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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 > May
May 2009
Editorial: Land lines still safer in an emergency
With cellular phones always close by in a pocket or purse, it’s easy to see why people are ditching their land-line phones.
Especially in this economy, it’s hard to justify paying for two phones when you can get by with just one. Yet, while it may be cheaper (if you don’t count the kids’ phones and unlimited texting charges) to stick with a cell phone, it isn’t necessarily safer.
A recent national survey found that the move toward cell phones is happening fast. More people now have only cell phones than have only land lines (the majority still have both). In Ohio, 14 percent said they are cell phone-only.
But even with many of today’s 911 dispatch centers equipped with the latest mapping technology, finding a cell phone caller who has an emergency, in some cases, can cost precious minutes.
“Until this new technology becomes absolutely certain in how it locates callers, I personally will always have a wire line phone in the house,” said Frank Young, director of Warren County’s 911 dispatch center.
Among the area’s biggest counties, Montgomery, Warren and Miami have the best technology available for locating cell phones. Greene County will upgrade to the new equipment by Sept. 1.
When cell phone calls come in, the new equipment pinpoints the caller’s location automatically on a video map, which shows the address or nearest address. This is similar to the process for land-line phones, which immediately display the address of the call.
In both cases, dispatchers can send the information to video displays in emergency vehicles with a few keystrokes.
Technological advances have greatly improved response times in emergencies by reducing confusion. In the past, dispatchers had to be trained to know things like what firehouse served what neighborhoods and the job required typing in a lot of information. Now those tasks are largely automated.
But people still make mistakes, and the high-tech equipment is not perfect. For instance, the software may accidentally locate a cell phone in the house next door to where the caller is. Older phones can sometimes only be narrowed down to a general area, not always to a specific address.
When the emergency is grave — health crises, severe injuries, violent threats — confusion can be fatal.
Volume is growing. Miami County reports 60 percent of its 911 calls now come from cell phones. Dispatchers are trained to ask callers for an address first, but people in distress may struggle to remember exactly where they are. The whole idea of automating addresses in the system was to move quickly past “where are you,” so dispatchers can get to “what is your emergency?”
To stay protected, consumers consider taking these steps:
Keep a land-line phone. Especially for households with children or those who are elderly or medically fragile, a traditional wired phone is still the safest bet for quick response in an emergency.
Upgrade your cell phones. Phones more than two years old may not have GPS capability, making it harder for emergency workers to locate a caller.
Ask questions when buying a cell phone. Make sure the phone has the latest GPS technology and specifically ask how well it can be pinpointed during a 911 call.
Ask questions of phone service providers. Those who want to use cell phones at home or get home phone service through their cable company or over the Internet need to know for sure that 911 service offered. They must make sure the provider has their address correct, especially after a move. Also, keep in mind that when the power goes down, phone service provided through the Internet or cable goes down, too.
Checking with municipalities. Before going cell phone-only, check to see if your city’s 911 dispatching service can track cell phone location. Keep in mind that some cities do their own dispatching and may have different equipment than the rest of the county.
Mr. Young tells the story of one 911 caller on an old cell phone with a medical emergency who couldn’t speak.
“We had a great deal difficulty locating that phone,” he said. “All we got was the sector of a 911 tower. We eventually found the person, but it took an hour and a lot of work with the cell phone company.”
When minutes count, make sure your phone is ready.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
Guest column: Payday lenders milk loopholes
By Tom Allio and Bill Faith
One year ago this week, Gov. Ted Strickland signed the Short Term Loan Act that capped the annualized interest rates payday lenders could charge at 28 percent, down from 391 percent.
Today, payday lenders are celebrating all the way to the bank, using loopholes in the law to charge up to 680 percent APR.
As of February, Montgomery County had 62 payday storefronts, the fourth-highest in the state. (Greene and Warren counties have 9; Miami has 10.)
The businesses are living it up, trapping customers in debt with their trademark one-two punch: excessively high interest and short repayment terms. Not even the people’s vote would stop them.
Maybe you remember that after the governor signed the rate cap law, the industry spent $20 million of its enormous profits to “let the people decide” at the polls last November. By a margin of nearly two-to-one, Ohioans voted yes on Issue 5 to uphold the 28 percent rate cap law.
First, our elected officials spoke; then the people of Ohio weighed in. No more debt trap, right? Wrong.
Only 19 of the 1,000-plus storefronts statewide licensed themselves under the Short Term Loan Act. The rest opted for licensure under Ohio’s Mortgage Loan Act and Small Loan Act.
Both statutes were designed to regulate other long-term lending products, like second mortgages; neither was intended to regulate a short-term product like a payday loan.
Under these statutes, payday lenders got creative. They started issuing loans in the form of a check, then charging the customer to cash the check; started charging origination fees — in addition to interest and other fees — as often as every week. Loans bulging with add-on fees sent interest rates through the roof, up to 680 percent APR.
The Housing Research and Advocacy Center confirmed all this in a March 2009 report titled, “The New Face of Payday Lending.”
The new face of payday lending funnels money from the needy into the vast coffers of a greedy industry. It mocks the system that tries to regulate it. It thumbs its nose at the will of the people. And except for even higher rates and fees, the new face looks a lot like the old face.
It lures borrowers with the promise of easy, fast cash, then traps them with excessively difficult repayment terms.
Borrowers don’t choose to return again and again. They do so because they’re trapped; and borrowers trapped in debt cannot save, invest or contribute productively to a healthy free-market economy. The practice strips wealth instead of building it.
Ohio has seen enough wealth-stripping from the foreclosure crisis. We don’t need more bad lending products that promise one thing and deliver the opposite. And we certainly don’t need a deceptive industry sidestepping the law to continue the carnage.
Let’s stop “loophole lending” with legislation that tethers all loans for under $1,000, and for less than 90 days, to the 28 percent annualized rate; that prohibits charging a fee to cash the loan check; and that gives the attorney general authority to go after lenders who attempt to skirt the law.
The people spoke clearly in a historic referendum last November. Ohio’s public officials have been delivered a mandate to address abusive payday lending practices.
Legislation that effectively closes the payday loopholes should be passed through both chambers and signed by the governor as quickly as possible.
Nothing less than the integrity of the Nov. 4, 2008 vote of more than 3 million Ohioans is at stake.
Tom Allio is director of the Social Action Office of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland. Bill Faith is the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Elections, Guest Columns, Ohio politics, Predatory lending
Ellen Belcher: Dragging down Dayton gets region nowhere
I’ve been in too many conversations lately where there’s an anti-Dayton subtext.
Two weeks ago, I criticized the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force for not promoting Dayton’s Wright brothers’ National Park Service sites. Some of the push back I got was: Why should the Air Force museum promote Dayton?
Prior to that, I wrote a piece about Children’s Medical Center objecting to Kettering Medical Center creating an intensive care unit for sick newborns.
Again, there was an undercurrent in some people’s complaints that the expensive facility is needed because suburban women don’t want to deliver at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton. (It has a neonatal intensive care unit, as does Children’s.)
Then there’s the debate about the regional 911 dispatching center. Some critics argue that, with Dayton being part of the venture, calls from the city will suck up resources. It’s, of course, not news that Dayton isn’t beloved by all.
Some people who have been around a long time will trace those feelings to the veto Dayton exercised (for a while) over the construction of I-675, thereby infuriating the suburbs.
Though most of the players in that controversy are dead, this wouldn’t be the first time historical animosities have lived on past the point when people can remember what they’re supposed to be mad about.
Others will say the disdain is rooted in racism, and the fact that the city has become increasingly black and poor over several decades.
Without a doubt, the quality of Dayton’s schools has made the city a target — for some good and some horribly unfair reasons.
Also, once upon a time, Dayton couldn’t be dismissed because so many companies and jobs were located downtown. It was a hub — economically and politically in a way it’s just not today.
Here’s the thing, though. The animus toward Dayton — covert and overt, conscious and unconscious — is poisonous.
Is anybody better off if — borrowing from the Rush Limbaugh school of politics — Dayton fails?
Ned Hill, an urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University, said that sourness about cities isn’t “just self-defeating. It’s self-fulfilling. That’s why it has to be fought.”
An adviser to the Ohio Department of Development, Hill said that when he hears others outside the region talk about Dayton, the community isn’t seen as fractured as it might seem to people living here.
In fact, when it comes to recruiting new businesses, the Columbus area is perceived as more willing to cannibalize itself, he said.
On the other hand, that region also has a reputation for rallying around that city when, say, there’s a possibility of it creating an amenity that improves quality of life for everyone.
Hill said that he also believes that the sport of running down Cleveland — long a pastime of the locals as well as late-night comedians — has “calmed down.”
Dayton, however, Hill said, can’t not focus on the city’s well-being. “You’re in danger of becoming an exit ramp community.” Without Dayton, there’s no core and no brand.
Hill is quick to insist that Dayton, or any struggling city, won’t be revived by putting a guilt trip on its suburban neighbors or through boosterism. Rather, meaningful, distinctive selling points — walkable streets, a green culture, eclectic arts, historic homes, good restaurants and bars — have to be leveraged and created.
Carol Coletta, the president of CEOs for Cities, agrees, adding cities must play to their strengths in a counter-intuitive way.
“If you’re in a downward spiral, you have to invest in assets. … You have to intensify and magnify the good things,” Coletta said. That approach, she concedes, bumps up against the political reality that politicians are elected to fix what’s wrong, not improve what’s working.
“I think we’re at a moment in time where all the trends are moving in the direction of cities,” said Coletta, whose nonprofit organization advocates for, and does research on, urban issues.
“We can’t spend infinitely on infrastructure. We’re undermining our ability to be innovative in the way we spread people out over too much land,” she said. Meanwhile, young people are saying in “pretty strong numbers” that they prefer central cities.
Nobody denies Dayton has problems. But those who can’t see its strengths and possibilities, those who don’t recognize its importance to the region’s success, might want to ask themselves if maybe they’re too quick to judge or even uninformed.
Or they could consider if they’re shooting themselves in the foot.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Ellen Belcher, Miami Valley Politics, Montgomery County
Scott Elliott: For the right advice, find the right advisers
To all the 2009 graduates, high school or college, a few words of advice:
Volunteer. Learn to cook. Travel. Pray. Take risks. Learn another language. Exercise. Dream big. Remember to have fun. Serve others. Stay close with your family. Keep learning. Compete. Listen for God’s call. Network. Thank your teachers. Nurture your friendships. Learn from your mistakes. Fight despair. Accept that you don’t know everything. Make art. Be patient. Be optimistic. Be courageous. Be compassionate. Wear sunscreen.
That’s a lot of good advice, and it comes courtesy of CEOs, politicians, ministers, bloggers, talk show hosts, spiritual leaders, authors, and journalists. Shoot a few words into Google along the lines of “2009 graduation speaker advice” and you can track down all the specifics on who said what and where.
This spring, literally thousands of graduation speakers are dispensing all sorts of advice to the various classes of 2009. The Chronicle of High Education used to track who was speaking at what colleges — a project it has now given up. Last year, it logged more than 600 college commencement speakers across the country.
The worst of these speeches are trite, impersonal and self-centered. The best speeches, carried into the right ears, can be inspirational, uplifting and useful. But for the most part, 2009 graduates, the commencement speaker’s advice will be — and should be — ignored. There’s a simple reason why.
By the time someone reaches the age for these transitions — out of high school, out of college, out of graduate school — the most important advice he or she receives is primarily useful because of whom they receive it from. What is actually said is almost secondary.
It’s not an impersonal speech or a self-help book or a guru video that will provide the key guidance in life. Instead, this is a time for grads to look around at the people they’ve chosen to surround themselves with. Who really knows what they are talking about? Who has provided reliable advice in the past? Who really cares about you?
The best thing young people can do for their futures right now is to start figuring out who their core group of trusted and reliable advisers is going to be — the friends or family members they’ll come to know they can count on to give sound counsel.
These are the people they’ll want to bounce their toughest life decisions off to see what they have to say. The next big step will be learning to parse through conflicting good advice and choose the path that makes the most sense for them. That comes with time and life experience.
This is what the best leaders do — whether in politics, business, the military, athletics, communities, families. They encircle themselves with people they can trust — competent, caring, loyal people. When they come across those people in life, they stick to them like glue.
Even those who don’t become CEOs or senators will still have to “lead” their own lives. So, 2009 graduates, certainly listen to good advice. But also remember where you heard it and start figuring out where best to go back for more.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
Editorial: United Way bias should be to merge
No good can come from beating around the bush:
United Way of Greater Dayton is struggling. When it struggles, so do the almost six dozen agencies that it helps fund.
With the economy so bad, this year’s campaign was going to be unavoidably difficult. Contributions indeed did drop — by 19.5 percent.
Meanwhile, because more givers are directing their pledges to a specific charity, United Way had to reduce its awards from nondesignated commitments by 24 percent. Some nonprofits were cut a greater percentage, some less.
The campaign raised $9.5 million this year. The goal was $12 million, which has been the target — give or take — for several years. For historical perspective, in 1990, the goal was a bit over $20 million.
Raising money, in some ways, is becoming infinitely harder for many United Ways. Their strategy is built around planned workplace giving. As big companies have downsized or even gone out of business altogether, campaign organizers here and elsewhere have had to make many more pitches, in more places, to even hope of raising the same amount as in previous years.
At the same time, employees — who are nervous about whether they’ll have jobs — are understandably being more careful about committing a part of their pay to United Way.
But even accounting for all of these seismic changes, the local trend lines are going steeply in the wrong direction.
Partly in acknowledgement of this reality, for two years now, Dayton’s United Way and the United Ways of Cincinnati and Warren and Butler counties have been in talks about whether they should merge, consolidate, share resources — or pick another description.
The discussions could wrap up this summer, at which point all of the boards will get a presentation on how consolidation might proceed. They each hope to vote in August on whether they’re in or out.
That decision, of course, would come after meetings — and they should be public — with clients and nonprofits in each of the affected communities.
In the meantime, United Way officials say they have made $500,000 in administrative cuts, and the board wants $300,000 more. There’s probably no way to get to that number without laying off people at the agency, which has 32 full-time and eight part-time employees.
Nationally, small and even some bigger United Ways are being encouraged to consolidate. A southwest Ohio United Way would be among the biggest when you roll in Cincinnati’s 10-county and more than $60 million operation.
Maybe there are good reasons not to form a partnership. But the bias when considering that decision should be in favor of coming together. Yes, each community is different, and each has special needs, and outreach to donors has to be tailored.
But fundraising, in addition to being about relationships, requires maximizing efficiency, taking advantage of technology and not re-inventing wheels. Surely, there are economies of scale and back shop savings that could be realized.
Critics of working together will worry about the Dayton community’s, Warren County’s and Butler County’s voices being drowned out. And their concern will be legitimate (though Cincinnati has to be doing something right if it can keep 10 counties hanging together).
But the bigger worry has to be whether Dayton’s United Way — as it’s organized — can afford to be all that the community needs.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Social Services
Martin Gottlieb: Train depot issue offers break from the bleak
There’s something a little odd, isn’t there, about the fact that, in these times of the worst economy in memory, Dayton is starting to argue about where to put two stations in a publicly funded passenger rail system that doesn’t exist yet, hasn’t been fully designed and hasn’t been funded.
Jobs disappear left and right. Governments cut back on services. Charities go begging, so to speak. And yet we’re apparently getting a new train system from Cincinnati to Cleveland, though we have managed to live without one these past four decades.
Seems odd. To some, it seems a lot worse than odd.
Some politicians in Columbus have opposed the whole train idea on the grounds that this is no time to be pouring big public money into an iffy venture that the state has never seen the merits of before. They have said that, considering that more people are out of work than ever — and more are expected to be out of work in the near future — and even employed people are cutting back on their spending, because of fears for the future, governments need to do the same.
The thing is, though, the whole idea of building the train system right now is that all those people are out of work. Here’s a project that will put some of them to work, and will leave the state with an asset it didn’t have before.
If all goes according to plan, and the federal government puts up all the money for construction, then the project should actually help the state government’s coffers. It will make taxpayers out of people who might otherwise need government help.
Works for me. We might as well get something good out of this mess we’re in. The Great Depression of the 1930s resulted in a lot of terrific public works projects that otherwise would not have been done. That seemed odd, too, at the time, and still does. But it’s true.
Yes, it’s deficit spending — big time, if you count everything in the federal stimulus package, which is funding the train project. I’ve spent decades denouncing in these pages deficit spending that was much lower. But what seemed so awful back then — still does — was habitual, huge deficit spending in relatively good times, in the absence of any national emergency.
Well, here we have something like an emergency. Deficit spending got us through the Depression and World War II. It’s a reasonable tool now.
So we might as well take advantage of one upside in this downturn and luxuriate in actually having options, nothing to be taken for granted these days.
The idea of a stop at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force has a lot of appeal. That’s easily Dayton’s best tourist attraction, and a short cab ride to other action. Public transit connections could develop to other aviation-related sites and more.
Riverside was denuded long ago of much of its potentially developable land (and potential tax base) by annexation by Dayton. And it failed in its attempt in 2007 to get income tax money out of some civilian employees at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, much of which now goes to suburbs where the employees live. The town is struggling hard, and it deserves this kind of break.
But the use of an old railway site in West Carrollton makes a lot of sense, too. For south suburbanites, the idea of trips into Cincinnati will have a lot of appeal, all the more so if a station is convenient.
Other possible sites — Fairborn, for access to Wright State University and Wright-Patt, for example — are worth considering, too, besides the one that would presumably go downtown. All these have been put forth. More might be.
If train travel becomes popular, what could happen, with time, is the development of, say, three local stops, with only one or two being used by any given train.
In time, perhaps, competition for the stations will take unfortunate turns. For now though, best to embrace that oddity in these times: an actual upside.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Martin Gottlieb, Suburban Communities, Transportation
Editorial: Impact of military hiring plan all depends on execution
If you’ve followed the news through the last several American wars, you know that contractors are playing a bigger role in Iraq than they’ve played before. They perform military or quasi-military functions but don’t wear the uniform of their country. They aren’t even Pentagon employees.
You hear about them all the time — as providers of security, transporters of goods, victims of violence, perpetrators of alleged misbehavior that has angered the locals. They have come in very handy for an American government that is trying to limit the number of uniformed Americans in Iraq but hasn’t worried much about how much the war costs.
Contractors have been playing a larger role in military matters stateside, too, including at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In the 1990s, the government sought to reduce the number of federal employees. In a period of relative peace, the goal of limiting military spending was widespread. And it wasn’t just that decade. After 1999, in the field of acquisitions, Air Force employees — civilian and uniformed — dropped by about 20 percent.
After 9/1l, the George W. Bush administration took to using contractors for new programs in record numbers. Now the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. President Barack Obama says the days of “giving defense contractors a blank check are over.” He says the weapons contracting system has “gone amok.”
