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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 > September
September 2009
Editorial: Changes can reduce unwanted pregnancies
Stopping unwanted pregnancy should be a bipartisan goal, and yet the actions and inactions of state lawmakers go beyond failing to make progress against the problem. Legislators are actually making things worse.
First, the General Assembly required school districts to favor “abstinence-only” programs, a discredited approach that seeks only to persuade kids not to have sex until marriage. Districts that wanted to offer some frank talk — or share much practical information — about how to avoid pregnancy when sexually active found state law discouraging.
Compounding the problem, lawmakers blocked educators from establishing health education standards without legislative approval. The lawmakers were trying to assure that abstinence-only programs dominated.
Without standards, what resulted was wide variability in what kids are taught. Not enough districts have the courage to offer comprehensive sex education, that is, programs that talk about the value of abstinence while also describing methods of birth control and ways to avoid disease.
Now districts frequently rely on programs run by partisans in the sex education wars. Some hire church-affiliated groups to give pro-abstinence messages. Some would not dream of allowing other outside groups that would emphasize only birth control and other precautions.
Both approaches are foolish unless accompanied by complete, accurate, practical information that kids will need to navigate the increasingly complicated and confusing decisions that come with maturing to adulthood.
Everyone should be able to agree upon the goal of making abortion less frequent, less common and less in demand. Abstinence-only programs reach only some of the young people it’s necessary to reach toward that goal.
Two Democrats from Northwest Ohio, backed by 31 women’s groups and health organizations, said last week they will introduce a bill in the General Assembly they hoped will cut the number of unintended pregnancies in the state. They propose:
• Sex education that covers contraception, condoms, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS, in addition to abstinence.
• Access to emergency contraceptives in all hospital emergency rooms for rape victims.
• Mandated coverage of contraceptives by insurance plans that cover other prescription drugs.
Plenty of that will be controversial. The plan needs to be debated. But the core concepts make sense. Ohio should be doing more to combat unwanted pregnancy.
There’s also a federal role. Under President George W. Bush, the federal government would just fund abstinence-only sex education. Under Gov. Ted Strickland, Ohio opted out of taking those federal sex education funds due to the restrictions.
During the abstinence-only push by the Bush administration, decade-long trends that saw sexual activity by high school students going down and condom use by teens going up both came to a halt. That’s probably not a coincidence.
Abstinence-only programs failed to give kids information they needed and also failed to convince kids that abstinence is the best choice.
Abstinence certainly works when kids adhere to it. Unfortunately, statistics show that very few delay sex until marriage.
Young people come in many varieties. All need information to make choices that will avoid life-altering mistakes.
By not giving kids that information, Ohio schools contribute to their troubles and to social problems in their communities.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Are Dems for real on redistricting reform
The Ohio Senate passed redistricting reform last week on a party line vote, 21-12, with Democrats opposed. Now the question is: for proponents of reform, is that good news or bad news, given that the House is Democratic and hasn’t taken up the measure.
Answer: there might actually be some hope here.
The most knowledgeable and active reformers like a lot about the Senate bill, a product of Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering. And they have the ear of the Democrats.
Indeed, some Democrats reflect the view of the reformers when they say the problem with the Senate bill is that it doesn’t go far enough.
Now they have to live up to that talk. So far, only the Husted side has done anything.
The Senate bill would put a measure on the ballot next spring. The measure would assure that no single party gets to draw legislative districts anymore. Believe it or not, the current system puts all the power — at least in the case of state districts, as opposed to congressional ones — in the hands of whichever party holds two of these offices: governor, secretary of state and state auditor.
Sen. Husted proposes to create a seven-member, bipartisan commission to handle both legislative and congressional redistricting. Any map would need five votes from the commission to be enacted, at least two from each party.
That is a good way to deal with the partisanship problem.
But there are other problems, too.
At stake here is the competitiveness of districts. Districts can be drawn to lopsidedly favor one party. For example, Sen. Husted’s district (not drawn by him) makes a near circle around Dayton to avoid Democratic voters.
Such districts minimize the options and power of voters, because the minority party typically forfeits the race, or effectively forfeits. Also, lopsided districts tend to result in polarization. That’s because incumbents worry more about a primary challenge than about the general election.
Splitting the map-drawing power between the parties would be progress, but it wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the drawing of such districts. It could result in the two parties divvying up the districts, making most of them safe for one party or the other.
Sen. Husted’s proposal lists competitiveness as one criterion the map drawers must pursue. But some of the reformers — in this case a coalition mainly of the League of Women Voters, Ohio Citizen Action and some professors — fear that Husted’s wording makes competitiveness too low a priority.
Earlier this year, they held a map-drawing contest using rules they would like to see enacted. Members of the public were asked to draw congressional lines in Ohio (using the 2000 Census). The result: more districts turned out to be compact and competitive than the current map.
The promoters of that process and Sen. Husted ought to be able to work something out. They’re on the same basic track.
Incumbents might be expected to be unenthusiastic about making districts more competitive. That’s one reason that reformers in the past have tried to end run the Legislature, putting measures on the ballot by gathering enough public signatures.
But term limits make the job of reformers a little easier. Reform wouldn’t take effect until 2012, when many legislators will be gone.
Still, the public needs to be heard here, demanding real reform, real elections. As has often been said, this issue is about whether voters pick their politicians in real contests, or whether the politicians pick their voters by keeping the ones they don’t like out of their districts. Ohio’s current system is indefensible.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government
TweetGuest column: Ohio should modernize unemployment program
This column is written by Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal think tank based in Cleveland.
Unemployment compensation often is described as “the first line of defense” in an economic downturn. Today, it is providing income to more than 330,000 Ohioans, keeping families afloat while also bolstering the economy.
Each dollar of unemployment compensation generates $1.63 in near-term economic output, according to Moody’s Economy.com. These benefits allow many jobless workers and their families to avoid poverty. Their spending also helps local businesses.
But Ohio’s program leaves out tens of thousands of unemployed who would receive benefits if they lived in other states. While it is not widely known, the federal government is offering support to Ohio to provide these benefits — support that so far has gone unused.
Part-time workers are among those who do not fare well under Ohio’s standards.
Policy set by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services requires that out-of-work Ohioans seek full-time work in order to qualify for benefits. Those who don’t are not eligible, even if they worked for years and made more than the minimum amount needed to qualify.
Thus, a cashier at a retail store who worked 30 hours a week can’t get unemployment compensation benefits if she or he is laid off and seeks the same kind of job. This is so, even though employers pay unemployment taxes on the first $9,000 of annual earnings for workers, regardless of how many hours they work.
Twenty-six states allow jobless workers seeking part-time work to get benefits, including seven that just changed their policies this year.
Congress offered states a carrot to do so as part of the federal stimulus act approved last February. It approved a total of $7 billion for states that take steps to modernize their unemployment compensation systems, including offering benefits to those who seek part-time work.
For Ohio, that adds up to $265.5 million. So far, we have received $88.2 million — a third of the total — because Ohio counts workers’ most recent quarterly earnings when they apply for benefits, a positive reform that the state adopted many years ago.
In order to qualify for the remaining $176.3 million, Ohio must approve two of four other reforms:
• Allow unemployed workers seeking part-time work to qualify.
• Allow workers with compelling family circumstances to qualify, including victims of domestic violence, those caring for an immediate family member who is sick, and those following a spouse to a place not within commuting distance from their job due to a change in the location of the spouse’s employment.
• Pay $15 a week in unemployment benefits for each dependent of a claimant who is receiving benefits, up to $50 a week.
• Extend benefits for 26 weeks to those who participate in approved training programs. The workplace has changed since 1935, when the unemployment compensation system was designed around families that depended on one male breadwinner. Most women work, and part-time work is the norm in some industries. Most of Ohio’s million part-time workers are women, and many earn relatively low wages. More workers need training as they move to new jobs.
Can Ohio afford to modernize its unemployment compensation system when our trust fund is broke?
The answer is yes. The cost of these reforms is modest. Experts have pegged the cost of adopting part-time eligibility at less than $27 million a year. The training option would be less expensive than that, especially now.
Compare this with the $176 million Ohio would receive, and you can see that the state’s unemployment trust fund would actually benefit from these improvements for the next several years.
The federal recovery act does not permit states to limit the effective dates for implementing these options. Otherwise, states could enact them for just long enough to collect the payments, and not extend benefits to many of the workers Congress intended to benefit from the improvements.
However, the General Assembly would be free to repeal the changes starting in 2012. While these positive changes are beneficial in any economy, they are especially essential in this deep recession. Legislators should help Ohio workers and the economy by acting now to modernize Ohio’s unemployment compensation system.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Guest Columns, Ohio government
TweetEditorial: GOP’s Bennett goes after the talking heads
Former longtime Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett has distinguished himself by lambasting “some of our talking heads” and calling for some civility in politics — and addressing his remarks to Republicans.
The word “distinguished” here was chosen carefully. Mr. Bennett is close to alone in the Republican Party in standing up this way. More and more, the GOP’s elected officials seem afraid of the talk-show people, a fact that Mr. Bennett noted.
Speaking of the ludicrous scare some talking heads put out about President Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren, Mr. Bennett said, “Not one Republican senator, to my knowledge, stood up and objected to what was being driven as a Republican message.”
Mr. Bennett was speaking to the Ohio GOP Central and Executive Committee, the party’s governing board. One might reasonably guess that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have some big fans in that group. (Mr. Bennett mentioned those two personalities.)
Now, one might treat this event as the surfacing of a turf battle over who speaks for the Republican Party. Certainly the talking heads enjoy bashing people like Mr. Bennett — the Republican “establishment” — as too wimpy in confronting Democrats.
One might also note that Mr. Bennett undermined his case for civility when he called U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson — of “You lie!” fame — a “complete idiot” who should resign. (Or one might note how incivility breeds incivility.)
But the larger point here is that the Republican Party does need to have this discussion. “I just think that we have to bring civility to the process if we’re going to have any credibility as Republicans and as a Republican Party,” Mr. Bennett said.
“Every time something like that happens, we lose,” he said, referring to the storm of outrage about a president’s speech about the need to stay in school and buckle down.
The discussion of civility ties in with the controversy about whether the president’s opponents are racists. It’s a reasonable suspicion, because the rage of some anti-Obama forces is so intense — the hatred so furious — that it reminds a lot of people of the ranting of the racists as the nation turned from them.
But the truth is that if Hillary Clinton were president and were pursuing the same course as President Obama, the hatred would be just as intense. And some people would wonder if it had something to do with her gender. But if Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton were president, same thing.
The animosity is about politics. In a day when hate speech about race, religion, nationality or ethnicity is not acceptable, politics becomes a substitute for those on the airwaves.
The talking heads try to cut off such criticism by pretending it’s part of an effort to silence them through government regulation. It’s not. They’re protected by the Constitution, and that’s that.
But their role has to be recognized. They have an impact, even on people who don’t listen to them or share their views. Some voters just don’t like to see the nation at war with itself. They hold the prevailing bitterness against the president himself, because they see his job as uniting the nation (within reason).
Those people and the politicians alike need to understand that, while reasonable people can disagree strongly about health care and President Obama’s course, the ugly screaming is coming from a small minority — however vocal, visible and energized — that generally has certain listening and viewing habits.
And the Republican politicians need to decide if they’re content to be seen as run by that group.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetGuest column: Medicaid must reimburse pediatric specialists fairly
This column is written by Dr. Thomas Murphy, of Miamisburg. He is vice president for medical affairs at the Children’s Medical Center of Dayton.
It’s time to have a real conversation about health care reform and how our children will be impacted. True health care reform will not be successful until the full range of care for all children — from primary care to the most specialized treatment — becomes a central point for controlling the expensive, preventable conditions of adulthood.
Throughout the health reform debate, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have rightly focused on expanding health insurance coverage for all Americans — including children. However, we must understand that providing coverage does not guarantee access to care.
Medicaid reimbursement often does not cover the cost of care, which forces many physicians and providers to limit the number of Medicaid-covered patients they see. Medicaid is this country’s single-largest children’s health insurance program, covering one in three children in Ohio and one in four nationally. That makes Medicaid the single-largest payer for children’s hospitals, including Dayton Children’s.
Currently, 50 percent of Dayton Children’s patients rely on Medicaid for their health care coverage. Yet, Medicaid reimburses our hospital as much as 20 to 30 percent less than Medicare pays for the care of adult patients.
Even after supplemental programs for Medicaid providers, Dayton Children’s saw $20 million in Medicaid losses last fiscal year.
This payment challenge is just as great for many of the dedicated pediatricians and pediatric specialists here at Dayton Children’s, with children on Medicaid making up more than half their practice. These pediatric specialists get paid 30 percent less than their colleagues who care for Medicare patients.
This is a primary reason why so many doctors stay away from pediatric specialty care. This growing gap in Medicaid reimbursement is a huge barrier that impacts our children’s access to care and experts. Children currently experience long wait times for many specialty-care appointments, which can result in delays in care and increased emergency room use.
This common situation is not just bad medicine; it’s bad business and completely unsustainable.
The House health reform bill — America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 — would begin to address this inequity in what Medicaid pays primary-care providers by increasing the reimbursement rates to 100 percent of what Medicare pays — over time. Sadly, this increase does not apply to pediatric specialty care, which includes the most critical provider shortages in children’s health care.
