative case against Obama to preposterous degrees. It’s what they do.
The result is more hatred than makes any sense. I was glad the president mentioned him to Republicans as a problem.
2) When Limbaugh said he hopes Obama fails, I thought this was just another flap for the political warriors to spit at each other about. I was wrong. This one grabs the interest of regular people. I’ve had it mentioned to me outside my political circles.
3) Rush is not playing well.
4) But I doubt that it matters much, politically speaking. That is, I don’t see this as a sign of the shrinkage of the Republicans down to a narrower, harder core. What matters now — for both parties — is whether the economy recovers next year. All the spitting and spinning might as well be put on hold, for all the difference it makes.
4) Still, the effort of the Democrats to paint Limbaugh as the face of the Republican Party is fair enough for politics. Look at the Republicans that criticize L: One congressman said that it’s easier for Limbaugh to spout off than for Republican officials to handle their problems. That’s not even criticism. Yet the congressman had to take it back. Then the party chairman said Limbaugh is about entertainment and that, yes, his show sometimes gets ugly. That’s hardly criticism. Yet he, too, had to grovel. The Republicans can’t insist that L is a just sideshow and treat him as if he’s the boss.
5) When Limbaugh says he hopes Obama fails, he means it in exactly the way it sounds. He has never denied that. His apologists spin his statement it to make him look not so bad, but he doesn’t spin it.
6) All that being said, I no longer see the Limbaugh types as the great threat to a new era of bipartisanship. The real threat is now the economy and the fact that Obama has decided that he must respond as an activist, whether he gets Republicans on board or not. In this context, activism really comes down to liberalism. I think that when Obama started talking about bipartisanship in 2004 and continued in his campaign in 2007 and 2008, he was sincere. He didn’t see any reason that Rs and Ds couldn’t find more common ground on the issues of those years. But the times changed suddenly, killing the dream.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetEdtorial: $20 million gift to Dayton is extraordinary
Virginia Toulmin’s gift to Dayton cannot be overstated.
The legacy gift of more than $20 million that the former Daytonian and businesswoman donated to the Dayton Foundation is four times the next biggest individual gift the foundation has ever received.
Plus, the majority of the 3,000 funds set up by donors to the foundation target specific groups. Of the $41 million in grants the foundation made last year, $40 million of them were earmarked for pre-selected causes.
Mrs. Toulmin’s gift, however, ultimately will become unrestricted, meaning the foundation will get to reward groups that are making an important difference in the community through a competitive grant-making selection process. Do-gooders will be encouraged to be imaginative about what the community needs.
Speaking of her husband and her decision to not attach strings to the donation, Mrs. Toulmin told the Dayton Foundation, “Harry always said one shouldn’t try to dictate from the grave.”
Mrs. Toulmin is herself a remarkable story. She grew up and went to college in St. Louis. After graduation, she found herself working as a stewardess nurse for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. That’s when a young patent attorney from Dayton named Harry A. Toulmin Jr. started timing his weekly train travel to coincide with her runs.
Harry Toulmin’s father and law partner, Harry Sr., is a key figure in Wright brothers lore. As the Wrights’ attorney, he wrote the patent application to protect their revolutionary invention — the airplane.
Mrs. Toulmin moved here in 1958, beginning 41 years in Dayton that she describes as wonderfully happy. Not long after the move, her husband, relying on her medical background, appointed her to the board of a small, bankrupt drugmaker he helped rescue.
After his death in 1965, Mrs. Toulmin became president, and over 30 years, she helped create a thriving enterprise.
At the time of her husband’s death, an attorney wanted her to sell the company for $1 million. She balked, and, three decades later, she sold it to a multinational firm for $178 million.
Mrs. Toulmin had many philanthropic interests in Dayton. But now that she has relocated full time to Florida, she wants a trusted community partner to help continue that endeavor, and she picked the Dayton Foundation. Its charge is to use her gift to continue to make a difference in the community long after Mrs. Toulmin is gone.
Michael Parks, the foundation’s executive director, said he believes Mrs. Toulmin’s gift could some day double the amount of “discretionary” grants the foundation makes each year to about $2 million.
What can that money do for Dayton? Consider some recent examples.
In the 1990s, the foundation used discretionary funds to help launch the Montgomery County Job Center, a training and service facility that today plays a crucial role connecting displaced workers with new jobs.
Earlier this decade, it funded the Out of School Youth task force to coax dropouts back to school. That led to the formation of the Fast Forward program at Sinclair Community College, which has created alternative school programs that have helped cut Montgomery County’s dropout rate in half in five years.
Today the foundation is working in partnership with the Dayton Business Committee on a three-year project to support minority-owned companies through the Minority Economic Development Council.
With Mrs. Toulmin’s gift, the foundation will have more latitude to address community needs. Through her generosity, the city’s reputation for ingenuity and problem-solving that she and her husband helped build can continue for new generations.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Social Services
TweetEditorial: Time for the city to tear down Ecki building
Any city needs to be careful about what it destroys. Old structures are cards cities can play. In the eyes of many people — not all, to be sure — they add something to the quality of life, connecting generations, offering a sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself.
But some things are not worth saving, not compared with the alternative.