Complaints are widespread about cost overruns and delays on big projects. Emblematic of the latter has been the ugly battle between Northrop Grumman and Boeing over a contract to build the Air Forces tanker (for refueling airborne aircraft). It has been going on, roughly speaking, forever.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided that the contracting habit is out of hand. He wants to hire more people — 20,000 — and reduce contracting out to pre-Bush levels.
Other reform proposals are out there, too. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chair of the Armed Services Committee, has proposed, for example, having somebody other than the Pentagon make estimates for Congress as to how much a particular system will cost.
Sen. Levin, Sen. John McCain (the top Republican on the committee) and the president are going in roughly the same direction. Ohio Sen. George Voinovich has also bought into the idea of more employees and fewer contractors. He comes at the issue as an expert on federal staffing issues, having long focused on that unglamorous subject.
How this will all play out for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base isn’t known. The Dayton-area economy is not necessarily either a big winner or loser, being home to both contractors and federal employees.
It all depends on execution. As Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, of the House Armed Services Committee, notes, the Pentagon needs to make sure it hires enough people and pays enough to get the best.
Nobody knows how many employees of contractors will end up filling federal jobs. Certainly, many contractors are dedicated, experienced people who have done excellent work for the government.
The people promoting the Gates direction are acknowledging that many of the hires might be people already doing the same work. They note that it’s not about the people, but about the system, its structure and cost.
A new system will not be designed from scratch, of course. But just altering a system that handles $200 billion a year and deals in complicated technology is monumentally complicated. The transition will presumably be bumpy.
If there was ever a case of the devil being in the details, this is it.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Troubled schools betray need for oversight
Four years after Ohio lawmakers moved to clamp down on charter schools in the wake of a series of scandals, still more tightening is needed.
In Sunday’s newspaper, Staff Writer Anthony Gottschlich wrote about Carl W. Shye Jr., the treasurer for nine Ohio charter schools, including three in Dayton, that have been repeatedly cited for deficits, unpaid bills and shoddy accounting.
For his work, Mr. Shye is paid nearly $347,000 a year with taxpayer money. Meanwhile, he’s responsible for $10 million in public funds.
Where are the schools’ governing boards and sponsors? And where is the state department of education, which oversees most of the sponsors?
The problems here are rooted in law, attitude and in funding.
Changes to Ohio’s charter school laws in 2005 and 2006 actually are beginning to require better academic performance. This year, two low-performing charters were forced to close by the state. Next year, 23 more are in line to be shut down.
At the same time, it is now quite tough to open a new charter school unless you can demonstrate a level of academic and managerial competence.
But there are many bad charter schools still operating. Those laws did not go far enough to address oversight issues that allow schools like Arise Academy — a low-scoring Dayton school that has bounced employees’ paychecks and failed to keep up its health insurance payments on Mr. Shye’s watch — to stay in business.
But there’s an opportunity to make some of this right, as the Ohio Senate debates the next two-year budget, which includes fixes that would help.
Among them:
Department of Education authority. It’s bizarre, but local school districts that sponsor charter schools are not under the jurisdiction of the education department due to a quirk in the law. This is also true for the Ohio Council of Community Schools, a Toledo-based charter sponsor.
The current budget bill would put all sponsors under the education department’s control — a good move.
Charter school transparency. Also in the budget bill is a provision that would make financial records public, including salary information, for charter schools that are operated by non-profits or third parties — a loophole that keeps taxpayers from seeing how their money is spent. This would be another good fix.
Tougher academic standards. The rules that close down low-scoring schools would be beefed up, putting more rock-bottom schools on the list to be closed sooner. Still, an important piece missing from the bill, and from state policy, is more effort to police sponsors. Charter school sponsors, also called “authorizers,” are supposed to be the first level of accountability. But bad sponsors, who essentially collect fees from their schools but decline to serve in a watchdog role, abound.
The education department has been too tepid in holding bad sponsors accountable. This is partly due to the laissez faire approach to managing charter schools dating back to the department’s first experiences with them.
It’s also partly due to money. Monitoring charter schools is a big job that has long been understaffed and underfunded. Consider that Todd Haines, who left as head of the department’s charter school office more than a year ago, has never been replaced. Prioritizing oversight, and funding it, must be part of maintaining Ohio’s charter school program. It does no good to have high standards and tough rules if nobody calls out those who ignore them.
That is how Carl Shye’s schools have been permitted to keep going despite grave dysfunction.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Ohio Republicans looking better than national party
With state Auditor Mary Taylor deciding not to run for the U.S. Senate, the shape of the Republican ticket in the potentially pivotal year of 2010 is becoming pretty clear.
Actually, it was pretty clear before, if you accept the conventional wisdom that Ms. Taylor didn’t have a chance against former Congressman Rob Portman. She apparently accepted it.
In a conversation with this newspaper’s editorial board in February, Ms. Taylor said that she was considering running for three reasons: she thought a woman might generate a lot of bipartisan interest, especially in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat; some Republicans are concerned that Mr. Portman might be too associated with the unpopular George W. Bush, having worker for and with him (and his father); and Mr. Portman is not well-known in northern Ohio.
Her run might have been interesting and might have put Mr. Portman to a test before he is anointed. But Republicans really, really hate primaries. Ms. Taylor undoubtedly got that message. (Also, she had to make a decision about whether to run for auditor; she is.)
Other races are officially undecided, of course, but the Republicans basically think they’ll have Mr. Portman for Senate, former Congressman John Kasich for governor and maybe Mike DeWine for attorney general.
A lot of Republicans are happy about that lineup, and they have good reason. The candidates are qualified by experience and ability. Each starts with a good base of personal support — financially and otherwise. And they all seem to be coming from the Ohio mainstream, rather the fringes of the party, though we’ll see.
When the Democrats were out of power in Ohio until 2006, they kept putting up weak candidates, precisely because they didn’t have anybody in a high enough position to become well-known. Remember the names Tim Hagan, Ted Celeste, Rob Burch and Mary Boyle?
Chancellor of higher education Eric Fingerhut was another. Even at the end of his campaign against Sen. George Voinovich, he had to lead a chant at rallies that went: “I say ‘FINGER,’ you say ‘HUT.’ FINGERHUT.”
At least the Republicans don’t have a problem like that.
Clearly the state party is looking a lot better than the national party.
The national party seriously considered passing a resolution “rebranding” the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party.” It’s as if some Republicans are trying to deliver the message that the party is in the grip of Rush Limbaugh types.
(To his credit, Ohio Republican Chairman Kevin DeWine denounced the rebranding. “That sort of noise is unproductive,” he said.)
Trashing the state of the national Republican Party has become a bipartisan fashion. But that always happens when a party is losing elections and fighting internally. And yet, parties always come back.
One writer recently noted that the number of Americans calling themselves Republican (21 percent, by one count) is lower than at any point since 1983. He didn’t note, however, that the Republican president won a re-election landslide in 1984. Republicans have a good election coming before too long.
Of course, Ohio Democrats themselves are likely to have a pretty good lineup next year. But Gov. Ted Strickland is going through his roughest patch so far.
What’s clear now is that Ohio really has not gone from being a clearly Republican state to a clearly Democratic state. It has always hung in the balance. It continues to have a vibrant two-party system — a good thing for voters and a reason that Democrats can’t be lazy or cocky.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
Editorial: Strickland school commission bad idea
Gov. Ted Strickland is not going to get his way on changing how Ohio pays for schools.
Nor should he.
Republicans control the Senate, and they are decidedly not on board for fundamental parts of his plans — and wouldn’t be even if the bottom hadn’t fallen out of the state’s coffers.
The one good thing about the state’s seemingly ever expanding deficit, though, is that it does give the governor an excuse for backing away from his most expensive and unworkable ideas.
Maybe that cover will prevent a partisan meltdown in Columbus that Ohioans aren’t in any mood to put up with.
By far the governor’s costliest idea is his call for an “evidence-based model” for school funding.
Specifically, he’s proposing using evidence — that is, studies and research — as Ohio’s guide for how much should be spent on educating every child. Once a committee gathers the so-called evidence, state lawmakers then would be handed a tall order and essentially told to find the money.
Were it only so simple. If only the cost of an education could be reduced to a math problem with a right or wrong answer.
Ohio has, indeed, sometimes cheated its children. Especially the poorest schools have not always gotten the money they’ve needed (which, of course was the premise of the endless lawsuits that ended up with even conservative Republican Ohio Supreme Court members agreeing that the legislature was passing out money inequitably).
But it’s a big leap to move from this conclusion to advocating that K-12 education is the state’s highest priority, and that schools should be funded ahead of everything else. After all, keeping the prison doors locked is important, too.
Gov. Strickland has done a masterful job of getting business leaders — specifically the Ohio Business Roundtable — to publicly support his plan. Those CEOs care about workforce development, and they want to ensure schools have what they need to turn out educated, mostly college-bound young people.
The business titans are not, however, charged with figuring out how all the state’s needs will be met.
The governor also has the public support of school associations and teachers’ unions — even though the new funding they so desperately want isn’t in this next two-year budget. Instead, they’re putting their hope in a promise of money down the line, under new rules of the game that theoretically would put lawmakers in the position of giving them their money or explaining why they aren’t supporting what the “evidence” requires.
But, in fact, even school people are divided about the governor’s ideas. Many think the research-driven model is too cookie-cutter and too prescriptive. Not all school districts, for instance, would hire as many nurses or teacher-mentors as the state says research indicates is necessary.
Do school districts all want more money? Of course.
Do they all want the state to pay more so they don’t have to run around asking voters to increase their property taxes? Absolutely.
But they also see big-time practical and financial issues with a formulaic approach to managing their operations.
Every bit as problematic, the leaders in the Republican Senate have a major philosophical difference with Gov. Strickland. They believe that his approach favors public schools at the expense of charter schools in ways that set back — if not eliminate — the pressure that’s especially on urban schools to do a better job.
They’ve fought long and hard to institutionalize competition for public education using charter schools. They think that if anybody should be credited with changing the rules in a profound way that fosters genuine reform, they have had — and still have — the better changes.
Finding a way for both sides to come out as winners is not going to be easy. Meanwhile, time is getting short; the budget must be finalized by the end of June.
With money problems being what they are, with his supporters being as tepid as they are, it’s the governor who’s going to have to back down the most.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
Editorial: War dead not forgotten, even if it seems that way
There’s something especially poignant about a Memorial Day during war. Even as we remember those who have died in past wars, more young Americans are being sent into harm’s way.
As if to add to the poignancy locally, 92 Marines are departing Dayton this very day for training before being sent to Iraq. They are from Military Police Company C of the 4th Marine Logistics Group, based in Dayton. They’ve been activated for a year, with seven months to be spent in Iraq. Their departure was scheduled for 9 a.m. from the Gettysburg Avenue Dayton Marine Corps Reserve Center.
What a day for their loved ones to say goodbye.
No modern Memorial Day would be complete without a certain amount of public hand wringing about what is happening to Memorial Day.
It seems to have become all about picnics, travel and mattress sales, especially since it became a three-day weekend, rather than set for May 30 every year.
And yet, the truth is that people have their own ways of keeping the sacrifices of the troops in mind. Individuals honor their own fallen loved ones in ways that nobody else knows. The media focus attention on the ultimate sacrifice so many have made.
And there’s much more. For a new generation, the Internet has provided a way of remembrance that helps some. Those who have lost someone can highlight and share his or her memory and be comforted by others.
Meanwhile, organizations like the Blue Star Mothers — so visible locally at Town & Country Shopping Center — stay involved in making sure the troops aren’t forgotten. And schoolchildren are urged to remember those in uniform abroad and to send good wishes.
This year, Penny Moody, of Kettering, a Blue Star Mother (meaning one who has a child who has served in a war zone) found herself with letters some school children had written to a soldier she didn’t know who, it turned out, had been killed on duty. She went out of her way to find the soldier’s mother, in Kentucky, who turned out to be greatly moved. “I just think it’s divine intervention,” she said.
Then there’s the nationally noted Honor Flight program, originating in the Dayton area. It remembers the fallen of World War II and their comrades by bringing the aging survivors to the nation’s World War II memorial in Washington. The effort turns out to be enormously appreciated.
In Dayton, as elsewhere, we tend to divide up our war fatalities according to war, with each war getting its own memorial. This is because ultimately the veterans want to make sure that the war they fought in is not forgotten, and the dead are not forgotten. Ultimately, there will almost certainly be a memorial for those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In truth, so much respect is paid to those in the military these days that it sometimes seems that the young people who sign up for service are motivated, at least in part, by pursuit of that respect. The Pentagon would likely have had a lot more trouble meeting its enlistment needs during the Iraq war — especially when the war was going badly and before the U.S. economy turned down dramatically — if young people weren’t getting a positive message about how Americans feel about their people in uniform.
Of course, not all who have died for their country have been volunteers, even for the reserves. In World War II, Korea and Vietnam, huge numbers were called to serve their country who had no military inclination.
Others enlisted to avoid the draft; or, in the case of WWII, they signed up in a unique moment of national crisis with only temporary service in mind. (Of course, some young people in this decade have had similar motivation.)
Now the successors of those who died, and the veterans organizations, and their families often wish the society would remember the dead of long-ago wars more formally. That’s understandable.
But a lot of people do remember, do take note, even if not at parades or ceremonies.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Courage, hard choices can protect retirement
When alarms were ringing in 2007 about the sustainability of Ohio’s five public employee pension funds, nobody listened.
That year, despite newspaper stories around the state and expert reports calling for fundamental change, nothing significant happened. The boards that manage the pensions, and the legislators who make the rules for them, looked at a rising stock market and decided things would work out.
Welcome to 2009, when that logic no longer applies.
After a steep stock market dive, the value of the investments controlled by the funds has crashed, losing a combined $63.6 billion. The threat today is whether the funds will be able to pay their obligations going forward.
Hard decisions about benefits and required contributions that were put off before have to be faced now. The stock market crisis is forcing changes that should be obvious to everybody.
By any measure, public or private, Ohio’s pension programs for teachers, school support staff, police and firefighters, government workers and state troopers are tremendously generous.
Workers commonly retire in their 50s (or, for firefighters, as early as age 48) with the pension fund often doling out two-thirds of their salary for life (or, for teachers with 35 years, 88 percent of their final average pay).
In many cases, these retirees served the public in difficult or physically demanding jobs. A firefighter certainly leaves the job having experienced more wear and tear than an office worker. In other cases — teachers, for instance — the generous retirement is seen as a part of the bargain that promises quality people secure retirements in exchange for enduring challenges and stress that many people won’t put up with.
People in these jobs don’t want to have their benefits reduced. Yet, without change, the entire system is at risk.
Among the ideas the funds are considering:
Raising retirement ages. Even relatively small alterations, like raising the minimum age for firefighters by four years to 52, could make a big difference. Some funds — the teachers’ plan — don’t even have a minimum age.
Raising contribution rates. Employers (using tax dollars) already pay high percentages toward retirement — between 14 and 26.5 percent of each worker’s pay. With state and local governments hurting, they can’t be asked to pay more. But in some plans, it would be reasonable to ask employees to kick in more.
Reducing benefits. Moves like calculating employees’ final pay as an average of the last five years worked instead of the last three years, could really cut costs and wouldn’t profoundly hurt workers. Some plans also are considering recommending a lower cost-of-living raise each year — perhaps 2 percent instead of 3 percent.
Revising health care plans. None of the plans has to offer health insurance to their members, but they traditionally have provided it. Some already have made cuts in these benefits. More may be on the way, especially if national health care changes aren’t adopted.
By phasing in any new rules, workers who are close to retirement should be able to plan and prepare accordingly.
But even if the pension boards propose these sorts of changes, legislators will have to enact them. They haven’t exactly flocked to the front of the line to make these fixes. For the past two years, the police and fire pension fund, for instance, proposed good changes, but could not find a lawmaker to sponsor them. Elected officials don’t like to anger police officers, firefighters and teachers.
The moment calls for political courage. The opportunity is here not just for tweaks and polishing, but for overhauling the pension plans in ways that would secure retirement for people who perform some of our most important public services.
Fix it now and they won’t have to wonder if the money really will be there when they retire.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
Paul Leonard: Jay Haverstick was passionate about Dayton
I didn’t know Jay Haverstick very well. I remember him from the good old days at the Yankee Tavern. And I knew him as the owner of Jay’s Seafood Restaurant. He was the guy in the tuxedo who walked around the restaurant greeting his customers, always with a smile on his face.
But our paths did cross, one election season in the early 1980s.
I was a relatively young, new mayor. Jay Haverstick, who died last week in Death Valley National Park, owned one of Dayton’s best homegrown restaurants in the Oregon District. Oregon was a Dayton experiment. It was our effort at rebuilding an inner-city neighborhood, a mini-version of Columbus’ German Village.
We were going through a lot of growing pains. Urban pioneers were buying and investing serious money in the old homes. The business strip was being redeveloped along Fifth Street. The city had come a long way from the days when I was an East Dayton kid, spending a lot of time on the streets and knowing the Fifth Street strip as home to one of the roughest establishments in Dayton — the Burnin’ Stump. As a matter of fact, we used to refer to the intersection of Fifth and Wayne as “Filth and Wine” streets.
The new businesses and the new residents had a hard time understanding each other. The result was a collision of dreams and ideals.
The residents organized and petitioned for a vote in the local precinct that would have made the Oregon Village a “dry” neighborhood. Try as I might, I could not mediate the differences.
The neighbors had the votes. The businesses depended on the ability to serve beer and liquor. City officials were caught in the middle.
We didn’t want to lose viable, revenue-generating businesses, but the residents had valid complaints: noise, beer cans in their yards, and strangers relieving themselves in the neighbors’ grass after leaving the bars and heading for their cars.
I talked to leaders of both the neighbors and the businesses. I was looking for a name, a person who was respected by both factions. Someone who could help broker a peace that would allow both to exist side-by-side. The name mentioned more than any other was Jay Haverstick.
Again, I didn’t know Mr. Haverstick very well, but I knew of him. We spent a great deal of time at the restaurant talking through the issues and assessing the ramifications of a “dry” vote. He agreed to help.
I don’t know exactly what he did or how he did it, but it worked. A “truce” was brokered. More police would be assigned to foot patrols in the district and in the Oregon neighborhood. The business owners would do a better job of controlling the noise and encouraging their customers to respect the residents.
And the neighborhood leaders would give the businesses one more chance.
The “dry” vote failed by a comfortable margin. Somehow Mr. Haverstick was quietly effective, where others, including the mayor, could not succeed.
I didn’t see much of Jay Haverstick after that campaign. Occasionally, I would visit Jay’s and wave to him across the restaurant. I’m sure though, he knew how much City Hall appreciated his efforts and leadership.
We don’t have many business leaders like that any more. In these days, most come to Dayton from someplace else. Their passion about this community is not quite the same. And, certainly, business leaders have their hands full in this economy with their own financial challenges.
