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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 > July
July 2009
Martin Gottlieb: Ohio Democrats have good reason to worry on health care
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is not enthusiastic about the pursuit of a bipartisan health care plan.
Talking about the leader of the Democratic negotiators in the Senate, he said, “Sen. (Max) Baucus (Montana) has emphasized getting a bipartisan bill. I emphasize I want a strong, good bill for the public interest.
“I hope Republicans vote for it,” Brown continued. “But if we had insisted on bipartisanship, we never would have got Medicare in the 1960s.”
Let’s look at that.
Medicare — which was enacted 44 years ago last week — was, on the one hand, a landmark achievement for the Democrats and a turning point for the country. But that’s not the only hand.
The story is relevant today, as the Democrats wage an internal fight that is basically about interpreting the 2006 and 2008 elections. Did the excellent Democratic showings reflect a sea change in public attitudes about the issues, as Brown has said? Or were the Democrats just lucky that George W. Bush became so unpopular?
If you mistakenly agree with Brown’s analysis, then you’re likely to say the Democrats should now do what they think is right and not worry about the political consequences. If you disagree, you might say the Democrats need to tread more lightly, because the Republicans are not as dead as they sometimes look.
The 1965 Democrats were certainly bold on Medicare. They provided it enough votes for a majority in both houses of Congress.
However, for the record, Republican votes were needed in the Senate to avoid a filibuster. Senate rules then required a two-thirds majority to end a filibuster, or 67; 57 Democrats supported Medicare.
There was plenty of Republican support. The party was sharply divided in the Senate (17-13 against) and the House (68-48 in favor).
You have to understand: The parties were different back then. The Republicans had a substantial moderate-to-liberal wing. The Dayton area elected Chuck Whalen to Congress in 1966. He was a liberal Republican known for his opposition to the Vietnam War.
With time, the Republicans essentially traded in people like him for Southern conservatives, who had previously been Democrats. The party became more conservative.
On top of that difference, 1965 was a genuinely liberal hour, unlike anything since. In the 1964 election, President Lyndon Johnson had carried everything except the deep South and his opponent’s home state. Democratic control of Congress was overwhelming.
And the Democratic victory of 1964 was not a reaction against an unpopular Republican president, as in 2008. The Democrats had won the presidency in 1960, too. However, in the first election after the passage of Medicare, in 1966, the Democrats lost 49 seats in the House. That is now seen as a turning point election. In 1968, the Republicans began their dominance of the presidency that ended in 1992.
Medicare certainly wasn’t the dominant issue in 1966; there had been a spate of aggressively liberal legislation under the War on Poverty; there was an increasingly dubious war; and there was rioting in the streets.
But, still, a good case can be made that the Democrats overplayed their hand after 1964, a hand that was much stronger than their current hand.
Now a lot of congressional Democrats from districts that were recently held by Republican are worried that the party is exceeding any voter mandate it might have.
The Ohio delegation abounds with Democrats from such districts: Steve Driehaus, in Cincinnati: Mary Jo Kilroy, from the Columbus area; John Boccieri, whose district, which includes Canton, went for John McCain in 2008.
Rep. Zack Space, representing an eastern Ohio district that was held by a Republican until scandal struck, is one Democrat who’s balking on health care.
Democrats languished in a small minority in the Ohio congressional delegation for a very long time. Now they’re in better shape than they ever expected to be, given that the Republicans drew the current congressional districts. But, for that very reason, the Democrats’ hold on office is weak. They’re destined to worry about that.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Voinovich cuts to heart and hits exposed nerve
When the gun lobby suffered a defeat in Congress last week, Sen. George Voinovich was crucial.
The Senate was voting on a bill that would have required states to allow people who have a permit to carry a concealed weapon in one state to carry it in other states as well.
The bill needed 60 votes. It got some Democratic support (including from Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada). And it was supported by all the Republicans except two, Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar and Sen. Voinovich. It fell two votes shy of 60.
Sen. Voinovich is also seen as one of the few Republicans who might vote for a cap-and-trade bill if he can win substantial changes in the pending one.
And, in the same week as the gun vote, he won from President Barack Obama general agreement on a proposal he has made with Sen. Joe Lieberman: appointment of a nonpartisan national commission on the nation’s long-term deficit.
The commission would make recommendations that Congress would have to either accept or reject as a bloc.
So what we have here is a senator who is not on board for the berserk level of partisanship that is characterizing Washington these days.
In a talk with the Columbus Dispatch the other day, Sen. Voinovich was asked what he thinks the Democrats’ biggest problem is. Nancy Pelosi, he said, speaking of the House speaker whose MO has been to proceed without Republican support or much input.
What is the Republicans’ biggest problem? Sen. Voinovich began with a reference to the South Carolina senator who said the fight about health care is the party’s chance to “break” President Obama.
“We’ve got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns (an Oklahoma senator),” Sen. Voinovich said. “It’s the Southerners.
“They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr’,” he continued, apparently indicating a sort of angry growl.
“People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re Southerners. The party’s being taken over by Southerners. What the hell have they got to do with Ohio?’” Sen. Voinovich said.
But, of course, the regional accents are not what’s at the heart of his concern. He worries that the party is being seen as too conservative and too removed from the problems of his state and constituents.
If he were the vice president, his statement would be considered a gaffe and would be reeled in by the White House, because of the indelicate phrasing.
It has caused a considerable kerfluffle on the Internet, with bloggers of all political stripes taking note. And it has resulted in Sen. Voinovich being the object of the worst possible slur from the conservative stalwarts. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (of the prostitution scandal) said he is “a moderate, really wishy-washy.”
One can quibble with the Voinovich quote, pointing out that Oklahoma isn’t the South and that, after all, the House Republican leader, John Boehner, is from Ohio.
And yet it is universally recognized that power in the Republican Party has shifted dramatically southward, and the hard-line conservative posture associated with the South is a tough sell in the urban areas of a northern urban state.
It’s been a while since Sen. Voinovich has actually parted with his party on a really big vote. But he does it on mid-size issues, and he often seems at least open on the big ones.
It’s good for Congress to have a few people like Sens. Voinovich and Lieberman, who identify with the moderates of both parties, even if they typically stick with their own party in the crunch And it’s good for the Republicans to have somebody of stature, who has won many elections in Ohio, occasionally reminding it publicly of the political dangers in settling for the constant repetition of right-wing platitudes — with or without a regional accent.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Sugarcreek needs school levy to pass
After more than a year of turmoil, voters in Bellbrook and Sugarcreek Twp. can on Tuesday put their schools back on solid financial footing.
A “yes” vote makes good sense.
The 5.5-mill replacement levy won’t restore any of the $3.2 million in painful cuts the district has already made. But it would prevent even more cuts that would reduce bus service and dramatically raise the cost to participate in sports.
The levy would go into effect at the same time a tax for school construction bonds will drop, reducing the sting of the new tax. If the levy passes, property taxes will go up about $89 annually per $100,000 of property value.
If approved, the levy would eliminate a deficit the district faces at the end of the next school year. If it’s defeated, the school board is ready to place a similar issue on the November ballot.
The district’s slide onto financial thin ice was helped along by a combination of bad bets and bad luck. After cutting it close and barely breaking even for several years, school leaders hoped to resolve financial problems by getting an earned income tax levy passed in November 2008.
Even though most of the other districts in Greene County have approved some sort of income tax, Sugarcreek voters defeated that idea soundly. At the same time, the national economy collapsed. Meanwhile, growth of new revenue from home construction stalled, catching school officials off guard and putting a severe squeeze on the budget at the close of last school year.
The deficit might have been avoided if school officials had acted sooner to make cuts once it was clear the economy was tanking. But either way, the confluence of events meant the district would need deep cuts and new money for the upcoming school year. School officials, to their credit, have made hard cuts. More cuts would threaten the quality of instruction that has helped raise the district’s state report card rating to “excellent” for four consecutive years.
The district still faces a couple of fiscal curve balls.
It doesn’t yet know how much new state mandates from Gov. Ted Strickland’s school reform will cost. Requirements for all-day kindergarten and smaller class sizes will raise costs for all local districts. At the same time, the Ohio Department of Education is projecting a slight decrease in state aid for Sugarcreek.
School officials also still are awaiting a “performance audit” from the state that will recommend cuts and changes to make the district more efficient.
No matter how those issues turn out, Sugarcreek expects it will have to do even more with less. A levy defeat would only make things tougher.
The question voters face is: What kind of school district do they want? Maintaining Sugarcreek’s reputation as a top district will require voters to say yes to a levy. The other option is to accept the likelihood that the run of top state ratings will come to an end.
School leaders accept that they must spend less. The cuts they’ve made have been significant and strategic. If voters approve the new money, the continuing levy should take the schools out of crisis mode and let everyone get back to focusing on what’s happening in classrooms.
Nobody wants taxes to go up. But this levy is needed.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Governor misses flight connection
Gov. Ted Strickland didn’t make it to Dayton’s air show or the trade expo this month. He was scheduled to speak at the trade exposition, but finalizing the state budget took over his life.
OK, fine. But he isn’t off the hook for failing to give the aerospace industry in Dayton — and across Ohio — the attention that he promised more than a year ago.
People at Ohio aerospace companies, defense contractors, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the NASA Glenn Research Center near Cleveland, and universities that are involved in aviation and space-related research have long believed that state government doesn’t understand their economic muscle.
In response to that problem, these groups cooked up an Aerospace Day in May 2008, and took their case to Columbus, touting statistics about their impact. In response, the governor committed to creating an 11-member Ohio Aerospace Advisory Council.
The goal was to give the industry a higher profile and to familiarize politicians and bureaucrats with aerospace’s place in Ohio.
Aviation’s reach across Ohio is sweeping. But much of the work — because no one is turning out completed planes — flies under most people’s radar.
Of course, Daytonians know about Wright-Patterson’s presence (it’s the largest single-site employer in the state).
But did you know:
— Ohio is the No. 1 supplier to Airbus.
— Boeing has almost 600 suppliers in Ohio, making the state the company’s second-largest supplier.
— Hartzell Propeller, of Piqua, is the world’s leading manufacturer of propeller systems.
— Columbus will be home to FlightSafety, the world’s largest flight simulator training facility.
— GE Aviation is the world’s largest commercial jet engine company and it’s in Evendale.
(All these stats and information are courtesy of the Ohio Aerospace Institute.)
As interested as Dayton is in promoting aviation and making sure the region is known for having a critical mass of businesses focused on aerospace, it’s a mistake to think this campaign is just Dayton’s cause.
Cleveland is wildly protective and possessive of NASA Glenn because of the research money it draws and the spin-off jobs it creates.
Meanwhile, in southern Ohio, the University of Cincinnati has the nation’s second aeronautical engineering department.
And not long ago, Columbus fell over itself to make sure that NetJets, which has the largest private jet fleet and which conceived the concept of fractional jet ownership, didn’t leave there.
A commission won’t guarantee that aviation and aerospace will expand in Ohio. But if it has passionate, knowledgeable people promoting the industry, that could help leverage the state’s rich connections and create new jobs. The high-paying and high-tech work that dominates the industry can propel Ohio forward.
Now that the state budget war is over, maybe the governor can get back to fulfilling an easy and cost-free promise that he made 14 months ago.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Higher Ed, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Xenia levy renewal crucial
Xenia is facing a financial squeeze. If, on Tuesday, voters don’t renew a 3.5-mill levy, a bad situation will become dire. A “yes” vote would not raise taxes.
With the economy’s steep decline during the past year, revenue in Xenia is way off. Unemployment is higher than the state average, and income tax collections are down more than 6 percent. State aid is expected to decline by as much as 15 percent. Though spending for the coming year has been reduced by 1 percent over last year, a deficit looms.
Unless major cuts are made, city officials estimate the deficit will be $1.45 million by next June even if the renewal — which brings in about $410,000 a year — passes. If it fails, the deficit could approach $2 million for a city with a $17 million annual budget.
Renewing this levy is the first step in Xenia’s plan to stabilize its financial ship. Other proposals being considered: eliminating six police officers, six firefighters and taking out of service periodically the fire station that serves the western half of the city.
City Manager Jim Percival hopes it won’t come to that. He said he is meeting with labor unions and employee groups seeking pay cuts or other concessions that would avoid layoffs and help maintain services.
Passing this levy won’t keep those cuts from happening. Moreover, Mr. Percival expects a levy for new money will be on the ballot next spring.
Renewing the levy will make sure Xenia’s finances don’t collapse. The harder choices — deeper cuts, future tax increases — are yet to come. This one is easy.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Suburban Communities
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Rape case ruling clears way for focus on who did it
Jim Petro says, “Every day I wake up thinking about (Roger) Dean Gillispie,” a convicted rapist who’s languishing in prison. Petro, one of his lawyers, is convinced he’s innocent.
Petro is a longtime politician: attorney general, state auditor, Cuyahoga County commissioner, possible candidate for chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. He does have a feel for lines that get attention. So maybe you don’t want to take him at his word.
But he is far from the only one who has Gillispie on his mind.
Gillispie was convicted in 1991 on nine counts of rape, plus related crimes (kidnapping, robbery), on the basis of testimony by the victims. Parking lots outside a drug store in Harrison Twp. and near the Dayton Mall were crime scenes.
There was no physical evidence. Gillispie had had no major trouble with the law before that and has been a model prisoner since. His defenders think the eyewitness testimonies were achieved through manipulation and just don’t hold up. They say the victims’ original descriptions of the assailant don’t come close to matching Gillispie’s appearance.
Gillispie is now defended by the well-respected Innocence Project, operating out of the University of Cincinnati School of Law. (The project has been a leader in overturning convictions with DNA evidence. However, there’s no DNA in this case.) Last Friday the Gillispie situation was ruled upon by the Ohio 2nd District Court of Appeals. That’s the court just above the county level (common pleas) court in the Dayton region.
The ruling was not entirely satisfying to either side. But from a certain point of view, it might be considered perfect.
If you are eager to make sure the innocent aren’t jailed, but you are skeptical when convictions are overturned on technical grounds — procedural issues, call them what you will — this was your decision.
The three-judge unanimous ruling (Jeffrey Froelich — doing the writing — Mike Fain and James Brogan) rejected lots of complaints by the defense about how the case has been handled by police, prosecutors and courts.
Petro had been particularly hopeful that the court might free Gillispie pending a new trial, on grounds of violation of something called the Brady rule. That rule requires that prosecutors make sure a defendant’s lawyers know about any evidence that the prosecutors have that might work in the defendant’s behalf. The Gillispie side said crucial material was withheld.
But the Brady claim was not upheld. Gillispie did not get freed. A new trial was not ordered.
But the court did call for a new hearing. It pointed to new evidence that suggests that somebody else might have done the crimes. (You can read the decision at the court’s Web site at mcohio.org/SecondDistrictAppeals. Look for “opinions.”)
In that regard, the court overruled Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge A. J. Wagner on a crucial point. Wagner had turned down the request for a new trial or new hearing in the case. He noted that Gillispie had actually been convicted in two trials on the same charges, and he said the Gillispie side has no important new evidence. The identity of the other suspect has, indeed, been known for years. He was even referred to in a previous trial.
But the appeals court said new evidence that has materialized since that trial includes the fact that the other man did a couple of things during the crime that the rapist did, according to victims. He bragged of being a contract killer, and he used the name “Roger” about his brother, even though that wasn’t his brother’s name.
Also, when confronted out of court by a lawyer about the rapes, the other suspect asked about “the ladies” before he was told there was more than one victim. And he has a “distinctively authoritative” voice, like the described rapist.
Also, the Gillispie team submitted “several purported photographs of (the second suspect)… which are similar to the composites and descriptions by the victims,” the court said.
So now Wagner holds a hearing — perhaps in September — to see if there should be a new trial.