When a city or a neighborhood has to struggle for any economic development it can get, sometimes something has to give. So it is now with the Ecki Building at Wayne Avenue and Wyoming streets in Dayton.
The Spanish Colonial Revival-style building is more interesting than most buildings around it. But it isn’t attractive from the front now, and it’s downright ugly from the back; and the back is exposed.
Most important, it’s at a crucial corner. That commercial intersection needs to be put to the best use possible. It needs a fresh start.
The residential neighborhood behind it is in need of redevelopment, for which it seems ripe. The intersection and some nearby neighborhoods already have growing vitality, suggesting that some businesses could do well. There’s a demand for new shopping opportunities, especially a modern supermarket.
The corner was to be part of a new development featuring a Kroger to replace the smaller one already on Wayne. That deal fell apart before a final resolution had been reached on the Ecki building.
Some people had pushed to have the building preserved, or, failing that, to have the facade preserved, or failing that, to have at least a part of the facade preserved, even if it had to be moved.
In truth, however, that effort has never generated much enthusiasm among the people who live in the struggling area east of Wayne and north of Wyoming. They have supported development with little or no conditions. The insistence by historical preservationists that the development ought to somehow look urban rather than suburban has fallen on a lot of deaf ears.
Now the city of Dayton has plans to buy the building, with thoughts of demolition. That’s the best course.
The city must make the site attractive to developers, minimizing the problems they will run into. The record so far has shown that goal won’t be fulfilled easily. Every stage is difficult, from locking up the land, to attracting developers, to agreeing on usage, to finding tenants.
To keep hope alive in the wake of Kroger’s decision not to go forward — to show that Dayton is still serious — the city also is renewing its options to buy some properties. That expenditure might seem strange for a city that is cutting back on jobs. But the money will not come from the general fund that pays workers’ salaries, but from dedicated bonds.
At any rate, the city cannot afford to lose sight of the future as it struggles to get from day to day. Short-sightedness will not help.
As it looks to the future, Dayton must sometimes look to the past, too. But not this time.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Governor’s shot at charters hits Dayton
Gov. Ted Strickland must be stopped in his drive to put charter schools out of business.
His proposed budget would cut funding for the state’s 330 charter schools by about 20 percent overall, which, for many, would mean they’d be done.
The schools already get far less in taxpayer money than traditional public schools. That’s the price they pay to buy autonomy to operate free of sometimes stifling bureaucracy and rigid union contracts.
In Dayton, the cut would be a travesty for the charter schools that are besting or equaling Dayton public schools. Especially tragic would be the potential double-whammy that the Dayton Early College Academy would suffer.
Let’s be clear: If the governor gets his way, this special school that is putting Dayton on the map nationally in the school reform movement is history.
DECA, as the school is known, is a celebrated charter high school that allows students to attend high school classes and take college classes at the University of Dayton and other area colleges. Its mostly disadvantaged students are posting phenomenal test scores, graduation rates and college-acceptance rates.
The exact amount charter schools would be cut varies. DECA’s calculations are that it, for sure, would lose 17 percent of its state money.
On top of that, the governor also wants to eliminate certain funding for Ohio’s nine early college academies. Across the state, 2,200 students are attending high schools that are working hand-in-hand with a college to introduce kids early to college-level material. They earn college credit if they can keep up.
These schools might or might not get the money that former Gov. Bob Taft and then-Speaker Jon Husted, both Republicans, expressly set aside in previous budgets for these experimental schools. Instead, bureaucrats would decide whether to fund them; who knows what they’d do.
Not just at DECA, but at eight other academies, low-income students — many of them minority, many from families where no one has ever gone to college — are taking college classes and succeeding.
The governor is correct that there are horrible charter schools in the state that deserve to be shut down. But they need to be closed in an honest, straightforward way — by showing how they are not meeting standards or not following the law. Punishing every charter because Gov. Strickland is so high on traditional public education is betraying the thousands of children who are demonstrably better off in these alternative schools. These mostly small schools are already at a disadvantage in that they get no funding from the state for their facilities, and they don’t get money from local property tax levies. Many pay their teachers less (when benefits are included), while they also typically have longer school days.
Go figure how it makes sense for the governor to dock schools that already are doing a lot with a little.
Most of the reputable local charter schools that are making better progress than some public schools are, even so, not shining examples of educational excellence. Even with the freedom to do things differently and to put incredible demands on their staff, they’re struggling.
DECA, on the other hand, has in five short years exceeded everybody’s expectations. It is changing the lives of its 300 students in profound ways. And this school is pretty much those kids’ last chance to lay a foundation that allows them to dream of college and to succeed there.
Maybe Gov. Strickland doesn’t know how awful his budget would be for this one particular school because of its admittedly unusual status as both a charter school and an early college academy. But he needs to know about it because DECA is already doing what he says he says schools should aspire to achieve.
Charter schools have an important and now entrenched place in Ohio’s educational landscape. Even a governor shouldn’t get to eliminate them without having to spell out that as a goal. And he should take tremendous heat for trying.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ellen Belcher
TweetEllen Belcher: Community organizers had it right
When Barack Obama was running for president, some opponents dismissed his experience as a community organizer, questioning the value or importance of that work.