Jay Haverstick, though, never stopped advocating for Dayton. His last passion was fighting for the homegrown restaurants that are doing battle against the Goliaths — the big chains with corporate offices located elsewhere.
I never knew his politics and I didn’t even know he liked photography. But I do know one thing: Jay Haverstick loved my hometown. That’s enough for me. Paul Leonard, who teaches at Wright State University, was mayor of Dayton from 1982-86.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Local Business
Terry Ryan: We must shut doors on zombie charter schools
During this fiscal crisis, we’ve heard much about “zombie banks,” institutions that are fundamentally insolvent but stay open because they are propped up by government intervention. But finance isn’t the only field trod by the walking dead.
In Dayton, and indeed across Ohio, we are also witnessing zombie schools. Many are operated by public school systems. To the great embarrassment of those who have supported charter schools (myself included), more than a few also exist within the charter sector. I refer to schools that remain open though they no longer have any real hope of successfully educating children or even paying their bills.
Zombie charters are characterized by low enrollments, persistently weak academic achievement, and sorely troubled finances. Most have shown these failings since birth, which for many occurred during Ohio’s mad rush by irresponsible sponsors in 2003-4 to open as many charter schools as possible, as fast as possible.
Sponsors — of which my organization is one (we sponsor two schools in Dayton and four elsewhere in the state) — are responsible for “licensing” charter schools to operate, holding them accountable for results, and intervening when they struggle.
Regrettably, too many Ohio sponsors have not done their jobs well, and as a result we are stuck with too many zombie charter schools.
The Dayton Daily News has reported on three of them. The New City School, Arise Academy and Nu Bethel Center of Excellence all display zombie-like symptoms. All were launched in 2003-4. All have enrollments under 150 students (two are actually below 100), and all have struggled academically and financially.
One of these schools was rated F by the state and the other two have too few students to even receive academic ratings.
Like zombie banks, zombie schools hurt people and threaten community well-being. They hurt children attending them because they are ill-equipped and ill-prepared to educate these youngsters. They hurt employees by shorting their pay or not meeting their fundamental commitments for things like health insurance.
They hurt charter supporters who find themselves associated with dysfunctional schools and irresponsible sponsors. And they hurt communities by violating the core obligation of a society’s adults to do right by its children.
Closing a charter school is hard and painful work. Last year, the Fordham Foundation worked closely with the leadership of two Dayton charter schools to help close their doors after more than eight years of serving families and children. At both the Omega School of Excellence and East End Community School, responsible adults struggled with the difficult decision to close their doors because they cared deeply about these schools and the children in them.
But the schools ultimately were shuttered — Omega closed and East End merged with the Dayton Public Schools — because, in the end, everyone agreed that this was preferable to letting them continue in a way that might embarrass their supporters or hurt the children and families that depended on them.
Of course, we’d rather open schools and see them thrive than watch them falter — despite valiant efforts to turn them around — and then close. But sometimes the responsible move is to shut them down while assisting families in finding acceptable alternatives. In Dayton and across Ohio, those sponsoring and operating zombie charters need to do what’s right and bury the walking dead. If they refuse or fail to do this, state authorities must crack down on them.
Charter supporters — lawmakers, advocates and operators — should not just demand protection, fair treatment and equitable funding of decent charter schools (as they did recently at a rally in Columbus), but also push hard for the closure — in a fair and transparent way — of zombie schools that hurt children and wound the charter movement.
Those working on the state’s two-year budget should pursue a “tough love” approach to charter schools. This approach is just as right for schools as it is for child rearing. Love means giving them the freedom and resources they need to be successful. Tough means holding them accountable and coming down hard on those that fail or are irresponsible.
That, by the way, is also the way to treat district schools, too.
Let’s purge the zombie schools among us.
Terry Ryan is vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Education, Guest Columns
Editorial: Dayton has to take Obama up on offers
When President Barack Obama’s man for helping old auto towns came to Dayton Thursday, May 21, he didn’t just bring word of federal money that is available. He brought an army.
He had somebody from the Commerce Department to talk about help for businesses looking to retool for a new day. There was somebody from the HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) to talk about what comes after foreclosures, among other things.
The Energy Department was here to talk about going green. The Labor Department was pitching retraining dollars. The Environmental Protection Agency was here to talk about re-using old facilities. Treasury, Transportation — they were all here.
The whole effort was designed to foster what Ed Montgomery, the director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers, calls a “holistic approach,” meaning dealing with the whole. (Don’t ask what happened to the “w”.)
In others words, there’s no one magic bullet. There are just a lot of different paths to be used, or at least explored. Recovery is implicitly seen as a long, complicated process.
Skepticism about what the feds can and will deliver is entirely appropriate. Job retraining programs, for example, have been much criticized as to their effectiveness. But give the Obama administration and Mr. Montgomery credit for this much: they are putting themselves on the line.
The Montgomery show of force — and the cooperation of all the federal agencies with him — must be seen as a public embrace of responsibility. The statement being made was: This is a high priority for us — the feds, the Obama administration — and we expect to be judged on how well we deliver.
Mr. Montgomery and his boss in the White House know full well the price of making such a public commitment and not delivering.
Now the burden is on local officials, businesses, institutions and individuals to test the feds. They need to check out the options available to make sure that Dayton and Mr. Montgomery’s namesake county tap every useful outlet.
Mr. Montgomery’s job — separate from the office that is overseeing the actual revamping of the auto industry — was created with the Daytons of the country in mind. He and his effort will be judged on how things go in Dayton. There is likely to be congressional and national journalistic attention specifically focused here.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown has been promoting the Montgomery effort and associating himself with it. This might turn out to be the major role Sen. Brown plays in Dayton. He, too, can expect to be judged partly on what happens now. And when Mr. Montgomery came to Dayton, so did the governor and lieutenant governor of Ohio. Once a federal program is in place, that’s no guarantee that it will get fully used. A liberal think tank in Cleveland called Policy Matters Ohio made this point recently about a job-retraining program.
Under the Trade Adjustment Act, Americans who lose their jobs because of trade are eligible for income support while they retrain. The bill has just been amended to cover up to two and half years of training and to cover more people. Specifically, it will apply to people in service fields and to more manufacturing workers.
But to become eligible, at least three workers from a certain site must petition the Labor Department, which then makes a judgment. It’s not difficult to imagine the word failing to get out to people who would qualify. (It’s also to be expected that some people who think they are eligible for something — or should be eligible — won’t get it.)
Overall, here’s where things stand: The need for recovery — and for help — is there. The willingness to help is there. A certain amount of money is there, though not an inexhaustible amount.
For the moment, what’s most in doubt is the follow-through — on all sides.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
Editorial: Judge should let Duke’s reopen
The only thing that’s missing from the messy courthouse battle about the fate of Duke’s restaurant in West Carrollton is an ever-present video camera.
With a heavy pour of drama and a pinch of intrigue, this story is ready made for reality television. Maybe they could call it “Food Fight!”
Really, the war about the legacy of the fondly remembered, but hardly world-class, former Italian restaurant Dominic’s is so over the top that a network executive might be tempted to tack the favorite reality TV catch phrase “extreme” onto the title.
It’s hard to blame U.S. District Court Judge Thomas M. Rose for getting a bit fed up. In seeming exasperation, he ordered the recently opened Duke’s to close down, a decision that has put 50 or more people out of work. He reaffirmed that order Wednesday, but at an upcoming hearing could let Duke’s reopen. That would be the right move.
The cast for this family feud includes:
— Anne B. Mantia, widow of Dick Mantia, whose father founded Dominic’s on South Main Street; it closed in 2007 after 50 years in business.
— Christie Mantia, Dick Mantia’s daughter and Anne Mantia’s stepdaughter.
— Reece Powers III, nephew of Duke Morris, who owned Duke’s Golden Ox, a restaurant that operated just a few doors down from Dominic’s for decades before it closed in 2004.
— Harry Lee, a chef and a former 25-year employee of Dominic’s.
Anne Mantia and her stepdaughter had a short-lived, 50-50 partnership as owners of Dominic’s until they agreed, in writing, to part ways in 2005. Anne Mantia got the restaurant and control of the Dominic’s name while Christie Mantia sold her half of the business for $460,000. Under the deal, Christie Mantia was prohibited from using the Dominic’s name or being associated with any Dominic’s-related business.
So when Christie Mantia told the Dayton Daily News in March that she was helping Mr. Powers open a new restaurant that would be “similar to Dominic’s,” used its recipes and employed ex-Dominic’s chef Mr. Lee, that got Anne Mantia’s attention. Mr. Powers even filed papers with the state for a “Dominic’s Restaurant Inc.”
A lawsuit quickly followed with Anne Mantia, who sells a pasta sauce and salad dressing to local grocery stores under the Dominic’s name, claiming trademark infringement. She has a strong case.
Judge Rose was quick to block the use of the name “Dominic’s” for the new restaurant and, late last month, a lawyer for Mr. Powers said the business had cut ties with Christie Mantia and “terminated” her.
Still, Mr. Powers appeared not to grasp the legal sensitivity of the situation. In a settlement conference on May 1, nobody from his side made mention that the restaurant was opening that day. A miffed Judge Rose said that move violated his restraining order; he held Mr. Powers in contempt of court when the restaurant continued to remain open.
Duke’s owners now claim to have eliminated all references to the Dominic’s name and are asking the judge to let them reopen. Anne Mantia is demanding more than $2 million in damages.
Duke’s owners have made big mistakes that could cost them by the case’s end. Still, it’s hard to see how Anne Mantia’s business interests are terribly harmed by Duke’s existence, provided the new restaurant truly sticks by its pledge to steer clear of the Dominic’s legacy.
While the court sorts those issues out, it’s reasonable to let Duke’s reopen, serving customers and keeping its workers on the job. Judge Rose should lift that prohibition.
Meanwhile, both sides should calm down and agree on a settlement that protects Anne Mantia’s trademark, but allows Duke’s to get on with business.
If they can work something out, maybe the Mantia-Dominic’s family won’t have to be remembered for the restaurant business equivalent of a family brawl on the Maury Povich show.
NOTE: An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly identified Reece Powers as Duke Morris’ son. He is Morris’ nephew.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Local Business, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
Martin Gottlieb: Pelosi fight also about Boehner
The Nancy Pelosi story is all about John Boehner, too, because the Republican House leader from these parts has emerged as her most noted pursuer. If she falls, he looks good.
So far, it’s clearly Pelosi who has a problem. Boehner has gone after her in the right way.
Some people might question whether Boehner should be the one going after her, rather than let some low-level scalp-seeker do the dirty work. After all, Boehner has to work with her day-to-day as they lead their respective parties in the House.
But it’s clear that his Republican colleagues want Pelosi blood. And they want a fighter as leader.
He could go astray. Fortunately, however, he has Newt Gingrich to show how not to handle this. Gingrich said Pelosi is engaged in “the most despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Phew. But, of course, that’s just the way he talks. Gets attention.
In fact, the truth or falsity of Pelosi’s story is still in dispute. Boehner — while he has kept hammering at the issue — has pretty much limited himself to calling for an investigation of her story. He says she “ought to either present the evidence or apologize” (to the CIA).
He says if there’s going to be a full-blown investigation of the George W. Bush administration’s handling of torture — the underlying issue — then she should be investigated, too. He says that every time she talks, she raises more questions than she answers. Some nonpartisans in the media have said that, too.
The controversy is basically this: the Republicans claim that, although Pelosi has lambasted the Bush administration for using “waterboarding” and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, she didn’t raise an alarm when she was told privately about such use shortly after 9/11. She ultimately flipped for political reasons, they say.
With the Washington Post having reported that congressional leaders were briefed fully about the techniques, she has been on defensive. After being accused of changing her public story repeatedly, she read a statement at a press conference last week and took questions.
She said that she was only briefed by the CIA once, as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in September, 2002, and was told that waterboarding was not being used.
The only other person in that meeting, besides the CIA, was the Republican chair of the Intelligence Committee. He says the CIA did say it was using the techniques. And Obama administration CIA chief Leon Panetta says CIA records say she was briefed fully and honestly.
Pelosi also said at the press conference — in indirect language that reporters kept trying to get her to clarify — that she did ultimately learn of waterboarding use in early 2003. By then, she had left Intelligence and was a party leader. Her successor at Intelligence got a briefing, and she (Pelosi) was informed to that effect.
What’s the big deal about the difference between learning in early 2003, as opposed to 2002? Only that Pelosi did not raise qualms when she was on Intelligence. Her successor did write a letter raising qualms in 2003.
Pelosi says that by 2003 her job as a party leader was not to write letters to the administration, but to try to get the offending party out of power.
To outside observers it might seem odd that there’s a controversy about whether the CIA was misleading Congress. After all, the CIA told Congress that there were weapons of mass destruction. But the issue for Boehner is consciously misleading, as opposed to being wrong.
Asked if she was accusing the CIA of lying, Pelosi nodded and said, “They mislead us all the time.”
Her press conference performance has been derided for displaying the “body language” of somebody who is uncomfortable with her own story. I didn’t think it was so bad. (You can see it at c-span.org, searching for her name and CIA.) She has never been Barack Obama, as to coolness.
But it certainly was the sort of thing that results in the other party pouncing, by the normal rules of the game.
She’s had some support, though, from senators outside her passionately liberal political base who have long dealt with the CIA. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and former Sen. Robert Graham, D-Fla., have indicated they find her story perfectly credible.
Still, she’s on the spot. One news operation went to former Congressman Dave Hobson, of Springfield, for a comment. He’s a Republican who sometimes worked a little closer with Pelosi than Boehner seemed to like.
Said Hobson, “I think this is a very uncomfortable position for both of them to be in. Frankly, it takes away from the real business of Congress.”
Certainly. One thing you know for sure is that both leaders are very focused on it.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
Guest column: Ohio must grab aerospace opportunities
By Michael Heil
It is an industry that employs more than 100,000 Ohioans at nearly 1,200 companies.
It is an industry focused on cutting-edge technology that produces high-quality, well-paying jobs. It is an industry that is staying strong even in the recession and is poised for phenomenal global growth.
But, most significantly, it is an industry that has at least a $4.5 billion economic impact on Ohio.
This industry is aerospace, and it is critically important to not only the economic future of the Greater Dayton area, but the entire state.
Aerospace involves much more than sending rockets to the moon. It touches the lives of just about every American every day. It is a complex industry that includes all aspects of researching, designing, engineering, testing, manufacturing and operating manned and unmanned vehicles safely, efficiently and effectively. Through air and space, they transport people, goods, defense systems, communications systems and other technology to destinations on Earth and considerably beyond.
The industry allows us to communicate across our planet, observe its health and well being and predict our weather. It includes allied industries and disciplines such as materials, energy and power generation, distribution and storage, instrumentation and electronics, medicine and biomedical engineering. Aerospace is a diverse field, with a multitude of commercial, industrial and military applications.
In Ohio, it also is a growth field, and one in which Ohio is a leader.
From its humble beginnings in the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop in Dayton, the aerospace industry has grown tremendously in the state.
Consider:
— Ohio is the only state that is home to both a federal civilian aerospace research laboratory (NASA Glenn Research Center) and military aerospace research laboratories (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base).
— Market-leading companies in the aerospace supply chain are either based, or have operations, in Ohio. These include GE Aviation, Parker Hannifin, Alcoa, Timken, Goodrich, Lockheed Martin and Eaton.
— Ohio is home to hundreds of small businesses — many engaged in direct manufacturing — that support the aerospace supply chain.
— Ohio is the nation’s second-largest supplier to the Boeing Co.
— More than 20 universities and colleges within the state have strong programs in aerospace-related disciplines with many of their graduates staying in Ohio to launch their careers in well-paying, high-tech jobs.
What does the future hold for aerospace in Ohio?
Aerospace products are the top U.S. manufacturing export with projected growth in 2010 and beyond. Ohio can position itself to capitalize on this growth by making investments now that support supply chain enhancements, workforce development and the expansion and attraction of aerospace companies to Ohio.
This is particularly critical if Ohio wants to reposition its automotive industry assets to serve the growing aerospace industry. This is just one of the many opportunities that possibly are ahead for the state.
There is also the opportunity to leverage Ohio’s aerospace capabilities to address our nation’s energy issues and target new and promising markets in advanced energy.
Ohio can lead the way to the future of aerospace in quiet, clean, efficient aircraft; next generation access to space; and advanced space exploration systems.
The time is now to position Ohio at the forefront of this leading-edge industry.
Michael Heil is president and chief executive officer of the Ohio Aerospace Institute.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Guest Columns, Local Business, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Chinese Chevies a tough sell for GM, but maybe
Seems like every time you turn around there’s another reason to be outraged by the behavior of institutions getting government help in these tough times. If it’s not insurance executives getting million-dollar bonuses, it’s auto executives taking private jets to Washington to beg for taxpayer support.
Now comes this business about General Motors planning to import cars from China for the first time.
Say what??? They’re taking billions of dollars from American taxpayers while they plan to cut American jobs and foster Chinese jobs? Yes.
How serious the company is about this cannot be known for sure. Word of the plan surfaced as it was negotiating with the United Auto Workers. When asked about the plan, GM says little more than that the subject is appropriate for negotiations. So maybe the whole thing is something of a playing card.
The company does also say that, while imports from China might be new, importing by GM is certainly not. Imports already account for about a third of GM’s sales in this country. And, the company says, that wouldn’t change.
At hand specifically is a plan to import a subcompact Chevrolet.
Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown hit the political ceiling when he heard about the plans. He said that what is good for General Motors is no longer good for the country (referring to an old saying in business quarters).
He said he didn’t see how “the American people can be expected to provide taxpayer funds to the company while GM is offshoring production.”
In the course of venting, he also made a specific proposal: that the government require GM to make subcompacts here. However, noted auto analyst David Coles says that making the cars in China makes more sense for GM, because the market for them there is more stable. And he implies that adding a plant here wouldn’t make much business sense if the company has unused manufacturing capacity abroad.
The question becomes: if what taxpayers want is a stable, self-sufficient GM, does it make sense for the government to require the company to spend taxpayer money in a way that the top corporate offices consider inefficient?
Probably not. What does make sense is for the Barack Obama administration, the unions and the politicians to play the game just as GM might be playing it in floating its plans for Chinese Chevies: put some pressure on.
If the company is going to add another category of imports under today’s circumstances, it has a lot of explaining to do. One price of taking public money has to be an obligation to pay a special degree of attention to public opinion.
However, if GM pays attention, then the politicians, the unions and the government are obliged to, in turn, pay attention, to listen, rather than to blithely play to the emotions that are fostered by some headlines.
If GM really isn’t increasing its reliance on foreign-made cars, its use of Chinese cars ought not be considered an outrage.
The federal government moved into a new realm when it offered GM and Chrysler loans accompanied by insistence on dramatic restructuring. Defining just how much power the government should have in shaping the restructuring isn’t easy. But certainly there is a limit.