The appeals court decision is thorough and impressive. It goes through arguments that lawyers have been flinging at each other and at others for years, trying to get to the bottom of each, or at least to the legal import.
The decision brings all the questions down to one:
After all these years, do we really know who did these crimes?
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Grads can’t be bought for so little
Call it a small — emphasis on small — graduation present.
To entice college grads to stay in the state, Ohio will help them make a down payment on a house and ensure that they get a competitive interest rate on a conventional loan.
The catch: You have to live in Ohio for five years — or pay back the money on a prorated basis.
It’s a nice gesture, but the offer isn’t a solution to the “brain drain,” wherein especially young, educated people are leaving Ohio. That will take initiatives bigger than this.
Here’s the deal, passed as part of the new state budget: Graduates — of a community college, a 4-year program or a graduate program — can get help with their down payment, provided they are a first-time buyer and act within 18 months of graduation.
The Ohio Housing Finance Agency hasn’t worked out how much the down-payment help will be, but rules will be out within 90 days. The subsidy will be a percentage of the home’s cost, and it’s likely to be 2 or 3 percent.
(There will be some income limits to ensure the aid goes to young people who aren’t rolling in dough.)
How will the program work?
The assistance would show up on a borrower’s paperwork as a second mortgage. After five years, the “loan” would be totally forgiven; if a borrow leaves the state early, the subsidy would be taken from the sale price.
Borrowers also would have to get their loan through one of the 140 banks that are partners with the housing finance agency.
States across the country target populations — mostly low-income families — that they want to help get a piece of the American Dream. Housing agencies sell bonds and then use that capital to finance discounted loans and provide upfront assistance for people who can afford a mortgage, but struggle to save enough for a down payment.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation recently surveyed Ohio college students and learned that some might be interested in staying in Ohio if they received a housing subsidy. But 3 percent of $50,000, or even $100,000, won’t cause many people to rethink their post-college plans.
Moreover, as much as young people might say they’d like to own a house, they also know that doing so ties them down in ways many just aren’t ready for.
The housing agency says it’s not aware of another state that has targeted college grads in exactly this way, and it can only guess how many people might be interested.
The original “Grants for Grads” plan by Sen. Steve Buehrer, R-Delta, didn’t spell out where the money for this help would come from. Advocates for the poor were worried that housing subsidies for the poor would be siphoned off.
That isn’t a threat anymore, what with the funds coming from the housing authority’s bond proceeds.
Young people are not indifferent about where they live. They’re voting with their feet by favoring cities, walkable neighborhoods and places that have a sense of community and energy.
A lot of streets in Ohio that have these attributes would benefit if young grads put down roots here. But this cash won’t be what seals the deal.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Higher Ed, Ohio government
TweetEditorial: U.S. pension insurance crucial to Delphi retirees
As recently as the 1970s, horror stories abounded about pension plans. Some pensions were offered on an all-or-nothing basis, rather than graduated according to the number of years an employee worked. That made employees vulnerable to be being fired or laid off just before becoming eligible, which did, in fact, happen.
There was also the matter of companies going bankrupt and not fulfilling their promises to pensioners.
In the mid-70s, Congress reformed pension rules, passing what’s known as ERISA, for the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA required, for example, that pension programs were reasonably well funded, in an attempt to make sure employees weren’t left high and dry.
One of ERISA’s arms has long been in play for 67,000 retirees from Delphi, many of whom are in the Dayton area.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) — having pressed Delphi and General Motors (from which Delphi was spun off) to keep assets to pay for pensions — is now taking responsibility for paying Delphi pensions.
When Delphi went bankrupt, the PBGC got GM to take some responsibility for the pensions and to promise to eventually take all responsibility. That plan died with GM’s bankruptcy. The PBGC backed off from a fight, deferring to President Barack Obama’s desire to get GM through bankruptcy quickly.
The PBGC already has responsibility for more than 3,800 pension plans that have been terminated for one reason or another.
It isn’t promising Delphi retirees the moon. It won’t pay out more than $54,000 a year per person; and to get that much, you have to retire at 65. It doesn’t necessarily cover special incentives that companies have offered to encourage early retirement or survivor benefits. It doesn’t cover health care.
Over the years, though, says a PBGC spokesman, about 85 percent of retirees have received from PBGC the pension benefits they had been promised by their companies. The percentage has been lower in highly paid businesses, such as airlines and steel. In a useful FAQ (frequently asked questions) feature about Delphi, the agency offers fairly plain language about what people in particular circumstances can expect and not expect. (Go to www.pbgc.gov/ and look for the reference to Delphi.)
If you’re wondering where the money comes from, it’s not taxpayers. The company imposes a fee on companies with the 29,000 pension programs it insures. It also takes in money from the plans it takes over.
In Delphi’s case, the plans — for union and salaried workers — already have about half the money the agency will need.
You might also be wondering if the PBGC has its own money problems these days. Of course. It took over 91 pension plans in the six months before May. It’s running a short-term deficit.
But the agency says it has $63 billion, plenty to handle its needs for a long a time.
What the PBGC does now will not satisfy everybody. There are always disputes. And the absence of health coverage is a huge gap that needs filling.
But the existence of the agency itself is one of the good efforts of “big government.”
The PBGC deals with “defined benefit” pensions, wherein employees are promised something specific. That type is widely seen as going out of style as more companies look to 401(k)s in an effort to avoid long-term obligations. But 44 million people are now in defined benefit plans.
One downside of such plans is that they do need government insurance. The 44 million employees — nearly all of whom must be feeling some degree of uncertainty about the future prosperity of their companies — should take some comfort that they came along in these times and not 35 years ago.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Don’t doubt it, government has changed forever
The recession that began in 2008 eventually will end. But an important question looms for local governments across the Dayton area:
What will the new reality look like?
If there’s one safe bet, it’s that this part of Ohio will emerge with permanent scars. Some of what’s been lost will not return. The smart move now is for local elected officials and government administrators to prepare for a very different future.
Patrick Titterington, service and safety director in Troy, said as much last week when he argued against that community using “gimmicks,” like furloughs and wage freezes, to avoid budget deficits. Instead, he said, Troy must look for systemic changes, reshape itself, get smaller.
This path is not optional. Some offices, jurisdictions and public employees have been better at recognizing this than others.
Last week, Montgomery County sheriff’s deputies showed good sense in accepting a one-year pay freeze that, however painful, at least will prevent more deputies being laid off. But if revenue is flat or falling going forward, this will not be the last time deputies will be asked to save the county money.
County leaders also must do their part by rigorously reviewing practices and labor contracts. They have to be able to defend all spending.
This also applies to the city of Dayton. City Manager Rashad Young is leaning hard on his biggest unions to agree to concessions — which include a pay freeze and dropping extra pay for some holidays — to close a $6 million deficit. He’s run into special problems with the police union and is threatening to lay off 11 officers.
City workers already have agreed to these changes, and firefighters, on Friday, voted to accept a similar pay freeze and suspension of extra pay for some holidays. But police officers are still holding out for a raise.
Mr. Young is not the bad guy. His responsibility is to scour the budget for ways to save. When he sits down with the unions to bargain for new contracts, in this climate, he’s obligated to propose cutbacks — while trying his best to protect services.
There are still too many perks in Dayton’s labor deals. It’s crazy, for instance, that the city is considering layoffs at the same time it is shelling out extra holiday pay to police officers who already were paid for a day off, and giving “overtime” to officers summoned to court during their work hours.
The firefighters’ contract gives them Good Friday off.
These sweet deals have to end.
Understand that the Dayton Fire Department’s vote on Friday merely gets it through today. A large number of firefighter retirements are coming in the next few years. That may be an opportunity to reduce the force less painfully than through layoffs. But, at the same time, a rapidly shrinking force could compromise service.
A thoughtful reorganization would make a big difference. What size department makes sense going forward? What firehouses and equipment should be in service and when? These hard questions must be confronted and answered.
The wrenching changes that governments have to go through aren’t just happening to public employees. Other workers are going through similar retrenchment. No one is being singled out.
Government leaders and unions can work together to decide how to get through this. Or they can go to war.
But if employees expect public support, they can’t choose war. And neither should their bosses.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Montgomery County, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Dayton lost; competition has to deliver
The Ohio Board of Regents has a tough, new policy when it comes to doling out money to special programs. Its competitive bidding rules send the message, “What doesn’t work won’t get funded.” That is the right attitude. Last week the new approach cost Dayton schools $730,000 and forced the ending of its adult basic literacy program. Superintendent Kurt Stanic said he was surprised by the cut and never got a good explanation for it. A spokesman for the regents said that a review of Dayton’s program showed it was far more costly and less effective than other programs. Money the state formerly spent with Dayton now goes to efforts in Kettering and at the Miami Valley Career Technology Center. The regents’ responsibility doesn’t end with this call. Now they must follow up and be certain they have chosen the right winners.
In this case, perhaps they have. Dayton’s program was incredibly costly. Consider that while Miami Valley CTC was spending about $200 per student, Dayton’s cost was $1,700. It’s hard to imagine how the expenses could be that different.
Mr. Stanic argues some of the reasons for higher costs make sense. Dayton deals with a tougher population, he said, with more than 400 adults served in the city. The district paid high rent to be at the Job Center because that was the best place to help people who need the services, Mr. Stanic said.
Also, Dayton’s program probably had more experienced, and therefore more expensive, staff. Mr. Stanic said his concern is that Dayton adults who need literacy services continue to get them.
“If they can serve the same amount of people for much lower costs, then I guess they were right,” he said. “Only time will tell. If they can, I have no argument.”
Mr. Stanic said he expects Dayton to bid again next year. He said with some feedback and lead time to address the state’s concerns, the district might have been able to acceptably reshape it, keeping the service going. Instead, Dayton school officials are now working to transition its students to the new programs.
There absolutely should be accountability and even competition for these sorts of programs. Going forward, the regents have a responsibility to see that the winning programs are not just cheaper, but that they are aggressively reaching out to a needy community they promised to serve — and succeeding.
If they do that, everybody wins.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetScott Elliott: Black students doing better in the South
One of the most vexing problems in education in the United States today is the stubbornly large gap between the performance of black and white students on standardized tests.
Over decades, black and white students have improved their scores, but the overall national gap has persisted. Still, an intriguing New York Times report on a new federal study of this “achievement gap” shows that, state by state, there have been surprising changes.
It’s the deep South — states remembered for pervasive segregation like Alabama and Mississippi and where the test score gap was traditionally the widest — that in recent years has seen the gap narrow significantly.
Conversely the Midwest — nearby states like Illinois and Wisconsin — now has some of the biggest racial test score gaps. (Ohio, too, has had its struggles with the achievement gap, but was not cited as one of the worst offenders in this study.)
The Times reported that over time, black students made big gains in the South, while in the Midwest they made smaller gains, or, in some cases, actually lost ground.
How could it happen that the Midwest now comes off looking worse than the deep South? At least part of the answer is connected to the way school integration was carried out in big Midwestern cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit — and a similar effect is evident in Dayton.
School integration in the South was painful, even sometimes violent, and only took place under intense pressure — including outright intervention — from the federal government. Segregation in the deep South was so pervasive, ingrained and flagrant that reformers set their sights for change squarely on states like Alabama and Mississippi. Schools ended up being the vehicle by which court challenges would lead to that change.
Under direct monitoring from federal courts, schools in those states were forced to integrate, often by busing students for racial balance. By chance, many Southern school districts were large, countywide systems. This made it difficult for white families to escape by moving farther out.
The result was the South became the region with the most integrated schools by the 1970s. And since then, the Midwest and Northeast have been the most segregated parts of the country.
That’s because as integration efforts pushed north, courts got cold feet. Repeated legal battles and a changing political environment eroded momentum and, in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a crushing blow with a ruling in Detroit’s case that made it nearly impossible for Northern cities to include the suburbs in their integration plans.
Midwestern cities, Dayton among them, had to stop integration at the city limits. Families of means — mostly white, but also some black — continued to migrate to the suburbs. What remained were city school districts that were poor, mostly black and significantly disassociated from the rest of the region. While wealthy and white suburbanites in many Southern cities were forced to care about the quality of their urban public school districts, many in the Midwest wrote them off.
This is part of the reason why some of what are widely regarded as the worst big, urban school systems — Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland among them — are in the Midwest. Dayton, which routinely scores below Cleveland on state tests, is in that boat, too.
I can’t help but wonder if things might have been different had the Supreme Court not drawn that line. Would the Dayton region be better off if schools here were regionally integrated, causing suburbanites in places like Kettering, Centerville, Beavercreek, Englewood and Vandalia to be directly connected to —Â and therefore invested in — the success of Dayton’s inner-city schools? Under a regional set-up established 25 or 30 years ago, might black students here not be as far behind today?
In Dayton, there is a widely held sentiment that school integration and busing caused as much harm as good. Could have been different if it were done right?
Looking at Alabama and Mississippi, there’s a persuasive example that the answer might be yes.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Obama has tough sell on health care in Ohio; needs to hear skeptics
President Barack Obama came to Ohio Thursday with a difficult case to make. He says he can reduce projected increases in the government’s health care costs at the same time he is extending health insurance to millions more people. It sounds, at first, at least, too good to be true.
To make matters worse for him, a nonpartisan government expert — from the Congressional Budget Office — recently said that a pending Democratic bill would, in fact, increase projected deficit spending.
The president used a trip to the much respected Cleveland Clinic to make the case that high-quality care need not mean high cost. The clinic prides itself on using high technology to control costs while improving quality. It pays doctors a flat salary, rather than per-procedure.
The trip made a good point. But doubts are still in order.
To ultimately sell their plan to the general public, the president and his people must
listen to skeptical nonpartisans and relatively conservative Democrats.
Substantial Republican support is simply not available. The party’s base is in an intensely conservative mood. It feels the party has not been sufficiently true to Reaganesque principles. Some party leaders have the sense that President Obama’s activism gives them a chance to reclaim a clear identity. (Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said last week that about half the motivation behind Republican opposition to health care is to score political points.)
Solid Republican opposition is an enormous problem for the president. The American political center becomes very skeptical when one party is pushing for an enormous change that is making the other party apoplectic.
In this debate, Democrats have to treasure their own skeptics. Absent real Republican participation, the Democrats must be the Democrats and the Republicans, the advocates and the skeptics. There must be real debate, not just action by Congress, as the president wanted at one point. Otherwise, the result could be a hugely unpopular, bad program.
Rep. Zack Space, a Democrat who represents Chillicothe and Zanesville, wants the party to slow down. He believes the pending legislation must change in a lot of ways, that it doesn’t now control costs enough and that it’s too tough on small business, as well as on small hospitals.
He’s in a group of 50-some moderate House Democrats called the “blue dogs.” Many represent districts that used to be held by Republicans and could be won again by Republicans.
The blue dogs appear to have won one fight already: a tentative agreement in the House to give an outside panel — rather than Congress — the power to make cuts to government-financed health care programs.
The blue dogs should have a big role. And the Democrats must be willing to bend to pick up a few Senate Republicans.
The American health care system is more expensive on a per-person basis than systems in other economically advanced countries. It is becoming hugely more expensive all the time. It’s the biggest obstacle in bringing the federal deficit under control.
And yet it has gaping holes that other modern countries don’t have. One estimate has 60,000 people just in Montgomery County being without insurance, more than 10 percent. That is appalling, unacceptable.
So what the president is trying to do is necessary.
Meanwhile, though, millions of people are largely satisfied with their coverage; and somebody will have to pay if the reforms are not to worsen the deficit.
The legislation is terribly complicated. But open-minded citizens can get a feel for things by noting what independent experts and political moderates say.