Congress must take note of the needs of children in health care reform, including that the most critical work-force shortages in pediatrics are not in primary care, as they are in adult medicine.
Health care reform must translate into access to the right care, at the right time, in the right setting for children. This can only be achieved if Medicaid reimburses pediatric specialists fairly — by extending the House primary-care payment provision.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown has recognized the crisis in the pediatric specialist work force, and he has already incorporated pediatric work-force training measures in the Senate legislation. Brown is committed to focusing the attention of Congress on the Medicaid payment problem and pediatric access to specialist care.
The Ohio congressional delegation and Congress should join with Brown to ensure that the promise of coverage for children under health reform means children get the care they need, when they need it.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Health Care
TweetEditorial: Strickland, Ohio are out of choices
Gov. Ted Strickland needs to give it up.
He can’t unilaterally bring video lottery terminals to Ohio. If he’s going to insist on trying to find a way around the Ohio Supreme Court’s 6-1 ruling this week preventing him from allowing slots at racetracks, he effectively is defying the state’s highest court.
That’s the wrong road to go down.
He must decide now how to respond to the coming $1 billion shortfall that is just the tip of Ohio’s financial problems.
Slots were supposed to bring in $851 million over the next two years. Given the court’s decision (and other pending challenges to expanding gambling), the chances of that money materializing are poorer than poor.
Meanwhile, the state has already cut $2.4 billion from the original two-year budget he proposed and there’s $6 billion in one-time money — mostly from the federal stimulus — being used to keep Ohio in the black.
Clearly, Ohio is either going to have to raise taxes or further reduce spending.
Keep in mind, too, that getting through this budget cycle will be simple compared to figuring out how, in the next budget, to make up for the feds’ money. That help represents more than 10 percent of this two-year spending plan.
The state’s financial mess is, of course, due in large part to the recession. But another reality is that Ohio has cut personal and business taxes, hoping those moves would attract jobs and, ultimately, bring in more tax revenue.
That hasn’t happened. That fact is not necessarily a fatal indictment. It takes time for tax policies to make a difference, to even be recognized.
That said, businesses don’t move to a state, or grow jobs where they are, solely because of tax policy. There are always more considerations. The thing to guard against is having a total tax burden that’s out of whack. In truth, that was the reputation Ohio had acquired.
A short four years ago, however, Ohio dramatically overhauled its tax code — establishing the broad, but small, Commercial Activities Tax. It also phased in cuts in individual tax rates by a dramatic 21 percent.
Now, here we are, reeling from the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and the state doesn’t have the money to adequately support its schools and colleges; keep up its infrastructure; protect its resources; and look after the most vulnerable.
The combination of cuts was too much — and that problem has been compounded by the economic crisis.
Slashing spending further is not the way out. The only places to cut that would result in significant savings are schools and colleges, Medicaid (though because of the federal match, cutting $10 only saves about $5), and prisons. Those are the big drivers.
Gov. Strickland has been adamantly opposed to raising taxes. That’s nice, but exactly what straw does he propose to spin into gold?
There are options:
— The last of five installments of the 21-percent tax cut for individuals started this year. If that 4.2 percent cut were rescinded, that would raise $900 million.
— The new CAT tax, a business tax on gross receipts, could be increased from 0.26 percent to 0.38 percent, to raise a similar amount.
— The cigarette tax could be increased. If it was hiked another $1.25 per pack, that could bring in $1.5 billion for the biennium (though that amount might be smaller if large numbers of people were enticed to quit). Other tobacco products also could be taxed.
Gov Strickland and lawmakers who’ve been around know that something has to be done. Choosing not to do the obvious will have powerfully negative and lasting effects on the state. The denial phase has to end.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Education, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Death penalty too grisly to allow
The dreadful scene at Ohio’s Lucasville prison on Sept. 15 — when executioners tried unsuccessfully for two hours to find a vein to administer a lethal injection to Romell Broom — is one more reason why Ohio should get rid of its death penalty.
This process is ugly, inhumane — whether it’s done right or wrong, successfully or unsuccessfully.
The courts aren’t likely to give Mr. Broom, who abducted, raped and stabbed to death a 14-year-old East Cleveland girl who was walking home from a high school football game, a permanent reprieve. That would be hard to rationalize — that having a horrendous time in the execution chamber is a reason to escape this ultimate punishment. As terrible as it was for Mr. Broom, a one-time botched execution try does not itself constitute cruel and unusual punishment, not so long as the death penalty is allowed.
There is, however, a danger here. Ohio’s lethal injection procedure has now resulted in three cases since 2006 that dragged on excruciatingly long, as prison personnel were unable to find usable veins to administer a cocktail of drugs that anesthetize, paralyze and stop the heart. Mr. Broom’s case comes after new procedures were put in place to try to resolve the problem.
While it likely will not benefit Mr. Broom, a pattern of problems that could cause pain and suffering for a condemned inmate is just the sort of thing that might eventually lead to emancipation from death row for a future convicted killer. It’s the pattern, and the state’s failure to successfully correct the situation, that eventually could make a compelling legal argument that the state is out of control.
The problem of botched injections begins with personnel. The state simply cannot get the most qualified people for this horrific job because so many health professionals abhor the death penalty. Also as important, organizations of doctors, nurses and anesthesiologists bar those professionals from participating in an execution.
So Ohio uses emergency medical technicians — the folks who ride in ambulances — now that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the state board governing EMTs could not ban them from executions.
The unanimous rejection of the death penalty by medical groups should tell Ohio lawmakers — and citizens themselves — something.
If Ohio insists on continuing with the death penalty, it must get the procedure right. The state should probably just adopt Kentucky’s lethal injection procedures, which were specifically upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year in the case of Baze v. Rees. Kentucky’s rules, for instance, have a one-hour limit for the team to find a usable vein before it must contact the governor and ask for the execution to be rescheduled.
There are a host of persuasive arguments against executions. The fact that DNA tests have shown disturbingly often that people have been put to death for crimes they didn’t commit haunts anyone who really thinks about the issue.
So many doubts have been raised in capital cases around the country that public support for the death penalty has sunk, and several states have put a halt to executions.
The inability of Ohio to effectively administer capital punishment is just one more reason why the heinous punishment should be junked.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Suburbs need law to settle war
Solving the expensive, seemingly never-ending battle between Sugarcreek Twp. and Centerville about the former Dille farm apparently is going to take either a decision by the Ohio Supreme Court or an act by the legislature.
The latter would be best.
The fight has dragged on for three years and, between the two sides, cost more than a half-million dollars in taxpayer money. The owners of the 268 acres of land, located in a prime spot near the Wilmington Pike interchange along Interstate 675, asked in 2006 to be annexed to Centerville. That deal was completed with developers standing by, waiting to add commercial buildings to the land.
The Ohio Legislature wrote special rules in 2001 to address just this sort of situation involving a landowner who wants to be annexed to a city. The law was supposed to speed that process and preclude the sort of lengthy court battles that have bogged down many past annexation cases.
Notwithstanding the law change, Centerville and Sugarcreek are bitterly engaged in a legal war over what the law allows.
Developers want to use “tax increment financing” to build on the old Dille farmland. That financing strategy spends future tax revenues from a development project to make improvements to the property now.
What Centerville and Sugarcreek are fighting about is who gets those future tax revenues. Sugarcreek insists it is entitled to a portion.
Because the law is fairly new and each side thinks it has the right interpretation, both are insistent on continuing to fight in court. Rulings in this case have implications that could affect other so-called TIF development deals.
With an issue this complex, there is a lot of risk for both sides that a major ruling could hamstring either cities or townships across the state.
A recent Second District Court of Appeals decision demonstrates that danger. Because the issue is so complicated and the ruling so detailed, lawyers on both sides are, days later, still not certain what it means for them.
On balance, the outcome seems most beneficial to Centerville. But the judges also said Sugarcreek was entitled to some future tax revenues. And they left unsettled the question of who should receive the biggest chunk of future tax revenue.
Centerville Council member Brooks Compton, a lawyer, says the battle over TIF financing is so important for future development projects that the issue may have to be decided by the Ohio Supreme Court.
There is another way. The legislature could clarify the 2001 law to make clear what is, and what is not, intended by the original language. A legal fix is a better option than leaving these calls to judges.
With this case as a prime example of what has gone wrong with the original law, Dayton-area lawmakers should push for changes that can settle the issue. A fix needs to be made.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetKevin Riley: All eyes on STEM school
To see a photographs from the grand opening, click here.
Last week when the Dayton Regional STEM School held its grand opening, you had to be impressed.
A long list of regional and state leaders stepped up to the microphone to celebrate getting the one-of-a-kind school in this region off the ground.
Among the speakers: Wright State University President David Hopkins, Dayton Development Coalition President Jim Leftwich and Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut. Former Congressman Dave Hobson, one of the major forces behind establishing the school, was in the crowd, too.
But the really impressive people that night were the students and staff, including two students who served as emcees and greeted the crowd in Chinese, the language that the school’s students are learning.
Other students served as tour guides, proudly showing off their new school. The students started classes Aug. 17.
One student, 14-year-old Sierra Davis, of Trotwood, explained the school this way: “It’s like a normal school, but you learn differently.”
Sierra’s explanation points out why the Dayton Regional STEM School represents an important and closely watched experiment in education for our region and state. The school emphasizes the STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and gives its students real world experiences and problem-solving skills.
The idea is that these are the kinds of skills that students will need to succeed in the work world of the 21st century. These students also are the kinds of employees and young talent that Ohio and the Dayton region need to develop as we transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based, high-tech economy.
So educators, local governments, Wright State and other colleges, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and area high-tech companies got together to organize and fund it. The school is located along Interstate 675 near Wright State’s campus. It’s temporarily being housed in a Clark State University building.
Dayton’s STEM school is one of several in the state, but it’s the only one that is open to students from a region, rather than a specific school district.
Students from 30 school districts in Montgomery, Greene and Clark counties were eligible to apply to the school, which has 81 ninth-graders for this year. Eventually it will have grades six through 12 with an enrollment of 600.
The hope is that students like Sierra, whose father drives her to school each day, will come to school from throughout the area, providing the Dayton region with an asset that is strongly connected to local universities, Wright-Patt and local companies.
One of the teachers at the school believes those kinds of connections are important, based on her own experiences.
Linda Hallinan, of Oakwood, spent more than 20 years as a mechanical engineer, including working for Delphi. About three years ago, she decided to change careers, and now she’s the STEM school’s science and engineering teacher.
She’s driven by a passion to connect students — especially young women — to the real world of science and engineering.
Hallinan, who said she spent much of her engineering career as the only woman in meetings, has several plaques in her classroom that acknowledge her patents. She considers them an important message to her students about what they can achieve.
In fact, part of her curriculum includes having students come up with their own ideas for patents.
“I hope that my patents will set an example, as my students will take time two Fridays a quarter to brainstorm ideas for patents,” she said. “I would like to help inspire this future generation.”
The state’s leadership is also hoping the school inspires changes to the educational system.
Chancellor Fingerhut made a point of being at the grand opening — even though his responsibility is for higher education, not K-12. He said he knows that projects like Dayton’s STEM school are critical to the higher education system and Ohio’s future.
“The entire state is behind you. We are watching,” he said. “We’re learning from you.”
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TweetMartin Gottlieb: Sully symbolized politics for many who loved it
I think I heard of Sully in my first week in Dayton, in 1984 — and then heard his name a half dozen more times in a couple of months. By the time I met him, I felt I knew him. He turned out to be just as I imagined.
It’s not that James E.P. (Sully) Sullivan — as the ritual newspaper ID goes — was such a great power. He was known during that particular passage as the right-hand man of Joe Shump, the chairman of the Democratic Party. Shump was the power, Sully the sidekick.
I think he got talked about so much because Dayton politicos enjoyed having a Sully around. He made politics politics, as the term was understood in certain times and places. You could imagine Damon Runyon writing about him, or Jimmy Breslin.
He could be a character in “The Last Hurrah,” an iconic novel about big-city politics in the early 20th century.
He was the behind-the-scenes guy who was always there, always kibitzing, helping, doing whatever. He was characterized by fierce loyalty to his boss and party and a strong belief in the human element — the human touch — in politics, as opposed to ideology and all that.
And he simply loved politics — not only the game, but the game’s connection with doing good things. He was a sentimentalist about it all, as shown by his collection of memorabilia. He loved to talk politics.
“So, who do think is the best (politician) to come out of here in your time?” was a question he put to a newspaper guy visiting him on other business.
At a big event for the party, he might be a greeter, trying to make you feel welcome, like an old friend.
He could schmooze with the best, having some old, reliable lines. What did the E.P. in his name stand for? Elvis Presley.
When Chairman Shump became the victim of an internal party uprising, Sully lost his position as a precinct captain. Specifically, a supporter of the uprising ran against him in the precinct, because the precinct captains elect the county chairman. Sully said he felt like the victim of a drive-by shooting.
But incoming Chairman Dennis Lieberman recognized him as a party institution and kept him involved. A whole new generation of activists and journalists came to know him.
I had grown up in Chicago in mid-century, the heyday of the Daley Machine. The Machine was built around the human element. The party wanted somebody in every precinct tending to the needs of the people, whether the need in question was for work done by the city, or for a job for a family member (that is, a job with the city or with somebody who wanted to stay on the city’s good side), or whether the need was just for condolences or congratulations.