On the specifics, the benefit of the doubt has to go to the people at the top of the company, lest we expect our politicians to undertake business management tasks that even they know they are not prepared for.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
Editorial: Sugarcreek must stick with tough cuts
Sugarcreek schools, which persuaded voters to pass a crucial renewal levy May 4, can’t let its guard down yet. The district’s fiscal crisis will be around at least through the next school year.
The school board already announced it will ask for new money with a 5.5-mill replacement levy in a special election in August. But Sugarcreek is skating so close to the financial edge that funds will continue to be tight even if that levy passes.
The good news is that Superintendent Keith St. Pierre and Treasurer Kevin Liming are taking the financial threat seriously and are making hard choices. On Monday, they got administrators to agree to forego a 3 percent raise for next year. They’ve asked the teachers’ union to do the same.
Meanwhile, this year Sugarcreek will finish with a deficit of about $775,000. That should not have happened.
Even after making $2.1 million in cuts last year, the district overestimated the money it would receive from new housing starts; new construction all but stopped when the economy tanked. School leaders probably should have seen the shortfall coming, as it was plain the housing market was tanking by the end of October.
The first budget rescue plan — temporarily borrowing money from a construction fund so that it appeared the general fund was in the black — would have complicated the problem and, technically, would have violated state law. Now Mr. St. Pierre and Mr. Liming have decided instead to accept a citation from Ohio Auditor Mary Taylor for finishing the year out of balance and to commit to erasing the deficit before next June.
That won’t be easy. On June 11, the board will hear proposals to cut roughly another $1 million. School officials say they are looking at eliminating jobs, reducing busing and imposing higher extracurricular fees. Even if teachers and administrators all give up their raises for next year, deep cuts elsewhere will still be needed.
If the school board signs off on all the cost-cutting, Mr. Liming says Sugarcreek should break even for the next school year even if the August levy isn’t approved. But that will be cutting it close. And if the levy does pass, most of the cuts still will have to be in effect for the full school year for Sugarcreek regain its fiscal stability.
Combined with the reductions from last year, Sugarcreek will have cut a $21 million budget by $3.1 million, down almost 15 percent by June 30. At the same time, school leaders are trying to protect high quality schools that last year were rated “excellent” on the state’s highest report card for the fourth straight year.
For certain, Mr. St. Pierre and Mr. Liming must do everything they can to preserve the quality of instruction. But, at the end of the day, Sugarcreek can’t operate in red ink, and that will require discipline even when it’s painful.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Martin Gottlieb: Can Biden/Clinton activism save promise of ‘Dayton”?
In Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo this week, “We are looking to demonstrate intensified U.S. engagement in the region, starting with Bosnia … and to demonstrate our unequivocal support for Dayton.”
Thus spoke a “senior administration official” in a conference call with journalists.
So, no, it’s not just a matter of getting Biden out of the country to give the president a break.
Things are bad in Bosnia, politically speaking.
The sober American publication National Journal says, “People are genuinely concerned about what could happen, up to and including an outbreak of fighting. The conventional wisdom holds that there won’t be another full-scale war, but the conventional wisdom in 1992 and 1993 said the same thing.”
The Bosnian war of the 1990s saw at least 100,000 killed. It introduced much of the world to the term “ethnic cleansing,” the wholesale removal of populations.
The war was formally ended at the Hope Hotel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (or, colloquially, “Dayton”), when then-Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke convened the leaders of the region.
Biden’s own involvement with Bosnia goes back to even before the talks. And he has stayed involved. He’s well-known there. So, for President Barack Obama to send him there makes perfect sense.
After the peace accords, the word “Dayton” came to symbolize a positive event. The word became a symbol of peace itself.
However, in Bosnia it also symbolizes a sort of constitution, a basic set of arrangements. These include a three-person presidency (Muslim, Serb and Croat). And the country is divided into two nearly sovereign territories: The Muslim/Croat part and the “Serb entity.”
In the long term, that’s not a great way to run a country. The American and Muslim hope was to move toward something less awkward with time. But it didn’t happen and isn’t happening. Tensions fester. The country stagnates in a lot of ways.
The Americans see the Serb entity as the major political problem, as unwilling to fold into genuine nationhood.
The Obama administration sees another problem, too: The Bush administration. Holbrooke argued for years that Washington was so focused on Iraq and Afghanistan that attention to Bosnia languished. He said that only strong American attention can get anything done.
The European Union has gradually taken over responsibility for the international oversight Bosnia is under. The hope has been that the Europeans could achieve reconciliation by offering Bosnia a shot at membership in the EU if progress is made.
But many observers are moving toward the Holbrooke view: that, just as during the war, progress requires American involvment.
The Obama administration buys in, with its promise of “intensified U.S. engagement.”
There are good signs. The president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, is at odds with the ever-present hardline Serb nationalists, who have protested against the very idea of Biden’s visit.
He’s less interested in supporting the Bosnian Serbs than his notorious forerunner, Slobodan Milosevic. Tadic’s main focus is Kosovo, which last year declared independence from Serbia, with American support. He’s willing to leave Kosovo alone (and stay out Bosnia), if Washington stops pressing him to actually recognize Kosovo. Obama is willing.
Still, the ultimate goal for Bosnia must be reconciliation within Bosnia itself.
From the purely parochial view of people who like having the word “Dayton” stand for something good around the world, the make-up of the Obama administration could hardly be better. Besides Biden, there’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Her husband’s big international accomplishments were fostering peace in Bosnia and saving Kosovo from Serbia. To this day, Bill Clinton is hugely popular in Bosnia and Kosovo.
And there’s Holbrooke himself, who now has an assignment unrelated to Bosnia but will surely be heard about the Balkans.
All three have strong personal motivation to make sure that “Dayton” doesn’t turn sour.
And yet there’s a limit to the pressure Washington can apply to Bosnian Serbs and others. Indeed, the question now is whether Washington can do anything substantial.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Dayton Peace Accords and Other Peace Initiatives
Editorial: Dayton has to brace for GM’s bankruptcy
There’s a lot at stake for the Dayton region as General Motors edges ever closer to what would be an unprecedented bankruptcy case.
There has never been a company like GM go through bankruptcy. It’s gigantic, deeply interconnected to other companies and massively important to both the national economy and big states, including Ohio.
Local communities that have historically depended on GM as an employer, buyer of component parts and taxpayer have seen that connection diminish hugely over time. Still, the consequences of bankruptcy could affect lots of people here. Consider:
Retirees. Pensions are guaranteed by the federal government and there would have to be talks with the union to make major changes. But payments could be reduced if GM is in bad enough shape. Salaried retirees have already seen cuts.
Unions. (Specifically, there are 435 employees at the GM-Isuzu-owned DMAX plant in Moraine). In bankruptcy, GM could ask the court to tear up its labor contracts. The company and the unions are in talks, with GM asking for more big concessions. That could mean reduced wages and benefits.
Dealers. The company began notifying 1,200 dealerships Friday that they are severing ties with them. Local jobs could be on the line.
Vehicle owners and buyers. There is every reason to expect GM will continue selling and servicing cars, and live up to its warranty promises. To continue in business, it has to do that. But nothing is guaranteed.
The communities most directly affected are Moraine and Kettering.
Moraine City Manager David Hicks has been working overtime to try to attract new tenants for the closed truck and bus assembly plant, and he’s seen some interest. Just last week the CEO of a California company that specializes in buying or reworking large plant space for reuse by multiple smaller firms toured the plant.
For Mr. Hicks and Moraine, it is much better to connect potential buyers directly with GM and to do so soon. If a buyer isn’t found until, say, after GM goes into bankruptcy, that would probably only make a sale more complicated.
“We need something to happen sooner rather than later,” Mr. Hicks said. “Time is our enemy here.”
There are also the communities that depend to some extent on tax revenue from GM-owned property. The company pays almost $1 million a year in property taxes in Montgomery County.
More than half of those taxes are for the former Moraine assembly plant, and the money goes primarily to Kettering schools. Since GM’s truck plant closed in December, Montgomery County Auditor Karl Keith has adjusted down the tax bill to reflect the lower value of an idle facility.
But GM wants its tax bill slashed even more. It has asked a county review board to reclassify the plant as “warehouse space,” a move that could cut what it pays in taxes by more than half. Even if the review board says no, bankruptcy could give the company more leverage to insist that the county reconsider.
Kettering schools Treasurer Steve Clark said there is no need to panic. The district has planned for an expected loss in revenue from GM; though important, that reduction won’t break the budget.
Fortunately, GM is up to date on its taxes. Bankruptcy focuses only on past debts. Future obligations should be unaffected by the proceedings and paid at their full cost. Still, it’s hard to envision the full scope of what a bankrupt GM would look like. Clark University’s Gary Chaison, who studied the Delphi Corp. bankruptcy, said the GM case would be so complex there are few lessons from Delphi or other companies that can be applied to anticipate the effects on the economy and GM legacy communities like Dayton.
“We’re in unexplored territory,” he said. “There is no historical precedent at all. Anyone who is predicting anything is really only speculating.”
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Editorials, Scott Elliott
Guest column: It’s wrong time to ask for earmarks
By U.S. Rep. Steve Austria
Re “Austria takes easy way out on earmarks,” May 12: After reading this editorial on my choice to not submit earmarks, I thought it best if I clarify and further explain how and why I came to this decision.
My choice to not submit earmark spending at this time was a very difficult decision. It is harder to stop and assess the full situation rather than continue government spending as usual.
So much has changed in even the last few months that now, more than ever, government fiscal responsibility is needed.
Although I did not elect to do earmark spending at this time, my office is committed and continues to work very closely with our businesses and community leaders. This includes working with the Springfield National Guard Base to bring in pilot training missions, as well as assisting Community Hospital, as it moves into the next phase of its project.
We also continue to help our small businesses and farmers obtain financing and credit during this difficult financial crisis. Additionally, we continue to reach out around the district to secure projects for our area.
Since I have taken office in January, Congress has passed massive spending bills, including a federal budget that proposed a $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009. Under this plan, we are creating more debt than ever before in our nation’s history.
In addition to the budget, Congress passed, and the president signed, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill that included approximately 9,000 earmarks. This came on the heels of the $791 billion stimulus bill and the second half of the $700 billion financial bailout.
This spending has expanded government to the point that we are now borrowing approximately 50 cents of every $1 government spends.
During this economic crisis, when Americans are making sacrifices and businesses are suffering, government needs to be fiscally responsible.
President Barack Obama has also stated the need for earmark reform and more responsible government spending. I support the president’s commitment and I look forward to working with him on this issue.
While I understand the reasoning of those who argue in favor of earmark spending, the “easy way out” would have been to submit every earmark given to my office and post it on my Web site.
When I served in the Ohio Legislature, I was supportive of specific projects that were sensible and made a positive, viable impact on the community, but that occurred under a balanced budget and a more stable economy.
I remain committed to working with our families, small businesses and local communities on economic growth.
U.S. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, represents Ohio’s 7th House District.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
Editorial: Greyhound’s Dayton-to-Trotwood trip could work out
Maybe the possible move of Greyhound’s bus operations to Trotwood should be seen as regionalism at work.
Under some circumstances, one might expect to see the city of Dayton fighting to keep the bus terminal. After all, contrary to some assumptions, the city doesn’t have huge concerns about crime resulting from the presence of buses. And Dayton is struggling, not simply to keep businesses downtown, but to increase commercial activity there.
In fact, though, both Dayton and Greyhound say that Dayton initiated discussions about the terminal moving to an existing RTA terminal in Trotwood.
Dayton sees the site of the current terminal — on Fifth Street near Patterson Boulevard, sort of separating the downtown business district from the Oregon District — as developable with something that jibes better with the neighboring Dayton Convention Center and the Crowne Plaza hotel.
Even if a bus station isn’t a crime zone, a lot of people think it is. It’s not the first thing a city wants visitors to see. And, says City Manager Rashad Young, the downtown wouldn’t be losing much revenue, because Greyhound only employs one person at the site; and the bus travelers are not spending much money downtown.
The proposal that the city took to Greyhound is one that RTA Director Mark Donaghy says he had developed after he heard informally that Greyhound was looking to move north. By giving Greyhound a spot (near the old Salem Mall) that’s closer to Interstate 70, it would free the east-west buses of a long side trip downtown.
It also would give Greyhound passengers access to an existing RTA “maxi-hub,” complete with a covered building. And it would be convenient for a lot of car travel, because of the Trotwood Connector connecting the neighborhood to U.S. 35.
In addition, the arrangement would work for the RTA, which would become the local Greyhound agent, as transit agencies are in some other cities. The RTA says the deal should net it more than $100,000 a year, at a time when it’s facing cutbacks because of the economy.
(As of now, the Greyhound agent is private, and the city is Greyhound’s landlord.) Greyhound has reacted favorably to the proposal, though it publicly claims it is not necessarily looking for a way out of downtown.
So far, nobody has raised a fuss on behalf of bus travelers who live east or south of downtown, who would be farther from the proposed new site. The widespread view is that most of them get to Greyhound in cars and wouldn’t be inconvenienced by a slightly longer drive.
And the truth is that, while Greyhound says the largest racial category among its passengers is whites, they come in at 35 percent. The majority of users are nonwhite, a category more heavily concentrated north and west than south.
The only fuss raised so far has been by some people in Trotwood who see that city as being asked to take something Dayton doesn’t want, with an attendant crime problem. However, the Trotwood police chief has concluded, after looking at Dayton police statistics, that there’s no evidence that crime would be a threat.
A downtown bus station can, if not run right, develop problems. Homeless people tend to concentrate downtown, and the building has a roof. But that really shouldn’t be an issue in Trotwood, especially because there’s already a functioning terminal, and because it is privately owned, rather than public property. Adding Greyhound wouldn’t change much.
Meanwhile, though, Trotwood would get a little attention, a little niche, a little more traffic. And its residents would have easier access to Greyhound. Couldn’t hurt. If Dayton were fighting to keep Greyhound, it would be accused of hoarding all good things for itself. When it wants to let Greyhound go, it gets suspected of dumping its problems on others.
Best if all communities examine their interests calmly. If they do that, and conclude that some regional operations are best located downtown and some are not, that’s a good thing.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Transportation
Editorial: County deserves answers from AT&T
A month ago Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer and County Administrator Deborah Feldman sent AT&T a list of questions that added up to:
Please explain, in writing, how your equipment failed so badly on the opening day of our regional 911 dispatch center.
Many people will remember that on March 26, callers repeatedly tried to report a house fire in Harrison Twp. and those calls went unanswered. The house burned, and an 81-year-old woman was hospitalized.
One caller hung on for 22 rings, while 17 people were at the new 911 center in Miamisburg waiting for calls. But this and other calls never came in because AT&T had programmed a Nortel switch improperly — at least that was AT&T’s story at a press conference after the debacle.
In addition to the switch problem, officials later said that some AT&T lines didn’t work — a whole other problem, though it didn’t result in any missed calls.
Initially, AT&T officials and the sheriff’s staff were focused on making sure that the backup system was working and that the new equipment was being fixed. But as time passed, Sheriff Plummer and Ms. Feldman have tried to get answers about the mistakes. Mostly, they’ve gotten the cold shoulder.
On Friday, AT&T Vice President Michael E. Kehoe said the company will send the county a letter this week. He said he’s been slowed down by the complexity of the problem, the need to consult lawyers and because he didn’t want to give answers in dribs and drabs.
Previously, though, Mr. Kehoe had written an odd and hard-to-understand e-mail suggesting that the problem was “in large part the result of the (911) system being programmed in a manner that called for any calls that exceeded the number of dispatchers present to be placed in a queue with a ring no answer recording (sic).”
In that explanation, he seems to be suggesting that the sheriff created the snafu — in which case, he’s backing away from his earlier admission that there had been a programming error.
Apparently Mr. Kehoe is forgetting that there are recordings of people’s calls ringing and ringing, even as dispatchers were available. There was no shortage of people on duty.
AT&T’s stony silence thus far about how much pre-testing it did — that’s at the heart of the county’s questions — before the system was turned on speaks volumes.
After all, AT&T notes that the company has been involved in this work thousands of times across the country without this sort of mishap occurring. OK. So what didn’t happen properly before Montgomery County’s system was turned on?
No one recommends overwhelming an emergency system with test calls after it’s live; that might prevent a real call from being answered. But it is standard procedure to test and re-test 911 systems to ensure that all lines are working and that calls aren’t being lost before it’s really being used.
If that were not the case, law enforcement and 911 equipment vendors would be playing with people’s lives while they figured out if a new system was really operating properly.
When Sheriff Plummer and AT&T were trying to explain how so much could so wrong, Sheriff Plummer said that one of the fixes he was implementing was buying something called a “status board.”
It will allow dispatchers to see graphically — picture something like a stock exchange board — how many calls are coming in, how many are waiting and how many are being re-routed if all lines are tied up.
He offered this as reassurance for the future (though it may not have been of any use in March, depending on exactly where the missed calls were stuck in the computerized system).
But another good question is why wasn’t this part of the package Montgomery County bought in the first place?
Sheriff Plummer has said the cost is just $21,000, while the new equipment from AT&T cost $1.5 million. For a high-volume operation, this add-on is regarded by many departments as standard-issue stuff. Sheriff Plummer said he can’t explain why the equipment wasn’t ordered initially.
After the dangerous and embarrassing opening day for the center, Ms. Feldman insisted that an information technology consultant be brought in to watch over AT&T and the sheriff’s IT staff. The communities that contract with the sheriff for their 911 service will continue to be served by a backup system until the consultant certifies — in writing — that all systems are good to go.
If things were working right, taking out an insurance policy on AT&T’s work and the sheriff’s oversight shouldn’t have been necessary. But, obviously, much has not been done right.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Montgomery County, Suburban Communities
Ellen Belcher: AF museum dissing Dayton, Wright brothers
Here’s a sad number. Just 50,000 people visit Dayton’s Wright brothers National Park sites each year.
This includes the interpretive center in West Dayton (adjacent to the inventors’ bike shop); Wright Hall at Carillon Park (which houses the world’s first practical airplane); and Huffman Prairie Flying Field (where the Wright brothers learned to turn corners and where there’s a second visitors’ center).
To give you a feel for just how small that number is, more than 100,000 people attend every Ohio State home football game, even if the Buckeyes are playing Bowling Green.
Meanwhile, more than 1 million people visit the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force annually. Many of them go there, spend the day and keep on driving.
On Thursday at 4 p.m. — not exactly prime time — there were cars in the museum parking lot bearing licenses plates from no less than 18 states and Ontario.
An hour before closing time, families from Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wisconsin and Missouri were still making their way through the massive complex that boasts “more than 17 acres of indoor exhibit space.”
The cranks who say Dayton doesn’t have anything to see, and that tourists will not come here, have not been to the Air Force museum. They probably also have not visited the Wright brothers park sites either. But forget them.