When the Democratic mayor of Dayton joins in the effort to drum up support for the Obama effort, as Rhine McLin did last week, that helps get proponents as motivated as opponents. But it’s not going to do much to move the people in between. That’s the hard part. That’s where the focus has to be.
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TweetEditorial: Park repairs can’t wait forever
Budgets have consequences. Remember that when you’re stuffing trash bags into your minivan or backpack instead of leaving them in park trash cans.
Trash removal at Ohio parks fell victim to the budget axe. Busing your own picnic table will save the state $53,000 a year. If that seems like a dinky amount for Ohio to pay to save park-goers the trouble, it only goes to show just how tough it was for state lawmakers to strike a deal while an economic nosedive has tax receipts in a free fall.
But when it comes to state parks, the really big issue got lost in the weeds. So much focus was on cutting — even down to whether to empty the trash — that lawmakers ignored a thornier problem.
A half-billion dollar backlog of capital projects is approaching the crisis point. As easy as it is to back-burner parks in tough economic times, Ohio can’t let its park infrastructure fall totally apart.
Overall, lawmakers made many good choices crafting the budget for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources — the steward for the park system. It did preserve key services and assets.
For instance, the legislature did not kill the threatened Scenic Rivers Program, which helps preserve 4,000 acres of unspoiled waterways. Department officials came up with a good plan: charge a small fee to the primary users of these waterways who paddle them in kayaks and canoes. That effort will raise enough funds to maintain the program’s operations.
Ohio benefits because its abundance of scenic, undeveloped waterways are drawing paddlers by the thousands, and kayak tourism is booming.
In addition, lawmakers didn’t give in to pressure to allow oil and gas drilling on conservation land. They also kept a fee on municipal waste that helps fund soil and water conservation. However, a new fee on mining, that would have helped fund regulation, didn’t make it into law.
Even as the department probably can maintain its core services, the long-term situation is not looking good.
The backlog of overdue improvement projects for the state parks got no attention, and the situation is getting dire. The list is not for cosmetic jobs. Rather, it spells out basic repairs to water and sewer pipes, bridges, roads, dams, buildings and wiring that make the parks usable by the public.
Some of the maintenance issues are dangerous. Last year, a bath house at Caesar Creek State Park finally had to be demolished for safety reasons after repairs never came.
Meanwhile, as the state gets further behind, Ohio could lose out to competing parks in neighboring states.
Spending money on park improvements is not sexy. Even in good times, lawmakers tend to rob from the parks for other pet projects, figuring repairs can always wait. But the reality is that the abundance of parks and natural resources here are a huge asset. Letting them crumble is dumb.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Voinovich, Brown right on F-22
The U.S. Senate has voted 58-40 to stop building F-22 Raptors, the jet fighters that have never been used in Iraq or Afghanistan.
This is the view of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He argues that the Air Force and other services don’t always need the most advanced, most-expensive equipment, given the specific kinds of wars the country fights.
President Barack Obama has embraced the position. Sen. John McCain agrees. Both Ohio senators, Republican George Voinovich and Democrat Sherrod Brown, voted with the majority.
The opposition to the Obama-Gates (or Obama-McCain) line was concentrated in states with big defense contractors. Although most Democrats went with the president, those from California, Washington and Connecticut, where contractors have worked on the F-22, abandoned him.
Surely 187 F-22s — the number currently ordered — are enough, and surely the money can be better spent on more useful, lower-flying planes.
The House has voted to build more F-22s. So this fight isn’t over.
But it’s good to see the views of the Pentagon prevail over parochial interests.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Short editorial
TweetEditorial: Post mortems for stimulus premature
The official unemployment rate in Ohio is 11.1 percent. In Michigan, 15.2 percent. In Kentucky, 10.9 percent. Indiana 10.7 percent. Pennsylvania 8.3 percent. Illinois 10.3. Everyplace, it’s on the rise.
Looked at that way, the differences seem to have less to do with the policies of state governments than with, say, a state’s former dependence on the auto industry.
And yet, the political season is here, at least in the heat of rhetoric. Says a release from Rob Portman, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, about a Democratic candidate:“Since Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher became Ohio’s self-appointed Jobs Czar, over 338,000 Ohioans have lost their jobs. We have lost over 136,000 jobs in Ohio this year alone. While Lt. Gov. Fisher continues to support the status quo, another 33,000 Ohioans lost their jobs in June.”
Lt. Gov. Fisher offers the Republicans a two-fer.
Whether the issue is the state government’s performance or the Obama administration’s, he’s a target, because he’s in Columbus now and wants to move to the U.S. Senate, presumably as a supporter of the president.
Even Sen. George Voinovich, a Republican who isn’t seeking re-election next year, is emphasizing the bad news.
“Five months ago, Democrats passed a stimulus bill. … Five months later, unemployment has grown and American taxpayers have little to show for almost $800 billion in spending.” (In fact, though, the vast majority of the $800 billion hasn’t been spent.)
The Obama administration is the legitimate target of some charges and not others. It did make projections about the economy early this year that turn out to have been insufficiently pessimistic. But the president certainly wasn’t optimistic. He always said that the economy would get worse before it got better. He always said that people should look for improvement — if his program passed — next year, not this year.
The administration responds to criticism now primarily by arguing that things would be worse yet if the stimulus had not been passed. In Cincinnati last week, Vice President Joe Biden said budget deficits at the state level could have resulted in thousands of layoffs, if not for the stimulus money, and that would have resulted in thousands more private-sector layoffs.
Maybe. But the largest truth here is this: There’s no point in pretending that the verdict is in on the stimulus.
Ronald Reagan came into office during a bad time for the economy. In the fall of his first year, he won a tax cut that was designed to turn things around. Five months later, things had only become worse. The economy was just entering its worst year since the Great Depression. Democratic rhetoric was apoplectic about how his effort was a failure. And Republicans took a little bath in the 1982 election.
But the year after that, things picked up, and in 1984 the president was able to run for re-election on the slogan “Morning in America,” winning by a landslide.
What about today? The good news is slight. The stock market is up from its pits, and some corporate profits are up, most strikingly in the once prostrate financial sector. But, by common consent, the bottom line is jobs.
Everybody is learning the term “lagging indicator.” People are being told that employment might be the last thing to turn up, because employers will be skittish for a long time.
If only that were the extent of the bad news. In fact, jobs are still disappearing fast. Ohio lost a net 33,000 in June, and the nation lost 467,000.
And things are worse than average in the Dayton area, where all counties have a higher unemployment rate than the state average except Greene, Butler and Warren. Even in the first two of those, the rate is above 10 percent — typically considered awful — and Warren is at 9.7 percent.
Still, there is also no resolution of the debate about the stimulus, no reason to pretend there is any such resolution and no sense in paying any attention to the partisans.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Gambling wars not about philosophical issues
Undisputed fact: lots and lots of Ohioans like to gamble, and will travel substantial distances to do it. That’s why the gambling interests keep placing very large, unsuccessful bets on casino ballot issues.
They know what the jackpot is, even if they don’t know what the odds against them are.
This question of the odds is worth exploring.
The impression is wide and broad that Ohioans are basically against the spread of gambling.
It’s an understandable impression, being based on the fact that the state electorate has turned down one gambling proposal after another in the last two decades — and the votes have not been close.
But the impression is wrong.
This summer, a Quinnipiac poll showed 65 percent statewide favoring slots at racetracks and 61 percent favoring a casino proposal pending for the November ballot.
At least one politician has referred to 2008 polls as evidence that the public’s hostility to expanded gambling may be softening. But that’s not the right reading.
In past years, early polls before the elections have found people fine with the idea of casinos. In August and September of 2008, for example, three different polling operations found sizable leads for a proposed casino in Wilmington (with few undecideds).
But the measure ultimately went down overwhelmingly.
The explanation for the gap between the early polls and the outcomes of elections is apparently this:
A certain number of voters ultimately decide to confront the specific facts at hand, rather than a general philosophical question about gambling.
At that point, they seem to decide that the deal being offered is designed primarily to benefit one corporation, or a few. They think that’s not the way for the state to move big into gambling. And they are right.
Gov. Ted Strickland’s attitude toward gambling seems to fit roughly in the Ohio mainstream: it depends on the specifics.
Clearly, he has never wanted to use his power to help some company get permission to open a casino or otherwise cash in on gambling fever. That just isn’t what he went into politics (or, as he would probably say, “public service”) to do.
But, on the other hand, he obviously believes there are worse things than gambling. It is often noted that his decision to allow slot machines at racetracks is a change in positions. Fair enough. But he’s never been a fire-breathing, George Voinovich-type crusader against gambling.
If philosophical predispositions about gambling are not driving the voters who decide the outcomes of ballot measures, that’s a good thing, a recognition of reality.
One newspaper commentator recently said, hey, personally I wouldn’t be caught dead dropping my own money into some electronic bandit; but if other people want to throw their money away, who am I to say no? It’s their business.
Sure, he said, certain social ills would result (from compulsive gambling), but social ills are a part of life. Are we a free country or not? Social ills are part of the cost.
One might gather from that argument that the issue at hand is whether gambling should be legal. But, of course, that’s not the issue. Gambling is legal in so many ways:
The state lottery; lotteries in neighboring states; racetracks; casinos in neighboring states; innumerable Internet games; private games; church games.
Gambling is like alcohol and tobacco in that the decision has long since been made that it will be legal. It is unlike alcohol and tobacco in that the regulations haven’t been fully worked out.
Public opinion on how to do that is up for grabs.
In bidding for it, Strickland has on his side the fact that, in making the slots decision, he really did not seem to be acting on behalf of any special interest, but in the interests of the state, as he saw them.
Nevertheless, the particulars are pretty ugly this time, too. He made a rushed decision — always dangerous — with dubious assumptions as to the numbers. What people want is something that works out in the public interest. That’s the crunch.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Issue is Lamb, not Portman
It would be a shame to see Lebanon’s Golden Lamb go to slaughter because an owner of its building is running for the U.S. Senate. Somehow, though, one has to suspect that isn’t the way things will play out.
The restaurant — a local landmark and gem —Â has rescinded a request for economic aid from the city. That happened after Rob Portman, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2010, was blasted because his family owns the building, and because Lebanon, like everybody else these days, is strapped.
The city has helped in the past. It should continue to treat the business as a business, to ponder it’s role in the city’s economic future, not the profile or power of Mr. Portman.
If the business wants to pursue help, it probably needs to take special care to show that local Democrats are on board — however difficult it might be to find Democrats in Warren County.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Air show, expo putting Dayton on map
Very few of the estimated 80,000 people who went to the Vectren Dayton Air Show last weekend saw what came before it.
As thrilling as the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds always are — admit it, they give you chills every time — what preceded the entertainment was way more important.
The four-day United States Air, Trade and Technology Expo — which attracted almost 1,400 people and many of the country’s biggest aerospace companies — was designed as a chance for businesses and researchers to hear about projects the military, the federal government and NASA have cooking — and how that could translate to work for them.
In this economic climate, to have so many businesses represented can only be seen as a certified success.
Specifically, many of them came wanting to know what the government is looking for in advanced manufacturing, alternative fuels, sensors, unmanned air systems and more. Not coincidentally, these are areas of expertise that a growing number of Dayton businesses and researchers have, in large part because of the Air Force’s presence here.
If the expo’s volunteer organizers — that’s right, all volunteers — hadn’t been able to assemble such a jam-packed, meaty schedule of speakers and diverse exhibitors, you can bet that, in this economy, executives would have stayed home.
The fact that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is in Dayton, and that the Air Force was so clearly using this as an opportunity to put out appeals for its needs, made all the difference in the world.
But if the people running the show weren’t organized, didn’t have the contacts to attract first-rate speakers and weren’t aggressive about selling the opportunity, the week could have been a bust.
This year’s event represented a resurrection of sorts, and it had to go well if it’s going to get traction in the future. (The exposition used to be a regular event, but it was discontinued in the 1990s.)
The plan is to hold the event every other year, with the ambitious goal of becoming the United States’ equivalent of the Paris Air Show and the Farnborough International Air Show. Make no mistake; tons of business gets conducted at those events, and deals get sealed because of them.
Some registrants are saying what they liked most was the caliber of speakers they heard from. That sort of word travels: Give people quality, and they will come back and bring their colleagues. That’s nothing but good for Dayton.
The stars couldn’t have aligned any better for Dayton, with Monday being the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The National Aviation Hall of Fame’s weekend dinners and recognition ceremonies brought together 12 Apollo program astronauts at a momentous time. That, too, was an impressive selling point.
By Monday, the actual anniversary, Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin were at the White House and being feted nonstop in the media. Some of their weekend, though, was in Dayton.
The air show can and should be more than a weekend where tens of thousands of adults and kids crane their necks to see how daring and precise pilots can be.
It’s also a profound, special and logical economic development opportunity for a community that, 100 years after the Wright brothers flew, is still very much connected to the future of flight.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Is redistricting victim of budget war?
One apparent casualty of the budget war in Columbus is election reform — asking voters this November to change how Ohio draws legislative districts.
Reformers — including people from both political parties — wanted to ask voters to amend the state constitution to create a nonpartisan system for drawing legislative districts, a long overdue idea.
The plan was to ask the question this year, before the parties get a good fix on which party is going to come out of the 2010 elections with control of the redistricting process, which one of them will under current law.
But getting the measure on the ballot would require getting 60 percent support in both houses of the Legislature, which has been a bit preoccupied. So now the reformers are looking at next spring.
That’s worrisome. To be approved by voters, the measure needs energetic support from the leaders of both parties. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, one of the reformers, says that’s realistic.
It will never happen in an election year.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: 4 things Ohio is doing to help uninsured
Are you without health insurance? You might be better off as a result of the new state budget.
About 1.2 million Ohioans are uninsured. Some little publicized changes could help 100,000 individuals. It’s a small percentage, yes, but, if the reforms affect you, they’re not minor.
What’s interesting — and frustrating — is the changes shouldn’t be costly. It makes you wonder why, if they were so easy, they weren’t done before.
Basically there are four new developments:
Help for those with pre-existing conditions
People who have pre-existing conditions can get insurance at a better price.
Currently, if you have cancer or diabetes or are pregnant, for example, you can’t be denied insurance. But if you’re trying to buy a policy as an individual — not as part of a group — you can be charged four times what the company charges an individual of your age and gender.
Most people can’t afford the premiums. The new rule is the rate can only be 1.5 times the cost of what a similarly situated individual without a pre-existing condition pays. The insurance department says this rate reduction for hard-to-insure people will cause insurance rates to go up for all people who buy policies on their own. But they estimate the increase will be 5.5 percent.
About 52,000 people who can’t afford insurance now are expected to take advantage of this change.
Help for parents with 20-somethings
Parents will be allowed to put their children — up to age 28 — on their group plan that they get through their employer.
Twenty-somethings are among the largest group of uninsured. Many don’t think they need coverage because they’re young and healthy. It’s a bad decision.
Employers would not be required to pay the tab; the young person or his or her parents would be charged the added cost, which in some, but not all, cases would be cheaper than trying to buy an individual policy.
There is a big wrinkle, though. A spokesman for the insurance department says the department hasn’t decided precisely who will be eligible. If, for example, the department requires the young person to be a full-time student to be eligible, or for the parents to be providing half the person’s financial support, that will reduce the number who qualify.
One consumer advocate says there never was any discussion that something other than age would matter.
In the coming days, bureaucrats will have a lot of latitude to decide just how eager they are to get people in their 20s under a health care plan.
Attention parents of grad students, unemployed or under-employed kids: watch what happens next.
Help for workers at small companies
Companies will be required to offer employees the option of buying health insurance using pre-tax dollars.
This change will mainly benefit people working at small businesses that don’t offer health insurance.