Besides the fact that community organizers now have one of their own in the White House, there’s another reason these folks who work on the street, trying to help families and neighborhoods, are looking pretty smart these days.
With a very few regulators and even fewer honorable Wall Street money-changers, they were among the first to predict that the predatory lending that was decimating neighborhoods was going to bring down more than poor families.
Community organizers saw that subprime lenders weren’t just ripping off gullible, low-income consumers. They understood that bad loans that were never going to be repaid were being bundled and bought by investors — from banks to hedge funds to your pension fund — who had no idea what they were purchasing.
They knew those “toxic assets” that Washington now wants to put in a “bad bank” — what great oxymorons — were based on inflated appraisals that encouraged people to use the equity in their homes as if it were a pot of gold.
Community organizers don’t often have degrees in high finance, but they did recognize a house of cards.
Some of them tried to blow the whistle by documenting the scale of what was happening in neighborhoods. But they were dismissed.
In 2004, Jim McCarthy, the head of the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center, gave a briefing on predatory lending in Dayton to U.S. Rep. Michael Oxley, then chair of the House Financial Services Committee. At the behest of U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, he and others argued that lenders’ financial model wasn’t sustainable and that big institutions were going to get creamed.
More recently, Turner has asked McCarthy if he feels like an “oracle.”
Turner, incidentally, was one of just seven Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote last week for legislation that would give bankruptcy judges so-called “cram down” authority to rewrite the terms of mortgage loans, including reducing principal or extending the life of the mortgage.
Lenders complain that the option would encourage people not to pay their mortgages and to file for bankruptcy, thereby driving up costs for responsible borrowers.
Supporters of the idea, however, argue that until the foreclosure crisis is dealt with, the economy will keep reeling. Moreover, they note that bankruptcy judges already can reduce the principal for loans on commercial property, second homes, cars and boats, so why not for primary residences if that’s what it takes to stop the real estate slide?
Because of Montgomery County’s huge number of foreclosures — it and Cleveland have been among the hardest hit areas in the state— Dayton has developed some genuine authorities on the subject. Turner has had McCarthy testify before Congress twice. McCarthy points to others who’ve worked tirelessly, including Stan Hirtle of Advocates for Basic Legal Equality; Beth Deutscher, of the HomeOwnership Center of Greater Dayton; attorney Charles Roedersheimer; and Richard Stock, of the University of Dayton’s Business Research Group.
At the state level, Bill Faith at the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio has trenchantly exposed Republican and Democratic ignorance on the depth and implications of the foreclosure crisis in Ohio.
Aided by these people and others, Democratic state Rep. Mike Foley, of the Cleveland area (and a UD grad), is proposing legislation that would mandate a six-month time-out on foreclosures in the state and give common pleas judges “cram down” authority when considering foreclosures. (The federal legislation applies to bankruptcy judges.)
While his proposal is controversial and raises prickly constitutional questions, the contrast between the Ohio Bankers League testimony on the bill and that of Paul Bellamy, who directs the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program, was stunning.
The bankers have no suggestions about what to do. They just know what’s wrong with others’ ideas and point to the laws Ohio already has to regulate lenders. But if they worked, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Bellamy’s chronicle of how the process is stacked to force foreclosure even when it’s not in a lender’s financial interest — though servicers of loans make out — is a case study in craziness.
Lest anyone think Bellamy is just a liberal community organizer on an ideological toot, he cites a speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in which Bernanke says pretty much the same thing.
In the words of Bellamy, Ohio is in a “wealth-destroying crisis of unprecedented proportions.”
Lenders got us where we are. Maybe the community organizers can help get us out.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Ellen Belcher, National Politics, Ohio politics, Predatory lending
TweetEditorial: Cutting Delphi retirees’ benefits has its costs
The New York bankruptcy judge who ruled last week that Delphi could stop paying health benefits and life-insurance premiums for 15,000 white-collar retirees didn’t invent that cost-cutting move. Many companies that are not in bankruptcy have stopped providing this benefit.
A survey of big companies last fall found that just 31 percent of businesses that offered health care coverage to employees offered it to retirees. In 1988, that number was 66 percent of large firms.
Knowing that others are in the same boat is scant consolation to the families who are trying to figure out how they’ll be able to afford health insurance until they become Medicare-eligible.
The issue for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain was whether Delphi could afford this expense. In light of Delphi’s awful balance sheet, it didn’t take much to persuade him that the auto supplier had no choice but to cancel the coverage.
“It is crystal clear to me that the debtor is well within its business judgment in assuming that it will need to eliminate the projected (post-retirement benefits) liability, which is projected at $1.1 billion, in order to reorganize,” he said in his ruling.
Since the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005, it has been hemorrhaging money. Delphi has lost more than $12 billion, even though it has closed 21 of its 29 U.S. factories, cut its hourly work force almost by half and its salaried employees by almost 40 percent.
Looked at one way, the company’s first reaction was not to renege on commitments to its retirees. That’s partially because, not long ago, the $70 million annual cost of the benefit wasn’t eye-catching; there were much, much bigger problems. But now, with the company so much smaller and still looking to save because the auto industry is so stressed, the spending sticks out.