Sully, who died Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 89, could also have been a figure in a Mike Royko column about Chicago.
When I started in newspapers, I expected to come across more people like him than there turned out to be. He was of his times, and the times were changing. I suppose that’s another reason people felt such affection for him.
I don’t claim to have known him well. I couldn’t tell you, for example, just exactly what he did for Joe Shump, aside from his official jobs with, say, the elections board. Was he a “ward healer,” the guy who tried to keep peace in the party? Or was the idea more to just be there as somebody for Shump to talk to, and to handle details?
But like everybody who knew him at all, I knew there was a lot more there than a fun personality. Famously, he made a trek up Mount Kilimanjaro to find the remains of his son, after training for a year and a half. The character with character, as somebody characterized him on an Internet site for grievers.
Sully saw politics change a lot on his watch. In his later years, he used to tell people how, when he and the eventually legendary state Rep. C. J. McLin started out, when they showed up at a meeting, somebody would tell them how they were voting.
He went with change — including the uprising against Shump in favor of a more democratic Democratic Party — as well as anybody. He didn’t turn sour, as so many do. He left people from several generations — including people far younger than I — remembering him fondly.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetGuest column: State relies on each district to provide, check its data
This column was written by Deborah Delisle, Ohio’s superintendent of public instruction.
Re the Dayton Daily News editorial, “School data means nothing if it’s wrong,” Aug. 25: The Ohio Department of Education absolutely agrees that the data-collection process must provide an accurate presentation of what’s occurring in schools.
Each year, the department collects more than 400 unique pieces of information from 1,045 individual entities, including public school districts, community schools and educational service centers. This information is critical for calculating the amount of state funding schools receive, compiling performance accountability metrics for state report cards, complying with No Child Left Behind, and meeting state reporting requirements, as well as for reports on which federal funding is dependent.
We do rely on these entities to report information through our data-collection system.
A series of checks and balances exists to ensure the information reported is as accurate as possible. Throughout this process, we rely on the reporting entities to verify their information.
Some of the checks conducted are basic. For example, if no data is reported, or if an analysis shows that 100 percent of students have been reported in one category, these issues raise a flag. The reporting entity is made aware of the possible issue and reviews the information.
Other checks involve reviewing trends over time to determine if there is a spike or dip in a particular element.
Again, we alert the reporting entity that there may be an issue, ask it to investigate and confirm the data, and then we readjust the report as needed.
The expulsion data referenced in the editorial is evaluated by several checks: one for no reported information, one that looks at changes from previously reported numbers, and a check that looks for high expulsion rates.
We did notify the Dayton school district on several occasions, highlighting all potential data issues. The department has no way of knowing if the information is incorrect. We can only ask that districts check what they have submitted.
In addition to checking data, the department has worked with the General Assembly to obtain the authority to initiate enforcement actions when issues go uncorrected. Recently, the education department was authorized to withhold funds, require corrective action plans and, in exceptional cases, revoke licenses when misreporting occurs.
In 2008, the department of education required 236 corrective action plans from entities that did not meet data submission requirements, most of which also had temporary financial penalties applied. We are monitoring entities with corrective action plans.
In addition to mistakes that have been made, the editorial also pointed out a recent incident involving test scores that were allegedly changed by a school district official. It is correct that schools are responsible for reporting test scores. The reason is that schools may challenge test scores of individual students and, if the scoring company finds a mistake, the school would need to correct that score. There is a check run against what the school submits to the education department and what is received initially from the testing vendor.
Too many changed scores in a particular district will raise a flag.
In the case highlighted, the changes that were allegedly made did not meet the threshold needed to generate a flag. However, it is also important to note that someone in the district alerted us to the matter.
An overwhelming majority of Ohio’s educators are honest. The data is not collected or reported in a vacuum, and as multiple individuals in a district have the opportunity to review the information, they are often the best defense when issues like this occur.
Ohio has a well-regarded data-collection system. Even with this acclaim, it is not a perfect system, and mistakes happen. However, with each of these instances, we learn something and look for ways to improve.
Practically speaking, it’s unlikely any system that collects as much information as ours does will be completely error-free — but that is what we strive for.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns
TweetEditorial: Murky law in Husted case needs to be fixed
Anybody reading Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s 12-page decision about state Sen. Jon Husted’s residency is likely to conclude that one problem here is the law. The law is a mess.
Secretary Brunner, a Democrat, was obliged to send the Montgomery County Board of Elections her views on whether Sen. Husted, R-Kettering, should be allowed to vote in Kettering, or whether he must be considered a resident of Franklin County.
The local board had deadlocked on the issue twice, 2-2, along political party lines. The secretary of state breaks ties. The Ohio Supreme Court recently gave Secretary Brunner seven days to make her decision, criticizing her for taking too long.
This point cannot be made too often:
The issue here is not whether Sen. Husted can represent Kettering (and many other Dayton suburbs) in the Senate, but only whether he can vote in Kettering. The question is loaded with political freight for a candidate for secretary of state, as Sen. Husted is. (Secretary Brunner is running for the Democratic nomination to replace George Voinovich in the U.S. Senate.)
At bottom, this is a story about an appropriately ambitious young man who went to Columbus as a legislator, successfully sought to be speaker of the House and married a Columbus woman. Under those circumstances, the fact that he spent little time in Dayton is pardonable.
But the law must be confronted.
The mess:
Republicans on the county elections board point to a law that says that when a person “enters the employment of the state, the place where such person resided at the time … shall be considered” the place of residence.
They also point to a passage that says that when a person leaves the state to serve the state, that person shall not lose his or her residency. Sen. Husted hasn’t left the state, but the spirit of that law might be seen as protecting him.
Meanwhile, though, the Democrats on the board cite a law that says that the “place where the family of a married person resides shall be considered to be the person’s place of residence” for voting purposes. That place, in the Husted case, is clearly Franklin County.
Beyond all that, several passages in the law focus on a person’s “intention of returning” as the determining factor for deciding a voting address. Sen. Husted insists he intends to return to Kettering.
And yet he is running for statewide office. And his family seems to have no ties to Kettering.
Secretary Brunner does not mention his candidacy in her decision. But she does make the point about his family in the context of a discussion of intent.
Relying mostly on the law about where spouses live, Secretary Brunner ruled Sen. Husted is a resident of the Columbus area. She says she didn’t want to rule against him, that the last thing she wants to do is deprive a person of his voting registration. But, she says, the law is the law.
Sen. Husted responded to her decision saying, “This is another partisan, political decision that is typical of Jennifer Brunner.”
Sen. Husted’s real enemy here is the law, because it does give comfort to his critics, and because it’s ambiguous. He should help fix it, either as a senator or secretary of state.
Secretary Brunner says she hopes the Supreme Court, to which Sen. Husted has appealed, will issue guidance as to which laws trump which. Failing that, she says, the Legislature should clarify things.
Somebody needs to.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Amtrak keeps hope alive for 3C trains
Last year, Gov. Ted Strickland ordered up a study by Amtrak about how Ohio’s biggest cities might be linked by passenger trains: how long it would take to build a system; how much it would cost; that sort of thing.
It was a complex study to do, because the state is a maze of ancient, modern and incomplete tracks and rights-of-way, owned by various freight train operations.
The report came in last week, in time for the state to put together its application for federal stimulus money, which is due in October.
Whether the study comforts the proponents or opponents of train travel is a matter of debate.
It projects a half million people will use the train in the first year. Seems like a lot, but that amounts to 1,300 persons a day, in a state of 11 million.
It posits six and half hours for a trip from Cincinnati to Cleveland. Some people find that laughably long, compared to car travel of 4 to 4½ hours, nonstop, depending on weather and who’s conducting your car.
But most train travelers seem likely to take shorter trips, where the time differences don’t seem so big. Anyway, there are always trade-offs in choosing modes of travel. With trains, there’s more travel time, but you can put the time to better use.
Moreover, the idea is not to replace cars, but to add an option for people who don’t have a reliable car, don’t like to drive, don’t want to use the gasoline, have trouble dealing with a spike in gas prices, or whatever.
The study puts forth a train schedule that it emphasizes is “preliminary.” To the relief of some, it imagines more than just one or two trains a day. (See page 13.)
But day trips would have to be scheduled very tightly, at best.
And the schedule doesn’t allow for, say, going to a ball game in Cincinnati from Dayton. But that’s the sort of thing that can be addressed later.
The study pegs the cost of the 3C line (Cleveland to Cincinnati, via Columbus and Dayton) at more than $500 million of federal money, plus state and local expenditures on depots and such. It says the system would need a subsidy of $17 million a year after that. Almost no train systems support themselves.
But supporters say trains can spur economic development. Officials in Dayton and Springfield heard last week from a developer from Maine who talked about a line from Boston up to Portland that has revitalized a town in between. Robert Martin spoke of $7.2 billion in construction sparked by the train.
How that experience might translate to Ohio is not clear, particularly given Amtrak’s belief in limiting the number of stops.
Springfield, where officials have already been working on getting a station built, was not included as a stop in the Amtrak study. It still has hopes of being included eventually. It has won the attention of Columbus.
Perhaps the best case for passenger trains is the nature of Ohio. The study notes that Columbus is the largest city in the country, other than Phoenix, that has no train service. (Cleveland and Cincinnati have middle-of-the-night connections between Chicago and the East Coast.)
Moreover, the state’s cities are too close together for air travel to be attractive, except from Cincinnati to Cleveland.
The Amtrak report will not keep some people from seeing the 3C project as just another dubious big-government spending project. But spending some money that results in short-term construction jobs has something to be said for it as the nation faces an expected economic recovery in which the unemployment rate may be the last statistic to improve.
Moreover, trains can be part of a turnaround for Dayton. This community stands to benefit more than most, being the smallest metro area on the proposed line that would have service in two directions.
You know how those commercials for certain anti-cholesterol drugs say they can help if combined with good diet and exercise? Similarly, if trains are combined with other approaches to economic health, they can help lower Dayton’s cholesterol.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Transportation
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Gay rights vote foretells more about Lehner than Blair
When state Rep. Terry Blair, R-Washington Twp., voted for what was commonly known as a gay rights bill last week, a lot of people were surprised. He says in a letter on the page opposite this one that they shouldn’t have been. But, after all, no exceptions had arisen before to his identity as a conservative.
And the word does have a certain meaning. A time will (and should) come soon when conservative politicians are generally on board for basic gay rights. (This legislation was about equality in housing and jobs.) Already many conservative politicians and thinkers believe their movement should downplay the issue, rather than be seen as looking for a fight.
But when it actually came to a vote in the Ohio House, only five Republicans favored the bill, with 39 against.
Blair’s vote raised an immediate question in some minds: Has he had some experience that causes him to see gay rights differently than other conservatives? Does he have a gay friend or loved one?
That, after all, seemed to be the explanation when then-Vice President Dick Cheney broke with other conservatives and supported even gay marriage. Cheney’s daughter is a lesbian.
No, says Blair. Nothing like that. He just consulted his conscience (and his priest).
OK. So are there other surprises in store? Does he tilt to the liberal side on other social issues? Answer: He couldn’t think of any. Certainly not abortion. Not gay marriage. No.
One might note, however, that he isn’t an opponent of gambling, which some might want to count. In fact, he owns race horses. (He recused himself from a vote on the state budget because he felt the slot-machines-at-racetracks issue cut too close to home.)
The south suburbs of Dayton supplied another of the Republican renegades on gay rights: Rep. Peggy Lehner, Kettering. That, too, must have surprised people: those who assume she’s a staunch conservative because of her past as an anti-abortion activist. She’s been president of Ohio Right-to-Life. It’s a commitment of long standing.
But the vote actually gave her a chance to underline — and perhaps finally get across — a point she’s been trying to make for some time: That she’s really not the hard-charging conservative ideologue some might assume. She has presented herself as relatively moderate and pragmatic and eager to work across the political aisle. In 2004, she lost a fairly close election for the Montgomery County Commission.
If 5,000 of the 135,000 people who voted for her opponent, Debbie Lieberman, had voted the other way, she’d have won.
Observers had to wonder if her reputation on abortion had hurt her. After all, being against abortion presumably didn’t get her any votes beyond those which any Republican would be expected to get.
(On the other hand, her activism might have caused some people to contribute money to her. She outraised Lieberman 2-1.)
Meanwhile, for some Lieberman voters, abortion might have been a symbol.
Until the 1990s or so, the local Republican Party had a moderate wing. Support for abortion rights was the hottest issue identifying the moderates. Such regular election winners as Chuck Horn (a county commissioner and state senator) and Vicki Pegg (county commissioner and recorder) were members of that wing.
By this decade, that wing was routed within the party. Well, maybe some old Horn and Pegg people — nursing a little grudge — went for the Democrat in 2004.
Lehner has always seemed to be saying that Horn and Pegg supporters might be surprised how much they had in common with her, if they could get past abortion.
Since arriving in Columbus last year, she hasn’t exactly been a rebel. But the best bet is the gay rights vote says more about her general posture than about Blair, another first-termer.
Both Blair and Lehner report that the reactions they’ve received to their votes have been muted and have leaned a bit toward the positive. Maybe that’s the biggest news here: that the issue isn’t generating much heat.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetEditorial: Booing Brown was shabby
The one good thing about U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown getting booed at a Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce meeting is that we can skip the debate about whether the insult had anything to do with his race.