The insurance department is creating an accounting template that will make this requirement hassle-free. Once the system is set up, though, there’s no cost to businesses — just a savings for their employees.
The change doesn’t literally lower the cost of insurance. But consumers effectively will get a significant discount on their premiums because they won’t be taxed on the money they’re using for this expense.
Essentially workers whose employers don’t provide them insurance are being given the same tax advantage that workers receive if their company does provide coverage.
The hitch here is that the IRS has rebuffed this strategy in other states. It’s not a done deal, according to an official for the Ohio office of the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
Help for some workers who’ve been laid off
Workers at small firms who had insurance, but were laid off, will have the choice of buying insurance through their employer for a year and having the bulk of the cost picked up with federal stimulus money.
Currently, employees who work at companies with fewer than 20 employees are not covered by COBRA, the federal law that allows them to, among other things, purchase insurance from their employer for 18 months if they get laid off. (The problem, though, is that the cost is prohibitive.)
Ohio has a “mini-COBRA” that applies to these small firms, but it only gives employees the option to stay on a company health plan for six months.
Under a one-time deal, federal stimulus money has been set aside to subsidize this cost. And the help will be available for a full year, not just six months.
Small businesses especially have doubts or objections pretty much about all of the changes. They fear insurance rates will go up beyond the projections and, for example, that parents will abuse the system and only insure their sick young adults.
By no means do these changes fix the health care problem — only the president and Congress can do that, and they’re fighting fiercely about it. But Ohio didn’t invent these tweaks; they’re things other states are doing — generally without the immense hardship critics complain about.
There’s no case against giving the reforms a chance to do some good.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Dayton needs its stimulus money now
If Dayton city officials could send one message to the federal government about the stimulus money, it would be: Get us the money now.
Dayton has put in for more than $125 million in stimulus aid from the $787 billion Congress allocated in February hoping to create, or save, jobs. The goal was to maintain services and keep consumer spending from completely crashing in the wake of a once-in-a-generation economic crisis.
The city has only been awarded $16.4 million so far — money to fund street repairs and airport improvements.
For Dayton, perhaps its most important request is for funds to help keep police on the street. As the city grapples with a $6 million deficit, the time is now for that stimulus money to make a difference.
The slow pace of disbursing the money is predictable. The mechanics of getting federal money always involves navigating a complex bureaucracy. In this case, money is being doled out in two ways — through federal departments, like energy and transportation, that have existing processes for project bidding; and by passing cash directly to states, which in turn use their usual methods to disburse it.
Both approaches take time. Still, it has been reported that the United States is well behind Europe in getting money moving. France, for example, expects to spend 75 percent of its stimulus money this year. Meanwhile, this country has spent somewhere around 10 percent of its stimulus money so far and won’t get close to doling out all the money until late 2010.
Of course, European economies are more tied to government, making some of their spending processes more streamlined.
Obama administration officials argue that they are right on schedule, disbursing the money as promised. That may be, but the simple fact is that’s not good enough. A big goal of the stimulus was to keep people working. But as the money has trickled out slowly, unemployment has jumped dramatically to 9.5 percent nationally, 11.1 percent in Ohio.
A good case about why the money matters is Dayton police. The city and the police union are in talks to try to find a way to make a significant cut in the department (perhaps through furloughs, a pay freeze or changes to holiday pay) without laying off police officers.
But the city has notified the union it will lay off 11 officers in early August if a deal is not struck.
Dayton has asked for stimulus funds specifically designated to help cities maintain and grow their police forces. City officials requested funds for 30 officers. That’s aiming pretty high, but if funding came through for even a half dozen positions, it would be a huge step toward resolving the crisis of the moment.
Sadly, City Manager Rashad Young said he has no hope he will hear anything before his August deadline. If it comes to layoffs, the best he could do is let officers go and then try to re-hire them later.
That’s a rotten way to have to do business, and it’s counter to the stimulus strategy. Those officers should stay on the street. It’s up to the Obama administration to find ways to knock down obstacles that are getting in the way of its own goals.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: EPA owes more to residents of McCook Field
(McCook Field neighbors produced this video about the TCE spill)
Dayton has a nasty environmental mess on its hands. The problem deserves faster action and more responsiveness from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA should do what Dayton’s well-regarded Environmental Advisory Board has asked: provide extra protection to more than 400 homeowners.
In the ground beneath the McCook Field neighborhood is a huge plume of contamination that includes trichloroethylene, or TCE, a solvent that apparently leaked from a former Chrysler plant that is now home to Behr Dayton Thermal Products. TCE is a suspected carcinogen. Its effects on human health are not well understood.
More than 200 homes already have had special vacuum systems installed to suck out potentially dangerous vapors. With the systems, the EPA believes the homeowners are safe. They are designed to keep indoor air safe by redirecting TCE fumes to the outdoors.
But neighbors want — and deserve — better assurance than that. In a YouTube video, activists make the case for the EPA to conduct regular testing of the air inside affected homes that have the vacuum systems. (Keep in mind that some houses needed a second vacuum system to bring the vapor levels down far enough, and, as the plume migrates, concentrations can change.)
The city’s Environmental Advisory Board has been asking for nearly a year for testing to be extended beyond the usual one-year period. It cites federal law that it says makes residents eligible for an extension.
EPA officials say they are still considering the idea, and they don’t believe anyone’s health is currently at risk. Repeated air testing is costly.
The agency’s work on this situation has been admirable. It has taken steps to try to speed up addressing the spill. It has named the plume a federal Superfund site and placed it on the National Priorities List, which, in theory, should expedite a cleanup. Even so, fixing the problem is a complicated process and likely will take years to resolve. The EPA must evaluate a host of cleanup options. The contaminated area is large and awkwardly placed. Cleaning groundwater is expensive and can be tricky.
There also is the matter of who is at fault, and who will pay what will be a stiff tab for the cleanup. Chrysler admits some responsibility but is arguing that Behr and other businesses may also be at fault (and, therefore, liable for some of the costs). A big battle is likely.
It’s already been 2 1/2 years since the plume was first discovered and little progress toward cleanup has been made.
In the meantime, residents rightfully worry about their health and their homes (which have plummeted in value). If the neighborhood were made up of million-dollar homes rather than modest, working-class ones, what do you bet that progress would be happening faster?
More testing makes sense if protecting residents is a priority. The EPA should make that happen, and all parties dealing with the spill — federal and local governments and the related companies — need to accept, not avoid, responsibility for ending a nightmare.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Energy, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Ohio finally has budget but no plan
After the prolonged dust-up about Ohio’s budget, the dust hasn’t settled. This is very much an ongoing story.
In some ways, the dust should not be allowed to settle. Take the spending cuts that were made. Rather than just make them and move on, Gov. Ted Strickland should put somebody in charge of measuring their impact, precisely quantifying what’s being lost.
Will the actual harm be as intense as spokespeople for safety-net programs predict? Or worse? Will people go hungry, lives be lost, families be devastated?
The cuts were as last-minute as the ridiculous gambling proposal that was enacted.
The cuts reflected last-minute revenue projections. Neither legislators nor journalists nor anybody else had time to get an authoritative feel for their impact.
State government makes decisions that affect people in direct, dramatic ways. Often the politicians talk about the potential indirect, subtle impacts of their policies, as in stimulating economic development. They can overstate their influence.
But their impact is clear in determining whether mental health care is available, whether seniors can avoid nursing homes, and whether people who lose their jobs can turn to food banks for sustenance and public libraries for a way back to a job.
Things might get worse from here. Many people believe the Strickland administration and lawmakers are wildly optimistic about future revenue; they worry there will have to be more cuts before the next budget is written in two years.
The projected money from the slot machines that the new budget authorizes at racetracks, for example, might not materialize. The gambling might not even start very soon.
The economy might still worsen. And the next budget won’t have this year’s $5 billion in federal stimulus funds to fall back on.
One estimate is that the next shortfall will be $8 billion. (The current two-year spending plan is $50.5 billion.)
True, the recent news out of Columbus could be worse. The overwhelmingly Republican Senate did give the Democratic governor enough votes (just barely) to get something enacted. As a party, the Republicans took the opportunity to pin all the bad news on the Democrats, but only to the degree that was consistent with getting the deed done.
Gov. Strickland lost substantial public standing during the ugly fight. But he does get to run for re-election as the governor who resisted a tax increase even when many in his party thought a tax increase — or a delay in planned tax cuts — was necessary. That seemed to be what he wanted.
And the spending cuts could have been worse, if the governor had gotten his original way. The final version of the budget cuts libraries by less than half as much as the governor proposed (but still by an awful lot). Food banks, mental health service and child care were also cut less.
The burden was spread a little to higher education (which also gets to raise tuition, as a trade-off), hospitals, nursing homes and non-public schools. On balance, that was the right direction.
But to take much comfort in the good news would be to miss the big picture and what’s likely yet to come.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Social Services
TweetEdiorial: ‘Creative class’ is living up to name
You probably could guess that a phrase like “Don’t dog Dayton” wasn’t conceived by people over 50.
For more than a year now, a growing group of “young creatives” (not all of whom precisely fit that description with respect to age) has done more than just talk about what Dayton lacks. The good thing for Dayton is that they keep rolling out new work for themselves and the others they’re infecting with their passion and energy.
“Don’t dog Dayton” is one of the latest projects. The plan is to sponsor a video contest about goofy, serious, or important things going on Dayton, with an eye on what will catch on on YouTube. The hope is that when people Google Dayton, maybe they’ll stumble on something other than Forbes.com’s computer-generated, comically oversimplified, decidedly frustrating list of dying cities.
Over a year ago, local universities (mainly, but not exclusively) took up the cause of organizing a group to do something to hang on to workers and students who are popularly known as the “creative class.”
Lots of research shows that communities that have an abundance of entrepreneurial, talented free spirits are having more luck attracting the next generation of workers that companies are hungry for.
The Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education put out a call for volunteers who would show up at a bunch of meetings and promise to act, not talk. That was the genesis of DaytonCREATE, which has rounded up and deputized still more people committed to finding out what young creatives want.
One group organized a summit last spring where two hundred or so people showed up to mull over what to do first. What could have been a boring, discouraging gripe fest was a mass brainstorming session that wrapped up with participants settling on four big things to tackle.
They voted for reaching out to Dayton’s high school and middle school kids; growing downtown (these people are trained on downtown); fixing up the Wayne Avenue corridor; and creating a one-stop online space where people can find out what’s happening at bars, with bands and around Dayton generally.
The fact that the group has a soft spot for doing something for others — the young people in the community — tells you something about its interest in giving back. That they see the need to link the Oregon District to the Cannery and the area around Fifth Third Field — by making Wayne Avenue more walkable — says they understand the need to connect the dots among Dayton’s bubbling entertainment spots.
And speaking of getting connected, give them credit for valuing efficiency and accessibility for recognizing that you can’t know what’s going on if your options are scattered at Web sites whose names you might not know.
As for growing downtown, the “Don’t dog Dayton” contest is a diplomatic nudge that Dayton’s marketing of itself and the community is pretty awful. Here are some people who acknowledge that fact and aren’t afraid to have some fun and to engage those beyond the self-proclaimed professionals.
The DaytonCREATE initiative is working on so much more — maybe you made the three-day film festival in May or have heard about the “walk on water” contest that’s coming up next year.
But the most important take-away is that there really are young people committed to the region and who are powerful sales people for it.
Dayton is lucky to have them.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: DECA is a success story, so why not fund it?
There are at least two good ways the state has been trying to deal with the fact that not enough kids are getting from high school to college.
Up until the recent budget debate, Ohio had been both nurturing programs that are showing success in getting young people to go to college and also investing in new programs that seem likely to make a difference.
But with money as tight as it has been in decades, lawmakers ended up making a bad move. Evidently feeling they couldn’t afford both strategies, the governor and lawmakers junked a program they know is working, while at the same time authorizing new money for ideas they hope will help.
What this means in Dayton is that the highly successful Dayton Early College Academy — where students take college courses and simultaneously complete high school work — will lose nearly a quarter of its funding, making its long-term future shaky.
Smart planning and support from the University of Dayton mean there is no immediate danger of the school closing. The same can’t be said for the other eight early college high schools in the state. As many as half of them may close before school starts in the fall because of this budget broadside, according to their backers.
Collectively, early college academies have done their job — demonstrating that they can get kids who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college to both go and succeed. They’ve done that by identifying talented, if sometimes underachieving, students who would be the first in their families to go to college. Then they push them hard with challenging, college-level work while still in high school.
The bulk of the kids are minority and low income; many have a host of disadvantages. Every one of DECA’s 2008 graduates went on to college, and 93 percent report they will return for a second year. That is a phenomenal return on the state’s investment. Typically, first-in-the-family college students drop out after their freshman year at a rate of 50 percent or better.
Yet, in the course of the budget crunch, the $12 million in annual special funding that helps these schools evaporated completely.
That didn’t help much to balance a $50.5 billion budget. Meanwhile, there’s no suggestion the money will ever be restored. If that were the plan, lawmakers would have kept at least some special funding, even if only a pittance.
At the same time, Ohio pressed ahead with new spending on other, untried experiments in education. Consider one example — STEM schools, which emphasize science, technology, engineering and math.
The state is hot on the idea that extra study in STEM could make kids more college-ready. So it wants to start special schools built around that theme. One of those schools will open this fall in Fairborn, with financial support from the state.
Dayton’s STEM school is a promising, needed venture, with Wright State University, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and lots of good people involved.
But it’s fair to wonder why Ohio would pull funding from DECA, which has a five-year record of producing college-ready students from a high-risk population, while at the same time throwing new cash at a STEM school that hasn’t held its first class yet and, by design, is more likely to serve kids who are already college bound.
With strong support from UD, DECA should be able to survive. But if the other early college schools don’t, Ohio will be moving in the wrong direction at the same time other states — most notably North Carolina and Texas — are spending generously to expand early college programs.
In the long run, this seemingly small budget cut could harm Ohio’s big goals for work force development.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetGuest column: Aerospace history still shaping Dayton’s future
Janet Bednarek, who wrote this column, is an aviation historian at the University of Dayton and a former chair of the history department.
Anniversaries are an opportunity to reflect on the past, but they also shine a light on the future. Monday, July 20, is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first time humans set foot on the moon.
In June, Dayton marked the 100th anniversary of the great parade honoring the Wright brothers upon their return home after stunning much of the world with their public flights in Europe and near Washington, D.C.
Both anniversaries celebrate events that were made possible, in part or in whole, by people and technologies associated with Ohio. They should remind us that Ohio and Dayton have a rich history of entrepreneurship and technological innovation.
The Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong and the airplane easily come to mind when reflecting on these anniversaries. Perhaps less well known is the important work on rocket engine technology done at what is now the NASA Glenn Research facility in Cleveland.
Today, around Dayton and throughout Ohio, many individuals and groups are working to draw on that heritage to chart a course into the 21st century.
This week, several aviation/aerospace events are taking place in the Dayton area. This shows how much many people — both locally and nationally — already recognize the important air and space heritage of the city and, in some respects, can envision a possible future.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Air, Trade and Technology Expo opened. On Friday, a dozen Apollo astronauts — including the first two and the last two on the moon — gathered in Dayton for the National Aviation Hall of Fame’s President’s Dinner. There, in an important link in the chain of events leading to the moon walk anniversary, they and their other Apollo colleagues were awarded the NAHF Spirit of Flight Award. Finally, this weekend, the Vectren Dayton Air Show is taking place at Dayton International Airport.
Local leaders hope this burst of activity will help reshape the image of Dayton and Ohio. Instead of the Rust Belt and closed factories, people will think of aerospace, technology and — most important — innovation.
Initiatives such as the creation of an Ohio Aerospace Institute, Dayton’s Tech Town and plans to strengthen STEM education also speak to an emerging vision for Dayton and Ohio.