Though Delphi has negotiated cuts in benefits for retired union workers, it didn’t have to go through that process for retirees who were salaried. Undoubtedly salaried workers are probably feeling bitter that they accepted the uncertainty of being in management in their working careers, and, now in retirement, they’re absorbing a burden that union workers have been spared.
The judge’s decision will have impact locally. It’s hard to say how many retirees here aren’t yet Medicare-eligible. But for those families, the financial shock is big. The cost of their insurance could be more than $1,000 a month for a retiree and a spouse. For some, finding a less expensive plan will be impossible because of pre-existing conditions.
Delphi certainly hasn’t been alone in encouraging workers to take early retirement, and, until the economic meltdown, that option was one some people wanted to grab. But with people’s retirement savings being ripped apart, with housing values (and thus home equity) falling, and with companies being able to change the terms of retirement packages, workers are going to be increasingly inclined to play it safe and stay on the job. You can’t blame them.
One consequence is that it’s going to be harder to trim payrolls the easy way, by asking for volunteers.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: Springboro is still waiting on school aid
This is the definition of crazy: Financial constraints are forcing a fast-growing local school district to close an elementary school that it knows it will be forced to reopen within three years.
If Gov. Ted Strickland’s proposed school funding reform can’t help avoid this problem, then the overhaul won’t be complete.
On the first day of school last fall, enrollment in Springboro grew by 270 students, or about 5 percent annual growth for the 5,500-student district. That sort of influx has been typical for the past several years.
Even with the slow economy, the young families that have already moved to this high-performing suburban district will send a flood of new kids to school during the next three years. An informal survey of local preschools and day care centers that the district conducted showed as many as 475 kids would be old enough to attend kindergarten in the district next year.
For a decade, Springboro has been trying to get out ahead of its rapid growth. When it built schools, it built them large enough to be ready for the influx. But, right now, the focus is not on construction, but on an immediate financial crisis.
Voters have rejected three requests to pass a levy for new operating money. The district is trying again in May, with a scaled-down 4.1-mill proposal (the previous try would have grown to 5.9 mills). Meanwhile, the district has pared its way to a balanced budget.
It also has undergone a “performance audit” by Ohio Auditor Mary Taylor’s office, designed to bring in outside eyes to look for efficiencies. That report is not done, but Superintendent David Baker said he has gotten some early feedback.
The suggestion: Close a school.
Auditors looked at the capacity of the buildings and argued that there is enough space at other schools to absorb students from one closed elementary school, achieving a significant savings for now.
Even with that savings, though, more cuts will be needed if the May levy fails. There also will be higher fees to participate in extracurricular activities, as well as reduced busing. This gets the district through the crisis of the moment, but it also means Dennis Elementary School will be 100 children over the design capacity, with 1,200 students next year.
Wealthy Springboro is one of the area’s best performing school districts, ranked “excellent with distinction” on its state report card. But with class size expected to creep near 30 in some rooms, the district’s ability to deliver that level of quality is endangered.
This situation is not unique to Springboro. Nearby Centerville, another high performer, also is trying again for a levy in May. And the pattern is familiar to those who recall past recessions. When money gets tight, even the best regarded schools have trouble passing levies.
Gov. Strickland says his school funding overhaul should keep districts from having to return to the ballot every two or three years just to keep operating at the same level. But when state aid projections for the governor’s plan came out, there was no sign of any big change in the way many districts — Springboro and Centerville among them — would be funded.
Gov. Strickland deserves credit for making a real run at school funding reform. But his plan’s key flaw is that the underlying fundamentals of the property tax-based system are not significantly changed. And for too many districts, that means actions that would otherwise seem crazy end up making sense. There’s something wrong with that.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetBrooke Bryan: Not all ‘creatives’ choose NYC
I beg to differ with Richard Florida’s somewhat doomsday forecast of Midwestern cities in The Atlantic .
Florida forecasts that people will continue to concentrate in the gold-standard handful of cities currently enjoying an influx; and that the growth of mega-regions — or multi-city corridors — will continue to strip less prime areas of their mobile, educated, and innovative workforce. The article looks at how the economic bust will hasten and concretize the trend.
He cites the diversified economy of New York City as the reason it will be spared serious deleterious effects in the present bust. NYC is a breeding ground for arts and media and culture, a longstanding stronghold of the creative class — surely part of the genesis of the creative class theory.
But what of the cost of living?
For Florida, this is a side note. But as a freelance, day-job dodging fiber artist, writer, and mother, I can assure you that no cultural allure can cause me to live in a place where I may never afford an apartment larger than 700 square feet. Analysts think high median real estate prices mark a strong economy. For me, they signify it’s time to look elsewhere.
Apparently, I’m not alone in sensing a shift.
A New York Sun article (from pre-bust December 2007) entitled “New York in Danger of Losing Its Artists” cites the city’s efforts to retain its creatives.
The article quotes notable arts director Theodore Berger:
“It’s a question of how we attract and maintain talent in this city, and how that talent matures in the city.”