Definitely not likely.
That said, the incident was bad. It was, quite simply, boorish.
Lucky for Dayton that Sen. Brown is a big boy, not likely to take too much offense or never forget the experience. Some politicians definitely do have memories like an elephant, which, in this case, would not be good for Dayton.
After all, this was an audience that isn’t bashful about asking Sen. Brown to rustle up federal money for special pet projects now and again. It’s also worth noting that Dayton isn’t in front of Sen. Brown every day; when he does come to town, it would be good if the experience isn’t insulting.
That’s not about kowtowing. It’s about behaving well, even as others around you are behaving badly.
Sen. Brown was appearing before about 250 people at a chamber breakfast Friday, Sept. 18. In response to a question about the overheated rhetoric about health care, Sen. Brown, echoing former President Jimmy Carter (who touched off a controversy nationally), said, “I think some of the animosity against Barack Obama is race-based.”
That comment elicited boos, gratifying some people and mortifying others.
Sen. Brown, an avowedly liberal Democrat, could have been expected to side with the president and to have this concern about race. Trust him; he isn’t kidding when he says that if you read the e-mails and letters he receives, you’d know why he has this opinion.
In fact, you don’t even have to be a member of Congress to get that; turn on talk radio.
That said, the ugly people, the haters, are a small minority. Most of America has work to do, or at least better things to do than stoke bigotry and boldly proclaim prejudice. Yes, we all need to know such people are out there; but they don’t run the world or much of anything, which is among the reasons they’re angry.
If good and thoughtful people are making mistakes in judging others’ views about the health care debate and the role race is playing in it, their mistake is to assume the very worst about the people they disagree with, and the very best about the people they agree with.
It’s ridiculous to assume that the great bulk of people who oppose the president are driven by racial animus. There absolutely is a substantive and real ideological tug-of-war going on. Real political oxen are being gored.
At the same time, it’s equally ridiculous to deny that, in some people’s minds, President Obama couldn’t do anything right, and race is at the bottom of their contempt. You know people like this. You’ve heard them speak; some of them are probably your friends or family.
Falling into either of these traps — assuming the absolute worst or the absolute best — is giving in to forces that don’t deserve respect and that are corrosive to society and to culture. They polarize and divide people about an issue that needs our best thinking and best instincts.
Some people apologized to Sen. Brown after the chamber event, which was only appropriate.
If a few more people wrote him notes in the same vein, that’d be a good thing.
When you’re wrong or out of line, there’s nothing more cleansing than owning up to the mistake.
Permalink | Comments (64) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Health Care, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Grocers milked tax argument in absurd way
You do not want to read the Ohio Supreme Court ruling that says grocers have to pay the state’s relatively new business tax.
The 28-page decision is bor-ring, even as court rulings go.
You, however, might want to know what the ruling means for your favorite grocery store: It, like pretty much all businesses, will have to pay a tax that amounts to 26 cents on every $100 of gross receipts over $1 million.
In a 6-1 ruling, the all-Republican court said last week that grocers owe the money even though the state constitution is explicit that food can’t be taxed.
Proponents of the tax — which included Republicans and Democrats — argued that it is a business tax, not a food tax. Tying the levy to gross receipts was simply a measure — a yardstick of sorts — of business activity, not a tax on the food itself.
The justices said it’s well established that businesses can be taxed for the “privilege” of doing business in the state.
Grocers, on the other hand, had argued that the state couldn’t tax their activity without bumping into the actual food on their shelves. That distinction was extremely important to them, because they’re a high-volume, low-margin business. The tax — even though it has an exceedingly low rate — can add up in their case.
Even granting this concern, it was always a stretch to conclude that when Ohioans amended the constitution and definitively made food tax-free that they had this sort of tax in mind. The more believable, the more logical objective was to exempt food from a direct tax, such as a sales tax, at the check-out counter.
If the Republican governor and legislature — who were in charge when the tax was imposed — and a Democratic governor who advocated to keep the tax are missing something about its peculiarly onerous effects, then grocers need to document that case.
The CAT — or Commercial Activities Tax — was billed as a broad-based, low-rate levy that requires all businesses to pony up in an equitable way.
If that’s not now turning out to be the case, then let’s have that discussion. But simply saying that a whole industry is exempt from what is now Ohio’s main business tax isn’t a winning strategy.
The court’s decision is especially good news for Gov. Ted Strickland. More than $700 million was at stake. (That’s the total that would have had to be refunded for taxes paid since 2005, and the estimated amount grocers will pay during the current two-year state budget.) Given how iffy the state’s revenues are, the court’s decision was welcome.
But there’s no reason to believe the court was trying to do the state a favor or that it knew what it wanted to do and then set out to find a rationale. It makes perfect sense that the Republican justices gave the legislature the benefit of the doubt and that they would be reluctant to make the leap the grocers’ argument required.
The end result was right, and probably should have been foreseen.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Isaacs, Lee, Thompson, Lacey best picks for Dayton school board
2009 ELECTION
Dayton schools continue to struggle, but there are signs of hope.
Since a reform team known as Kids First won four seats on the school board in 2001, changes for the better have been sustained. The district is more professionally run, money is more likely to be spent on instruction, and families have better options among their school choices.
During the same period, the school board also has made blunders. It overpaid for too much downtown office space. It waited too long to ask for a levy, and then asked for too much, resulting in the request going down. Devastating cuts resulted. Overall, academic performance remains very poor. Dayton needs a school board with focus and energy.
The four incumbents seeking re-election — Yvonne Isaacs, Ronald Lee, Stacy Thompson and Joe Lacey — have mostly learned from mistakes and built on successes. Lacking a strong challenger this year, Ms. Isaacs, Mr. Lee, Ms. Thompson and Mr. Lacey are the best choices on Nov. 3.
Jim Weir, the only other candidate seeking one of the four seats, is the parent of a special needs student and seems genuinely interested in the success of the district. But he hasn’t immersed himself in the schools’ business, and he doesn’t have any concrete ideas to push. He isn’t ready for the job.
A more aggressive, better prepared challenger might have had a case to make against Mr. Lacey, who landed on the school board in 2005 following failed bids for other elective posts. Frequently, Mr. Lacey has been an obstacle, endlessly debating process questions and seeking to score political points. When given the chance to use his talents to help the board, he rarely comes through.
When Mr. Lacey complained, for instance, about the board’s process for reporting financial data to the state, his fellow board members responded by naming him head of a new audit committee. Mr. Lacey, an accountant, never formed the committee or held any meetings.
His signature concern on the board has been trying to save old buildings like Roosevelt and Julienne high schools from demolition. His interest in historic preservation is admirable, but board members should primarily be focused on student learning. He points to little evidence of his attention to that issue.
If he’s serious about being a school board member, Mr. Lacey must start to demonstrate more interest in what matters most.
Stacy Thompson and Ronald Lee have been quality players on the board, although primarily behind the scenes. Mr. Lee is the board’s point person for the district’s highly successful school construction program and has played a crucial role resolving a debate about requiring union wages on district projects. Ms. Thompson, as head of the board committee that evaluates the superintendent and treasurer, pressed for explicit review of efforts to make course work more challenging and standardized across all schools.
Both show genuine interest in focusing school leaders on student achievement. Ms. Isaacs blossomed into a leader as school board president for two years, and she remains a key voice in the board’s big decisions. During her tenure — this would be her third, four-year term — she has developed hard-earned insight. One of her strengths is her ability to learn from both mistakes and successes.
Collectively, the incumbents have made better decisions during the past two years. Recovering from the levy defeat in 2007, the board sought a smaller levy (which passed) and picked Kurt Stanic for superintendent (who has earned good reviews).
The school district can make a comeback if it builds on ideas that are working. Yvonne Isaacs, Ronald Lee, Stacy Thompson and Joe Lacey are the best choices to do that.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEllen Belcher: EPA is McCook Field neighbors’ only hope
If the U.S. EPA becomes your friend, you have a big problem.
That’s the bad news for Dayton’s McCook Field neighborhood. Some 400 families and businesses have groundwater under their property that contains, or could contain, a chemical solvent that produces dangerous vapors that can get trapped in their homes and buildings.
The property owners have been dealing with the threat — believed to have resulted from spills, leaks or dumping at an old Chrysler plant — for upward of three years.
Recently, the EPA gave the mostly low-income neighbors a lot of what they’ve been demanding. Two hundred homes already have vapor extraction systems, installed to suck out trichloroethylene or TCE vapors.
But some 200 other properties didn’t have alarming readings when they were tested previously, or they weren’t tested at all because, back then, they were deemed to be outside of the threatened area.
The problem, though, is that groundwater and chemical contamination move. The fear — make that, assumption — is that conditions have changed and the pollution is spreading in some form or fashion.
So there’s going to be another round of testing, to make sure people aren’t breathing nasty stuff.
This might sound like a logical thing to do. But until BVOCAL, a neighborhood group that formed in response to the problem, and Dayton’s aggressive Environmental Advisory Board made a fuss, the new testing wasn’t planned.
Picture the level of attention any middle-class, suburban neighborhood would be getting if 400 property owners were worried about the air in their homes and businesses; furious about what has happened to their real estate values; and frantic about the fact that a school in the neighborhood had to be closed because of harmful vapors.
Welcome to McCook’s nightmare.
The mess isn’t going to be fixed soon, but here are some reasons to pay attention to it — because of the lessons that can be learned and how patently unfair some things are:
— The U.S. EPA’s division of labor — between the people who handle environmental emergencies such as this and those who oversee permanent cleanups — doesn’t optimize the chance to fix problems quickly.
There are interim actions that can be taken now — without waiting for a detailed permanent cleanup plan that will take years to produce — that can protect public health, maybe save money. Putting in more interceptor wells to capture and treat contaminated water, for example, is something the city of Dayton wants. Removing dirt that’s known to be contaminated also is proactive.
Some decisions shouldn’t have to wait on an extensive study.
— Behr Dayton Thermal Products, in many ways, is taking the fall for Chrysler in this expensive mess. The TCE contamination probably occurred before Behr became the property owner.
In light of Chrysler’s bankruptcy and dicey financial position, getting much money out of it for the cleanup is as likely as getting blood out of a turnip.
Maybe Behr didn’t do its homework when it bought the factory, maybe it didn’t protect itself against this sort of thing in its real estate contract. But Behr is not the bad guy.
Meanwhile, the fact that Chrysler can’t really be held accountable is yet another way that Dayton is absorbing the fallout from the collapse of the auto industry.
— BVOCAL and especially neighborhood activist Jerry Bowling could be the subject of a movie. They’ve hounded public officials and educated themselves about topics lay people should not have to understand.
— The city’s Environmental Advisory Board is a competent and important check on the federal and state EPAs. Its members are serious people doing important volunteer work that protects people and neighborhoods and the region’s water supply.
The TCE plume — which the feds have designated to be among the worst environmental messes in the country — is about 1,600 feet from one of the wellfields that supplies the region’s drinking water. The contamination is moving away from, not toward, the wellfield. But, under drought conditions, the flow could change. The last time that happened was in the 1980s.
There are checks in place to discover contamination before it could get to any wells, but the bigger point is that this is sensitive territory, and anything that can be done now to anticipate problems later is smart.
The U.S. EPA has good people on this problem. But they’re most effective if the community stays on them. Unfortunately, lots of communities are finding they need the EPA to be their friend.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, City of Dayton, Columns, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: As sex crimes change, so must area police
Prostitution has changed in the Internet age. Law enforcement, too, has to change to combat it.
But the efforts of local police departments to catch Internet sex criminals — ranging from prostitutes and johns to child sex offenders — begs for more regional cooperation. Too many police departments are addressing the problem on their own, making the region’s approach a patchwork, haphazard effort.
That’s not to say those police departments are doing a bad job. Quite the contrary. Online sting operations are catching bad guys and bad girls and providing disincentives for sex industry operators to set up shop in the Dayton area.
But many of the criminals they catch are not from here. Often they are actually from out of town, or even out of state, enticed by the idea of meeting up with a prostitute, a john or an underage girl who is really an undercover officer. A regional effort might be better able to bring together law enforcement officers who know how to target stings to the local sex trade.
Some of the sting operations have great track records of success. Xenia’s child protection unit gained a national reputation for its pioneering work combating sexual predators.
In the last couple of years, there has been an explosion of online prostitution, fed by solicitors and potential clients meeting up through online classified Web sites, especially the popular and free Craigslist, where you can buy and sell almost anything. The problem has become a national issue, with law enforcement groups pressuring Craigslist last year into changing its practices to make it tougher for the sex industry to use that forum.
This effort has had only a modest effect. Locally, police report that Craigslist has changed the sex trade, moving sexual deal-making from the street corner to the Internet, and moving prostitution rapidly to suburban hotels and homes.
Naturally, police departments have reacted as the sex trade moved to their communities. In a Sept. 11 story, officers discussed sting operations in suburban communities like Troy, Kettering, Miamisburg and Warren County’s Deerfield Twp. In most cases, these were individual operations run by local police or task forces.
Suppose all these efforts to combat sex crimes — both involving adults and children — were combined across several counties. One team of officers could patrol the Web, focusing on hot spots around the Dayton area. The shared effort could reduce costs, while expanding law enforcement’s net into even more communities. It’s also likely such an effort would be easier to fund by spreading the cost and burden over many departments, not just the few that can put resources toward it.