The extensive aviation and aerospace heritage of the city and the state offers a strong foundation upon which to build this image. Throughout the 20th century, individuals and organizations in Ohio helped the United States step into a future of flight — atmospheric and space.
Dayton and Ohio boosters hope that the heritage of those activities will inspire a new generation to help the city, the state and the nation take the first steps into whatever future the 21st century might offer.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Local History
TweetKevin Riley: A baseball dad, and so much more
Last weekend, I was in Nashville, Tenn., at a tournament with my son’s baseball team.
In most ways, it was the typical experience many parents have of joining your kid’s team or club on an out-of-town trip: watching them compete, hanging out at the pool, organizing meals, enforcing curfews and finding something for them to do during the down time.
And the parents, together for long periods instead of for just one short game, got to know each other a little better.
But we had one parent missing.
Mark White, father of infielder Ryan White, had deployed to Iraq just a few days before the trip. Instead of joining his family in Nashville, Col. White was at Kirkuk Regional Air Base in northern Iraq. He’s in charge of the 506th Expeditionary Medical Squadron and runs the hospital at that base.
Through this season, as our team got to know White and his family, we gained insight into Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and life in the Air Force. The base employs a large number of people; at times it’s hard for those of us outside its gates to understand its many operations (Air Force people say “missions”) and people.
But when you’ve developed a direct connection to an Air Force family, it helps you appreciate their commitment.
It started with Ryan coming to the team tryouts last fall. He was new to school, and some of our players knew and liked him. And he’s a good player. Through the winter, during indoor workouts and parents’ meetings, Mark was usually around, lending a hand.
Occasionally it was clear he’d rushed from work, and sometimes he’d still be in uniform. Like many of us, I wasn’t sure about asking him about his job; often the Wright-Patt folks can’t or won’t talk about their work.
As games began this spring, we became friends. I learned that he was a senior administrator at the Wright-Patt hospital. He’d moved to the base almost a year ahead of his family. His wife, Kim, daughter, Sam, and Ryan joined him from Virginia in the fall of 2008, after he’d spent time scouting out schools and places to live.
Dayton was the latest stop after stints in Wyoming, Michigan, Louisiana, Mississippi, Hawaii and Colorado.
He’s part of the 88th Air Base Wing, the unit responsible for operating Wright-Patterson, including the hospital. He’ll be in Iraq for six months. He is among the 300 to 500 airmen from Wright-Patt who are deployed to places like Iraq and Afghanistan on any given day.
Because the base is so large, and has so many areas of expertise, its units are sent to the war theaters as security forces, medical specialists, engineers and logistical experts. White emphasized that his role is not like so many military men and women who are in front-line combat roles.
He’ll run a small hospital that provides care to troops and also to injured Iraqis. He had to train intensely, including learning how to react in a chemical attack and how to defend the hospital if it came under attack.
When White first told his children about the deployment, they cried. He will be away from home for his wedding anniversary, several birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
While he’s in Iraq, he has e-mail, and he can call home twice per week for 15 minutes. The military calls them “morale calls.”
When I talked to White a few days before he left, he was focused on his family. He said he was “spending time with my family. Doing the day-to-day stuff that most people don’t think about much.” Like attending his son’s baseball games.
In Nashville, our team had some good moments and some bad.
Ryan was injured when a ground ball took a bad hop on him. He kept playing, but after he returned to Dayton, we found out he’d broken his thumb.
The boys, as always, had hoped to win the tournament. We didn’t, so most of us left a little disappointed. But I thought about Col. White and just appreciated being there.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Kevin Riley, Sports and Recreation, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Turner weak on case to amend Constitution
U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville: “With no apparent limit on the government’s ability to expand its ownership of business, the only solution is a constitutional amendment.”
Rep. Turner has submitted just such an amendment. Fifty words long, it would ban government ownership of any part of a private company, except through investments in pension funds.
He says he’s concerned that the country is “creeping toward socialism.” (In introducing the amendment to the House of Representatives, though, he didn’t use the S word.)
He is reacting to the government’s substantial ownership of General Motors and smaller stake in Chrysler.
That ownership is certainly troubling.
The Obama administration did not ask for ownership; rather, GM — under pressure to show it was taking a dramatically new course — offered it in return for forgiveness of $10 billion in debt.
Accepting the offer might have been a mistake. Widely criticized as GM’s leadership has been, nobody has seriously suggested that government ownership was the solution. (OK, almost nobody.)
As Rep. Turner notes, GM has private competitors. If Ford and GM both want a certain government contract, what happens? It’s a seriously awkward situation, one reason among others to see government ownership as a problem.
And yet, a constitutional amendment?
In saying that his amendment is the “only solution,” Rep. Turner is, in effect, saying that the forces that want to expand government ownership are powerful. But if they’re powerful, then a constitutional amendment is not the way to deal with them. It’s so easy to block.
Constitutional amendments simply do not pass if they are controversial. After all, they must be accepted by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and by 38 state legislatures (three-fourths of 50).
In every Congress, a hundred or two hundred amendments are proposed. But none has been ratified in 17 years. And that one said that Congress can’t vote itself a pay raise in mid-term; an election must intervene.
Rep. Turner says he is not out to prevent future bailouts of private corporations (though he’s opposed the current ones), just governmental ownership.
If people see the amendment as a move against bailouts, it’s dead. That’s not because anybody wants more bailouts. Their undesirability is one thing upon which left and right agree.
The left doesn’t want to be regularly helping corporate fat cats, and the right worries about helping undeserving unions, and about protecting its right to anti-government rhetoric.
But emergencies do happen.
Well, if bailouts are going to happen, how much does it actually matter if temporary ownership results?
At a congressional hearing, Rep. Turner asked Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke what he thought of the amendment. The chairman wanted to think about it. But he said that a bailout itself “essentially is a temporary ownership.” (A video is available at Rep. Turner’s Web site.)
He’s got a point. After all, when the White House forced out Rick Wagoner as CEO of GM, it didn’t yet have any ownership of the company. It was just a powerful creditor.
If the government’s majority ownership of GM causes some sort of calamity and/or doesn’t end reasonably soon, the case for a flat ban will improve.
To rush ahead now, though, is premature, an overreaction. The government is not interested in gobbling up struggling corporations. Any alarm about that is simply false.
What’s appropriate now is pressure on the Obama administration to make good on its promise to divest itself ASAP.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Strickland gamble has big risks here
If you’re excited that casino-style gambling might be coming to Montgomery or Warren counties, you’re jumping the gun.
The only thing to be excited about is that things are happening so quickly that this venture could go badly wrong here, thanks to Gov. Ted Strickland.
Warren County commissioners, who own the property where Lebanon Raceway is, don’t want to allow that track’s owners to bring in video lottery terminals. Now that the state is allowing 2,500 slots at each of Ohio’s seven racetracks, the raceway desperately wants them to prop up its teetering business.
So, in the budget bill, there’s a provision written just for Lebanon that allows the Ohio Racing Commission to transfer the raceway’s license to another site, so long as it’s not more than 50 miles from where it is now; there isn’t a track already in existence in the county it moves to; and that the new site is in a contiguous county.
Montgomery County fits all the fine print.
The only insurance against Montgomery or Warren County becoming the site of a new, but cheesy, glorified bingo hall is that both the county commission and the city commission or city council or township trustees in the relevant jurisdiction have to support a track — with slots — being built.
If those elected officials don’t like what’s being proposed, the state racing commission can’t sign off on the track moving.
Where to begin with the concerns:
— Lebanon’s raceway owns 100-plus acres of property in Warren County along I-75, according to Warren County Commissioner Pat South. That raises the possibility that the raceway owners are shopping for a deal and just using Montgomery County as leverage to get special considerations from Warren County.
— Gov. Ted Strickland ordered the Ohio Lottery Commission, which will oversee the new gambling machines, to require a minimum investment of $80 million over five years at the tracks where any slots are installed.
That money won’t go very far if the goal is to create a first-class entertainment venue. (The casino that was proposed for Wilmington, and that voters rejected last year, was a $600 million complex.)
— One site that’s being mentioned for a new track is the Austin Pike interchange. Plans have been in the works literally for years to make that a vibrant commercial area. Montgomery County has touted the site as its last chance to spur development along I-75 and to capture some of the growth that’s been occurring between Dayton and Cincinnati, but mostly toward Cincinnati.
Consenting to a horse track would be radically changing the vision for that area and could — depending on the quality of the enterprise — complicate attracting businesses.
Austin Pike is prime real estate. There’s no reason to settle for anything sub par.
— What not everybody understands is that the governor’s decision does not allow casinos. Rather, he’s taking the most liberal interpretation of a constitutional amendment that created the lottery and says it allows him to permit video lottery terminals — as if they’re a computerized version of scratch-off tickets.
There is no skill in playing slots, and critics rightly say that the machines too often suck money from people who don’t have it to begin with.
— Because the racetracks aren’t rolling in money and they’ll be required to put up $65 million in the next year — $15 million of it by Sept. 15 — if they want to have slots, some people believe the track owners will have to sell their racing licenses.
The significance of that is: The people Montgomery County officials are meeting with about Lebanon moving might or might not be the people really calling the shots.
In turning to gambling to bail Ohio partially out of its financial problems, Gov. Strickland is making a major public policy decision that gives Ohio’s seven horse racing tracks a monopoly on gambling. He’s hurriedly negotiated a deal that in all probability would look much different — and be better for taxpayers — if it had been vetted in the light of day and had been subject to meaningful public scrutiny.
Now because of his decision, Montgomery County and Warren County are both in the gaming interests’ sights.
They are looking out for themselves, not this region.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio politics, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: IUE retirees getting shaft by court, GM
You might think that the people who run General Motors would have a soft spot in their hearts for the International Union of Electronic Workers. The IUE (now known as the IUE-CWA because of a merger) was the union that accommodated the company’s relatively early efforts to cuts its payroll costs.
Specifically, the IUE accepted tiered pay scales, meaning that new employees earned less and continued to earn less than older employees, the people whose jobs dated to the heyday of the industry.
The IUE took a lot of flak in labor circles just because it was being realistic about the company and its prospects.
Now, however, the IUE is being treated as if GM has something against it, preferring the United Auto Workers.
In GM’s out-of-bankruptcy agreement that was announced last week, health care benefits for IUE retirees weren’t protected.
The UAW retirees came out better, at least so far. They’ve had to make concessions along the way, too. But a UAW benefits fund — or VEBA, for Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association — owns a large chunk of what’s being called the “new GM.” That company will be doing business unburdened by the old GM’s debts. How well the UAW retirees will do remains to be seen.
The IUE was promised a similar deal. However, the bankruptcy court decided that the new GM shouldn’t be confronting old debts to the IUE, because no sizable number of IUE workers will be working for the new GM.
The Moraine sport utility vehicle assembly plant that was closed in 2008 was the only remaining IUE plant. The number of IUE pensioners and dependents is reportedly about 50,000.
The court wants to do everything possible to give the new GM a fresh start and a good chance at success. Fine.
But the result so far is that IUE retirees are in the hands of what’s being called the “old GM” or “bad GM” — the part of the original company with all the debt and empty factories — which is still in bankruptcy and has no prospects for a happy ending.
GM has put on the table a plan to let IUE pensioners buy health insurance for $240 a month, a tenfold increase over current costs, with a $5,000 deductible. That would be a sudden, wrenching change for people on limited, stagnant income. It’s not good enough.
There must be a way for the government — so crucial to this whole process of reshaping GM — to make sure that IUE pensioners are treated fairly. Promises have to mean something.
A lot of people think that GM was too generous for too long with retirement benefits. But that’s irrelevant. GM workers and retirees made their plans according to what they were promised. They sought certain jobs, did those jobs, and retired at certain times, after calculating what was right for them.
GM does not deny that it made an agreement with the IUE creating a VEBA arrangement like the UAW’s. Meanwhile, the IUE can’t deny that sometimes agreements get abrogated in the bankruptcy process. That, in part, is what bankruptcy is about: giving a beleaguered company protection for doing things it otherwise couldn’t.
Nevertheless, right is right.
Permalink | Comments (32) | Post your comment |
TweetEditorial: GM gets shot at new life surprisingly fast
With all the bad economic news these days, when something important actually goes better than expected, that should be noted.
Not long ago, the idea of an automaker going into bankruptcy seemed unthinkable, because bankruptcy proceedings go on forever, and nobody would buy a car from a company in bankruptcy.
Then Chrysler emerged from its bankruptcy in about a month. Even then, however, when General Motors entered bankruptcy proceedings, warnings were heard that things couldn’t be expected to go so quickly for GM, which was in a more complex situation.
But now, after about a month, GM has emerged in the form of a new company.
The law allows for a bankrupt company to be split into two companies, a good one and a bad one. The good one — the one with all the positive assets — gets a new lease on life. The bad — the one with the empty factories and big debts — heads toward death, as the court presides.
The provision almost sounds as if it was created for the auto companies. But it wasn’t. It was there before.
What’s now being called the new GM — and will officially be called the General Motors Company — looks a lot like what critics have said GM should have looked like all along: fewer models, fewer plants, fewer employees, fewer executives, fewer dealerships and much tougher union contracts. The company will make only Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC vehicles.
The company’s design doesn’t assure its survival. It still has to make cars people want. But the top executives are saying that all the changes noted above will be accompanied by changes — and even foster changes — in the company’s culture that will result in such products.
(Toward that end, too, the new GM announced that it is canceling the retirement of Robert A Lutz, 78, who directed development of the electric car, the Volt, due in showrooms next year. Not all GM critics will be happy about that news, though.)
Make no mistake: It’s still a big company. GM will have 34 plants in this country, down from 47 last year. It’ll have 64,000 employees domestically (down from 91,000 last year). The worldwide number is 235,000. It’ll presumably still have a large share of the huge U.S. auto market, if not the 20 percent it had before the recession. (It also has half a million retirees.)
Because of its size, the company’s survival — albeit expensive to American taxpayers, at least pending repayment of $50 billion in loans — is better than the alternative: liquidation.
Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Gerber rightly said liquidation would be “staggering” to the public. He wrote of the possibility of “grievous damage to all of the communities in which GM operates.”
The news of last week — when the new GM emerged — was certainly not all good, however. Leaders of the International Union of Electronic Workers-Communication Workers of America (IUE-CWA) are up in arms about the health care benefits of their retirees, including many in the Dayton area. That issue hasn’t been dealt with properly. An editorial on the subject will be in this space tomorrow.
Still, after a long, bumpy ride — though not as long as some had feared — a fabled American corporation comes out with a shot at new life. That’s good news for a lot of communities in the Midwest, which still have a lot riding on GM vehicles.
As bad as things are, they could be a lot worse.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Economy, Editorials, Local Business, Martin Gottlieb
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Brunner doing what Ohio pols just don’t do
What Jennifer Brunner is doing is seriously unlikely. Ohio politicians don’t do things like this. They might think about it. They might want to do it. But they don’t do it.
“It” isn’t the perfect pronoun here, because she’s really doing two things. One, she’s running for the U.S. Senate. Two, she’s not running for re-election as secretary of state.
To a lot of people in the Democratic Party, number two is the amazing part, the more fateful decision. She says party people are beating her over the head about it, trying to get her to back off her decision to leave.
She insists, however, that the die is cast, because, among other things, she has given her word to a would-be secretary of state that the job will be open.
The reason for the widespread anguish about her decision: The secretary of state sits on the commission that draws the state legislature’s districts after every Census. The governor and state auditor are also members. Whichever party has two of those jobs controls the process — completely.
It is an enormous power. Look at the current situation in Columbus. The Democrats, having had two excellent election years in a row, control the House of Representatives. But they are a pathetic one-third minority in the Senate. That’s fundamentally because the Republicans drew the maps (doing a much better job with the Senate than the House).