Now that sounds awfully familiar. New York is struggling to retain them. Dayton wants to attract them. The only thing we know for sure about the “bohemian” part of the “creative class” (questionable classifications with notably uncreative tags) is that it defies the status quo.
The point is that dominant social trends often present counter-trends of some significance. In my humble opinion, forecasts of a long-to-linger post-manufacturing interior tell us more about the creative class theory than about how creative people — driven by ideas and the want of basic freedoms — actually move through times and spaces.
Brooke Bryan is a journalist, multimedia folklorist and quilt maker. She runs the Web site for DaytonCREATE and is documenting the place and people of Yellow Springs.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: Brooke Bryan, City of Dayton, Dayton Creative Class Initiative, Economy, Guest Columns
TweetEditorial: Centerville should back off wrestler’s case
It’s not every day that the Second District Court of Appeals hears a case that turns on a $1.30 package of cookies.
The appeals court spends most of its time reviewing complicated murder trials and civil suits. But last week, it took up the case of Dillon Kelley, 16, the Centerville High School wrestler accused of stealing from the school cafeteria.
His parents, seeking to keep their son eligible for a district wrestling tournament, challenged the school’s decision to prohibit Dillon from competing in that meet, and then followed with a lawsuit and an appeal.
On Feb. 27, two appellate judges allowed Dillon to go to the mat. He still faces a misdemeanor theft charge in juvenile court. That criminal case should be dropped, and everyone needs to take a breath.
The publicity and the stigma that inevitably will follow Dillon in this digital age are punishment enough. The more the case is pressed, the more stubborn and unreasonable all the adults look.
Judging by the court documents, the school district had a good case supporting its disciplinary decisions. Two adults gave credible and consistent accounts of Dillon’s actions. One adult — a security guard — watched what happened when Dillon went through the line, and then checked with the cashier to verify that the sophomore hadn’t paid for his cookies.
In a school setting, it’s perfectly reasonable for administrators to rely more on adults’ versions of events. Moreover, the standard for disciplining a child in school is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But making the case a criminal matter is going too far.
Dillon’s parents, Jennifer Marovich and Patrick Kelley, have complained bitterly about Centerville’s disciplinary process. Dillon was suspended from school for a day under the school’s disciplinary code, and then under a separate athletic conduct code, he was told he wouldn’t be allowed to wrestle in one competition.
In Dillon’s hearing, the family pointed to incidents where lesser punishments had been meted out for what they thought were more serious offenses. They had good examples.
Though Centerville seems to think that point is changing the subject, if the school district isn’t consistent in its discipline, of course parents and students are going to object.
In truth, Dillon’s punishment wasn’t harsh. His parents would have had a tough time complaining if there weren’t other incidents where athletes have been treated more kindly. If athletes are to be held to a higher and different standard than nonathletes — a good rule — the expectations need to be enforced for all of them.
Discipline is always touchy for schools. Adults have to create an environment where a decision-maker gets to have the last word and deserves to have his or her call respected, even if a punishment is difficult to swallow. That gives school authorities their best chance to keep kids under control, to model proper behavior and to teach lasting lessons.
The cafeteria incident never belonged in court on any level. The adults on all sides needed to work harder to avoid that. But the kids are still watching, and lessons are still being learned. So far, they’ve seen more bad behavior than good.
Backing down on the criminal charge would end a saga that was bungled by Centerville school officials, as well as Ms. Marovich and Mr. Kelley.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetPaul Leonard: Rush, Olbermann— they’re comics
When I was in the Legislature, we had two polar opposites on the House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Harry Lehman was a liberal from Shaker Heights. Literally, at the other end of the table was Rep. William Batchelder, a conservative from Medina (who, incidentally, is back in the Legislature today). They were in different political parties, but they had a special respect for each other and a professional approach to legislating.
I was in my 20s, sitting at the middle of the table, getting a college education in intelligent liberal and conservative politics. They both made it nearly impossible to choose who was right and who was wrong in a good debate. And when they were together on the issue, you knew they were right. Those were the good ole days.
Longing for some of the same in today’s politics, I try to catch a little of Rush on the radio in the afternoon, and then I watch a little of Keith Olbermann at night on MSNBC. A little is enough.
It just isn’t the same. This isn’t old-fashioned, respectful, political discussion and debate. At best, this is entertainment. Even comedy.
Jonah Goldberg gives Rush a “right on” to Rush’s confession that he “hopes Obama fails.” Rush repeated his wish at the Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington to the roaring cheers from the right-wingers in attendance.
What a joke!
It’s one thing to say that a certain philosophy or legislative proposal should fail; it’s quite another to hope that the president goes down. Rush may have back-peddled a bit, but that’s exactly what he’s thinking.
Limbaugh and Olbermann both get a bit too personal. Rush is just plain mean-spirited.
As Goldberg notes, it isn’t the liberal press and media who are critical of Limbaugh’s veiled attempt to fill a leadership void in the Republican Party. Respected conservative writers and commentators are also taking him to task for his “take no prisoners approach” to modern Republican politics.
Barry Goldwater, the real father of conservatism in American politics, must be rolling-over in his grave. Had John Kennedy lived until 1964, Goldwater and Kennedy had talked about traveling around the country in the same airplane, exposing voters to both philosophies and points of view in a series of Lincoln-Douglas like debates.