Perhaps regional task forces could be set up across the state to deal with these crimes. Internet-based crimes have evolved quickly. Police have done their best to respond to what they see as new threats. That’s the right instinct. What’s needed now is a more coherent, planned response.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetFrom Peggy Lehner: Gay rights bill is about inalienable rights
This is the prepared text that State Rep. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, read from before voting for legislation banning discrimination against gays in employment and housing.
I rise to support House Bill 176.
This has not been an easy decision for me, and I know that there are many people who are going to be very disappointed by my support for this legislation. But I would like to share with this body why I have decided to support 176.
I have spent much of my life defending the right to life of unborn children.
While my personal religious faith has certainly played an important role in my opposition to abortion, ultimately that opposition has been grounded in perhaps the most famous sentence contained in the founding documents of our nation — those immortal words penned by Thomas Jefferson:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
I have vigorously argued for years that to deny the right to life to unborn children violates one of the most important principles upon which our great nation was founded — the unalienable right to life.
There are those who have taken the liberty of substituting the principle of unalienable rights with a principle of freedom of choice. I am not among those.
The constitution does not speak of choice when it refers to life, but nor does it speak of choice when it addresses liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The constitution does not grant this body the privilege of conferring liberty only on those who agree with us, live like us or believe what we believe. An unalienable right is one which we have no ability to deny and which, as legislators, we are sworn to defend.
There are those who are concerned that HB 176 creates special protections for one particular class of people. That simply is not the case, for those protections reside not in what this body does here today, but rather what our forefathers chose to provide over 200 years ago.
What we are doing today is simply reaffirming a principle upon which this nation was founded. There are also many people who, in good faith, believe that this legislation violates their freedom of religion. I appreciate the fact that the sponsors of this bill have attempted to take those concerns into account by excluding religious institutions from the employment provisions in the bill.
Balancing conflicting rights is never easy. The solutions are rarely perfect, but, in the end, I think (House Bill) 176 does a good job of affirming the basic natural rights of all citizens. I support this bill and urge your careful consideration as well.
Permalink | Comments (29) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Guest Columns, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Region leads Ohio GOP on gay rights
When the Ohio House of Representatives passed a gay rights bill Tuesday, Sept. 16, 56-39, all Democrats voted for it, but only five Republicans.
Three of the five are from the Dayton area: Peggy Lehner, of Kettering; Terry Blair, of Washington Twp.; and Ross McGregor, of Springfield.
Good for them. They bucked some of the most vocal, active people in their party’s coalition. They will be derisively called “Rinos” — Republican in name only — for this one vote alone.
They did right by Ohio — which must project a modern, tolerant face especially to young adults or saddle itself with one more economic development problem it doesn’t need.
They did right by the Dayton-Springfield area, which can use a restoration of its old reputation as a place where both parties are moderate and forward-looking.
The did right by gays, who are entitled to their basic rights as Americans.
And they did right by the Republican Party, which needs to, once and for all, get over its gay hang-up.
When, in recent years, the discussion of gay rights turned to the marriage issue, opponents of gay marriage frequently said that they had nothing against gays, just very strong views about marriage.
But this bill only guarantees equal rights in housing and jobs. The case that the people who voted against it don’t have anything against gays is a little hard to believe.
Some opponents are pretty frank about their hostility. Says Rep. Lynn R. Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, to proponents:
“Keep your hands and morals and your immoral beliefs to yourselves. Don’t punish those who disagree with you.”
Rep. McGregor’s independence on this vote is not terribly surprising. He has broken with his party in recent votes on passenger trains, a moratorium on home foreclosures and the state budget.
Rep. Lehner’s vote will surprise a lot of people who still see her as an anti-abortion activist and, therefore, presumably a staunch right-winger. But she has displayed some moderate and pragmatic tendencies. She explains her vote in a piece on this blog.
Rep. Blair’s vote is the most surprising. Still in his first term in the legislature, he has portrayed his views with staunch conservative language and has been seen that way. But he was actually a co-sponsor of the bill.
The owner of a swimming pool company, he says, “I don’t care about a person’s personal life. I care about if they show up for work, if they do the job, if they come back tomorrow and do the job again.”
The logic is hard to fault.
The only Montgomery County legislator who disappointed was Rep. Seth Morgan, R-Huber Heights, who assiduously courts the religious-conservative part of the party’s base.
Aside from the legislators, there was another notable local player in the passage: the Rev. Mike Castle of Washington Twp.’s Cross Creek Community Church. He’s chair of Equality Ohio, a statewide organization that has fought for gay rights since Ohioans voted against gay marriage in 2004.
The House victory is an important symbolic one, at least. Some people question how much discrimination against gays actually occurs in housing and employment. They question whether legislation is needed. But symbolism has been part of legislative work forever.
This symbol declares that Ohio embraces the modern world and the traditional American values of equality and tolerance, at a time when, let’s face it, not everybody is on board.
Speaking of which, there is still the matter of the Ohio Senate. If one were to judge by the party label of the House opponents, the fight is uphill. The Senate is two-thirds Republican. Senate President Bill Harris, R-Ashland, has not even promised a vote. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, would be doing his community a service if he were to push for one, and to vote yes.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Local Lincoln basher has problem with outcomes
As the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Dayton is being marked by various local events, an embarrassing truth must be confronted.
Well, “must” might be an exaggeration. Let’s just say that confronting it makes for a newspaper column.
The leader of the most anti-Lincoln faction in the North was the sometimes congressman from Dayton.
Clement Laird Vallandigham was the leader of the Copperheads, the stauncher anti-war wing of the Democratic Party, whose other wing was also not on board for the war or the fight against slavery.
(Since the Civil War era, the two parties have basically switched positions. Then the Republicans were the more progressive, Northern-based party with, eventually, black support; the Democrats were the conservative, Southern-based party without black support.)
Tellers of the Vallandigham story have various takes on why he opposed the war. Some present him as skeptical of war generally. (But he had supported the Mexican War — which Lincoln opposed — and labeled opponents traitors.)
Vallandigham himself made various cases against the Civil War. He said that if some states want to have slaves or exit the union, that’s their right.
And he insisted that the war was a power grab by Republicans, an effort to establish a sort of dictatorship. He apparently saw the Republicans as warring against the most Democratic part of the country.
That seems like the kind of argument you hear these days from the hyperpartisan radio and television screamers who wouldn’t put anything past the other side.
The intense partisan in Vallandigham kept showing up. Academic Frank Clement started his book about him (“The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War,”) with V’s arrival at the Harpers Ferry arsenal in Virginia. This was days after John Brown’s bloody, unsuccessful and notorious effort to stir up a slave rebellion there.
Vallandigham talked with a bedridden Brown and another participant. The Ohioan’s only interest was to find out if any Ohio Republicans were involved with Brown, so that he could use that against them politically.
You know the type.
The suspicion is hard to avoid that one reason he had seen opposition to the Mexican War as treasonous was that the war was waged by a Democratic president.
(Vallandigham once said — under provocation — that he didn’t care to live in a country where Lincoln was president.)
When he arrived in Dayton, Vallandigham had already served in the state legislature from the eastern edge of the state (New Lisbon, now Lisbon). His move west was in keeping with the times. He became editor and part owner of a Democratic newspaper, the Empire. He was also a lawyer.
He ran for a variety of offices, typically losing. He was elected to Congress from the 3rd District in 1858 and defeated in 1862. He ran for governor in 1863 and lost.
Lincoln’s visit to Dayton had nothing to do with Vallandigham. Lincoln was just campaigning for Republicans around the state, following the tracks of Stephen Douglas. Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, in a speech at Courthouse Square this week, characterized the Lincoln visit as a continuation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
But Vallandigham did eventually become a big figure in Lincoln’s life. In 1863, federal troops arrested Vallandigham at his home at 323 E. First St. for his anti-war agitation.
The arrest was, of course, decidedly controversial. It apparently led to a mob’s storming and burning of a Republican newspaper, the Dayton Daily Journal.
But Lincoln asked, how am I supposed to bring the full force of the law down upon some illiterate young soldier who deserts while I ignore the leaders who urged him to desert?
Lincoln felt that times of “rebellion” require unusual restraints on free speech. Vallandigham said he “spit” upon any such restraint.
Rather than imprison Vallandigham, Lincoln had him delivered to the Confederacy, which turned out not to want him. He was exiled to Canada, whence he ran for governor of Ohio.
In 1864, Vallandigham got the national Democratic Party to label the Civil War a “failure,” just before the North turned the tide.
After the war, its Northern opponents largely faded from history. With a different outcome, perhaps Vallandigham would have a different place in history.
Any article about him must end with his end. Are you ready for this?
OK, so he’s a lawyer after the war, and he’s defending an accused murderer in Lebanon. He’s at the Golden Lamb (which had another name). In a hotel room, he demonstrates his theory that the dead guy actually shot himself:
He was kneeling, Vallandigham said, with his gun in his pocket, and he accidentally fired as he got up.
Vallandigham’s gun was loaded. Shot himself in the abdomen. Took up residence at Woodland Cemetery.
Outcomes weren’t his best thing. (But his client did go free.)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Local History, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Want to bet on Strickland’s gamble?
The New York Times recently wrote a story about states hitting a wall in the amount of money they’re raising from gambling.
The newspaper quoted an academic who could easily have been talking about Gov. Ted Strickland.
“When budgets get tight, expanding gambling always looks to lawmakers like the perfect quick-fix solution,” John Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois, told The Times. “But in the end, it so often proves to be neither quick nor a fix.”
This week was the deadline for the state’s seven racetracks to each pay $13 million toward their $65 million fee to operate slots. Only two tracks put up the money, though all seven did pay a $100,000 application fee. Lebanon Raceway was among those that didn’t write the big check.
Because of the uncertainty about whether the tracks will ever really be able to have 2,500 slots each, it’s proving difficult to get investors to put up money for the privilege of entertaining people by taking their money. Three lawsuits challenging the legality of the decision to allow “racinos” have been filed against the state.
Meanwhile, Ohioans will decide in the November election whether they want to allow one casino each in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo.
If that measure passes, that would mean more competition for the racetracks, a concern that figures into their calculation of how much money they can rake in. The risk here for Gov. Strickland is that he was counting on big money quickly rolling in — from the fees and from having half the slots operating by May. He hoped to have almost a billion dollars in new money for the current budget.
The Times story was precipitated by the fact that states are, for the first time, seeing a drop in gambling revenues. Though the economy undoubtedly has had a role in the downturn, the development raises the possibility that there’s a finite amount gamblers can or will spend. If that money is spread among a growing number of casinos, that changes the financial predictions states have been making.
According to The Times, the 12 states with casinos brought in $4.5 billion last year, a 7.4 percent drop. “Racinos” did better, bringing in $2.9 billion in taxes and fees, representing a 6.7 percent increase.
What’s telling about that latter number, though, is the proceeds fell 6.7 percent if Pennsylvania and Indiana are taken out of the equation. Their “racinos” are new, and some experts think that they’re temporarily benefiting from the novelty factor.
Resorting to gambling as an economic development strategy has always been a hoax. The jobs that are created aren’t well-paying; oftentimes they’re hard on families because so many require odd and late-night hours; if the casinos attract other businesses, those jobs typically are also relatively low-paying, too.
If, going forward, the revenue from gambling also becomes iffy, that’s even more reason to ask whether casinos are all they’re cracked up to be for governments.
Tough decisions and choices will keep coming at Ohio as it tries to feel its way on this issue. For instance, the lottery commission, which is charged with regulating gambling in Ohio, recently decided that 18-year-olds should be allowed to play the slots — opening the door even to some high school seniors.
When critics dumped on that decision, Gov. Strickland said he thought the age should be 21.
Clearly, the lottery commission sees its job as getting people to gamble, so there will be more money for the state. But decisions about how aggressively to do that present all sorts of tensions, invariably leading to some tawdry choices.
The gambling option was never as simple or as certain as it was presented. Best not to bet that Ohio has hit the jackpot.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
TweetGuest column: Many depend on Dayton libraries, even to Google
2009 ELECTION
This column was written by Tim Kambitsch, executive director of the Dayton Metro Library.
The Sept. 6 editorial (“Strickland not only problem facing libraries”) describing the challenges facing public libraries suggested that some people believe libraries are less relevant in the age of Google and that other institutions might be better suited to provide some of libraries’ most heavily used services.
The majority of Dayton-area residents disagrees with that viewpoint. Every day, more than 10,000 area residents visit a public library. In fact, the Dayton Metro Library is busier than ever before.
Last year, residents checked out a record 7.6 million items. This year we will easily exceed that number. Foot traffic is up, too, with almost 3.7 million visits to our 21 locations. Eighty-five percent of households in our service area have at least one active library user. For many families, the library is essential to their quality of life.
A key fact missing from the editorial is that approximately one in three people do not have access to a computer with Internet in their homes. Last year, library visitors logged almost 750,000 hours on library computers.
People rely on the library for homework, job hunting and other activities that are essential to living in a digital world. Newspaper editors and other knowledge workers may be able to easily flip a few fingers to look up a fact from their desk, but the library is often the only place many other people can access online content.
With government agencies, employers and educational institutions all expecting people to have ready access to the Internet, it is clear that public libraries are needed more, not less.