When the Democrats won governor and secretary of state in 2006, it was the first time they had control of the redistricting commission since the 1980s. There was rejoicing. Of course, they needed their new officeholders to win again in 2010, because the lines will be drawn in 2011. But those candidates would have the advantage of incumbency.
Now Brunner is giving that up. Horrors.
A few years ago, Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell decided that he’d rather be state treasurer, a job he had once held. He was planning to run for that job. But alarms went up within his party about the redistricting commission, and he stayed put.
This year, Republican Auditor Mary Taylor seemed eager to make a longshot race in the Republican primary for the Senate, against Rob Portman. The party didn’t want her to. She didn’t.
Maybe Republicans are different.
Keep in mind that neither Taylor nor Blackwell was even the swing seat on the commission. In Blackwell’s case, the Republicans held all three seats. In the Taylor case, they only held one. Yet the pressure to stay was intense.
But Brunner is the swing seat.
OK, so that’s one decision by Brunner. You have to couple it with the fact that her run for the Senate is creating a primary.
True, that might also be said about the other major contender, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher. But everybody was expecting him to run. Nobody cares about a vacancy for lieutenant governor.
Fisher doesn’t generate universal enthusiasm among Democrats, because he has lost two consecutive general elections (1994 and 1998) for statewide office, hasn’t been elected on his own since 1990 and holds office now only because Strickland won in 2006.
But at the time that Fisher and Brunner made their decisions to seek the Senate seat, Fisher was basking in the popularity of Strickland.
Moreover, a lot of people just don’t like their party to have hot primaries. They fear party division and a waste of money.
This primary could be hot. The polls are competitive. There’s already heat on the Internet.
(Thank goodness for blogs and bloggers. Used to be, newspaper columnists were accused of jumping the gun if they took note of an election in the summer of the year before. But this gun has been fired. Besides the Internet sniping, the candidates are out on the hustings a lot and busily raising money.)
Parties shouldn’t be as fearful of primaries as they are. A good primary can actually add stature to the winner. As for money for the general election, it always seems to turns up somehow if the party has a shot at winning.
As for the redistricting thing, Brunner is supporting a change in the system, so that the districts are drawn on a nonpartisan basis, as they should be.
In truth, though, such reform has been attempted twice in recent years and never seems to happen.
The people Brunner is starting out by disappointing are not huge in number, just the insiders and deeply political people. They might not have great power in a primary.
She ought to be glad there’s a primary. If the party could decide things behind closed doors, she would not be the candidate for the Senate.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Ban on youth ATV riders would save lives
The death of 2-year-old Levi Jones in Warren County on July 7 is a tragic reminder of the danger faced by kids who ride all-terrain vehicles and the need for Ohio to strengthen its vehicle laws.
In this case, Levi was riding with his father when the ATV crashed, throwing them both off. This type of incident is common in Ohio, and ATV injuries spike in the summer. The off-road vehicles are especially common in rural areas and are used both for practical purposes and for recreation.
But the notion that ATVs fall short of being true motor vehicles, or can be treated as something of a toy because they are fun to ride, is dangerous. ATVs can weigh hundreds of pounds and maneuvering them requires sense and skills that children often don’t have.
They are flat unsafe for those under age 16 who have not been taught to use them with the sort of supervision teenagers get when they’re learning to drive cars. And riding along on a vehicle never intended for more than one person should never be allowed. Most Ohioans understand this common sense and would support new laws that would cut injuries and deaths.
Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, said Ohio is in the top third among states for ATV fatalities. While kids under 16 represent less than 15 percent of ATV users, they account for a third of ATV deaths.
“These are dangerous machines,” he said. “Children oftentimes are too young to respond to the moment-to-moment demands of operating them. They don’t know where to draw the line and that a fall isn’t a little tumble. It’s a crash involving a tremendous amount of energy.”
Ohio law is quite liberal, restricting use to those over 16 on public lands, but setting no age limits for vehicles driven on private property.
In 2006, the research center at Columbus’ children’s hospital surveyed Ohioans about potential legal restrictions. Respondents supported by wide margins proposals to prohibit ATV use by young children, ban passengers, require helmets and mandate safety classes. A state law with those elements is a good idea.
Many ATV users oppose those rules, complaining they’re oppressive. They argue that accidents happen, but that most users are responsible and the vehicles generally are safely used, especially in farming.
That certainly is true. But ATV enthusiasts cannot ignore the tragedy of the unusually high number of deaths — especially children — in the state. (A recent study showed 85 Ohioans died in ATV crashes between 2003 and 2006.)
With or without a law, Ohioans need to understand that they are playing a dangerous game by allowing kids to ride ATVs. Few would allow their children to get behind the wheel of a car without a driver’s education course or basic safety precautions (such as a clicked seat belt).
Taking a safety class or putting on a helmet before climbing aboard an ATV may be a short-term inconvenience, but it’s a price worth paying to save lives.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Law Enforcement and Public Safety
TweetEditorial: Police should give up on cushy deals
Dayton’s police union is playing a dangerous game of chicken that could result in 11 officers being laid off Aug. 3.
That cannot happen. Reducing the force by that many officers is irresponsible when there are other sensible ways to cut costs. But the union could force the city’s hand by continuing to demand a raise and reject furlough days that others have already given up. In an effort to close a $6 million budget deficit, Dayton has made a reasonable proposal to all four of its labor unions — forgo a raise this year and agree to four furlough days to avoid layoffs.
The city’s service workers have already accepted the deal, and the city has imposed it on managers and non union workers. But the police are holding out, saying the city owes them more.
The union wants to keep the 3 percent raise it negotiated, but it has made concessions —Â it was willing to take 1 percent this year. The city says police have to take a wage freeze like everybody else. The dispute is headed for binding arbitration.
City Manager Rashad Young said the union’s ideas for how he can give a pay raise to police and avoid layoffs at the same time are not workable. The suggestions that he use money from the city’s reserve fund, or borrow against it, only puts off the problem. A loan would have to be paid back, and the reserve isn’t a piggybank to use for routine operating expenses.
Though the $20 million reserve may look inviting, in truth it is barely adequate for a city Dayton’s size. Generally, bond rating companies expect cities to keep the equivalent of six to 10 weeks of expenses in a cash reserve or they will pay a penalty when borrowing. Dayton’s reserve would cover just slightly more than six weeks, city officials said.
Police union President Randy Beane has repeatedly objected to cutting spending by taking officers off the street. In fact, one complaint about Mr. Young’s proposed furloughs is that they would reduce manpower to a troubling degree. If that’s a serious worry, then the union must help work to avoid it. And there are other options.
Amazingly, Dayton police officers have a tremendous sweetheart deal when it comes to their 12 paid holidays. In many jobs, being assigned to work on a holiday means premium pay. But for Dayton police, premium pay means officers are paid for 48 hours of work during a holiday week instead of 40, whether they work on the holiday or not.
Moreover, Mr. Young says giving up this perk on just five of the 12 days would net the same savings as the four days off without pay.
It’s hard to imagine how this arrangement ever made sense, but it certainly doesn’t in today’s fiscal environment. (Ending it shouldn’t be just for this year.)
Agreeing only to this give-back would still require police to accept the same pay freeze as everyone else, but it would keep more officers on the street. It’s a no-brainer.
The police union cannot stick to a position that demands a raise even if other officers are laid off and even though other workers accepted the freeze. It can’t demand the city raid its reserve fund. It can’t reject furloughs while clinging to premium pay on holidays for everyone.
Mr. Beane and his union need to get serious.
Permalink | Comments (28) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetEllen Belcher: Find them jobs, NCR’s people will stay
You can bet that NCR Corp. employees who don’t want to move to Georgia, and those who are skeptical the company intends to take very many Daytonians when it leaves, aren’t sitting still.
Neither should Dayton be — or area employers.
This is an opportunity for Dayton businesses and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to easily recruit top talent that is here and likes Dayton. Recruiting is expensive and time-consuming; here’s a chance to do it cheaply and to have confidence that new hires will be happy where they’re living.
If all the institutions and people who say they want to defeat the brain drain don’t step up in the wake of NCR’s move, then their talk is just talk.
On Monday, June 29, Sinclair Community College organized a meeting to discuss how to pounce on the problem of keeping NCR employees in the community.
More than 1,200 people work for the company; many have long tenures here and professional skills. Not all of them can follow NCR to Georgia because they have spouses who have jobs here, or because they have family members they want to be near, or they don’t think it’s the right time for their children to change schools.
In the end, people will make agonizing personal decisions based on what’s best for them — not what’s right for NCR or Dayton.
But holding on to people who are on the fence about leaving, or who would stay if they could land a job, can’t be left to chance. Dayton employers have to reach out to precious home-grown talent.
Because of the Base Realignment and Closure process, Wright-Patterson is getting hundreds of new jobs and seeing an influx of defense contractors.
Among the skills both the Air Force and contractors are looking for are project managers, people with procurement experience and IT professionals. These job descriptions overlap nicely with what some NCR people do.
More specifically, NCR’s IT people are schooled in Oracle, the complex and sophisticated software program that Air Force operations run on. What NCR employees do with database management, for instance, is wholly transferable and relevant to military applications.
Most important to the NCR people: Wright-Patterson is in the middle of managing a massive project called ECSS — Expeditionary Combat Support System.
It’s a wholesale overhaul to integrate more than 400 Air Force computer systems. The Air Force and their contractors can’t have too many Oracle people.
NCR’s leaving creates a problem different from the job loss that the Dayton area has gotten good at dealing with, says Deb Norris, vice president of workforce development and corporate services at Sinclair Community College.
Local leaders and officials know how to reach out to people in manufacturing who lose their jobs (because that’s been happening for so long). There’s a good road map for getting people to the county’s Job Center and to Sinclair.
But now, instead of working with people who need training, the challenge is to work with those who are already well-trained.
New approaches and different outreach efforts have to be invented to get people placed. They could include private job fairs, virtual spaces where employees can anonymously leave their profiles so local employers can contact them and informal networking events.
The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce has offered to take the lead on the efforts to market Dayton to NCR people and to mine chamber contacts to let employers know that NCR people are in the hunt. It can’t be taken for granted that everybody knows the gold mine that is here.
The chamber’s job isn’t going to be easy, because NCR will want to hang on to some people as long as it can before it cuts out. And NCR is not going to be eager to broadcast just how many people are being told they’re no longer needed. Employers can’t jump on this chance if they don’t know the specific qualifications and skill sets the employees have.
Nonetheless, this is the chamber’s chance. It has to show what it can do when a problem hits and that it knows how to do important economic development work that makes a difference.
It will need help, but the pressure is on to show urgency, make things happen and account for what it does.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Strickland couldn’t be more wrong
Gov. Ted Strickland is recklessly, obstinately and selfishly putting Ohio on a horrible course.
He refuses to give up on his plan to help balance the state budget by allowing as many as 17,500 slot machines divided among Ohio’s seven racetracks. He hopes that permitting the so-called video lottery terminals will raise almost $1 billion.
Going with the slots avoids having to cut state programs by that amount or raising taxes.
There is so much wrong with the idea that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s keep it simple:
— Ohioans have voted against casino-style gambling four times in the last 19 years. That the governor thinks he can dismiss those powerful statements — unilaterally — is amazing for someone who fancies himself humble.
— The language allowing the expanded gambling is being written in a matter of days and hours. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the governor’s people have thought of everything they should have to protect the interests of Ohio or local communities.
— The public vetting of the governor’s decision has been less than what would be required to pass a resolution naming a state worm. The brief hearings that occurred in the Senate only validated the fear that there has been no serious thought put into the details of the proposal.
The lottery director, who will be charged with overseeing the gambling enterprises, didn’t even know how his job description was going to change until a few days before he was insisting that his agency could be an effective check on the sophisticated gaming industry.
— States that allow gambling have elaborate regulatory apparatus to make sure that governments get their fair share of gambling proceeds, that communities are not run over by gaming outfits and that corruption isn’t rampant.
Ohio’s protections will be an afterthought — decided after the horse (no pun intended) is out of the barn.
Meanwhile, there’s the matter of how this measure may affect Montgomery and Warren counties.
Lebanon Raceway is reportedly interested in moving from Warren County, sensing that the county commissioners there are hostile to allowing slots at its track. (The county commission owns the land the raceway is on.)
The governor’s people have contacted Montgomery County commissioners to ask how this community feels about a horse racing track with slots in its backyard. It’s not clear how they could possibly know, considering that there has been absolutely no public discussion of the idea.
At the same time, state Rep. Clayton Luckie is eager to say that he’s the person who got this whole conversation going about the Lebanon track moving to Montgomery County. He points to his friendship with the Lebanon Raceway owners.
Meanwhile, Warren County Commissioner Pat South says her county would like the raceway to stay in that county, just not at the fairgrounds if slots are going to be allowed.
The faux casino in the Dayton area would face competition from River Downs near Cincinnati, and Scioto Downs and Beulah Park near Columbus. So it wouldn’t be much of a destination. If the market is saturated, that complicates the task of attracting developers who are eager to dump big bucks into a venue for purposes of making it special.
(Rep. Luckie says he wants federal stimulus money to be used to finance the development. What do you want to bet that’s not going to happen?)
With the governor’s effort to blanket the state with these places, what we have is a desperate leader proving his unwillingness to use his bully pulpit to speak truth to taxpayers.
And who knows whether the state will ever be able to undo all the ways in which we will surely get snookered.
This is not the Ted Strickland Ohio elected.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio government, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Maybe reports of Antioch’s death were exaggerated
There was a lot of celebrating last week after an announcement that just a year ago seemed like a long shot:
Antioch University and an alumni-backed group have forged a deal intended to reopen the Yellow Springs campus. As hard as it was for all sides to work this out, that challenge was nothing compared to what’s ahead.
To be ready to reopen in the fall of 2011, the Antioch College Continuation Corp. needs a spruced-up campus, faculty, a curriculum and a steady enough financial foothold to inspire confidence with creditors, funders and prospective students.
Matthew Derr, the corporation’s chief transition officer, said making all that happen depends on the generosity of Antioch’s 17,000 alumni. The next step for a future Antioch is a $50 million, five-year fundraising campaign, and Mr. Derr is counting on the powerful story of the rebirth of their old school to convince alumni to open their wallets even in the worst economic downturn in a generation.
“We have a large and accomplished alumni population,” Mr. Derr said. “If the capacity wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be able to do this. But this is our moment in history. This is the time when they can step forward and help the college get back to the level it was.”
The corporation has raised $10 million — one fifth of its goal —Â in just six months. (It has since borrowed an additional $6 million that it plans to use to buy the campus from Antioch University when the deal closes.)
Mr. Derr estimates that a campus re-sized to suit 400 to 600 students, rather than up to 1,200, will cost about $25 million for repairs and demolition. Then the school plans an annual operating budget of about $4.5 million.
For the first several years, the college would be mostly dependent on philanthropy, he said. The goal, however, is creating a business plan that requires the college to quickly become self-sustainable.
Still, that is a long way off, and there’s lots of cash that will be needed. To have any chance to get off the ground in 2011, Antioch will need to already have in place academic leaders who inspire confidence, an inviting curriculum, workable facilities and adequate student services.
The beginnings of a curriculum inspired by Antioch’s tradition of liberal arts experimentation have been shaped. Mr. Derr describes a school that incorporates a work co-op tradition, but uses an alternative, year-round academic calendar to get students to graduation in four years. Students, he hopes, will work abroad and around the country, keeping connected to each other and the campus via social networking as an Internet-based “community” and completing some course work online.
A viable Antioch College back in business in Yellow Springs would be good for everybody, even if the operation is considerably slimmer than its former self and even if a chunk of its students are studying online from elsewhere. Last week’s agreement is an important, but small, step in that direction.