Usually, it’s the modern coalition party known as Democrats who are divided from within. It’s quite a sight to see Limbaugh, RNC Chair Michael Steele, and people like Ann Coulter and Elizabeth Hasselbeck (I have to admit that no one has accused Hasselbeck of The View fame of being a political heavyweight) debating the future of the Republican Party.
Democrats should just relax and remember that old axiom — never interrupt your enemies in the midst of self- destruction. Or, when you see Republicans forming a circle-shaped firing squad, hand them the ammunition.
Come to think of it, I might not like the tone of a live Limbaugh-Olbermann debate, but I’d sure pay to see it. That’s probably as close to Sumo wrestling as I will get.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Lawsuit didn’t fix Dayton’s minority hiring problem
When the U.S. Department of Justice came to town two years ago to investigate the hiring practices that have resulted in tiny minority representation in Dayton’s police and fire departments, some city leaders weren’t unhappy.
Diversifying these operations has long been a problem. Those who believe the departments need more blacks hoped that the “hammer” of a Justice Department lawsuit could force change.
Last week the suit was settled. To resolve the case, Dayton agreed to pay $450,000 to minorities who were passed over for jobs or promotions because of what the Justice Department deemed an unfair civil service exam. Also, as part of the deal, the city didn’t have to plead guilty to doing anything wrong.
What about the civil service exam that became the Justice Department’s focus? The civil service board is in the process of revamping the test. The settlement sets some parameters for the new exam but will not specifically guide this process.
So, the Justice Department has left town, the legal case is over, the city has agreed to shell out a pile of cash, and new procedures that might improve minority hiring still are not in place.
That these operations need more minorities is hard to argue with. Police and fire personnel handle tense, subjective and controversial situations day in and day out. They’re always under a public microscope. When departments have this sort of job description and are in this kind of limelight, their credibility is always subject to challenge.
If the police and fire organizations are overwhelmingly white — minorities make up 6 percent of the fire department and 8 percent of the police department in a city that is almost 50 percent black — that invariably creates tension between the people who are being dealt with and those in authority.
Achieving better minority numbers will require two big changes — effective recruiting of minorities, which Dayton has aggressively tried to do before, and adoption of a hiring and testing process that gives them a fair chance.
The civil service board says it is working on a new test. This is a crucial step with high stakes. The board needs to articulate the process it is following to create a new exam and invite the city and civil rights community to be its partners.
Minority recruiting efforts have not generally paid off. That isn’t a reason to give up; it is a reason to create still more and new strategies for reaching out to minorities.
In this tough economy, the city is hardly hiring anyone. But by 2011, the fire department expects a large number of retirements. That is an opportunity to diversify the force, one that cannot be missed.
The “hammer” is gone. Nobody is going to swoop in from Washington and make this problem finally go away. It’s going to be up to city leaders to make the needed changes for improvements to occur.
Now is the time to do the hard work that will finally correct this long-running problem.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Civil Rights, Editorials, Scott Elliott
TweetTell the kids they can come home again
NPR’s Morning Edition had a report this morning about two friends who’ve come back home to Wilmington to help that community rebound from the closing of the DHL hub.
Staff Writer John Nolan wrote a piece last month on Taylor Stuckert and Mark Rembert and their efforts.
Not sure if that is where NPR got the idea, but it’s great that the two twenty-somethings are getting the attention and the encouragement.
Check out their Web site.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Ellen Belcher, Rural Communities
TweetEditorial: Local reviews of Obama budget are some comfort
When Dayton Daily News reporters fanned out to get the reaction of local leaders to President Barack Obama’s budget, they found mainly positive responses to what he’s proposing in their realms.
The president of Wright State University, David R. Hopkins, was enthusiastic about the president’s desire to expand need-based financial aid. The superintendent of Dayton’s public schools, Kurt Stanic, liked the goal of expanding access to early childhood education and the goal of rewarding effective teachers.
Montgomery County Administrator Deborah Feldman liked the plans for fully funding a program called Community Development Block Grants. The top executive at the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority, Mark Donaghy, said, “We like the sound of what we hear,” though he also warned against excessive emphasis on equipment.
The equivalent person at the local hospital association, Bryan Bucklew, liked what he heard about updating the technology for keeping medical records, and White House talk of an overall reform of health care.
At this point, you might be thinking that, of course, it’s easy to get people’s support by giving them money. But that’s not a reason for the government to take other people’s money to do it; it doesn’t mean Washington should borrow money to do it; and it doesn’t mean that the nation will benefit overall.
True enough.
But history is full of cases where government activism of the Obama sort has had good effects, overall. The Great Depression was one, when Franklin Roosevelt’s similar activism brought a growth of national wealth by a third in his first term, which started with 25 percent unemployment.
Since then, there have been plenty of examples of hugely successful major spending programs, including veterans’ benefits.
History is also of full of cases of democratic governments getting too big, too habitually aggressive. In the 1970s, Great Britain had gone too far toward socialism, and had to be pulled back, because of economic stagnation.