For someone without computer experience, having access to the Internet isn’t enough. They need help getting started.
As at many libraries, the Dayton Metro Library offers free, hands-on classes in basic computer skills. Offerings range from how to get started using e-mail to online job hunting.
There is also a free, open computer lab where a librarian gives one-on-one assistance for the person trying to master the computer. The classes have had a waiting list since they began.
The editorial is correct in pointing out the funding challenges facing public libraries. We can’t ask local voters to make up for all the state cuts.
The Dayton Metro Library has implemented substantial cost-saving strategies, including unpaid furlough days and wage freezes for all employees, cutting the book budget, reducing programs and leaving jobs unfilled.
It’s especially tough when we see a growth in demand for services. We will spend nearly $1.8 million less in 2009 than in 2008. We know we will have to make more cuts next year.
The fate of the levy in November will have a huge impact. Even if the levy passes and we see an increase in local funding, we will have approximately $1.6 million less revenue in 2010 than last year.
However, it is the consequences of a failed levy that demand everyone’s attention. Failure means that revenues would drop to nearly half of last year. Failure means the closure of more than half our branches or limiting their hours to only a few days per week.
The Dayton Metro Library will have to lay off more than half of its employees and cut book buying to the bone. Those cuts will mean that hundreds of thousands of books will be inaccessible and hundreds of computers will sit idle. Kids will not have the safe and constructive spaces after school or in the evening.
Our community uses the Dayton Metro Library now more than ever. The loss of this community resource now would leave a big gap that no other institution can fill.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Elections, Guest Columns
TweetEditorial: Buckeye Institute and Policy Matters think tanks do good work
If you follow politics much, you’ve heard this term “think tank.” You know it’s not a military vehicle with special intellectual abilities.
It’s a nonprofit organization that researches public policy questions and, often, promotes specific policies.
The word “tank” is meant to conjure up images of scholars confined in an enclosed place, as in a fish tank. Sometimes, though, the other use of tank — the military use — is more appropriate. Some of these outfits are warriors.
Ohio has one liberal and one conservative think tank focused on state issues. This fact is now largely taken for granted. But it wasn’t always true. Today’s situation has its origins in Dayton in the 1980s.
Sam Staley is now an adjunct professor of economics and finance at the University of Dayton. He has been a local official in Bellbrook, in the realms of planning, zoning and parks. Mainly these days he researches and writes for Reason magazine, put out by a libertarian think tank in Washington.
Libertarians, like conservatives, want to keep government out of economic issues. Like liberals, though, they also want to keep it out of the bedroom. They also tend to be skeptical of government bans on drugs and gambling.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Staley and others founded the Urban Policy Research Institute in Dayton. It evolved into the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions. It eventually moved to Columbus, which only made sense.
Today it is conservative, rather than libertarian. It puts out studies and opinion pieces on a wide range of subjects: taxes, schools, transportation.
The Buckeye has a fairly pronounced tendency to be wrong, as in its current opposition to high-speed rail.
Nevertheless, providing like-minded politicians with some data is better than leaving them informationless.
Meanwhile, the Buckeye does very useful work with a project on making government data available to the public. (See www.ohiosunshine.org)
Still, something seemed wrong about the state having a conservative think tank and not a liberal one. Around the turn of the century, along came Policy Matters Ohio, in Cleveland. It has strong ties to organized labor and to liberal foundations.
Its creation might be considered one of the accomplishments of the Buckeye. Many people on the left saw a need for a counterbalance.
An example of Policy Matters’ contributions came on Labor Day, with the release of a study called The State of Working Ohio 2009. It isn’t just about the recession, but the longer term.
You already know things are bad, but did you know that Ohioans with up to three years of post-high school education “now earn less than those who didn’t finish high school earned in 1979 in Ohio”?
Or that the gap between black and white workers is now bigger than ever since 1979 (at $3.40 an hour)?
Or that the Ohio median wage is “now 70 cents below the federal median wage, a gap seen only once before”?
The study’s timelines (at www.policymattersohio.org/) make clear that the big drops in Ohio incomes — relative to the rest of the country — came during the last major recession (1981-1982) and the current one. Again, that’s not something that everybody knows.
The study doesn’t have much to contribute as to the causes of the state’s decline or possible solutions, just some liberal lines briefly stated, but not documented:
“The dire situation … stems directly from deregulation and deindustrialization…. A second stimulus and more public action is needed.”
But just getting the data out is a good thing. Everybody needs to understand how dramatically things have changed — and not just for those who have lost jobs — even as power in Columbus has gone back and forth between the parties.
Having two think tanks hasn’t prevented the decline of the state. But that might be asking a bit much.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Local History, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government
TweetKevin Riley: Here’s your chance to help shape downtown Dayton
At Urban Nights last week, people got their first peek at the developing Greater Downtown Plan.
Led by Michael Ervin, a retired physician and health insurance executive, and supported by the Downtown Dayton Partnership, the planning effort is not yet complete. Citizens are still being asked for input.
And while the process is going slower than scheduled, Ervin and others are insistent that input and buy-in are more important than speed.
Hundreds of volunteers — many of whom Ervin personally recruited — have been marching forward with ideas and drafts.
They’re undeterred by issues that could slow them down, including deficits at Dayton and Montgomery County, the impending departure of Dayton City Manager Rashad Young and the looming election.
The plan will be highlighted in several upcoming “Open Studio” sessions, the latest events in Ervin’s relentless push for public input.
In every conversation, he insists that the plan isn’t “exclusive,” but instead must be the “community’s plan.”
Of the folks working on different aspects of it, he says: “We have no need to be right or have all the good ideas.”
And some of the ideas will grab attention, including:
BEING BICYCLE FRIENDLY
The latest draft proposes that Dayton pursue formally becoming a “Bicycle Friendly Community,” a designation that requires a different view of downtown streets and other transportation corridors. The plan would change the purpose of a downtown street as a “utilitarian tool to move vehicles through the city as efficiently as possible,” and instead focus on bikes, pedestrians and a park-like atmosphere. More access to rivers
The plan calls for making changes to the rivers downtown, including eliminating the dangerous low dams so boaters and kayakers could navigate larger and more visible portions of the rivers. Also, the levees would be modified to create access and views of the rivers.
HIDDEN TREASURE?
As volunteers have worked on the plan, they’ve also discovered a piece of infrastructure that some believe could give Dayton a key advantage in attracting businesses. When Dayton began modifying its traffic light system, it installed a nearly citywide loop of fiber-optic cable to control it. The city needs only a fraction of that system’s capacity to operate traffic lights — and the techies around town believe it’s possible to use the rest of the “bandwidth” for other things.
Those involved are cautious in their enthusiasm. But if the city can offer low-cost, super-fast network capacity, Dayton may have a special opportunity to attract businesses to downtown.
DOWNTOWN HOUSING
One of the potentially controversial parts of the plan involves creating downtown housing.
The group is wrestling with this part of the plan, and they face several challenges. In order to make downtown vibrant, more people have to live there. No one seems to disagree with that.
During the past 20 years, only about 600 housing units have been built or renovated downtown, according to the Downtown Dayton Partnership. For downtown to thrive, more housing in different price ranges would have to be available, especially if the city wants to attract young professionals who want to live in urban areas.
The plan could call for developing as many as 5,000 housing units during the next 10 years, although there is not yet agreement on a number. Most believe that some kind of private equity investment fund would have to be set up to help make it happen. Of course, the question also has to be asked: will it work?
How the overall downtown plan would be financed — including housing plans — will be the next big hurdle for Ervin and his volunteers. He hopes to begin work on that this fall.
But it’s good news for Dayton and the region that this work keeps going.
It would be tempting to slow down, or to dismiss big ambitions as pipe dreams in these difficult economic times. But the times are actually forcing people together and inspiring better ideas. Even in tough times, it’s important that we find ways to keep moving forward.
Downtown needs a plan, and the next two to three years are likely to be crucial for it — and the region.
“We need the whole region to support this,” said Ervin. “Dayton is important even if you live in Tipp City, Beavercreek or Centerville.”
TAKE A LOOK
What: View Greater Downtown Plan Where: 8 N. Main St., National City Building near Third and Main streets When: • Oct. 3: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. • Oct. 5: 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., 5 to 8:30 p.m. • Oct. 6: 7:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Kevin Riley
TweetEditorial: Windstorm’s blowback wasn’t all bad
What was learned one year ago today surprised even lifelong Ohioans. A hurricane can hit us, too.
Tornadoes we know about — watch the sky, turn on the TV or radio, get to the basement or a sturdy interior room. Wait a while for the storm to pass. While tornadoes are dangerous and can be devastating when they hit, the effects generally are very localized and the actual event is over quickly.
The windstorm of 2008 — a “dry hurricane” remnant of Hurricane Ike — was totally different. It didn’t feel dangerous. Some people stood outside most of the day and watched as trees were lifted from the ground and branches tumbled. A huge area was affected — practically every corner of the Dayton area. Then the aftereffects seemed to go on forever, as utility crews struggled for nearly two weeks to restore power.
It was a ringing reminder of an interesting paradox — demonstrating how very dependent we are on communal services and yet how separated we can be from each other when roofs aren’t blowing off or trees aren’t making the street impassable.
How many of us got to know people or had experiences that we wouldn’t have had otherwise only because we weren’t glued to our Internet connections and cable televisions or moving through our neighborhoods with a cell phone plastered to our ears?
The windstorm forced everyone out of their routines, and we learned a few things. Obviously, community services matter. They cost money, whether in taxes or contributions, but life is a mess without them. We always knew we needed quality police, fire and rescue services. But also working overtime during the storm were street maintenance crews, power company repair crews, disaster relief teams and others.
At the same time, people themselves proved they can be a tremendous resource when motivated to use their time and talent and when they tap into their basic human kindness. The most uplifting memories of the storm are the human stories — neighbors helping neighbors, people checking up on each other, those with power opening their homes and businesses to those without.
That spirit, flexibility and willingness to pitch in had its own rewards.
Think again about the utility workers working round the clock after the storm the next time you return home and find the power company’s trimming crews have buzzed your trees more aggressively than you expected. Your yard’s look may have to suffer now to keep your neighbors’ power on some day later on.
Think also about being prepared for the unexpected. Everyone should have a plan for where they would go, and what they would do, if disaster struck again. Picking up a few flashlights and extra batteries is a good place to start.
Most of all, walk next door now and again and knock on the door. Know who’s there and what their needs might be in a time of crisis. It could make a difference the next time something bad happens. In the interim, it will just make you both feel good.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Divide on health care comes down to dreams
One point about the health care issue has come in for way too little attention: President Barack Obama’s promise to pay for his plan — as opposed to borrowing the money — is a radical departure.
Presidents don’t do this. George W. Bush wouldn’t have dreamed of paying — in this sense — for his prescription drug addition to Medicare; that initiative was about two-thirds as expensive as the Obama plan that opponents are calling a government takeover.
Bush also wouldn’t have dreamed of paying for any wars, which are more expensive. On the contrary, he was busily cutting taxes.
Of course, many people don’t believe Obama
when he says he will pay for his plan, not let it add to the deficit. They note that nonpartisan analysis shows that pending health care bills in Congress would add to it. But he keeps repeating his pledge as publicly as possible.
The fact needs to be understood when discussion turns to whether he can get Republicans on board.
Tough job. After all, some sort of tax increase would be necessary.
Opposition to tax hikes has been the single best unifier of the Republicans. Some Republicans in Congress have said publicly that the tax issue alone will cause nearly solid Republican opposition.
So a lot of what was said and implied over the last few days is `not to be taken too seriously.
To the naked ear, Obama sounded Wednesday as if he’s trying to get Republican support. He embraced a John McCain proposal and mentioned other Republicans favorably. He bowed in the direction of Republican efforts to reduce the exposure of doctors to lawsuits. He repeatedly tried to place himself between the extremes of left and right.
But, in truth, he was mainly trying to unite Democrats by allowing those from relatively conservative districts to point to his accommodating attitude when they confront their own constituents.
Meanwhile, the Republicans, too, were trying to give the impression that they are open to negotiation. Their House leader, John Boehner, representing rural and suburban areas around Dayton, as well as part of the city, wrote of “our offer to work together on common-sense reforms we can all agree on.”
Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican representing the bulk of Montgomery County and northern Warren County, said he supports Obama’s plan to prevent insurance companies from excluding people because of pre-existing conditions. But he worries about other elements of the plan.
Fellow Republican Steve Austria, representing Greene County and Springfield, spoke specifically of a disposable part of the president’s plan, the “public option,” under which some people could buy insurance from the government.
“I think that anyone who followed the federal government’s bungling of the Cash for Clunkers programs would have serious concerns with how bureaucrats in Washington would mange their health care.”
(Of course, anybody with those concerns wouldn’t have to buy into the plan. (Anyway, doesn’t dealing in the vapid old cliches about governmental incompetence seem kind of odd for a representative of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base? So far, the Air Force hasn’t been privatized.)
Sen. George Voinovich was himself, focusing on the details in a statement before the speech.
“To date, many of his (Obama’s) ideas have lacked vital details and have left me with more questions than answers.”
He’s one guy who has to be taken relatively seriously when he suggests his mind is open. And he’s never been a purist about taxes. But, still, he’s not being watched in Washington as somebody likely to cross over.