But an even harder push is needed before the school’s doors will reopen. A good choice for president (a hire expected sometime in the next year) will be crucial. The prospect — in every way — is dependent on alumni’s money.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Rural Communities, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Washington, Columbus canceling each other out
It has long been said — to the point of cliche — that Washington and the rest of the country are two different worlds. But now, wow.
At the state and local government levels, the overriding fact about life today is that there is no money.
Want to do something? Forget it. There’s no money!!
Far from being able to do anything new, the government of Ohio is being forced to stop doing things. Programs are being slashed or eliminated. Employees are being cut.
Then, however, there’s Washington, where they’re starting to talk about another stimulus.
That is, having borrowed the better part of a trillion dollars to stimulate the economy last winter, the government is facing the possibility that that wasn’t enough, notwithstanding that most of it hasn’t been spent yet, because, after all, spending that much money that fast is hard.
So, quite literally, we have one level of government that can’t spend its money fast enough, atop several other levels that can’t meet their bills.
To put a finer point on it: We have one level that is trying to fix the economy by creating jobs for people who have lost their jobs. Meanwhile, the lower levels of government cut back on jobs — think about librarians, just as an example — and on spending in ways that will result in the private sector cutting back on jobs.
We have, in short, a world whose inventor must have been Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. His Tweedledee and Tweedledum become Do and Undo, partners in governance.
The contrast between the financial situations of Do and Undo have been noted by others and, indeed, acted upon. The stimulus entails a lot of help for state and local governments. But even that action seems designed to mystify any Alice.
Take this trains thing. Passenger train service for Ohio is a great idea. We should have had trains all along, and if we can get some as a result of federal spending to stimulate the economy, that’s great, too. Some people who are out of work will be put to work, and they’ll pay state and local taxes, rather than looking for government help. And we save gas and have more travel options.
But, come on. Are we really going to build a train system from Cincinnati to Cleveland — with federal money — while we are cutting back on state money for foodbanks? While we’re slashing libraries and programs that are saviors for families who are dealing with mental illness? While we’re cutting the state program that helps older people stay out of nursing homes (a program which, by the way, saves public money in the long run)?
Like other presidents before him, Barack Obama is doing whatever he really, really wants. The stimulus was a starter. He’s pushing for expensive health-care reform. He’s moving troops into Afghanistan without really pulling any sizable number out of Iraq. He’s given the middle class a little tax cut.
All presidents do whatever they really want to do. Ronald Reagan did tax cuts and a defense build-up. George W. Bush did war, tax cuts and expansion of Medicare. They differ as to what they want, not as to whether they do it.
Their free hand derives from the magical power the feds have to borrow money. Some people think the magical power is printing money. But printing too much money is dangerous, leading to inflation. The real force at work is a great credit rating. Meanwhile, at the state and local levels, the failure to balance budgets somehow brings an end to life as we know it
OK. That’s the reality. Life is messy. Complicated.
But would it be too much to ask that somebody appoint somebody to try to make sure that the various levels of governments aren’t working at cross purposes?
As things stand, given events in Columbus, Gov. Ted Strickland might as well be trying to put a brake on the economy his president is trying to stimulate.
When the nation’s founders ensured that power was distributed among various levels of government — that the feds didn’t have it all — the idea was probably not to provide some latter-day Lewis Carroll with a book idea.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Transportation
TweetEditorial: Columbus throws over the most vulnerable
The fact that Ohio’s politicians can’t pass a budget is a sad commentary on them. This is their job, after all.
The fact that nobody in a high position will even think about suspending an ongoing cut in the state income tax to help deal with the crisis is another sad commentary.
The fact that the governor has abandoned an old stand and put together a half-baked scheme for turning racetracks into virtual casinos is sad. The fact that his Republican opponents oppose that, yet won’t say what they would put in its place is sad.
Saddest of all, though, is how much of the burden for the politicians’ failures will be borne — is already being borne — by the most vulnerable people in Ohio, the ones made all the more vulnerable (and increased in number) by the economy.
In enacting interim budgets to keep the state operating during the political impasse, the governor and Legislature have generally held most state agencies harmless. They can’t cut debt service. They aren’t cutting higher education or K-12 education. They can’t touch much of Medicaid. That leaves a third or less of the budget.
To bring overall spending in line with reduced revenues, the interim budgets limit the agencies in that third to 70 percent of last year’s spending pace.
We’re talking about funding food pantries and other parts of the state’s safety net, the kinds of programs seeing new applicants because people are out of work. The Columbus Dispatch reports that already a Medicaid hot line offering guidance for consumers has been shut down. And the state is no longer processing applications for disability assistance.
Meanwhile, there is still the matter of what will happen when a real budget is passed. The public debate about the budget has taken the form of an argument about gambling. But even if the governor’s gambling initiative were OK’d, and even if it produced the amount of money he optimistically projects, the budget would still have to be cut by $2.4 billion.
The governor has made his proposals. Other politicians have hardly raised a peep about them, much less about deeper cuts that would be needed in the absence of new revenue.
The director of an association of food banks told the Legislature, as reported by Gongwer News Service, “Let me be clear, crystal clear: the loss of $7 million (as the governor proposes) means a loss of 35 million meals. … (His) proposal literally takes food out of the mouths and off the plates of hungry children, unemployed Ohioans, the elderly and disabled who depend on these critical lifelines to survive,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt.
Said an appointee to the Washington County Mental Health Addiction and Recovery Board, “What you are proposing will undoubtedly cause the death of many of our loved ones.”
The list of such cries goes on. Responsible people all over the state are talking about pending “catastrophe.” Parents are begging for continuation of jeopardized programs they say are keeping their children alive. Ten thousand slots in Passport, the program that keeps people out of nursing homes, are threatened.
There’s always some exaggeration in politics. But what’s being heard today is no mere spinfest, no mere strategy of insulted special-interest lobbyists. The alarms this time are not false.
Whatever one thinks of gambling and whatever promises the politicians might have made about taxes, the path the state is on now is just wrong.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Social Services
TweetEditorial: Dayton hangs on to a keeper at airport
Dayton caught a break this week when Jacksonville, Fla., decided not to pick Iftikhar Ahmad as its new airport director.
On the job since 2006, Mr. Ahmad is a hot property. In just a short time, he’s put important improvements in motion, while at the same time ensuring that the airport stayed busy, even as many people were cutting out business and leisure travel.
He’s achieved that in large part by reducing enplanement costs from around $14 in 2006 to $4.50. That’s the fee that airlines pay per passenger to fly in and out of an airport. Cutting this cost can make flying out of Dayton cheaper than, say, Columbus or Cincinnati, because it’s an especially important consideration for low-cost carriers.
Mr. Ahmad took a pay cut to become Dayton’s airport director. He had been a vice president in Nashville, and, prior to that, an airport executive in Houston. Those who’ve watched him see an ambitious individual who wants to leave a mark.
He has gotten that opportunity in Dayton, but Jacksonville presented the chance to potentially double his $124,000 salary and to oversee four airports that are run by an authority. Instead of reporting to an assistant city manager, Mr. Ahmad’s boss would have been a board of directors. Airport administrators think they have more freedom and latitude under this arrangement, and they also can make more money.
Mr. Ahmad is driving changes that will be with Dayton for a long time: A new three-story parking garage has been started, a new control tower is being built, the inside of the terminal is getting a makeover with new shops and eateries in the works.
The goal is to create amenities associated with larger airports, without the hassle — hence Dayton’s slogan “Easy to and through.”
Mr. Ahmad has impressive marketing instincts and works with a sharp pencil. He’s needed these skills to survive in a climate that couldn’t have been worse for promoting Dayton and hustling to keep, and to get more, flights.
Recently, NCR’s Bill Nuti, when he was explaining why his company is moving to Georgia, noted that Atlanta has easy access to international flights. Even if he was just looking for excuses, Mr. Nuti was making the indisputable point that easy air travel catches the eyes of companies.
Dayton can’t compete with Atlanta on that score, which is why Mr. Ahmad has to be especially creative in appealing to airlines. His goal, he says, is to eventually bring enplanement costs down to zero, and possibly even pay airlines to fly to and from Dayton. Either situation, he says, would be unprecedented in the industry.
(Incidentally, Mr Ahmad isn’t buying Mr. Nuti’s point. He says traffic congestion into Atlanta’s airport cuts into any time savings for travelers; he also says that connections from Dayton to bigger airports, or even car trips to Columbus or Cincinnati for international flights, can be easier than getting in and out of the country’s busiest airport.)
Mr. Ahmad is not just making over Dayton’s airport; he’s also building his resume, which, by all rights, will get him considered in bigger places. Because those chances will inevitably come, he needs to be grooming a successor.
In the meantime, Dayton is giving him a great opportunity to show his talent, and Dayton is benefiting from the fact that he’s eager to prove he can take a hard job and make it look easy.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Transportation
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Dayton peace prize reading suggests links among the good guys
Fourteen years after the signing of the Bosnia peace accords in Dayton, the most visible local legacy of the community’s brush with history is perhaps the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Every year, organizers ask the nation’s publishers to submit fiction and nonfiction entries. There’s also a lifetime achievement award.
The contest has stretched the definition of “peace,” partly because there’s a limit to the number of great books that are written specifically about wars and how to avoid and resolve them.
So, for example, Taylor Branch won the lifetime award for a trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m one of many “first readers,” that is, local people who each screen a handful of entries for relevance to the subject and for competitiveness. The prize winners are chosen by others and announced later in the year.
This year my reading kept bringing to mind the name Tony Hall.
The Democratic congressman from Dayton (from 1978 to 2002) is actually mentioned in one book. It’s by a former Republican congressman, Mark D. Siljander, of Michigan. They knew each other from a prayer group in Washington. They share a lot, but there are differences.
In 1984, Siljander said Americans “are literally in … an ideological battle and war over inalienable rights given to us by our Constitution. Humanists are shoving their narrow, distorted, perverted self-loving concept down our throats.”
Not the Hall style. But now Siljander seems a changed man. His book — “A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide” — is all about healing and “reconciliation.”
He insists the divisions between the religions are not fundamental. He says the “misunderstanding” stems from bad translations.
He claims, apparently with considerable justification, a certain talent for languages. And he says that the original languages used in the major religious books were basically saying the same things about the biggest theological questions.
He takes the argument to the point of suggesting that Christians and Muslims aren’t even all that far apart on the divinity of Jesus Christ, which, of course, Muslims deny. So he has a tough sell.
There’s something Hall-like about the effort: the passion, the deep faith and the need to manifest that faith in worldly acts for mankind’s benefit.
Siljander says he takes inspiration from Hall’s pursuit of a congressional apology for slavery. He also mentions Hall’s hunger strike against fellow House Democrats who eliminated his committee on hunger.
Another book on my assigned list is by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He’s the founder of the micro-business, or micro-credit, idea. He began lending tiny amounts of money to dirt-poor women in Bangladesh to begin their own one-person businesses. They made furniture, fixed clothes, nurtured tiny crops. Hall has long promoted the micro-business, having seen it at work in Bangladesh and having known Yunus.
The Yunus book — “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism” — takes micro-business as a starting point. He stresses that the loans get paid back. He refers to his lending operation as a Social Business, the idea of which is not to make a profit (all profits get funneled back into the business), but to make an impact on some social problem. But, unlike traditional philanthropy, the project must be self-sustaining.
Yunus’ original operation, the Grameen Bank, gets cited in another book on my list. “A Crime So Monstrous,” by E. Benjamin Skinner, is a partial survey of world slavery. The author travels to Haiti, Africa, India and Romania.
The book’s a shocker. There are more slaves today than ever, millions (though they’re a smaller percentage of the world population than ever). And we’re talking actual slaves, not badly paid workers.
The author meets sex slaves, debt slaves (people who are in bondage because they owe a tiny debt, sometime incurred by a grandfather) and child domestic slaves (including in this country). He also deals with the people who buy, sell and enslave them.
Skinner explores what’s being doing by Christian evangelical groups, other nonprofits and the U.S. government, offering useful conclusions (and a gripping story).
To the consternation of some, the author unavoidably concludes that poverty is at the heart of the problem, and he holds out micro-business as part of the solution.
My reading journey didn’t leave me hopeful that the world’s huge humanitarian issues are moving to solution, just aware that some excellent people are doing their best, and struck by the connections among them.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Dayton Peace Accords and Other Peace Initiatives, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Animal lovers, farmers both wrong
The animal rights movement is coming to Ohio this fall.
Agricultural interests in the state are scared to death of a ballot proposal the Humane Society of the United States wants Ohioans to vote on a year from now, in 2010, that would prohibit farmers from keeping egg-laying hens, veal calves and pregnant pigs in the tiniest of cages and crates.
Voters have passed similar proposals in three states, most recently in California. Polling shows the idea would be an easy sell here, too.
In an attempt to head off that possibility, Gov. Ted Strickland and state lawmakers are supporting legislation that will ask voters this November if they want to amend the state constitution to create a board that would set rules about caring for livestock.
The hope is that this idea will pass and then Ohioans will be reluctant to turn around next year and vote against specific farming practices that the Humane Society says are cruel. Agricultural groups argue that a panel of experts knows better than voters how many inches of space a pregnant sow needs.
There’s also a more cynical consideration in play. If the amendment proposed by the governor and legislature passes, it arguably trumps any changes in law that the Humane Society could get enacted next year.
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society, says his organization won’t be rolled over so easily. His group is investigating whether to take a harder position and likewise put its restrictions in the constitution.
You can love animals and farmers and think both of these campaigns are nuts.
Neither idea belongs in the constitution. But, in fact, it was the Ohio Farm Bureau and the state’s poultry and livestock associations that went nuclear first by looking for constitutional protection.
Consumers are becoming increasingly fussy about their food. They want to know more about growing and breeding processes, and many people are willing to pay more for products they think are better for them, better for the environment and, yes, that don’t involve what they consider mistreatment of animals (or workers).
The debates about what farming practices are safest and best are fierce. Some defenders of the crowding associated with factory farms, for instance, argue that new methods aimed at maximizing production actually prevent disease.
Critics say that’s ridiculous, and they insist that crating animals, for example, threatens the safety of the food supply.
The arguments have to be resolved according to the science — not emotion, and certainly not with profits being the only concern.
Ohio is important to both campaigns. We’re the second-largest egg-producing state in the nation; No. 9 in pork production and among the top five states in veal production.
The agri-business people insist the Humane Society’s measure will be a job-killer, while the Humane Society counters that, no, having stricter rules about how animals are treated will level the playing field for small farmers to compete and create jobs.
Meanwhile, the coming ad campaigns showing caged laying hens that aren’t ever allowed to spread their wings, and pregnant pigs stuffed in grates where they can take only a half-step forward and backward, will be hard to stomach even for carnivores.
Agriculture policy, like everything else, has to evolve. What worked or was acceptable yesterday won’t always be the way of the world. Deciding the rules requires all sides sitting down and looking at bona fide research and negotiating in good faith.
But nobody should be for settling food fights in the constitution.
Permalink | Comments (24) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Rural Communities
TweetEditorial: Rules on police/fire diversity change too late for Dayton
A new U.S. Supreme Court decision about promoting firefighters in New Haven, Conn., raises questions about whether Dayton would ever have been confronted by the U.S. Justice Department last year if the court had acted sooner.
The Feds wanted to penalize Dayton because the city accepted the results of a test for police job applicants that resulted in almost no minority candidates making the cut. The two levels of government reached a settlement which included Dayton putting up $450,000 for disappointed applicants.
If the city had gone to court, it would have been in an odd position.