The bigger problem is the missed opportunity the museum represents to capture visitors and to showcase Dayton. Visit it and you’ll find one little, obscure kiosk promoting Dayton and other local historic aviation sites.
The arrangement may as well scream, “There’s nothing to do after you leave here!”
There also are two sad sack brochure racks, promoting sites such as Carillon Park (where Wright Hall is), and the information desk had a stack of park service brochures. But there’s no real effort to get people to stay on, or even to let visitors know that Dayton is the home of the airplane’s inventors, the men who sold the Army its first plane.
(That event — which occurred 100 years ago — was what gave rise to the U.S. Air Force.)
Asked why there isn’t more promotion of Dayton’s National Park sites at the museum (after all, Huffman Prairie Flying Field is on Air Force property), a spokesman wrote:
“We partner with the local convention and visitors bureaus, who provide an electronic kiosk in our atrium, as well as brochure racks with information on other local attractions, both in our atrium and near our café. The Dayton/Montgomery County CVB fills the brochure racks and provides information for the kiosk, and the Greene County CVB has an agreement with the Dayton/Montgomery County CVB to provide information on their attractions as well.
“Please keep in mind that exhibit space at the museum is at a premium, and our mission is first and foremost to tell the story of the U.S. Air Force.”
Yes, but.
Isn’t the Air Force interested in the communities that host it, the places its airmen live? Hasn’t Dayton been passionately supportive of Wright-Patterson, the Air Force and the museum? Aren’t we in this together?
Two decades ago when Dayton started trying to get a national park honoring the Wright brothers, there was terrific cooperation with the Air Force. Important generals had to do flip-flops to convince their superiors that tourists could be brought onto Huffman Prairie without compromising security. Today, the concern is a non-issue, and that spirit of honoring the Wright brothers and working together feels like a thing of the past.
The Smithsonian calls its National Air and Space Museum in Washington “the most visited museum in the world,” which tells you something about people’s interests in things that fly. Lucky for us, Dayton has its own air and space museum in our backyard — and an incredible story to tell about the Wright brothers’ lives. But the Air Force museum isn’t driving people our way.
How can that be? How can two taxpayer-funded entities — the Park Service and the museum — not be made to work together?
On Thursday, a visitor from Kentucky was reading the Wright brothers’ exhibit at the museum and commented in amazement to his buddy, “Hey, it says here they grew up just seven miles away.”
It makes your heart sink.
Further along, another sign explains that it was at Huffman Prairie where the Wrights made history by completing the first full circle in flight. But there’s no placard that adds, “You are here” — spitting distance from that very spot.
As you leave the museum, there is a sign on Riverside’s right-of-way, paid for with donations, that directs visitors toward Huffman Prairie, which to many fliers and history buffs is sacred land.
What a shame the Air Force museum can’t see past its little island. Orville and Wilbur are being so betrayed.
Permalink | Comments (45) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Ellen Belcher, Local History, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
How a financial death spiral takes hold
Think only fools get themselves into bad mortgages that drive them to financial ruin? Would a New York Times reporter who covers the economy qualify?
In this week’s upcoming Sunday Times magazine, Edmund Andrews talks about the factors that led him into a series of terrible financial choices that ultimately left him unable to pay his mortgage. Of all people, Andrews should have known better. But the tale is really gripping. You can see just feel yourself in his shoes, driven by illogical and emotional factors to make choices that could not succeed but somehow seemed rational.
It’s long, but worth your time. His accompanying book may well become a period piece for the times we are living through.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Scott Elliott
Editorial: RTA cuts need to be minimized
Lots of people say that whenever they see an RTA bus, it seems to be almost empty. In fact, though, the transit service keeps statistics on this sort of thing. RTA Director Mark Donaghy says the average bus has about 26 or 27 people get on in an hour. Whenever the numbers go much below that on a given route, the agency considers changes.
Mr. Donaghy knows that the impression of emptiness is widespread. He speculates that many people are seeing buses near the ends of their routes, rather than in the middle; and in the suburbs rather than the city.
He notes that a few buses do run emptier than others, including those that are dedicated to taking seniors from high rises to shopping areas a couple of days a week. And some areas, especially north and west, do get more usage than other. The Salem Avenue and North Main Street routes are the most used, with Third Street right up there. (For a chart showing usage of the weekday routes, click here.)
Of course, if a bus becomes relatively empty in the suburbs after leaving the city, the cost of running on the empty stretch is relatively low, because the bus would be in operation anyway. Nevertheless, he notes, if the extension runs too empty for too long, the RTA will make changes.
All this comes up now because it’s a tough time for the RTA. Sales tax revenue, which provides more than half the agency’s income, is dramatically down, 12.9 percent for the first four months of the year. So are other forms of income, including ads. So Mr. Donaghy proposed Thursday to take fares as high as $1.85, from $1.50, and cut some services. (Details.) Such moves, coming at a time when more people are hurting financially, would be a sad irony.
So would this: even as the RTA is having difficulty keeping its buses on the road, it has added new ones to its fleet, courtesy of the federal stimulus package.
Although some stimulus money elsewhere is propping up operating expenses, the feds wanted to minimize that in the transit realm, preferring to buy a lot of buses, to quickly stimulate the economy. (The vehicles have to be made in America.)
Mr. Donaghy and other Ohio transit leaders have hoped that Columbus might recognize their problems and step in with money. And, indeed, the House did put up about $6 million in new funds. Now the Senate has to act. Some transit advocates are pessimistic about it surviving.
Mr. Donaghy says that $6 million, after being divvied up around the state, would probably not be enough to save the RTA from making cuts. The board is looking at a projected deficit of $3.1 million.
RTA must have public hearings before changing or cutting routes. They’re scheduled for June 1 at the Dayton Convention Center at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Riders can give input about the impact of, say, increasing the time between buses on certain routes.
Meanwhile, as the state legislature considers its options — facing stunning budget problems itself — it needs to see the merits of focusing on services that are more useful to more people in tough economic times. It needs also to see the long-term value, of freeing people from absolute dependence on cars, with all their attendant problems, including energy consumption.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Transportation
Martin Gottlieb: So John Kasich is running as a Democrat, right?
John Kasich wants to run for governor, huh? OK, here’s the first question for him.
“Which party?”
People with a long political memory will know why that question arises. Kasich will certainly know.
He has been a Republican throughout his career, having served in the state legislature, in Congress and at Fox “News” under that label. In that middle assignment, however, a certain embarrassment arose.
In 1993, he was the top Republican on the House Budget Committee and a leading spokesman for his party on economic issues.
New President Bill Clinton was pushing for a deficit reduction plan that included tax increases. Every Republican in both houses of Congress voted against it.
To a person, they said that, not only would it not work — in revving up a slow economy and reducing the deficit — it would backfire. It would cost jobs and increase the deficit.
Newt Gingrich said, “This will lead to a recession next year.” Indiana Rep. Dan Burton predicted “a Clintastrophy, an economic Clintastrophy.”
Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas: “I want to predict … that if we adopt this bill, the American economy is going to get weaker and not stronger. The deficit four years from today will be higher than it is today… . (P)eople will pay more taxes, the economy will create fewer jobs, the government will spend more money, and the American people will be worse off.”
But Kasich put it most memorably:
“This plan will not work,” he said in a CNN interview. “If it was to work, then I’d have to become a Democrat.” That is, the Democrats would be proven right about economic policy and Republicans wrong.
Well, the plan was enacted. You know the rest. The remainder of that decade is now looked back upon as the good old days of the American economy. The deficit disappeared and actually became a surplus.
So here we are, all these years after that learning experience. Surprisingly enough, though, all indications are that Kasich is planning to run as a Republican. As if nothing happened. There’s been no talk of him challenging Gov. Ted Strickland in a Democratic primary.
Not only that, but he’s been exciting Republican audiences by calling for gradual elimination of the state income tax (which provides almost 40 percent of state revenue) and the inheritance tax.
Again, it’s as if nothing ever happened to round out his tax-obsessed views about how economies work.
Admittedly, this column is an easy potshot at Kasich. But there’s a larger point here than that the guy was wrong. Or even that he was so certain.
I came of political age reading William F. Buckley’s magazine National Review in its second decade, the ’60s. It taught me, among many other things, a concept I remember as “subject to disproof.” The idea was that if somebody expresses a theory about, say, how to improve the economy, that theory is to be more respected if it can be tested. It’s proponents should be able to describe future circumstances under which they would have to admit that it turned out to be wrong.
Kasich — a few years younger than I and a lot brighter — might have read the same stuff. When he offered to become a Democrat if proven wrong about economics, he was — admirably — subjecting his views to disproof.
(Contrast him with another Ohio politician of the time, now deceased. Asked if any degree of improvement in the economy might convince him he was wrong about the Clinton plan, he said, simply, “No.”)
And yet Kasich and so many others proceed as if the tax-obsessed view of economics has never been tested.
Neither, they seem to think, has the tax-obsessed view of how to win elections. No matter how many times Republicans run on tax cuts and lose (Ken Blackwell and so many others), they keep running on tax cuts. Maybe that’s because low taxes is the only value that revs up the entire party. Disproof would be dysfunctional. Kasich has a lot of admirable qualities: enthusiasm, optimism, experience, a certain bonhomie. But one has to wonder if the only lesson he learned in the 1990s was to never again subject his views to disproof.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
Editorial: Baseball can’t turn its back on black players
Isn’t it strange that a Dayton Dragons’ starting outfield of three black players — Byron Wiley, Dave Sappelt and Tony Brown Jr. — is a novelty?
One of the great civil rights and sports stories of the last century began with Jackie Robinson boldly shattering baseball’s color line in 1947. That led to the major leagues becoming a showcase for minority athletes. Baseball, in fact, was the first American game to become a widely integrated sport, as Latino players, and more recently Asians, became mainstays on the biggest professional stage.
To maintain that legacy, pro baseball must do more to safeguard the game in cities. Dayton is a good example.
Ironically, the sport’s record on minority hiring is admirable compared to peer sports like pro football, college football and hockey. A third of baseball team managers and coaches are minorities, including the sport’s first Asian manager this year — Seattle’s Don Wakamatsu. Even front offices boast non-trivial diversity. Baseball has a woman CEO (the Dodgers’ Jamie McCourt) and a Latino team owner (Arturo Moreno of the Angels). Only pro basketball does better in minority leadership.
But as baseball’s image as a diverse sport has grown, something odd has happened: black players have been leaving the game.
According to an annual report, which came out last month, the share of black major leaguers, which was 17 percent just 10 years ago, plummeted to a low of 8.2 percent last year. The report’s authors, from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, hope that was the bottom of the decline.
This year, the percentage of black players edged up to 10.2 percent. Meanwhile, about 27 percent of major leaguers are Latino, 2.5 percent are Asian and 60 percent are white. About 28 percent are foreign-born.
What happened to the black baseball player? There are several theories.
Perhaps basketball and football are doing a better job of connecting with young black athletes. Both have significantly larger percentages of black players and, especially in the case of the NBA, have overtly connected the game with black cultural icons.
Or maybe it’s about opportunity. If you’re a young player looking for a chance to get ahead through sports, there are far more college scholarships available for football and basketball than for baseball. Major league teams also are gambling big time on cheaper Latin American talent. It simply pays to sign lots of Latin players and hope a few pan out, rather than to bet on more expensive home-grown talent. This limits opportunity, too.
At your local ball field, barriers for African-Americans also are about money. In a bygone era, young players developed their games in community-run, low-cost recreational leagues, both in the city and in suburbia. Kids frequently played multiple sports straight through to high school.
Not today. Now the pressure to specialize comes early, often before middle school. Kids with even moderate potential feel pressure to choose their primary sports early, withdraw from recreational leagues and begin playing “select” sports on competitive traveling teams.
Those teams practice and play several times a week in seasons that can stretch half the year and that aren’t cheap. Parents can spend thousands of dollars a year to chase their kids’ athletic dreams.
Baseball can be especially costly. There’s pricey equipment — high-tech bats, gloves, cleats and accessories — and lots of multi-state travel. There are also camps, winter batting cages and private lessons. It’s no coincidence that some of the most successful youth baseball clubs are located in the wealthiest suburbs.
Meanwhile, city kids are often stuck with just the old-style recreational leagues. Some of those leagues can face obstacles just to keep the games going. Consider the recent threat to Pinewood Athletic Association, an East Dayton recreational league that was sent scrambling to save its season after the city hiked its fees for field rental.
More than half of African-Americans live in large cities, which means many young black children who might excel at baseball just don’t have the opportunity to specialize and develop the way their suburban counterparts do.
Major League Baseball has shown a strong commitment to urban baseball, but it needs to go further. In Compton, Calif., there is a potential model to be replicated. There the MLB-sponsored Urban Youth Academy, for boys and girls ages 11 to 17, seeks to develop area athletes’ baseball and softball skills. It’s modeled after schools in Latin America that prepare players for professional ball.
A bigger investment by the professional league such as this in the urban youth game is a missing piece in baseball’s quest to keep its place as a diversity leader in professional sports. How great for Dayton’s kids, and for baseball, if the story here and in cities like this, was the development of a baseball academy complex, not the struggle for even a simple recreational league to survive?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Sports and Recreation
Down on the Dragons? Check out UD baseball
It’s been a rough year so far for the Dayton Dragons, who have been losing at an unprecedented rate this season. It’s still great fun to go to a Dragons game, even when the quality of play isn’t that good.
But if you’d like to have a good time at Fifth Third Field and see some quality baseball by the home team, too, you might consider checking out next week’s Atlantic 10 Tournament, starting Wednesday. Coach Tony Vittorio’s UD Flyers are in first place in the league and have set a school record for home runs this year. The tournament winner gets an automatic bid to the NCAA national championship tournament.
Around here, folks usually pay attention to UD during basketball season and the Dragons during baseball season. This might be one year to think differently about baseball. It’s a nice coincidence that the Flyers are having one of their best seasons in a year in which the A-10 tournament is being held here. It’s actually the third time in five years for Dayton to play host. It’s a good example of how the Dragons have made their first-class venue a community asset much the way the university has done with UD Arena, which is among the national leaders in hosting NCAA events.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Sports and Recreation
Editorial: Joint effort could turn down cost of lights
A light over your head is a public necessity; a light over your car is not.
That’s the ruling so far from two courts in an interesting tussle between the city of Englewood and a DPL, Inc., subsidiary that could affect how area communities light their streets. Lots of other municipalities are watching.
While it looks like the subsidiary, Miami Valley Lighting, will win the court battle, all may not be lost for cities that want to lower street lighting costs — which they seem to be overpaying for. In fact, bargaining as a group may prove to be an even better strategy than suing.
This all began with the city of Englewood asking the question: would it be cheaper for the city to light the streets rather than to pay Miami Valley Lighting?
Over many years, that company has all but cornered the market on providing street lights in the region. It put the lights up (most many years ago), maintains them and charges most local communities for the service.
But a few years ago, Englewood, which has more than 1,000 streetlights managed by Miami Valley Lighting, decided to buy 300 decorative lights for a downtown project. City officials found they could buy the lights cheaper, fix them more quickly and operate them at lower cost than what Miami Valley Lighting would have charged.
Intrigued by the discovery, City Manager Eric Smith commissioned a study and received an estimate that Englewood could cut its street lighting bill by $100,000 annually — saving almost 50 percent of the cost — if it operated the system itself.
He then had Englewood’s lights appraised and offered Miami Valley Lighting $210,000 to buy them.
The company was in no mood to play “let’s make a deal.” So Smith asked his lawyers if he could go to court and argue that the lights are a “public utility,” the same as the grid that serves homes with electricity. If so, Englewood could take control of the system by paying a fair market price for the equipment.
Unless the Ohio Supreme Court takes up the case (a long shot), that legal strategy has failed. Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Frances McGee’s ruling that street lights benefit society, but are not a service that “society has deemed ‘necessary,’” was upheld on appeal.
This would seem to leave the parties at a stalemate. Englewood could demand Miami Valley Lighting uproot 1,000 streetlights at the end of its contract in two years and then set about installing new lights; but that would be costly, slow and leave the city mostly dark for a period.
Instead, Englewood could consider another avenue. It should try to persuade other communities to help create leverage through negotiation to bring down their street lighting costs.
The rates for this service are negotiated oddly. Because the Miami Valley Cable Council already acts as an agent for Englewood and seven other cities to negotiate cable rates, those communities also use the council to negotiate the rates for street lighting. Then a host of other cities usually follow with copycat contracts, and generally accept the same rates that were agreed to in the council’s talks with Miami Valley Lighting.
The result hasn’t been altogether happy for the municipalities. A council survey found street lighting rates here are higher than in other parts of the state.
The rates possibly could be driven down if communities formed a wider coalition for the purpose of negotiating the street light costs. If enough communities pooled their resources, that should carry some weight at the bargaining table. After all, a large coalition could potentially buy, install and maintain new lights cooperatively on its own.
Local communities have to be concerned about what they’re paying for their lighting systems. The evidence is that they’re paying too much. They have to get creative — and united — in an effort to reduce that spending.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
Scott Elliott: Education without politics? Not this time
The idea that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s visit to Ohio last week wasn’t about politics — as both Duncan and Gov. Ted Strickland repeatedly insisted — is absurd.
Duncan is on a multi-state “listening tour” that he says will help him get a sense of concerns about No Child Left Behind before congressional Democrats and the Obama administration offer a revision later this year of that law. (One revision that is already settled on: NCLB will get a new name, Duncan said.)
Upon visiting Columbus, Duncan found himself at a “rally for education” outside the Ohio Education Association’s annual meeting at Ohio State University’s Schottenstein Center. There was Duncan, standing before a lawn full of union-activist teachers (and a few pro-charter school protesters) next to a Democratic governor who was pleading for the Republican Ohio Senate to pass a budget that would preserve his education reform plan.
Duncan expressed support for Strickland’s general approach — urging investment in education now and echoing the sentiment that after four state Supreme Court rulings, Ohio needs a constitutional funding program — but he declined to specifically endorse the governor’s plan when pressed by reporters. That’s when he fell back on his “this isn’t about politics” mantra.
Isn’t it? Can it possibly be argued that the implicit support of the Obama administration in the person of his education secretary at a rally to save Strickland’s budget at this crucial moment is not inherently political?
Beyond the stagecraft, there also were hints that Ohio could have an inside track for future financial aid for education, thanks to the Strickland-Duncan get-together. Now that $100 billion in education stimulus aid is being disbursed to all 50 states, Duncan is talking up a second pot of money — about $5 billion more — for what he calls “challenge grants.” A small group of states, Duncan said, will get hundreds of millions for following the reform directives Obama and Duncan support.
Here’s the math behind Ohio’s case for challenge grants: Strickland wants big reforms, but will need big money to balance his budget and keep his reform plan moving over the next few years. Duncan has big money and wants big reforms, some of which line up directly with Strickland’s plan.