Apparently sensitive to the charge of being the party of “No,” in the grip of their extremists, the Republicans are taking pains lately to point out what they’re for: insurance for people with pre-existing conditions; some protection for people who lose their jobs, and more.
But they’re not talking about aggressive efforts to achieve universal coverage. That’s the Ted Kennedy dream, not the Republican dream.
After it’s enacted, whenever that may be, its existence will be no more controversial than Social Security or Medicare. The rest of the affluent world already takes it for granted.
But for now that’s pretty much what the fight is about. Either you’ve got your heart set on the goal of all American having decent health coverage — complete with the costs of that effort — or not.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Health Care, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Dayton still needs Catholic schools
The problems in Dayton’s public schools have been a boon for the city’s Catholic schools. But there’s a crunch coming.
For years, Dayton families that weren’t satisfied with their children’s public schools have flocked to Catholic schools. Since 2006, the state has helped send some families there, giving low-income students who left certifiably poor performing schools “vouchers” to help pay tuition.
Today, 12,685 Ohio kids statewide attend private schools using this financial assistance. Next year, the number of students in the program likely will hit the state’s cap of 14,000.
Then lawmakers will have to ask:
Should the program be expanded? Scaled back? Discontinued? Is the state getting its money’s worth?
The local Catholic network will be all over the debate because its schools have become so dependent on the state’s money.
Under the voucher law, students assigned to low-scoring city schools are eligible for up to $5,000 in aide to offset private school tuition. Lawmakers — mainly Republicans — reasoned that poor, not just middle-class, families deserve good educational options for their children.
Today Dayton ranks third behind Cleveland and Columbus for having the most kids using vouchers.
St. Helen and Holy Angels schools each have about a quarter of their students paying some of their tuition using vouchers — and they are the least hooked on the state’s money.
In four of the eight Dayton Catholic elementary schools, more than half of the students get vouchers. St. Rita School has an astonishing 76 percent of students getting aide. The practice is creeping into Catholic high schools and suburban Catholic schools, too.
In 2007, suburban Catholic schools, all together, had about 30 voucher students. Now there are 142. Kettering’s Ascension School, for instance, has 16 percent on vouchers; St. Albert School is at 7 percent; and Alter High School 6 percent.
The city’s two Catholic high schools — Chaminade Julienne with 16 percent on vouchers and Carroll at 7 percent — now have to consider vouchers a critical part of their budgets. Same with Dayton Christian High School in Miami Twp. (at 7 percent).
How Dayton’s Catholic schools got to this place is an interesting story. As charter schools exploded here in the late 1990s — turning Dayton into the nation’s No. 1 charter school city for a time — Catholic schools weren’t initially impacted.
Very few of their students transferred to the new free public alternative schools that were independent of the local school district.
In time, though, families who were choosing a school for the first time began opting for the free charter schools. While Catholic schools retained the families that were invested because older children had attended them, the tuition was too much for those who hadn’t made that commitment.
In the end, charter schools unintentionally punished not only low-scoring traditional public schools — a slew of which closed as charters grew — but also squeezed well-regarded Catholic schools.
If, because of the state’s budget problems, or because a new generation of students isn’t eligible for vouchers (this could happen if the public school they’re supposed to attend improves), that leaves Catholic schools hurting for kids and money. Important neighborhood anchors could close.
Catholic schools are an important option for Dayton families. The voucher program unquestionably has been a financial help to the schools, but, at the same time, they have been there for a long time for children who otherwise would have been sitting in really awful schools. That history can’t be forgotten.
Ohio, of course, can’t afford to operate an ever growing parallel system to its public schools. There does have to be some limit to how much money it sends to Catholic schools, especially if public schools are getting their acts together.
But Catholic schools have been there, and still are there, for many families who have every right to insist that their public school option is not nearly good enough.
Meanwhile, in the big education picture, the voucher program remains small.
Dayton legislators should begin now to push for support for the program. It’s plainly clear Dayton’s Catholic school network cannot survive without vouchers.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Is Jean Schmidt a birther?
Reports surfaced Wednesday, Sept. 9, that U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt had told a “birther” that “I agree with you.” There was, in fact, a video on YouTube, though it had some technical problems.
“Birthers” are the people under the delusion that legitimate questions exist about whether President Barack Obama is a citizen, about where he was born. The issue has been exhaustively researched by nonpartisans. (See FactCheck.org or politifact.com, for example.) It’s over.
So if a member of Congress from the Dayton area is still in denial, that should be widely known. (Rep. Schmidt’s 2nd District, based east of Cincinnati, reaches up into Lebanon.)
Politico, an important, nonpartisan online publication out of Washington, said Wednesday:
“Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) may be the worst stage whisperer in recent American political history. At a Labor Day event in Cincinnati, Schmidt was approached by a slightly unhinged constituent who wanted to know why she wasn’t demanding to see President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. … (T)he exchange … captures the wink-wink game some GOP pols are playing with the birther fringe….
“When the woman stops talking, Schmidt leans into her ear and whispers — loudly enough to be picked up by the mic: ‘I agree with you, but the courts don’t.’
“Schmidt is referring to a string of recent court decisions throwing out birther lawsuits.”
After it surfaced, Rep. Schmidt issued a press release:
“The president is indeed a citizen of this country and constitutionally qualified to be President of the United States. … The video clip being circulated by some is part of a longer conversation with a woman who was very upset about a number of things. … I did agree with her view that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted. I was trying to be kind. …”
The statement is good news and seems to settle the matter of where she stands. If Politico jumped to conclusions, that’s because a lot of people have doubts about Rep. Schmidt’s judgment, based on past performance. But let’s not rehash the litany.
The flap has a good upshot: she’s now on record. She doesn’t deserve any great credit for political courage. Mainstream conservatives generally are not birthers. Still, it’s a relief.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics, Short editorial
TweetEditorial: Dayton gets hub, now show us the money
Dayton’s effort to be known for its high-tech talent took some steps forward this week.
Gov. Ted Strickland came to town to name Dayton as the state’s first innovation hub, specifically for aerospace. The state is designating different areas as hubs for this or that, with the goal of trying to get different parts of Ohio branded and labeled as being especially good in certain industries.
Think bio-medicine in Cleveland, green energy in Toledo, and polymers in Akron, for example.
The hoped-for payoff is that businesses and researchers will go where there are other businesses and researchers who can complement their work.
In the old days, when Charles Kettering and the Wright brothers were doing their thing in barns and at workbenches, inventions were semi-solitary pursuits. Today technology is so sophisticated and expensive that researchers and businesses can’t build much of anything without collaboration involving teams of people playing off of each other.
Some of their communication can happen across the miles or via computer, but synergy through proximity matters.
By naming Dayton the state’s hub for aerospace, the state department of development is promising that if it gets a lead about an aerospace business, it will direct the firm here. In fact, though, that’s probably the least important advantage because that’s not how most businesses are recruited.
The bigger impact could be that when the University of Dayton or Wright State University competes for the state’s Third Frontier research money, they’re supposed to get bonus points if they’re furthering the goal of making Dayton an aerospace center.
That’s also supposed to be true when it comes to winning business tax credits or environmental cleanup funds.
It would have been great if the governor had brought money with him now. That he didn’t puts the burden on local institutions — including local governments, universities, the Dayton Development Coalition, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and companies that already are here — to make requests for state help that are so compelling that their asks can’t be deep-sixed.
Other communities also are asking to be named hubs. That Dayton got the first designation is evidence that people in the Strickland administration liked Dayton’s pitch. In fact, it should have been a good one.
This focus on leveraging Wright-Patterson’s talent, its combined $2 billion science and technology budgets and its relationships with myriad contractors, has been going on for some years now. If the community had to work hard to make a convincing case that aerospace can be a growth industry here, that would be an indictment.
At the same time the governor was here for the hub announcement, he also was recognizing a new partnership between Dayton and Montgomery County, and Israel.
Last year a local delegation went to Israel on a trade mission, hoping to connect to that country’s aerospace industry. This year the Israelis came here.
Over several days this week, Israeli business leaders were invited to meet with Dayton area businesses that wanted to collaborate with them or to sell to them. The Engineers Club in downtown was teeming.
From last year’s trip, two deals have been sealed with Israeli businesses, one involving STAN Solutions, and another involving IDCAST and Woolpert. The outreach looks so promising that $350,000 in private money has been raised to open a trade mission in Haifa.
The thing the governor needs to see — indeed that Dayton needs to see — is that people aren’t sitting on their hands when it comes to bringing jobs to the region. There are lots of efforts going on to use unsung and unrecognized talent to attract more of it.
To see a video on Dayton’s links with Israel, click here.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Ohio government, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Dann loses again, but he’s not all wrong
A strategy pioneered by disgraced former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann has flopped.
There’s a news flash.
Mr. Dann’s tortured idea of treating charter schools as “charitable trusts” — which would allow him to sue the low-scoring ones — has been soundly rejected by the courts.
Well, it wasn’t exactly his idea. Actually the plan came from a lawyer for the Ohio Education Association, a state teachers’ union that is critical of charters and that supported Mr. Dann, according to e-mails unearthed in 2007 by the Columbus Dispatch.
On Friday, the Dayton area’s 2nd District Court of Appeals became the fourth Ohio court to say Mr. Dann had it wrong — that his office did not have jurisdiction over charter schools, which are publicly financed schools that operate independently of local school districts.
Two Dayton schools were targeted by Mr. Dann. He succeeded in shuttering the Colin Powell Leadership Academy, but New Choices Community School has helped lead the successful courtroom counter offensive.
Richard Cordray, who is the new attorney general, is still deciding whether to appeal the district court’s ruling to the Ohio Supreme Court. That’s an easy call. It’s time for the state to give up this losing battle.
But before everyone writes off the episode as just another kooky gambit from the embarrassing Dann era, consider this: in one sense, Mr. Dann was right. Undoubtedly, it was, and is, time for somebody to get tough on perpetually failing charter schools. Consider what Mr. Dann said about Colin Powell Leadership Academy in his initial complaint:
• It has met only one of the 61 applicable indicators of school performance during its six years of operation.
• Its Performance Index Scores have been persistently abysmal, averaging 51.58 out of a possible 120, giving the equivalent of a very low “F.”
• It has failed to meet federal “Adequate Yearly Progress” standards for the last five school years.
• It has consistently lagged behind the performance of the Dayton City School District on the state tests common to both Colin Powell Leadership Academy and Dayton. The litany is pretty damning, and it doesn’t even mention that state auditors found its books were a fiscal mess, too.
How could such a school have been allowed to operate for six years? Without Mr. Dann’s lawsuit, it might still be open.
Even some strong supporters of charter schools have been frustrated with Ohio’s laid-back approach toward low-end charters. The true believers in the charter school movement want bad charters to close, if for no other reason than they are tarring the reputation of the good charters.
Ohio’s charter school law gives primary oversight of the schools to sponsors, which include nonprofit groups and school districts. That system could work if the sponsors all were reliable, or if the Ohio Department of Education insisted they be. But that hasn’t been the case.
Ohio has established better standards for poor charters — a new law closes down schools that can’t break out of the state’s lowest rating categories after three years — but it’s still not expecting enough from sponsors.
Just back in May, state Auditor Mary Taylor’s office came out with another devastating report on a local charter school, this time an outfit called New City School.
Ms. Taylor’s investigators found the school had more than $200,000 in debt, had stopped paying health insurance without telling its employees and failed to follow basic accounting procedures. Its academic performance wasn’t much better.
Then last month her office cited another low-scoring school — Main Street Automotive — for fraud, saying the school’s operators owed the state $116,000 in missing student aid. Both schools are sponsored by the Lucas County Educational Service Center.
The Colin Powell school was sponsored by Education Resource Consultants of Ohio, a Cincinnati-based group that also sponsors several other troubled charter schools. Isn’t it time for the state to expect more from sponsors?
Marc Dann’s lawsuits were a stretch, but his creative lawyering aside, he was right that somebody needs to step in when charter schools don’t measure up.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetGuest column: How can we let anyone be treated this way?
This column was written by Lawrence E. Mieczkowski, of Kettering, an internist who specializes in cardiovascular disease prevention.
“So, doc, what do you think about this health care debate?”
I am usually in the midst of writing a prescription or filling out paperwork when a patient asks. The younger patients don’t usually bring up the subject. They usually are employed and have coverage and generally don’t need a lot of medications.
A few of my wealthy patients ask, assuming I oppose President Barack Obama’s call for universal coverage. They are usually put off by my response that I support a single-payer system.
Sometimes I win over these patients, but, for many of them, this is simply an intellectual debate. They have health care insurance and can’t imagine a scenario under which they wouldn’t.
The most earnest questioning comes from the over-60 crowd; the retirees who took a buyout some years ago and were promised they’d have coverage and now are losing it; and the 30- to 40-year-old guy who is in-between jobs — yet again — and has no coverage.
I see the fear in their eyes, the worry about how they’ll afford the medicine they need, the relief when I tell them that I can give them samples. Their looks are the same when I offer to switch them to a less effective, but cheaper, generic drug, and when I waive their co-pay.
I also tell these patients about Ed, a 70-year-old retired truck driver living on Social Security and a small pension. He pays for the Medicare Part D drug coverage, but his monthly insulin costs alone are more than $300, and he falls into the prescription coverage donut hole within four months of the start of every year.