It would have been fighting against federal pressure to diversify its safety forces, even though the city commission strongly favors more diversity. The city just hasn’t found a way to achieve that. It certainly didn’t want a hot, racially tinged court battle.
How it would have fared in court cannot be known. But the Justice Department certainly knew the legal lay of the land.
Now the lay of the land has changed.
The New Haven Civil Service Board had decided not to abide by the results of a test for promotion of firefighters to lieutenant and captain. The test had resulted in almost no black or Hispanic promotions. A fair number of minorities had passed, but promotions only went to the highest scorers.
The firefighters who would have been promoted under the test sued. New Haven responded to that suit, in part, by saying that it felt it would have been sued by the other side if it had abided by the test results.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week, 5-4, that the city’s fear of a lawsuit wasn’t sufficient reason for rejecting the results. The majority said there had to be concrete reasons — independent of the test scores — for suspecting the test was a bad one. However, judges at two lower levels (including Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor) had accepted the city’s rationale.
And, writing for the Supreme Court minority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the civil service board seemed to honestly think that using the test would violate prevailing court decisions. After all, earlier courts had held that policies that result in “disparate impact” on racial groups can be judged prejudicial, even in the absence of prejudicial intent.
She noted that many jurisdictions achieve reasonable police and fire diversity by downplaying written tests. Instead, they put people into various scenarios and see how they respond. She said written tests may say more about access to education and to various forms of help in preparing than about fitness for a specific job.
At any rate, the question arises: Would the fed have sought the financial settlement if this year’s ruling had been in place earlier? To do so would have put Justice in a legal posture similar to New Haven’s — rejecting a test because of the outcome.
So we have a neat little irony: A city government run by liberals found itself having to pay a penalty that it might not have faced if the conservative Supreme Court had acted sooner.
Irony aside, the important question here is whether the court’s new direction is the best for racial progress. The jury’s still out. On the surface, the decision seems to make life harder for cities that want — as they should want — to achieve a reasonable degree of diversity in various safety-forces jobs.
But the response of those cities to the decision might be to move away from reliance on written tests. That might not be all bad.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Civil Rights, Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Governor, lawmakers failing Ohio
Gov. Ted Strickland and Ohio lawmakers have become spectacles.
Last week the Ohio Senate held hearings to ask legitimate questions about how the process of adding 17,500 slot machines at Ohio’s seven horse race tracks would really work and how the governor’s people concluded that gamblers would feed the state almost $1 billion in the next two years.
Notwithstanding all the emphatic assurances that the money really will materialize, that bad things won’t happen if the tracks set up temporary gambling facilities in their parking lots, and that the Ohio Lottery Commission can run de facto casinos, the governor’s plan is absurd.
The Senate’s motive behind the hearing — to expose the uncertainties and risks associated with slots — was partly pure. But the Republicans running that show also are playing games.
While they’re all too happy to punch holes in the slots proposal, they refuse to say how the state should go about raising or cutting $1 billion. They want the easy and politically cheap way out.
On the other side of the Statehouse, House Democrats were bringing out people who work in social services to tell how vulnerable Ohioans would be hurt if the state balances the budget with more cuts. The problems they spoke of are real.
But the Democrats are wrong that slots are the ticket out of this mess.
The stereo effect that was created by the competing testimony was a loud reminder that both Democrats and Republicans are not serious about getting the state through a historic economic slump.
Rather, they are focused solely and selfishly on trying to score political points with voters who don’t want to pay more in taxes, but who also are going to be mad if their prison guard son-in-law is laid off, or their daughter’s tuition goes up, or their aunt doesn’t get the help she needs to stay out of a nursing home.
In December, the tax department estimated that state income-tax revenue would drop 9 percent in this fiscal year as compared with last year. That projection — if it proves true — will represent the largest such drop in the history of the tax. But by April, receipts were 15 percent lower than the year before.
We’re headed nowhere good, and unprecedented times require unprecedented leadership.
Considering that so much of what the state does is obligatory — keeping the schools running, locking up prisoners and matching the federal money that ensures that poor people have Medicaid benefits — there’s not much room to make still more cuts.
The immediate hole that has to be filled amounts to 6 percent of the state budget, but that comes on the heels of three earlier rounds of cuts. We have hit bone and raw nerves.
The governor, Senate President Bill Harris and House Speaker Armond Budish are the people who must come to an agreement. They are the individuals letting you down and putting Ohio on a path that says to all that the state can’t manage its affairs.
Enough of the arguing. These men need to do the jobs they sought.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Education, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government
TweetEditorial: Ohio can’t be against capping carbon
When the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed a historic anti-global warming bill at the end of June, Minority Leader John Boehner, R-West Chester, made a splash.
He took to the House floor for an hour — almost unheard of in a body that limits floor time because it has so many members — to read portions of the bill, highlighting their length and complexity. He said he didn’t understand some portions, and he suggested that maybe legislators should know what they are voting for. He complained that much had been added at the last minute.
When asked later why he had read from the bill for so long, he said he thought that the people should know what’s in “this pile of … ” — let’s say, garbage.
To be sure, he had a legitimate complaint.
But much of the bill’s complexity resulted from efforts to get support from lawmakers in places like Ohio.
When the Obama administration’s proposal to reduce greenhouse gases came out, a justified cry went up that it would be too hard on Ohioans.
Under that proposal, the government would have auctioned permits to release certain amounts of the carbon dioxide associated with coal, which Ohio utilities are particularly dependent on. The auction process — the proceeds of which would have been used to reduce taxes elsewhere — died.
Now the House bill would have the government give away most of the permits. Beyond that, coal companies would get billions in incentives to pursue “clean coal,” which some environmentalists say isn’t realistic. And they’d get incentives to “capture” their carbon-dioxide emissions.
Added, too, were ways to protect the poorest consumers of electricity from price hikes. According to the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office, the poorest 20 percent of the population would not be harmed by the bill, but would actually come out a little better.
The average family, meanwhile, would pay about $175 more a year by 2020.
Farming interests also won concessions. (The Ohio Farm Bureau, which has 234,000 members, still opposes the bill.) So did a legislator from Chicago, who wanted green jobs for inner-city residents. And Florida got a $50 million hurricane research center.
The process of adding things to buy votes wasn’t pretty. It angered a lot of people. Some liberal Democrats, including Cleveland’s Dennis Kucinich, voted against the bill, seeing it as not nearly strong enough. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth also decided to oppose the supposedly environmentalist bill.
But the main result of all the politics-as-usual activity was legislation that’s historic. It is projected to reduce greenhouse emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and 85 percent by 2020. It would do this primarily by setting a national limit on emissions and allowing emitters to trade “credits” that allow them to emit a certain amount. If you emit less than your targets, you can make money. If you fail, you aren’t shut down, but you have to pay.
The hard core of opposition is the Republican Party, which rejects the official projections about the bill’s cost.
The hyperpartisan nature of the times is at work. A vocal part of the Republican base still listens to political warriors who are convinced that man-made global warning is not a problem, no matter what the vast majority of scientific opinion says.
The virtually solid Republican opposition — even after the auction (decried as a tax) was eliminated — required the sponsors to scratch for all the Democrats they could get. Some Democrats were leery. U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, from an Ohio swing district on the West Virginia border, in coal country, voted no.
Rep. Zack Space, from just west of the Wilson district, voted for the bill because of the late changes. Freshman Rep. John Boccieri, representing Canton, also voted yes. Both Democrats hold districts that were long held by Republicans. They have now been targeted by Republican ad campaigns because of their votes.
And yet something must be done about global warming. Democrats, being in control of the government, must take responsibility for designing the basic approach. House Democrats have done that.
Now the Senate needs to take a close look, especially at those provisions added in a hurry. But its focus, too, has to be on making historic change.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Energy, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Fehrenbach was right to confront Obama
Air Force Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach, a Wayne High School graduate, was doing his duty when he confronted President Barack Obama on Monday about the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays.
Lt. Col. Fehrenbach, 39, was among 250 to 300 gays and lesbians who came to the White House on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion that helped launch the gay rights movement. In his two-minute discussion with the president, the highly decorated aviator said he emphasized that his comrades didn’t care about his sexual orientation, that they saw it as a “non-issue.”
The son of an Air Force lieutenant colonel, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach, who was born at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and once served there, has had a distinguished career, serving the country for 18 years as a navigator. After Sept. 11, he was handpicked to join a team charged with protecting Washington, D.C.’s air space.
Even so, commanders at his Idaho air base are trying to drive him out of the service for one foolish reason: a civilian acquaintance told them he is gay.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to hear a challenge to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in an appeal filed by former Army Capt. James E. Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed based on his sexual orientation.
In its decision, the court deferred to the executive branch, noting that the Obama administration has asked for a review of the policy. President Obama said he was against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell during his campaign. The administration is still saying it plans a reconsideration.
Any change by this administration, though, will likely come too late to help Lt. Col. Fehrenbach, who could be dismissed by September.
Though the court declined to rule on the constitutionality of the policy in the Pietrangelo case, there are respectable arguments that discharging gay military personnel is unconstitutional. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell codifies overt discrimination. But, after all, the Constitution has a guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Another case working its way toward a Supreme Court appeal that opponents of the policy believe presents a better case for overturning it on constitutional grounds.
In that case, a San Francisco court ruled the Air Force must prove “troop readiness” and “unit cohesion” would be damaged (part of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’s rationale) unless a gay flight nurse is removed from duty.
The logic of that decision is seen as similar to the logic the Supreme Court used in striking down Texas sodomy laws as an invasion of privacy in 2003, according to a Washington Post story.
A court decision is not the best way to resolve this question. Better that elected officials take account of changing times and take responsibility.
Lt. Col. Fehrenbach can do his job every bit as effectively today as before his superiors discovered he was gay. But Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell forces the Air Force to waste time and money pushing good people like him out of the service.
Any way you look at it, the case for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is weak. And it’s getting weaker all the time, as fewer and fewer people care about anybody else’s sexual orientation.
Every time a quality individual like Lt. Col. Fehrenbach is chased away, the military is weaker.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Editorials, Scott Elliott, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: States should count grads same way
Summer may be down time for students and teachers, but it is the busy season for education data. Right now, Ohio’s school districts are double-checking reports from the state about test scores and attendance and graduation rates, in preparation for the August public release of their report cards.
That’s when an odd problem with graduation rates will resurface.
Ohio’s most recent official data shows a statewide graduation rate of 86.9 percent, which sounds pretty good. Except that rate might not be real. A nonprofit group called Editorial Projects in Education says the percentage is actually 10 points lower.
Who’s right? Hard to say.
There are several different methods that states use to calculate graduation rates. Ohio’s approach, called the “leaver rate,” is considered a relatively good measure and is used by most states. But the rap on it is that school districts can “code” kids who depart as either dropouts or transfers. Critics say districts may err on the side of listing kids as transfers if they are unsure, which artificially inflates their final graduation rate.
Editorial Projects in Education’s more stringent approach essentially counts any unaccounted for kids as dropouts when comparing a class as it moves from grade to grade and, finally, to graduation. Neither approach is perfect, but if the country and the state are serious about pushing more kids to graduate, policy makers need valid, comparable data. That requires having a common method for calculating graduation rates.
The good news is that this thought has occurred to a few people. The National Governors Association even got Ohio and other states to promise they would go to a common standard by 2014, and last year former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the federal government would require it.
While President Barack Obama is expected to continue Secretary Spellings’ graduation rate initiative, there hasn’t been much talk about it. This could put Ohio, which was aiming to make the change in 2011, and other states in a holding pattern.
Converting to a common approach isn’t as simple as it might seem. Some states have far worse data systems than Ohio and will need a few years of building up information just to be able to do the math the right way.
Meanwhile, Ohio is in the midst of implementing a new data system that will assign every child a unique identification number. That should make it much easier to track where kids go when they leave a school. With today’s computing power, it’s crazy that kids routinely disappear from school and nobody can say for certain whether they ended up elsewhere or dropped out.
But the ID system is several years away from being ready to use for calculating graduation rates.
The method Secretary Spellings favored had some differences with what the governors had proposed. President Obama and his education team need to weigh in on what they want and when they want states to convert. They need to keep this ball rolling.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetCheck out this mountain biking video
Check out this video from mountain biking at MetroParks’ Mountain Biking Area.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Kevin Riley, Sports and Recreation, Transportation
TweetKevin Riley: Go mountain biking
When you tell someone around here you’re going mountain biking, they assume you’re going out of town.
When you tell them, no, you’re going mountain biking in Dayton, you get a funny look.
But it can be done here — and in a big way.
Watch a video where I prove it.
Five Rivers MetroParks has for almost two years been operating a remarkable mountain biking area at Huffman MetroPark. A tour of the trails, which are on more than 100 acres, provides an exhilarating bike ride and showcases the larger regional effort to use natural resources to create an attractive community.
The MetroParks Mountain Biking Area, called MoMBA for short, has 8.3 miles of trails with different degrees of difficulty. It cost about $150,000 to build, and some 60 volunteers helped with the project.
With MetroParks’ Greg Brumitt leading the way, I found myself shooting along narrow trails, splashing through creeks and making hairpin turns as I tried to gain speed to begin a short climb. Brumitt knew I was on a mountain biking trail for the first time, so he shouted advice as we rolled through the sunlight-speckled woods, warning me on tough turns and big bumps that were coming up.
He also had this bit of counsel: focus on where you want to go, not what you want to avoid. If you stare at that big tree, you’ll hit it.
(I didn’t hit any trees, and, while Brumitt doesn’t claim to be a philosopher, he may have developed a useful metaphor for approaching life in general.)
Six different trails offer riders at all skill levels a chance to enjoy MoMBA. Kids are welcome. The easier trails are a good way to start, and the park district has a number of programs for beginners. The more difficult trails, with changing elevations and narrow paths between trees, give riders a chance to test their skills and get a demanding workout.
When you’re on the trails — just minutes from downtown off State Route 4 — you’re surrounded by nature, and you don’t have to make the commitment of a long trip. From start to finish, my ride — which was a little muddy, a lot of fun and a great workout — took just a couple of hours.
MetroParks’ MoMBA also fits into a bigger strategy for Dayton. Recreation opportunities are key to attracting and retaining companies, which are especially interested in drawing young, talented people. MetroParks has been part of efforts to recruit people to Wright-Patterson from other Air Force bases as part of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission process.
Our region has opportunities around its rivers and other natural resources, and we have already invested in bike trails and preservation of land. Brumitt and others, including MetroParks Executive Director Charlie Shoemaker, want Dayton to have a reputation as one of the Midwest’s best outdoor recreation centers.
So the mountain biking trails, plans for a whitewater area and the new backpacking trail in Germantown and Twin Valley MetroParks are part of building Dayton’s image.
Image-building takes time. But at least one outsider is impressed.
Chris Bernhardt was formerly with the International Mountain Bike Association and now works for a Portland, Oregon-based consulting company that specializes in bike trails. He worked with MetroParks on MoMBA.
“The community’s vision to provide close-in, active recreation is impressive,” he said. “It’s going to pay off in attracting people.” Bernhardt noted that many communities have bike trail systems and mostly along the rivers, as we do. Fewer communities have mountain biking trails.
Dayton’s opportunity is the integration of the two systems — something almost no community has, he said.
On August 14, regional cycling advocates are holding the first Miami Valley Cycling Summit. Brumitt believes that Dayton is moving toward becoming a bike-friendly, more active community. His unscientific way of measuring progress: he sees more bicycle “roof racks” on cars every day.
And he believes Dayton will eventually be seen as a hot spot for outdoor recreation. Our parks, trails, rivers and other outdoor amenities give us a chance to stand out.
“It’s hard to differentiate yourself with a mall,” he said.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Dayton Creative Class Initiative, Economy, Kevin Riley, Sports and Recreation, Transportation
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