So when is activism good, and when is it bad? This society might be working its way toward a general answer: It’s good when there’s a huge crisis at hand, when only the federal government can muster the money to do anything, as well as the will to take risks.
It’s bad when the spending becomes habitual, when it hardens into an ideology that holds — or assumes — that government activism always does more good than harm.
Whether that view emerges will depend a lot on whether the country experiences the kind of economic recovery the president is looking for.
In putting together projections about future deficits, the Obama administration is assuming that the economy will grow in 2010 by 3.2 percent. Wouldn’t that be nice? After that, the White House sees growth of 4 percent in 2011, and 4.6 in 2012. In other words, this is only a recession of fairly ordinary duration.
Not many people are convinced of that.
If the projections about the economy are wrong, then President Obama’s assurances about the deficit coming down are wrong. This generation will be piling mountains of new debt on future generations.
The horrors of that should not be overstated. The government did that during the Great Depression and, more so, during World War II. Certainly, mountainous debt is something any government should avoid in normal times; but emergencies are a different story.
Nevertheless, about President Obama it must be said that, by being so optimistic about the economy, he frees himself of seriously dealing with the deficit issue.
His budget — still a work in progress — might be right for this time and situation. Facing the consequences would be right, too.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
TweetCenterville wrestler’s parents blast school board
Dillon Kelley’s parents are unhappy about the Centerville school board’s defense of how it has handled the “cookie caper.”
Kelley, a sophomore wrestler, was accused of stealing cookies from the school cafeteria. When the school said he couldn’t wrestle in a Feb. 27 tournament, the family went to court. Ultimately, the 2nd District Court of Appeals sided with the family.
Here’s their side of things:
Re the letter to the editor, “Centerville wrestler’s punishment fit crime, consistent with rules,” March 1:
We, Dillon Kelley’s parents, read with surprise the letter from Karen Myers, president of the Centerville school board.
I spoke to Myers about the incident involving our son on Feb. 11, the day after it took place in the cafeteria. Myers thought the whole thing seemed silly and advised me to talk to Eileen Booher, the school principal.
I explained to Myers that I was concerned about other athletes who have been charged with the same offense receiving lesser or no consequences, and that athletes accused of far more serious offenses received lesser consequences.
Myers advised me to explain all of this to Booher and to ask her if this could be worked out, perhaps by changing Dillon’s punishment to community service.
Myers specifically told me to tell Booher that the family did not want to take this to the next level by involving lawyers, but may, if necessary.
We were concerned from the beginning with both the school suspension and the athletic suspension and appealed both. We tried for 10 days to work this matter out quietly with the school.
On Feb. 20, after exhausting all possible remedies with the school, our only alternative was to go to court.
The board’s letter states, “much has been made of the fact that the item stolen was $1.30 worth of cookies … and “since it was ‘only cookies,’ he (Dillon) should not have been punished.”
This has never been our position. We believe this was an oversight by the cashier that went unnoticed by Dillon. We believe further that theft of any amount is a serious matter and should be treated accordingly.
In some previous cases, athletes have been charged with theft and received no athletic consequence at all. There is no system in place to ensure that all athletes who may have violated the citizenship clause are referred to the athletic director to be held to the higher standards of the Athletic Code.
We believe strongly in the Athletic Code of Conduct. However, because consequences for any violation of the citizenship clause are solely at the discretion of the athletic director, the system permits serious inequities in its application.
The court documents, including testimony from those involved in the incident, are public record and are available online at the county clerk’s Web site. Enter case number 2009 CV 01460. We encourage everyone to read them before passing judgment in this case.
Patrick Kelley Jennifer Marovich Washington Twp.
Permalink | Comments (50) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Special election not best reform for senate seats
In the weird way that politics works, the ludicrously corrupt Rod Blagojevich has become a force for reform. Congress and states all over the country are re-considering how to fill vacancies in the U.S. Senate.
This is not entirely because, when he was governor of Illinois, Mr. Blagojevich was caught on the telephone talking about the “golden” opportunity he had to benefit from his power to appoint a replacement for former Sen. Barack Obama.
It’s also because the president has picked senators for his cabinet. That’s setting off a flurry of flaps.
When Caroline Kennedy’s name came up to replace Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and that of Vice President Joe Biden’s son and of a relative of a senator elsewhere, there was a flap about people with famous names getting appointed without even running, as if the Senate is some sort of House of Lords. That’s pretty much died down.
But a lot of attention is still focused on the fact that governors have an awful lot of power in most states. They can pick whomever they want, pending an election that’s typically two years off.
The most common reform being proposed is to hold special elections. State Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, adding to other proposals he’s made lately about elections issues, has proposed that for Ohio. A federal constitutional amendment has been proposed along those lines, too.
It’s a natural direction. More democracy. Who can object?
Well, in truth, some people object that special elections are expensive, costing millions of dollars.
Others might point out that if the rules were changed, presidents would stop picking senators for the cabinet, for fear of losing Senate seats for their party in Congress. (Typically presidents pick senators from states that have a governor of their own party.) Exactly how many people would care about this, though, is unclear.
The best case against holding a special election is that this country already has too many elections. When you have too many elections, you risk devaluing elections, and turnout tends to go down, at least in nonpresidential elections.