Sound like a match?
Strickland told reporters he spoke to Duncan about the challenge grants and that he thought Duncan’s visit might help Ohio’s case. Duncan even gave advice. He said Ohio should consider applying jointly for the money in a “bipartisan coalition” of states with governors from both parties.
Just for kicks, let’s imagine an Ohio-led, bipartisan coalition of needy Midwestern states that might apply for a big education challenge grant together — say Ohio, Michigan and Indiana (where Republican Mitch Daniels is governor). Those three states also happened to be battleground states that went for Obama in 2008 and that the president is likely to need again in 2012. Giving a pile of money to that group might just be politically smart.
That’s just one scenario, but it demonstrates how separating out the political undertones in debates about education is pretty tricky. Ohio having gone blue in this time of total Democratic control in Washington is helping Strickland get his phone calls answered when he needs help. That’s just good politics.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
Ohio voucher battle a year away?
Nationally, there’s been a lot of talk about the fate of Washington, D.C.’s voucher program, but don’t forget Ohio had the nation’s biggest statewide voucher program. What’s it’s fate? Well, questions about Ohio’s voucher could come to a head as early as next year. See my commentary about this at Get on the Bus, the DDN’s education blog.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Shooting near church is wake-up call
Talk to some black Daytonians about the shooting outside of a memorial service Monday and they say they’re scared and ashamed.
Scared that someone would be so brazen to try to kill a mourner, scared that this is the third shooting in eight months near a memorial service for a person who was murdered, scared that so many families are feeling threatened.
They’re also ashamed that more people aren’t willing to say, “Enough of this craziness.”
“They (the shooters) wouldn’t do this in Oakwood, Miamisburg or Centerville,” said Marlon Shackelford, who works with an anti-violence program in Dayton. “The (black) community has to say that we’re going to do something about this.”
Specifically, Mr. Shackelford, 47, complains that too often police don’t get the cooperation they need and deserve to solve crimes because of the historic animosity between blacks and law enforcement.
Speaking of the dozens of people leaving St. Paul Global Outreach Ministries on Germantown Street, he said, “There’s no way that nobody saw anything.” (Police arrested a suspect in the shooting on Tuesday.)
This coming Monday, the group Mr. Shackelford is part of — the Community Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence — is scheduled to have a press conference about the local trends with regard to reducing gun violence, which isn’t relegated to just black neighborhoods.
(Incidents are down a bit, year over year, which is good, but of little comfort to the people leaving Monday’s service).
In an effort started by Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl and that is important to communities throughout the area — criminals don’t care about city limits — the program orders known troublemakers to meetings.
There they’re told that if they go straight, they’ll get help with school or getting a job. Otherwise, the law will be all over them if they misstep. The message is a mix of “let us help you” and “don’t cross us.”
Sixty people have heard the talk, but there are 600 others to bring in, said Mr. Shackelford.
Meanwhile, keeping the promise of helping young men with limited educations — and maybe a prison record or a connection to drugs — is demanding work, especially in an economy that isn’t producing many jobs and in a community where many blue-collar jobs have disappeared.
Of course, no one is justified in turning to violence because he didn’t graduate, can’t get a job or has a drug habit. But an important way to ensure that people, and especially young people, aren’t attracted to crime is to make sure that they’re persuaded that hurting people and living in a way that can get you killed are stupid choices.
That’s not a message that police alone can preach. It takes families, teachers, pastors, neighbors, prosecutors, judges and the wider community insisting that violence, and especially gun violence, will not be excused or covered up and, in fact, will be punished severely.
People should be able to sit on their porches, go for walks and drive in their neighborhood and not have to worry that they might get caught in a crossfire between thugs or gang members settling scores. In some Dayton neighborhoods today, that’s not possible; that itself is a crime.
But when people can’t even grieve in peace and security, that’s beyond comprehension.
Anyone who thinks that more aggressive law enforcement is a sufficient response is missing something. Not all boundaries can be set by police.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Civil Rights, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Religion and Faith
Martin Gottlieb: Voinovich holds bipartisan dream and maybe another
Meeting with Sen. George Voinovich on Monday — as he happened through town — was a little like stepping into another political time.
Not that he has somehow been left behind because he’s in his 70s and not running for the Senate again. That could hardly be less true. He’s fully engaged and in touch. It’s just that he was talking bipartisanship.
Seems like kind of a quaint, old-fashioned term, doesn’t it? In a season when D is D and R is R and the wrong one Arlen Specter has chose (a reference to a song that you have to be almost as old as Voinovich to remember), Voinovich isn’t reconciled.
He’s got an agenda that sounds genuinely bipartisan (as opposed to just having a stray member of the other party co-sponsoring something, an old cosmetic, political game).
When you think about it, this makes a certain sense. Not being a flaming conservative causes Voinovich problems with some Republicans. So he might as well take advantage of its upsides. The more rigid Republicans couldn’t realistically offer a serious legislative agenda now, given Democratic control.
He has a plan with Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democrat or Independent or something from Connecticut. They’d create a bipartisan commission to investigate tax policy and entitlement programs with the goal of coming up with a plan for confronting future deficits. Those deficits will be monumental if no policies are changed. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, mainly) are key to any major progress.
The commission would propose something, and Congress would have to either adopt it or reject it, not use it as a blueprint to be amended. In that sense, the process would be modeled after BRAC, the Base Realignment and Closure process that locals have heard so much about, relating to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
It would be a huge deal.
Voinovich has another project that would have the U.S. government invest in international efforts to spur the development of clean, alternative forms of energy, such as solar, geothermal and cleaner fossil fuels. Washington would put up money and China, India, Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada (members of something called the Asia-Pacific Partnership) would match it. He’s talking about a billion-dollar American investment over five years. Several Republican and Democratic senators are on board.
Asked whether he really thinks the political atmosphere in Washington will change enough fast enough to result in action on his watch, he says that all he can do is take the various projects one at a time and see what happens.
Well, stranger things have happened. Both parties have reasons for engaging in bipartisan thrusts now. In reaching out to moderate and independent voters, the Democrats need to prove that they are not out on some lefty bender; the Republicans need to show that they are more than the party of “no.”
In Dayton, Voinovich was also on a bipartisan path. He toured parts of the city and met with bankers, eager to probe their use of government funds.
When he got to a meeting with this newspaper’s editorial board, he was juiced. Before being asked a question, he was off, talking about how much he had enjoyed his morning, about what the city is trying to do about vacant houses and what can be done. He said it was like being a mayor again, as he was in Cleveland in the 1980s.
He waxed so enthusiastically about being mayor — indicating, in an answer to a question, that it was his favorite elective position — that he left one observer wondering if being mayor is completely behind him.
He was noncommittal about his future — after leaving the Senate at the beginning of 2011, at 74 — except that he will live in Cleveland. He didn’t swear off elective office, but he did say that what makes him most enthusiastic about retiring from the Senate is not having to raise the millions that are necessary for a statewide run.
A former senator running for mayor is not something that happens every day. But Voinovich has said he tires of the partisan wrangling in Washington. When he first went there, a lot of people said he wouldn’t enjoy it as much as being governor or mayor, because he likes running things, that is, making things work.
By all accounts, he was a popular mayor of that hyper-Democratic city. But when he first ran for the Senate in 1988 as mayor, he lost the city to incumbent Sen. Howard Metzenbaum. The Voinovich camp’s take: the voters wanted Metzenbaum for senator and Voinovich for mayor.
Late in the 2008 campaign, Voinovich called Barack Obama a socialist. Now, however, he’s quick to say — without being asked — that he thinks highly of the president’s appointees generally and feels he can work with them. The transition of a potential candidate in Obama country?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
Edward Ryan: Auto industry should retool its business model
Edward Ryan, of Kettering, worked as a project manager for the automotive industry for three years and in the supply chain for 20 years.
It’s not too late to save the American auto industry, if only the car companies would embrace their traditions as innovators by trying a new approach to making and selling cars that might seem radical but, in truth, would make a lot of sense.
Remember, beginning with the moving assembly line, it was automakers who pioneered many of the ideas that have made manufacturing everywhere more efficient.
Even so, the basic business model that underlies today’s auto industry has remained virtually unchanged for a century. It needs an overhaul. By combining forgotten mass-production concepts with new ideas from high-tech industries, the auto companies could revolutionize their businesses and save $4.9 billion a year. For an industry that’s borrowing billions from the federal government, change is overdue. The common problem for car makers is proliferation — too many brands, too many models, too many dealerships, too many parts and too much inventory. With hundreds of models and millions of configurations, car companies gamble that the vehicles they make will be the ones customers demand. When they’re wrong, vehicles stack up and cost big money. The solution would require a major change in the way we buy cars. In the altered business model, you would not be able to walk into a dealership, buy a car and drive it off the lot. But by waiting a day, you’d ensure you get the exact vehicle with the right features, and the dealers won’t have to waste lot space in hopes they have the car you want. Here’s how this would work: • Dealerships would be completely reimagined. The days of massive car lots would end. Buyers would see and test drive a few standards models at the dealer. They’d order a car, specifying options and color, from a regional “finishing” location, to be delivered the next day. • Vehicle engineering would have to change. Borrowing a concept from the computer companies, auto companies could design vehicles to have standard components. If you want to take out your CD player and install a combination GPS/MP3 player, you pop out the old component and put in the new. This concept could be used for everything in the car, including body panels, seats, etc. Following this plan, dealers would need far less inventory, reducing a huge carrying cost and avoiding the problem of end-of-model-year excesses for vehicles that don’t sell. A lot depends on your assumptions, but it’s a conservative estimate that dealers average 60 days worth of cars on their lots (2.7 million vehicles on lots nationwide). Using Toyota’s 2008 vehicle cost of about $22,900, an 8 percent carrying cost would yield more than $4.9 billion in annual savings by eliminating this inventory. These changes wouldn’t be easy. Dealers will wonder if consumers will be willing to wait in an era when buyers expect immediacy. But this process of choosing your options and waiting for delivery is no different than the way many of us buy computers from companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard. The benefits would be huge — a more responsive auto industry with lower costs, greater customer satisfaction, smaller dealerships, a simpler buying process and better forecasting. The current economic climate is forcing change on the auto industry. This is its best chance to really re-think the way it does business ,which will ultimately make the industry far more efficient.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Guest Columns
Plain Dealer compares county spending
If you’re interested in how Montgomery compares to other metro counties in the state when it comes to spending, you might enjoy reading the Plain Dealer’s weekend stories on this issue. The chart that accompanies this story compares Montgomery County with Lucas, Hamilton, Franklin and Cuyahoga counties (home to Toledo, Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, respectively) for spending.
There weren’t any big bombshells for Montgomery County in the data. Some of the comparisons, particularly the calculated averages and rates, didn’t seem to match well given the wide range in the size of the counties. But it’s still interesting to see the counties lined up this way.
Take a look and let us know what catches your eye.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Montgomery County, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Austria takes easy way out on earmarks
Many years ago, somebody did a study asking school children how big Israel is. Specifically, the kids were asked to draw it on a map. Almost invariably, they drew it as very large, like Saudi Arabia or even Russia. But, of course, it is tiny as countries go, the approximate equivalent of a 90-mile square.
The researchers concluded that the students assumed that anything that is in the news as much as Israel — and anything that gets so much attention from the most important people — must be huge.
If that’s true, then the kids today must think that earmarks consume about half the federal budget, rather than less than 1 percent, the reality.
“Earmark” is a slightly fuzzy term, but it refers basically to items in the federal budget that are added by individual members of Congress for narrow purposes back home.
People have been bombarded with stories about bridges to nowhere and gas stations where no private company would put a gas station. By now the public is presumed to be against earmarks as a class.
But there are certainly other kinds of earmarks. Former Congressman David Hobson, of Springfield, who represented Greene County, prided himself on looking after his district’s interests through skillful use of the earmark process. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was central to his efforts. In fact, earmarks are at the core of funding for military construction.
But he also went to bat for Central State and Wilberforce universities (getting, for example, a gas station near them, which he thought was needed), and for other constituents.
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, has also pushed earmarks. He gets a list of projects that have been vetted by Dayton Development Coalition — military, educational and infrastructure projects and more — and does what he can.
Now, however, Rep. Hobson’s successor, Steve Austria, of Beavercreek, has decided not to seek any earmarks this year. He says that he hasn’t ruled out all earmarks forever. But, having sat through endless hearings about the budget, having concluded that way too much money is being spent, he felt he couldn’t ask for any this year.
There’s something admirable about a Republican putting his own district where his mouth is. Many others have done everything possible to get money for their own districts while posturing against spending in the abstract.
And yet, Rep. Austria’s position is too easy, too formulaic, too symbolic. It’s a cop-out. A good congressman should be against wasteful spending and for useful spending. The earmark category has some of both, as does every other category.
To write off a category of spending because it has a label that doesn’t play well isn’t the grown-up approach. This is especially true if nixing an entire category results mainly in other districts getting a bigger share of federal money, relative to your own.
Rep. Turner argues that, in any given year, the efforts of individual members of Congress to get some earmarks don’t add to federal spending, but just affect how the money is divvied up.
Many years ago, another local congressman, John Boehner, swore off earmarks in his first campaign. In those days, however, the earmarks process was more objectionable, primarily because of secrecy. Today much has changed.
Individual legislators must now attach their names to any request. Indeed, they are being asked by their leaders in Congress to post their requests on their Web sites. Meanwhile, the media are far more tuned into the subject, following closely what the members do.
In the Dayton area, the earmarks-vetting process is particularly formalized and open. Reform, openness, and focus on the merits of specific proposals are the keys. Symbolic posturing about savings — in such a tiny part of the federal budget — is not what’s needed.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Slots at church or bar near you? No way
If you heard somebody say something had gone “from bad to worse,” you’d think they were talking about the economy, right?
Yes, but there’s also the matter of how people are trying to rework the idea of bringing more gambling to Ohio.
Would you believe that there are actually people in Columbus arguing that what Ohio needs is not a few big casinos, but slot machines in local bars, restaurants, churches and at horse-racing tracks — subject to a vote, not of the people of the state, but of just the affected precinct?
Great. Picture every bar in every dive of a neighborhood where voter turnout is low, or where there’s hardly anyone living, bringing in four slot machines as a way to keep the doors open and money coming in.
The host business and game operator would share 60 percent of the profits. The other 40 percent — and when have you heard this before — would go to the Ohio Lottery Commission, which would give it to schools.
That’s the same lottery that famously is not funding your local school district now because the lottery raises a pittance as compared to what schools really require.
Some bar owners might like the idea because slots could draw people who can’t smoke in their establishments any more.
Ditto for certain kinds of restaurants.
Churches? Maybe proponents figured they had to throw them a bone, lest they object that attendance at bingo would suffer. (Picture the dilemma: Do you put the slots in the vestibule to catch people coming and going? Or would the altar be a better drawing card?)
The explanation for including horse-racing tracks is easy. With Internet gambling growing, these enterprises can’t draw crowds or enough interest to create attractive purses. Some tracks are likely to go out of business.
Gov. Ted Strickland hasn’t been a proponent of gambling — though he did allow Keno in bars and restaurants — so it’s not likely he would ever agree to this craziness.
But the appeal of the suggestion in proponents’ mind apparently is that the governor, in theory, could act unilaterally — no statewide vote, no fussing with the legislature.
The strongest argument of the pro-gambling forces is that, when done well, casinos can create jobs because they bring with them hotels, restaurants and shopping.
Of course, the draw of that sort of entertainment complex — if we’re talking about bringing in tourists — was bigger when casinos were less of a novelty.
But possibly the worst thing about this particular proposal is that it has zero economic development benefits. No one is going to drive from out-of-state or out-of-town to go to a bar with four slots — the limit.
Rather, this gambling would appeal most likely to people in poor neighborhoods who could walk out their door and be stripped of money they can’t afford to lose; they wouldn’t even have to drive or make an effort.
The Northern Ohio Hospitality and Entertainment Coalition can’t be serious. If it is, it’s also laughable.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
Editorial: Legislative meddling cost Dayton big
The settlement the Ohio Department of Education struck this month with Dayton Public Schools vindicates the district and also nets the schools at least $7.1 million. While school officials are thrilled to have the money, in some ways it comes too late.
In 2006, the legislature blocked a financial deal to end Dayton’s dispute with the state about how it counted student enrollment. That helped push Dayton toward its ill-fated 2007 try for a huge levy. After that request went down, the district made devastating cuts that schools today are still climbing back from.
The story begins with the state’s broken process for counting students — a process that urban districts across the state knew was a crock. The state told Dayton, year after year, that it was undercounting charter school students, requiring the district to redirect more money to those schools.
In 2006, school officials decided to dig into the state’s enrollment data. Using newly available state data to better identify where students were attending school (or not), Dayton found hundreds of kids who were counted more than once at charter schools, and many others who had transferred out of charters or were otherwise missing.
Over a three-year period, Dayton estimated it lost as much as $14 million.
At first, the Ohio Department of Education was receptive to Dayton’s complaint, which it had shared with Cincinnati and other urban districts. Settlement talks began, and the department was leaning toward giving millions to districts that had been cheated.
Eventually a deal was struck to essentially split the difference, with the state paying back about half of what the districts said they were due. In early 2007, Dayton hoped that money would at least shrink the size of the levy it was contemplating.
It wasn’t to be.
Republican lawmakers, including then-Speaker of the House Jon Husted and then-Sen. Jeff Jacobson, were frustrated by what they viewed as constant enrollment revisions by the education department that ran up the cost of what the legislature had to spend on education. They ultimately scuttled the settlement, outraging urban school leaders and prompting Cincinnati to go to court.
The legislature was wrong to get involved, a contention that was borne out by the fact that Cincinnati won at trial and on appeal. Late last year, the case was finally settled just before the Ohio Supreme Court was scheduled to consider it.
The appellate court endorsed a calculation for repaying the districts that resulted in pay-outs that were close to what was being proposed way back when in the settlement talks.
Yes, Dayton’s school board made mistakes that led to the defeat of its 15.17-mill levy try in 2007. But a $7 million infusion from the state around that time could have made a real difference in reducing the levy’s size. (The tax increase would have raised $30 million annually.)
Superintendent Kurt Stanic says he will spend the money on reducing class size in early elementary grades. That’s a good plan. With the settlement money and new revenue from the 4.9-mill levy that finally passed last year, Dayton is starting to recover from the deep cuts of 2007.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Seeking answers about recent sex cases
As with many of you, I am having a hard time understanding the recent story of Chaminade-Julienne High School girls basketball coach Marc Greenberg’s arrest for trying to arrange a tryst with a police officer who he thought was an underage girl while chatting online.
Greenberg was a professional success, a family man and by all accounts a likable fellow. If he did what he is charged with, it’s hard to imagine what motivates a man to put all that at risk to try to meet a young girl for sex.