In Ohio, every year is already an election year. Municipal elections are held in odd-numbered years, while county and state elections are in even years. Add primaries, special elections for tax levies, ballot issues and other offices, and you end up calling voters back to the polls all the time.
So, how about a middle-way approach to Senate vacancies? Allow the governor to fill the seat, but require that the person who takes the job may not be a candidate in the next election.
That would eliminate a lot of the “politics” of the situation. It would minimize public concerns about corruption. It would save the state money. It would save the voters trouble. It would keep the state represented, rather than letting it lose months while a special election is set up and a campaign happens.
This reform might reasonably be applied to the state Senate, too.
There, vacancies are filled by appointment of the outgoing senator’s party caucus in the Senate. Right now, Sen. Tom Roberts, D-Dayton, is leaving to take an appointment from the Democratic governor. He apparently will be replaced by a former Democratic state representative, Fred Strahorn, who can then run as the incumbent at the end of next year.
It’s all legal, but it feels wrong. It’s as if the whole system has been designed for the convenience of the politicians.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Arcade’s fate isn’t looking good
When former Montgomery County Treasurer Hugh Quill sold the tax lien on the Arcade in 2006, some people worried whether that move could come back to bite Dayton.
The day is here when that could happen.
City officials and anyone who cares about the architectural gem need to be watching closely.
On March 12, the Arcade is scheduled to be part of a sheriff’s foreclosure sale. If no one offers the minimum bid of $615,106, the process will be repeated two weeks later, though the price will be $2,707 higher; interest on unpaid taxes keeps accruing.
If the property doesn’t sell that time, Cintina LLC, a hedge fund that owns the lien, will become the new owner of downtown’s shuttered crown jewel.
Cintina, a New York-based group of private investors that no one locally knows anything about, bought a bundle of 567 Montgomery County tax liens, including the one on the Arcade. The state allows counties to sell tax liens for less than the total of the debt, effectively turning over the collection process for nonpayment of property taxes to private firms.
Counties get cold cash and don’t have to try to wring money from taxpayers; buyers of the liens make a profit by collecting more than they paid for the right to become the county’s debt collector.
After a period of time, if a delinquent taxpayer doesn’t pay in full, the owner of the lien can initiate foreclosure proceedings, which is what’s happening with the Arcade.
In some cases, buyers of tax liens don’t want to force a foreclosure; owning a property — and being responsible for taxes and upkeep — can cost more than it’s worth. If, however, an investor thinks a property is salable or valuable, then it can make sense to foreclose.
Cintina’s representative says that if no one bids at the sheriff’s sale and the firm becomes the Arcade’s owner, there will be “plenty of time” to talk about what’s next for downtown’s loveliest, but most troublesome, property. Best not to jump the gun, he said.
Dan Friedman, president of Optimum Realty Corp., did volunteer that Cintina has been involved in urban redevelopment projects in the past, though he won’t say where. He said Cintina might consider being a development partner for the Arcade.
Publicity about the coming sale, he said, has prompted inquiries about the property, though talk is cheap if interested parties don’t have financing. Most developers who’ve looked at the gorgeous rotunda and adjoining complex say it can’t be brought back to life without at least a $6 million to $12 million subsidy.
Mr. Friedman insists that Cintina isn’t unprepared to become the owner of a historic property that has huge carrying costs. (The property taxes alone are $120,000 per year.)
Will Cintina, which, according to the treasurer’s office, has not been able to collect on very many of the local liens it bought, be a more responsible owner than the well-meaning, but under-capitalized and ill-equipped, Tony Staub? (Mr. Staub is president of Brownfield Charities Inc., which is the Arcade’s current owner.)
Mr. Friedman said Cintina “wouldn’t have bought the tax lien if it didn’t have the capital to go all the way through the process” — up to and including assuming ownership and development. He thinks getting such a gorgeous complex for less than its back taxes is a steal.
Still, Cintina is being thrust into a role it didn’t sign up for in the worst economic times since the Depression. Knowing that, it’s awfully hard for Dayton to take hope in the possibility that publicity-shy, out-of-town private investors might be willing to make a run at something that past developers haven’t been able to accomplish — even when they were propped up by public money and local investors who didn’t expect a profit.
Two years ago, Mr. Quill set a process in motion that, once it got started, could only be stopped if Mr. Staub paid his tax bills and kept current. No one ever seriously thought that was in the cards. Remember, the naive Mr. Staub once tried to sell the Arcade on eBay.
It’s still possible a surprise buyer will come forward. But the more likely scenario is that an entity that never wanted to own the Arcade in the first place is going to have a stake in the heart of Dayton’s downtown, while being saddled with expenses it may not grasp from afar.
If bidders stay away, Dayton’s downtown advocates need to quickly figure out who’s calling the shots for Cintina LLC and find out what the investors really know and what their intentions are.
The Arcade hasn’t been mothballed well since businessman Tom Danis gave it to Mr. Staub’s organization in 2004. If it’s allowed to deteriorate further and faster, that’s a threat to the whole of downtown, not just a stunning turn-of-the century Dayton landmark.
Permalink | Comments (54) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local History
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