In a pair of stories Sunday, DDN reporters look at the factors that come into play that lead men with an unhealthy compulsion to spiral into potentially illegal behavior.
i don’t know Greenberg, but I did know Bill Nelson. Nelson, the former Miamisburg city manager, was arrested last fall for trying to meet up with a police officer he thought was an underage girl he met online. I worked with him when he was city manager in Tipp City and I covered the city for a small newspaper. Again, Nelson was a professional success, a family man and just the most unlikely person I could imagine to be charged with this sort of crime.
In Ohio, there are a lot of laws on the books to address extreme sexual predators — laws that require them to register and require community notice, among other things. But along the spectrum of potential sex offenders, men like Nelson and Greenberg seem potentially salvageable. If there was a way there could have been intervention, might they have dealt with their compulsions and avoided this fate?
Even if there were, would such an intervention translate in away way to law or public policy? Other than hoping men with such compulsions get help on their own in time to avoid self destruction, is there anything that can be done on a community level to help?
I’d love to hear your ideas if you have any.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Carillon’s big dreams blend past, future
If you think Dayton has gone about as far as it can to make use of local history, you will think again after hearing the plans of the people at Carillon Park. Those people are just beginning.
And they seem to have something.
They have, for one thing, a beautiful, ideally located site to deal with, right on the Great Miami River, off Interstate 75, south of downtown, at the northern edge of the Oakwood hills.
They already have enough history-related attractions to attract a local event a day.
But what they have is modest compared to what they want.
They’re talking about building an incline rail up to a hilltop park, offering a view of Dayton.
They want, too, to give people the experience of a canal trip, complete with a demonstration of how water levels are changed by man-made mechanisms to allow transportation between different bodies of water.
They want to take visitors up in a tethered version of a plane that was the only one the Wright brothers flew in together.
There’d also be a carousel on the theme of local inventions, a local trolley, a great big cash register for sliding in (something NCR probably should have added to its line long ago), a beer wagon highlighting a too-little noted aspect of local history, and more.
First in line will be an addition to the main building at the park, into which will be moved the actual Deeds Barn of legend (to preserve it from the elements). The addition would also have aspects of the old “Building 26,” the site of a crucial World War II code-breaking project.
This construction has already started, with $5.5 million on hand. (Half is from the state and half from contributors.)
The carillon itself — the vertical musical instrument that gives the site its identity — will be upgraded to allow for concerts even when there is not an actual person up there playing notes.
The money for the various additions and ugrades will come primarily from private contributions. The Carillon people aren’t saying how much their dreams will all cost. They are taking one step at a time, one project at a time. They’re not even launching a capital fundraising drive. But if you wanted to guess scores of millions of dollars, nobody could stop you from being conservative.
Some people worry about Dayton being more focused on its past than its future. But neither the Carillon people nor anybody else is suggesting that projects that celebrate the local past are a substitute for businesses and schools that are focused on the needs of the future.
It needs to be remembered just what about Dayton’s past is being celebrated: primarily its inventiveness. The airplane, the cash register, the car you don’t have to wind up, the community’s records for patents — all that and more.
That seems precisely the kind of historical park to have if you, as a community, want to attract people and companies that are part of the high-tech movement today. Those people will want to bring their children to a place like that.
The park is being designed so that they can keep doing that as the children grow, imparting new lessons each time.
In these difficult times, it’s good to see a Dayton institution growing, rather than downsizing. It’s good to see something on the move.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Local History, Martin Gottlieb
Kevin Riley: Wright-Patt is Dayton’s best weapon
During the recent Dayton Development Coalition trip to Washington, D.C., as community leaders sat through briefings by Air Force officials, all were focused on understanding what the future holds for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Though we’re getting hit with our share of bad news, the base remains a powerful economic engine because of its thousands of employees and key Air Force functions.
Air Force officials were generally optimistic about Wright-Patt’s future, but the higher-ups avoid specifics whenever they can.
Among those the group heard from was Michael Donley, secretary of the Air Force. He was appointed late last year after his predecessor, Michael Wynne, was fired following several Air Force embarrassments.
The question on everyone’s mind was: how do Donley’s priorities affect Wright-Patterson?
Air Force priorities imply opportunities for the base. You, for instance, can find people and organizations at Wright-Patt attached to each of the secretary’s five priorities.
On any given day, hundreds of people from the base are deployed to one of the war theaters. They could be members of the 88th Air Base Wing acting as security forces, or medical folks serving as medics and doctors in Iraq.
But, of all the priorities, the plans Donley has to modernize the Air Force and improve acquisition offer the best economic and job opportunities for the base and the region.
One of the more controversial decisions involves ending production of the F-22 Raptor, the newest high-tech fighter plane. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants the Air Force to move on to its next generation plane.
Important people disagree, including some members of Congress. And don’t forget about companies with contracts to build the plane, and the communities with the factories that build it.
The F-22 decsion spells bad news for some places. But in these kinds of projects, Wright-Patterson is the place where new planes are researched, designed and managed. As the Air Force modernizes, local jobs could grow. And this work is less subject to the vagaries of economic downturns the way, say, manufacturing jobs are.
Because the base is the headquarters for acquisition, Donley’s plans to “recapture acquisition excellence” likely offer a huge opportunity. But there’s none too subtle criticism here as well.
Developing a new airplane takes years of work. The process requires anticipating warfare needs years in advance and understanding what technologies will be available, including some that might not even be invented yet.
Lately, the Air Force has been criticized for mistakes involving big projects, including its new tanker. In that case, it picked a company to make it and then the decision was challenged. The complaint — that the Air Force didn’t play by the rules — remains unresolved.
The Air Force once was highly regarded for its ability to develop new weapons. Donley — and other experts — are of the mind that it has slipped.
The new secretary has made it clear that the Air Force has no choice but to reinvest in its development of weapons, including the training and expertise of the people involved. Many of those people work for the Air Force Materiel Command, which is headquartered at Wright-Patt. In his effort to improve the Air Force’s development of planes and other weapons, Donley plans to hire more people and shift greater attention to acquisition.
That’s exactly what supporters of Wright-Patt want to hear.
Now, the region and the base have to be ready to take advantage of the opportunity.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Kevin Riley, Local Business, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Strickland, education and money
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Gov. Ted Strickland for a rally in support of the governor’s embattled education plan today and there were a couple interesting revelations about the possibilities for future federal cash for Ohio’s education reform efforts.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Scott Elliott
Martin Gottlieb: Can national hardliners reshape Ohio GOP?
OK, so Arlen Specter leaves the Republicans, having decided he was insufficiently conservative to prosper among them. And, as this column briefly documented last week, the next least conservative Republican senator is probably Ohio’s George Voinovich.
So where does that leave the Ohio Republican Party? After all, all its holders of the biggest statewide offices in the last decade — Voinovich, Mike DeWine and Bob Taft — have some problems with conservatives.
Here’s Voinovich on the subject of the people behind the challenge to Specter in the 2004 and 2010 Republican primaries in Pennsylvania:
“They’re really not interested in Republicans,” he said, “even ones that are relatively conservative. (They say,) ‘If you don’t pass my litmus test, then you don’t qualify.’”
At issue, specifically, is a national organization called the Club for Growth, whence sprang the challenger to Specter. Voinovich, when asked specifically if he thinks the Club for Growth is a problem, said, “I think it is. I think it’s a big problem.”
You would, too, if you were him.
The club — on whose board sits former Ohio politician J. Kenneth Blackwell — applies big money to the task of promoting tax cuts, among other conservative causes. The club Web site says:
“The primary tactic of the separate Club for Growth PAC is to provide financial support from club members to viable pro-growth candidates to Congress, particularly in Republican primaries.”
The club and its supporters would love to take Voinovich out of the Senate if he were running again, which he isn’t. (Whether they could come up with a “viable” Republican alternative is another question.)
Voinovich, after all, believes that tax policies and spending policies should be somehow connected. For some reason, he has a problem with the whole idea of taxes going down while spending goes up. This put him at odds with his party when the spending was being done by Republicans.
When a party has suffered a string of losses like the Republicans lately, it inevitably has an internal fight over its soul. The fight takes an inevitable form, like a choreographed dance.
First the hardliners say that the party’s losses result from it having become too moderate, too much like the other party. Then the softliners say that is the single dumbest thing they’ve ever heard in their lives.
Or, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says more gently, “We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough. If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time … then we are going to keep losing.’’
Jump ahead to the end of the dance: the party makes a comeback. Always. It’s built in. It’s not an accomplishment, any more than the tide deserves credit when it comes back in.
When the “in” party runs out of luck, the “out” party comes back in. So the shape of the parties is of some interest.
The Club for Growth and other hardline conservatives are not likely to go after many incumbent Republicans in primaries. After all, most congressional Republicans are already quite conservative. But the club can have impact without launching many races. It can deliver a message about what happens to the few independent-minded people, a message that will be heard by Republican politicians in moderate states like Ohio and places like Dayton.
That’s the “big problem” Voinovich referred to: that Republican politicians will feel that meeting Graham’s 70 percent standard will not sustain them in office, not satisfy the hard right.
What would happen to Ohio Republicans if they went in the Club for Growth direction. Well, what we know for sure is that Ken Blackwell suffered a loss of historic proportions when he ran for governor in 2006. Admittedly, it was a bad year for Republicans; DeWine lost, too.
The upshot of that history may be the emergence of somebody like former Congressman Rob Portman, who splits the ideological difference.
But what splitting the difference means is that he is right in the mainstream of a party that is dominated by the south and west, not places like Ohio, which is why so many Republican officeholders have diverged from party orthodoxy in the first place.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
Obama can push Ohio to reform even more
Gov. Ted Strickland’s proposed two-year budget is a thing of the past.
This week numbers came out showing that state income tax revenues are coming in so far below projections that it’s possible — make that probable — that the state’s “rainy day” fund could be used up by the end of June.
That pot — almost $1 billion — was one of the sources of $7 billion in one-time money that the governor was counting on to help pay for the first steps in his huge 10-year education reform plan. Even before this bad news came out, critics were saying that Gov. Strickland couldn’t possibly fund his ideas unless a windfall arrives (or he raises taxes).
One source the governor may be banking on is money from the U.S. Department of Education. It has $100 billion in federal stimulus money to spend. In a speech last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the states that adopt the president’s priorities will be rewarded with extra money from “challenge grants.”
“There will be lots of pressure to fund all 50 states,” he said. “I promise you that is not going to happen. We will focus on the states most committed to these (the president’s) reforms.”
Maybe tellingly, today Secretary Duncan is appearing with Gov. Strickland at a rally in Columbus supporting the governor’s education plan.
Is it possible that Gov. Strickland has cut a deal with the Obama administration, insisting that Ohio deserves something for its support of the president and, by the way, the state is on board for the president’s priorities for schools? Has Gov. Strickland reminded the administration that there’s another election coming up in 2012, and Ohio is tired of being so important during presidential campaigns, but being forgotten later?
These would not be ridiculous points.
But do Gov. Strickland’s goals really match up with President Obama’s? Yes and no. In a recent speech, the president focused on five things:
Invest in early childhood education
Gov. Strickland has actually proposed cutting money for pre-school, after speaking up for early childhood education in his State of the State speech. He has dedicated some people to the cause, but spending money in pre-kindergarten classrooms is where the real work gets done.
Better standards and assessment
President Obama is critical of states that give easy proficiency and graduation tests that students score well on, even as they do poorly on national tests. Ohio is not in that group. Its state and national test scores compare fairly well.
Meanwhile, the president also opposes using just proficiency tests. Gov. Strickland is with the president on that score, proposing to require that all high-school students take a college entrance exam and calling for end-of-course exams and senior projects.
Recruiting, preparing and rewarding teachers
Though Ohio should have merit pay, the state doesn’t push that practice. President Obama, however, favors it. In what may be a back-door approach to the controversial issue, the governor has called for a “residency” program for new teachers, coupled with a “career ladder” and new sorts of licenses for top teachers. Those changes could lead to paying the best teachers more.
Promoting innovation and excellence
President Obama wants to lift caps on the number of charter schools. Gov. Strickland says he’s a fan of good charters (Ohio has a ton), but many charter school advocates complain his budget doesn’t reflect that. In his defense, the governor has pushed for more accountability from charter operators.
Quality higher education
This is a big strength for Ohio. Under the direction of Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, the state has pushed colleges to create opportunities for high-schoolers to start college early, and the state has kept a lid on tuition increases, with the goal of making Ohio colleges more affordable. Its colleges also are increasingly partnering with K-12 schools.
Gov. Strickland has plenty of good stories to tell Secretary Duncan about what Ohio’s doing in and with its schools. If, however, he wants to argue that the state can be a poster child for the Obama administration’s goals, he has more work to do.
Given how desperately Ohio needs Washington’s money, President Obama and his people can’t be criticized if they insist the state should be even more in sync with them.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Lenders beware; end to gouging is here
Sometimes people say that it doesn’t matter who’s president, that politicians are all the same.
On issues from torture to bailouts, there’s no question that Republicans are not calling the shots any more. Whether you think President Barack Obama and the Democrats are overreaching, or whether you believe that they’re making a course correction, there’s no disputing that it’s a different day.
Take the “Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights” that’s moving quickly through Congress. The president, who recently told bankers that he hasn’t forgotten what it was like to have credit card debt, is setting new expectations for lenders.
In a phrase, it’s, Cut out the gouging.
Democrats are proposing a bundle of ideas that would make it harder for banks to ding customers. Too many of the rules are stacked in their favor and work to the disadvantage of even good customers.
Among the changes being sought:
— Preventing card issuers from hiking interest rates “any time, for any reason” on existing balances. Instead, increases couldn’t be imposed unless a borrower is more than a month late, a promotional rate expired, the rate is a variable rate or the cardholder doesn’t follow through on an agreed-to payment plan.
— Allowing consumers to set their own fixed credit limit, so they don’t get in over their head.
— Preventing the practice of double-charging for interest on debt consumers have already paid on time.
— Outlawing lenders from charging a fee for payments made over the phone or online.
— Requiring that payments over the minimum be allocated to the balance with the higher interest rate rather than the lowest.
— Prohibiting credit card companies from using a consumer’s card history with one credit card company to justify a hike in interest on a different card.
— Restricting marketing to college students and others under age 21.
Reining in the credit card industry was the logical follow up to putting limits on subprime lenders, who peddle loans to people with bad credit histories, the poor and unsophisticated borrowers.
Predatory loans have trapped millions in debt, but those loans are not nearly as ubiquitous as credit cards with ridiculously costly or punitive provisions, often buried in the fine print.
The credit card industry — not unlike payday lenders who make two-week loans at exorbitant rates (until Ohio put a leash on them) — has sucked people into borrowing amounts that are impossible to pay back once interest, fees and penalties start mounting.
Credit cards are a fact of life, and an extremely handy one, when they’re used responsibly. Of course, consumers are obligated to control their worst instincts, but lenders also need to be checked so they don’t take advantage of undisciplined people.
As a society, we have all sorts of rules that protect people from their own bad habits; and these rules aren’t just about protecting consumers from themselves.
Credit card companies, for instance, sell their loans on a secondary market, just as lenders sell their mortgages. Now everyone knows the cost to the economies of the world of allowing lenders to make loans to people who had no business taking on so much debt.
Last year the Federal Reserve Board put new restrictions on credit card companies, but those rules won’t take effect quickly.
Moreover, with the restrictions in law, critics would have to go to more trouble to undo them. In effect, the Fed, too, was reading the handwriting on the wall that there was a new president coming into office and that experience was proving that banks couldn’t be trusted to always do the right thing.
Nobody is overreacting in insisting that credit card issuers are out of control.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, National Politics, Predatory lending
Editorial: Somebody has to own city’s empty houses
When the news surfaced this week that Dayton has one of the 10 emptiest neighborhoods in the country, the most common local reaction might have been “Only one?”
Wait. Montgomery County Recorder Willis Blackshear, who monitors this stuff closely, says the foreclosure epidemic is far from over; it has a few years to run because some people who’ve lost their jobs haven’t yet lost their houses.
An analysis of federal government data by The Associated Press found that the three neighborhoods with the highest portion of empty buildings in the country are in Columbus and Cincinnati.
A Dayton neighborhood ranks ninth, with 40.5 percent of 1,739 houses vacant. The neighborhood is between Salem Avenue and Main Street. It was the subject of an investigation by this newspaper last year. The paper found that Fountain Avenue had more homes sold at sheriff’s auction in the previous three years than any other residential street in the county.
The AP analysis is a little bit surprising, in that Columbus and Cincinnati have been mentioned less often as victims of the foreclosure crisis than Cleveland, which doesn’t show up in AP’s top 10. The study demonstrates forcefully that the problem is widespread in Ohio.
That’s important because: Late last year, the Ohio Legislature granted Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), but no other county, the right to set up a program to deal with home vacancies.
Cuyahoga wanted a “land bank,” a public agency to take control of empty houses and land and to make plans for reusing them. Why not, when the marketplace is failing completely to deal with the multiple problems that result from widespread vacancies: houses and yards become ugly, bringing down property values; they attract vagrants, thieves and drug dealers, making neighborhoods dangerous. They foster still more vacancies.
When the Legislature decided to let Cuyahoga County get systematic about approaching this problem — and to use money from penalties and interest on property taxes to fund the effort — there were qualms.
Government was getting into an activity normally concentrated in the private sector. It was getting into a complicated business that requires special expertise and energy. Lawmakers said they weren’t getting any sense of urgency and readiness from other urban areas about land banks.
So legislators decided to think of the Cleveland project as an experiment. Though not enough time has passed to evaluate the experiment, certain other things have changed. The Democrats took over the House of Representatives. And the foreclosure problem hasn’t abated and arguably has worsened.
So now the House has decided to allow smaller counties to set up land banks, too. The measure is in the budget bill that was just sent to the Senate.
Some people at Dayton City Hall and elsewhere in local government circles are hoping the state will give this community the same opportunity that Cleveland has.
City Commissioner Nan Whaley was leading the effort on behalf of Dayton even last year. She and others need to get busy quickly in convincing the Senate that land banks are a high priority for Montgomery County and that the locals are ready to run one.
This is not a spending measure. It is not a government intrusion in any realm the private sector is energetic in. It’s just about allowing a community to fight for itself. The Senate should be for that.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Montgomery County
Editorial: NASA can’t blow off Air Force or Dayton
Sweet.
That would have described the situation if Gen. Lester Lyles had stayed in the running to head NASA and had been tapped by President Barack Obama.
Last week, though, Gen. Lyles, who formerly was commander of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, took his name out of contention.
He said he would take too big of a financial hit to come out of retirement and go back into public service. He was widely reported to be on a short list of possibly just four people being considered. Gen. Lyles has been leading a major study on the country’s future in space.
A board member of DPL Inc., Gen. Lyles knows Wright-Patterson and the Dayton community well. With the Defense Department pushing to move the Air Force more into the realm of space, having someone in the highest place at NASA who is intimately familiar with Wright-Patterson would have been a great connection to have.
Moreover, there’s also this:
NASA is retiring its three space shuttles. Dayton’s National Museum of the U.S. Air Force wants one. How great would it have been to have a former Air Force guy, who had spent time here, running that agency as it decides where those spacecraft will go?
If only the stars had aligned.
The competition to get one of the coveted three-winged space vehicles is intense. A reported 20 museums and educational institutions are making pitches. The Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum in Washington is unquestionably going to get Discovery; that leaves just two.
As appropriate as that decision is, the Air Force is arguing that it’s also a no-brainer to put Atlantis here, because that shuttle carried military payloads.
The competition includes the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The shuttles are scheduled to be retired in 2010. Once that happens, NASA wants them moved to places where they’ll be accessible to the public. The hitch is that the receiver institutions must have $42 million to pay for the delivery, decontamination, restoration and so on.
The Air Force Museum thinks the Air Force can get a shuttle to Dayton as cheaply as anyone can move them, and it has the experts who will ultimately be called on to help direct efforts to put the spacecraft on display, wherever they go.
But merit will be only part of the consideration. Politics always counts for something, and members of Congress are going to bat for their communities. (U.S. Rep. Mike Turner has gotten agreement from all of Ohio’s congressional representatives to back the Air Force Museum’s bid.)
Some members of Congress are all over President Obama for not having named a NASA administrator yet (like he hasn’t had other things to do). Fourteen members of the House of Representatives from Florida, Alabama, Texas and California — all of which have NASA facilities — have sent a letter saying the president needs to make a choice.
Florida lawmakers are especially trained on the decision. That state could lose 3,500 jobs associated with the Kennedy Center because of the five-year gap between the shuttle retirement and when the space agency puts up its next generation of manned rockets.
But the attention goes beyond parochialism. NASA is at a crossroads about where it’s going to go and how it will get there. When the shuttles stop flying, for instance, this country will be dependent for five years on Russia for access to the International Space Station.
The point is: The next NASA administrator will have big issues on his or her plate.
That raises the possibility that the most connected people in Congress may need to be appeased on the least weighty matters — say, with a space shuttle.
To assure that it gets what it deserves, the Air Force Museum has to be aggressive in raising money and be creative about how it will pay to get a shuttle on view.
Partnerships — a hallmark of Dayton — are the only way it can do that.
Meanwhile, the politicians have to keep their eye on who’s buttonholing the new person after the NASA administrator is named.
And the Air Force has to keep fighting the fight.
One of the shuttles belongs to that service — and here in Dayton.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local History, National Politics, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Editorial: Federal bailout not a fate to be envied
When Washington decided — under President George W. Bush — to bail out not only the banks but the auto companies, immediately people started joking about how they, too, would like to be bailed out from, say, their credit-card debts.
But if they look now at GM and Chrysler, they might not be so sure.
Chrysler is going into bankruptcy, from which its top executive seems to think it will emerge in a good position. But it had to merge with Fiat
, in a deal that analysts are saying leads to Fiat’s dominance. And more than half of the company may be owned by the United Auto Workers union, or, rather, a UAW fund that deals with health benefits. The stock is in lieu of billions owed to members in health benefits.
And the company is shutting down production for a while, having already jettisoned many thousands of employees. And the CEO is on his way out. Dealerships are expected to close. The company’s financing arm has been cut out of the action. Suppliers, such as Dayton’s Behr Thermal Products, are watching with bated breath.
As for General Motors, it’s still struggling to meet the demands of the country’s new president, hoping to avoid bankruptcy. Pontiac is gone. Saturn may be gone. Dealerships are slated to go by the droves. Plants are being shut. The CEO is long gone. The company was a behemoth no more when the government stepped in, and it is becoming much smaller.
Much of what is left could end up being owned by a UAW fund. And nobody can say there aren’t still more blows ahead, before the government is out of the picture. In the end, both companies might survive and thrive. If so, they’ll have to repay the government money in some form.
President Barack Obama said at his press conference last week that, despite his extraordinarily aggressive role so far, he has no interest in running any auto companies. The claim is credible. Government ownership of auto companies has never been in the platform of the Democratic Party or the dreams of the party’s liberals.
Nobody knows whether the union is any more interested in ownership. For the union fund to own stock would be of little comfort to the thousands of workers in Dayton — more than in any city outside of Michigan — who have lost their GM and Delphi jobs over decades.
Nor would the presence of the UAW in management necessarily secure the jobs of present or future workers. If a company’s products aren’t selling, any owner must come to terms with that, making painful decisions.
Meanwhile, nobody knows how much the stock will be worth.
Given all that — plus the fact that running companies and running unions are very different businesses, potentially at odds with each other — the union might want to rid itself of the stock as soon as buyers can be found.
As for the corporations, they’ve been forced to act, in huge decisions, in accord with the interests of taxpayers, as those interests are understood by the president.
It’s not a model that anybody — management, unions, taxpayers, Democrats, Republicans — would want to see become a norm in the American business world, even if it was the least bad approach available.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
Scott Elliott: School helps kids grow up, catch up
David White thought he had a great idea when Dayton Public Schools asked the innovative principal to launch a school for dropouts in 2006.
He’d hook the kids with video games, he thought. Students would run their own company while brushing up their basic skills; in teams, they would develop educational video games and try to sell them to school districts.
The video game concept, it turned out, was a flop.
The Dayton Technology Design High School, on the other hand, has blossomed. Like any good entrepreneur, White, over three years, has refined his program, kept what worked, discarded what didn’t, and shown results.
In a recent Dayton Daily News story, staff writer Anthony Gottschlich reported the school has grown from 60 kids the first year to 130 and has sent 60 students to college. That is extraordinary considering the kids the school targets are at the highest risk for failure. Most have dropped out of school and have a history of arrest and juvenile offenses.
Even so, last year 83 percent of kids who enrolled stuck with the program, up from just 50 percent the first year. Recently relocated to the former Dayton Public Schools administration building at 348 W. First St., the district-sponsored charter school next year will add a third grade level to the program aimed at preparing kids for college-level work.
The staff’s intense support — helping kids grow up and learn to be adults while catching up academically — helps keep students on track. But the other big draw is the chance to start and run a money-making business.
That part of the initial school concept White kept when the video game idea crashed and burned.
“Out of the original 85 kids, we only had about five that wanted to do video games,” he said.
Instead, the revamped program allows the kids to choose their own small-business ideas. Teams write a business plan, create a sales pitch, launch the operation and manage it.
Some examples:
— After last fall’s windstorm, a teacher who lives in Greene County chopped up fallen trees on his property and brought in wood pieces that students shaped and finished into cutting boards to sell.
— One team has 17 contracts for their lawn mowing service.
— Students combined a science fair project studying vegetable growing methods with a business that cuts those vegetables up for salads and sells them at nearby businesses during lunch time.
Later this month, this year’s teams will present their plans to a panel of business people, who will rank them and pick a winning team. Teams also are entering the University of Dayton’s business plan competition.
“We try to unleash creativity and problem-solving,” White said.
In doing so, the Dayton Technology Design High School is getting even the most discouraged kids excited about learning and their futures — kids who, but for White and his staff, might have been headed for serious trouble.
“I can’t see how we are better off locking a kid up for two years than reforming them through education,” White said.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Let up in foreclosures not here yet
In Ohio, Montgomery County’s foreclosure crisis is second only to the Cleveland area’s. So it seemed like good news last week when a California realty tracking company reported foreclosure filings in the Dayton area declined in March.
Not so fast, say local experts.
In fact, Montgomery County data show little reason to expect a foreclosure turnaround this year or even next.
While there has been a slight burst in houses being sold, that uptick won’t be enough to help the region’s housing market, if at the same time neighborhoods are threatened because homes continue to be abandoned or sold at depressed prices at sheriff’s sales.
RealtyTrac Inc., reported that foreclosure filings in the Dayton metropolitan area were down 14 percent for March when compared with last year. (The firm counts all foreclosure filings, which can include multiple filings in one foreclosure case, rather than just new filings.) Montgomery County’s numbers also were down.
Yet, Montgomery County Recorder Willis Blackshear, who methodically tracks foreclosures, says he sees no sign there will be a significant drop-off in 2009. Last March, his foreclosure prediction nearly matched exactly the final numbers for the year — 5,193 total new filings and 2,781 properties sold at auction.
For 2009, his latest projections are only slightly down — just over 5,000 new filings and 2,500 auction sales. His view fits with what other agencies that work with troubled homeowners are seeing. There’s been no lessening in demand for their services.
Mr. Blackshear said nothing so far has swayed him from his estimation that the crisis will not hit bottom until 2013. He’s not being inconsistent when he says that while the overall housing market may begin to recover over the next year or two, foreclosures could still remain high.
Consider, for instance, that buy-out payments to laid-off factory workers from General Motors and other companies could start running out this year and next for those who haven’t been able to find employment at comparable wages. Mr. Black-shear said he worries that many area homeowners could struggle to make mortgage payments that were based on their previously higher incomes.
In anticipation of this problem and the fact that the recession continues to strap a lot of families, Mr. Blackshear has tried to raise private contributions to hire two people to personally call on borrowers his office has identified through public records as having troubled or predatory loans. The hope would be to head off foreclosure before the process begins.
One person starts next month, but there isn’t money to hire a second individual.
Another frustration of Mr. Blackshear’s is that federal stimulus aid is going only to private groups trying to avert foreclosures; his outreach effort, unfortunately, can’t get a small slice of those funds. He thinks that it’s a mistake to assume that local government can’t, or shouldn’t, play a role in helping people stay in their homes.
“We’ve tried mailing letters, but the physical outreach is required,” he said. “It’s better than waiting until they come to you.”
Despite his gloomy forecast on foreclosures, Mr. Blackshear said he has seen a hint of good news in the housing market. While mortgage filings remain flat for 2009, his office, which records deeds and property transfers, has been seeing more activity from title companies lately.
That could mean home sales are in the pipeline, but that banks are backed up on processing loan requests or are being more careful about whom they’re loaning to. (With interest rates low and so many people refinancing, that also could be slowing down loan approvals that, in other times, would have more quickly shown up as sales.)
Realtors, too, have seen similar signs of hope, Dayton Area Board of Realtors President Harry Vearn said. March sales were the best year-over-year results for home sales since October, even though they fell slightly compared to last March. (It’s telling what passes for good news in this economy.)
That new interest presumably is driven, in part, by the federal stimulus that includes a big tax break for first-time home buyers — $8,000 or 10 percent of the home value, whichever is less. Mr. Vearn said that seems to have spurred young families who had previously held off on home shopping.
If a home sales bump materializes as a result of the stimulus, that is a good sign of smart federal spending to get the economy going. At the same time, local government programs like Mr. Blackshear’s also can attack a desperate housing problem in another important way.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Predatory lending, Scott Elliott, Social Services
Ellen Belcher: Ohio’s love fest over, won’t be back
Two years ago, so much was so different in the state.
The Dow was in the stratosphere, and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and a Republican Legislature agreed on a two-year budget with just one no vote. The spending plan was heralded as stunningly low-growth and that was before the cuts that have since been imposed as the economy tanked.
The governor actually hugged then-Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, of Kettering, at the bill signing.
Here it is 2009, and the markets have gone off a cliff, and the chance of there being any hugs or near unanimous votes on Ohio’s next budget is nil.
When you consider how difficult meeting budgets — anybody’s budget — has become, lawmakers should have been happy in 2007. After all, as seen in today’s light, how hard could the decisions have been?
Further complicating things is that elections are around the corner. In the world of politics, 2010 is here. No one is making a move without thinking how it might look a year from this fall.
The goal is not necessarily figuring out what’s best for the state, or where people can compromise; rather, decisions are being made with an eye toward exposing the other side’s vulnerable spots and hypocrisy (of which there’s a lot).
At some point, at least a temporary truce will have to be called. Ohio has to have a budget passed by July 1, and it must be balanced. Democrats have taken over the House, but the Senate is still in Republican hands. For the sake of the state and its reputation, you have to hope that things won’t get so ugly that we’ll become California and deadlock will be national news.
Strickland is not kidding when he says the picture is bleak. His $54 billion budget relies on $6.7 billion in one-time money, most of it from the federal stimulus.
Meanwhile, the revenue forecast his plan is based on is becoming negatively outdated by the day.
Republicans complain that the governor is setting the state up for a fall, that not cutting deeper now means the pain will be horrendous in two years. But they aren’t proposing to give back the stimulus money. And they definitely aren’t proposing a tax increase. And they haven’t said how they would cut, oh, say, even a couple billion dollars.
Meanwhile, as the governor is trying to call out Republicans for their double-talk, the leading contender to challenge him next year is Fox News commentator and former Congressman John Kasich. He’s actually said Ohio should get on a path to eliminating its income tax, one of two of the state’s largest sources of income.
Kasich’s idea is ludicrous, but it explains why Strickland is so eager to insist that raising taxes is off the table now (though, when pushed, he’s careful not to say never).
Strickland is playing games as well. He is touting his education plan relentlessly, which he has to do because he staked his governorship on dramatically reshaping schools and how they’re supported. But he can’t pay for his boldest ideas.
His proposal that the state should have a panel that calculates the cost to educate every child and then present that tab to the Legislature has Republicans worried. Some speculate that’s a back-door way of forcing lawmakers to give school districts more money than the state has — unless it increase taxes.
After all, if there’s a law that says a panel gets to decide what it takes to adequately educate a child, and then if the Legislature doesn’t turn over that amount, doesn’t that give school districts a license to go to the Ohio Supreme Court — again — and say that lawmakers aren’t giving them what they’re entitled to?
Republicans’ suspicion is not ridiculous.
The history of school backers is that they believe their cause is right and that the Constitution is on their side. If Strickland’s language survives, they can say a new law also says that paying for what schools need — as defined by experts, not politicians who have to balance competing demands — is the state’s first and highest obligation.
In the next 60 days, Strickland and lawmakers aren’t just deciding how to spend your tax dollars for the next two years. They’re charting a course that creates even harder decisions down a short road.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Elections, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
Editorial: Overreacting to flu hurts more than helps
In the balancing act that constitutes a reasonable response to the swine flu threat, one constructive move might be to send Vice President Joe Biden out of the country for a while.
In a television interview the other day, he left everybody believing that he wouldn’t travel in an airplane or train or subway, and wouldn’t want his family do so, because germs travel fast in a closed environment.
But that, of course, isn’t the government’s position. Later his office said he just meant that sick people shouldn’t be out traveling.
As that flap was winding down a little, the White House sent out an announcement that Mr. Biden is going to Europe in mid-May, perhaps implying that if the United States can just hold on until then, things will be OK.
Short of the Biden expulsion, much of what needs to be done seems to be getting done. Local public health officials are organized to keep tabs on a changing situation, to monitor for outbreaks and to respond quickly.
At the federal level, the president is clearly engaged. Cabinet officers at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as top officials elsewhere, have received the message that this is not to be the new administration’s Hurricane Katrina. The secretaries are putting themselves on the line as are people at their agencies.
For what it’s worth, Congress, too, is fully engaged, calling these officials to testify, and asking questions about whether they have everything they need and about such controversies as closing the Mexican border.
To non-experts, closing the border is one of the first thoughts that comes to mind, since Mexico is the disease’s epicenter. However, students of these things say that other methods are likely to be more effective.
Shutting down the Mexican economy could do more harm than good, and could lead to other border closings, wreaking international economic havoc, which can increase disease. And the border shutdown would be a monumentally expensive undertaking.
In the cases of the avian (bird) flu a few years ago and the swine flu in 1976, borders were not closed, yet the problems were beaten back. However, those cases did involve containing the diseases. (Every chicken in Hong Kong was killed in connection with the avian flu.)
At this stage, the World Health Organization is saying the swine flu can best be handled with simpler methods: washing your hands often, staying home when sick and closing certain public facilities when there are outbreaks.
Meanwhile, a vaccine can be worked on, perhaps being developed in time for next fall and winter, the flu season.
(Meanwhile, too, it’s only fair to remember that the experts say that getting the disease has nothing to do with eating pork. Local pork producers, among others, would appreciate people knowing that.)
This country, as of this writing, has had not many more than 100 confirmed cases, with the vast majority of people recovering, even without medical treatment. There’s been no local outbreak, though Ohio has had cases.
The swine flu problem is real. It demands attention from the government, the medical community, citizens and the media. This is true partly because the problem is a new one, and nobody knows what it will develop into.
But one task of all is to keep a sense of perspective. In this country in the 1990s, 36,000 people a year died from flu. And disease situations constantly change. Small numbers of generally non-fatal cases don’t justify hugely disruptive actions.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Social Services
Guest column: Cutting dealerships won’t save any money for GM
Tim Doran is president of the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association.
I am extremely puzzled by the announcement of dealership cutbacks as a seeming “solution” to problems facing the auto industry in general and, specifically, General Motors.
Recently, GM President Fritz Henderson talked about reducing GM dealerships from 6,246 to 3,605 by 2010. Sounds impressive, but what will that do to save GM? The simple answer is nothing.
The most important question is not the number of dealers, but whether the dealers are a cost center for their respective manufacturers. They clearly are not. A study by the Casesa Shapiro Group found that auto dealers provide a vast distribution channel “at virtually no cost” to their manufacturers.
Dealers, for instance, pay for:
• Vehicles for customers and inventory before the vehicles ever leave the factory.
• Parts before ever receiving them.
• All their own personnel costs (wages, benefits, payroll taxes, training costs, etc.).
• Their own real estate.
• All of their own IT and computer costs.
• Equipment costs for their service departments.
And the list goes on.
Also keep in mind that dealers provide revenue to manufacturers, not costs. Dealers generate more than 90 percent of manufacturer revenue. A rapid reduction in dealer numbers would further cut manufacturer revenue and market share, while doing nothing to improve manufacturers’ viability in the short term. Even according to GM executives, it takes 18 months to regain market share when a dealership closes. And that’s a best-case scenario.
Trying to eliminate dealerships beyond the already systematic consolidations that have taken place for the past 60 years will only serve to hurt the hard-working employees of those dealerships and their families, the numerous communities that rely on the taxes generated by those dealerships, the related businesses that sell to those dealerships, the consumers who are served by the competition and convenience of the dealerships, and the numerous charitable organizations that benefit from dealers’ support.
When a dealership closes, the loss to the community is real and immediate. It is unnecessary to artificially designate a “right number” of dealers, as though that number is a “magic cure.” To do so is only an effort to deflect criticism from the manufacturers’ own poor performance and failure to control costs.
Closing dealerships won’t affect the bottom line for any manufacturer positively, but will negatively affect thousands of independent businesses, their employees, the customers who rely on them for sales and service, and the communities that rely on those dealerships.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Guest Columns