He calls us every two to three weeks, pleading for a couple of insulin vials. Sometimes he shows up at the check-in window unannounced. How can we refuse his request? I know that he doesn’t take the dose that I prescribe, in order to space out the insulin. We have a first-come-first-served approach to giving out insulin samples. People call to reserve them; we limit the give-aways to a bottle or two. That’s all we have.
Pharmaceutical companies have significantly cut back on samples. Sometime my office only gets five to six vials a week. Most of the time, that’s not enough to meet all of our requests. Ed usually requires five or six bottles monthly.
Then I share Tom’s story. At age 31, he was way too young to have suffered a heart attack, but he did. He wasn’t overweight, and he didn’t smoke. Now 38, Tom inherited a genetic cholesterol problem and then developed diabetes. Because of the diabetes, he then hemorrhaged into the back of his eye and almost went blind.
Still, he kept trying to work. He probably could’ve applied for Social Security disability since he has a bad heart and only one good eye. He’s one of the guys I call the working wounded.
He has had insurance coverage, but he couldn’t afford the co-pays for his diabetes medications, the insulin, the prescription blood thinner, the cholesterol medications, the heart and blood pressure medications, the co-pays for the family doctor, my fees as a specialist, his cardiologist and the two eye specialists. Meanwhile, there are medical expenses for his wife and two children.
There have been times when I have walked Tom out the door with more than $1,000 in medication samples. I’ve told him to send his $15 co-pay when he gets his paycheck at the end of the month. More recently, things have gotten worse since his employer fired him unfairly.
I ask the inquiring patient, not expecting a reply, “Where is Tom to go for help? Is this fair? How can we let this happen?”
These conversations happen sometimes six to seven times a day, week after week. So, yes, I say, repeatedly, forcefully, but respectfully, I favor health care reform.
Permalink | Comments (33) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Health Care
TweetEditorial: Business taxes are not what ails Ohio
Your grocery store has been in court — sort of.
Ohio grocers are arguing that they shouldn’t have to pay a certain tax that Ohio imposes on businesses. The grocers say that the Ohio Constitution forbids taxing food, and, therefore, they can’t be taxed on their gross receipts (which is how Ohio’s main business tax now is calculated).
The other side — the governor and the legislature — says that this is a business tax, not a food tax, and that grocers, like others companies, should pay. Even granting that the grocery business is a low-margin business, do you think grocers are looking for a loophole?
The problem for the Strickland administration and the legislature is that if the Ohio Supreme Court agrees with the grocers, Ohio will be short a half-billion dollars (on top of whatever other holes appear because of the economy).
Grocers are set to pay the state $188 million this year; they’d also be due about $355 million in refunds going back to 2005, when the tax was first adopted under a Republican legislature and Republican Gov. Bob Taft.
There’s also another issue relating to the gross receipts tax — known as CAT for short, or the Commercial Activities Tax — that isn’t one for the courts, but for lawmakers. When the tax was first passed, lawmakers guessed at what the rate should be to raise sufficient revenue.
The stated goal was to raise an amount similar to what was being produced by two other business taxes that were being eliminated. The CAT was seen as a fairer and more broad-based levy.
As protection against the state getting a windfall or coming up short, proponents of CAT decided that if revenue projections were off by more than 10 percent — up or down — that would trigger a correction. The tax rate would be adjusted automatically.
In 2007, however, lawmakers and Gov. Ted Strickland changed the rules. They said the trigger would only take effect if the tax brought in more than expected.
This was a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition if you believe that state government has certain obligations to fulfill. It was a great decision if you think businesses pay too much.
As it has turned out, all the state’s tax sources have gone to heck, including the CAT. That would have been true, too, if the old taxes were still in place.
Still, Gov. Strickland has shown no interest in acknowledging the structural tax problem Ohio has. Some people think he will if he’s re-elected in 2010. Some even believe that whoever is elected — Democrat or Republican — will be confronted with the reality that Ohio can’t afford the services Ohioans expect.
There is this big picture to keep in mind:
The tax burden on businesses in Ohio as compared to individuals has declined a lot. Businesses paid about 40 percent of the burden in 1975; in 2010, one estimate (from Cleveland’s Center for Community Solutions) is that business’ share will fall to 26.5 percent. In 2003, the percentage was 30 percent.
Further, while Ohio’s tax burden once was high relative to other states, it seems to have fixed that. According to 2006 data — the latest available — Ohio’s state and local tax burden ranked 18th.
Other states have changed policies since then, just as Ohio has, but this ranking was calculated before Ohio’s individual tax rates were cut a whopping 21 percent, and before the CAT tax was adopted and two big business taxes were done away with.
The grocers’ beef is a stretch. Other businesses — not just individuals — should find their argument maddening. In truth, businesses in Ohio already are getting a good deal.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetScott Elliott: STEM school could be the future of choice
Dayton has been a nationally important charter school mecca since the beginning of this decade. We tend to think we know a lot about charter schools and giving families school choice here.
Allow me, for a moment, to challenge what we think we know. A peek back at the intent of the push for charter schools in the United States can teach us something about where the school choice movement should go next in Ohio.
By the late 1990s, when Ohio’s charter school law was written, the national push for school choice had become identified with the right, especially conservatives who hoped charter schools competing with traditional public schools — for kids and cash — might spark reform and innovation in low-performing city schools. But that’s not where it all began.
School choice, at the outset, was not a conservative idea, nor was it a liberal idea. It also did not spring from urban centers, where most charter schools have come to be concentrated. It actually began in the suburbs.
The early concepts that led to the first charter school law, passed in Minnesota in 1991, were not driven by a free market-loving desire to inject competition into education. In fact, the idea was not ideologically driven at all. The Minnesota law would not have happened without support from both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives.
What that effort was about was helping kids find their niche and learn in an environment that suits them.
This came to mind on the first week of school as I toured the new Dayton Regional STEM School in Beavercreek. Technically not a charter school under state law, the STEM school is a regional center that’s drawing students from any of the 30 districts in Montgomery, Greene and Clark counties.
The school is charter-like in that state funding for its students is redirected from their home districts, and the school also has a specialty theme — high-level instruction in science, technology, engineering and math. It signed up students from 20 districts, including many kids who are making long commutes to try out the new school.
The STEM school is very much in the mold of what the original school choice reformers were seeking in Minnesota.
A couple years ago, I interviewed Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan about the roots of the charter school movement. Kolderie, a former journalist and public policy expert, and Nathan, a teacher, were both in the room when the plan that eventually led to the first charter school law was sketched out at a retreat held at a lakefront resort near Brainard, Minn., in 1988.
What led to that meeting was a growing interest among a small group of reformers who first came together in the mid-1980s to fight for open enrollment and post-secondary options. Both of those idea eventually spread across the country, including to Ohio.
Open enrollment allows students to break free of the boundaries of school districts set by the state. Nathan told me reformers were worried about underachievers — kids who did not fit in at one school, but who might thrive elsewhere.
The post-secondary option allows kids who do not feel challenged in high school to enroll in college courses. That program was explicitly designed to attract ordinary students — kids who might be smart, but who are bored in school — not just academic stars.
Both programs proved wildly popular, especially to suburban families with kids who didn’t fit in well in traditional schools.
The charter push sought to take school options in Minnesota a step further by allowing educators the freedom to start innovative, independent public schools that would be decidedly different from traditional schools, with the hope of giving offbeat kids more and different options to pick from outside of local school districts.
Open enrollment and the post-secondary option had created demand for alternatives — more schools for kids to choose from if they wanted to leave their local schools. Charters were supposed to provide a better range of unique school choices.
That idea still works. Reform shouldn’t stop at the city limits. Suburban and rural kids — even those in high performing districts — deserve variety, too. More regional specialty schools like the STEM school could be the answer.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetMartin Gottlieb: False alarms about Obama speech should raise an alarm about alarmists
Ronald Reagan could have said it, but Barack Obama did, to America’s schoolchildren on the day after Labor Day:
“What you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. … That’s no excuse for not trying. …
“Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. …
“I know that sometimes you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are you’re not going to be any of those things. …
“The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.”
How is it possible that the very conservative people who didn’t want their children to see President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren didn’t know that it would be a conservative speech?
How could they not have known that it would celebrate the accessibility of the American dream when pursued diligently? He has always talked this way.
How is it possible they imagined that he would use the occasion to promote his “socialist” agenda?
The calls to schools from anxious parents did not arise from newspaper or television stories saying the president would deliver a back-to-school speech. They arose because alarms went up on talk radio, talk television and conservative Internet sites. Alarms about political content, about indoctrination.
Said one Fox television commentator, “This is what Chairman Mao did.”
Some people say the Obama offense was not just the desire to give the speech, but a suggestion that went out from the Department of Education. DOE proposed that schools have students write about how to “help the president.”
But that suggestion could easily be ignored. Educators write lesson plans. This one had an unfortunate phrase. Big deal.
Yet the superintendent of schools in Springboro said Friday that so many complaints were coming in about the speech that “I’m getting absolutely nothing else done.”
All around the suburbs, superintendents and principals were meeting about what to do. In some places around Ohio, that process continued into this week, when last week’s decisions were modified.
Meanwhile, there was no great fuss in Dayton. So maybe the speech ended up reaching the kids the president had most in mind: those from poor and troubled neighborhoods and families, those facing the hardest struggles, from places where dropout rates are highest.
Still, there’s a problem to be paused over here: political inanity of a special degree.
Some commentators have said that the automatic hostility in some circles to all things Obama is like the same attitude in other quarters to all things Bush in the years before 2009.
Well, yes, there was a certain mania about that, a certain obsessiveness. But when did it result in something as bizarre as this: people calling school offices all over the country to object to the unobjectionable, to politicize the most nonpolitical work of a president?
Liberals complained when the first President Bush gave a similar speech. But there was nothing like this.
Hardly anybody complained that President George W. Bush turned out to be in a public school on 9/11 (he went to many schools to promote his education agenda) or that Dan Quayle was campaigning in a public school when he misspelled potato.
The special force at work today is the right-wing propaganda machine in the media. More skilled than ever, after decades of honing, it relentlessly delivers the message that the Democrats are not simply mistaken, but corrupt, evil, manipulative, extreme, anti-American, hateful and particularly contemptuous of you (the listener) and your values.
That’s the context in which listeners develop preposterous fears about the most innocuous event. They are primed to believe just about anything.
One has to wonder what it will take to make them start to wonder about the sources of their information. How many absurd alarms about death squads and birth certificates — and speeches?
Permalink | Comments (27) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Sale of Diebold is good news
The company that makes voting machines used in Montgomery, Greene, Miami, Darke and Butler counties has sold that operation to the company that makes the machines used in all the other counties in the Miami Valley: Warren, Preble, Clark, Champaign, Shelby and Clinton.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound like a great thing. The big get bigger. Less competition.
In this case, however, there’s good news.
The hyper-controversial Diebold Inc. makes the touch-screen, ATM-like machines used in the first group of counties. In recent years, it changed the name of its election-machine subsidiary to Premier Election Solutions Inc. and has taken a hands-off approach. But the machines are still associated with Diebold.
Elections machines are a small part of Diebold’s business. The company also makes ATMs and security systems. (Diebold is headquartered in Canton, but the election-machine subsidiary is based in Texas.)
Diebold got into the elections business in 2002. That was after the disputed 2000 presidential election led to a move away from punch-card ballots, which were used in Montgomery County and much of Ohio.
The move away from punch cards — and their sometimes hanging chads — was initially supported by many on the political left. The punch cards were seen as resulting in Democrats’ votes going uncounted.
But then the top guy at Diebold turned out to be a big supporter of then-President George W. Bush. Walden W. O’Dell wrote in a fundraising letter, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
In a time when people were worrying whether these mysterious new machines could be manipulated by tech-savvy bad guys, that declaration resonated — and resonated.
That was just the beginning. There were problems with the machines, resulting in lawsuits. One in Ohio asks the company to pay for machine problems in 11 counties, including vote-rich and Democratic Cuyahoga County.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has urged counties like Montgomery to move away from the Diebold equipment.
The reason the company has sold out is not that the Bush connection proved fatally embarrassing. It is that the division has been losing money. (The offending executive was eventually removed, but that, too, was after profits dropped.)
After spending more than $30 million to get into the election-machines business (according to the Wall Street Journal), Diebold is selling out for $5 million.
The buyer is Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., already the largest maker of election machines.
The local counties that use ES&S have optical-scanner systems. However, Franklin and eight other Ohio counties use its touch-screen system.
Forty-four Ohio counties use the Diebold touch-screen system.
The concentration of power in the hands of ES&S is not a great thing, in and of itself. The controversies and questions about ensuring the integrity of elections can become all the more heated if just a few players are calling all the shots and producing all the principal experts.
But buyers are gaining experience with the new generation of machines. Increasingly, they know what they are looking for. Certainly ES&S will be highly motivated to service and improve the machines that many Ohio counties use.
The administration of elections is a highly touchy subject — touch screen or no touch screen.
In Ohio and elsewhere, good safeguards are in place to ensure against partisan manipulation. But try to convince the political warriors of that.
The fewer the legitimate reasons for skepticism, the better. The Diebold name was snake-bitten, the product didn’t satisfy, and changing the name didn’t help much.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government
TweetGuest column: Bankers are tying us to railroad tracks again
This column is written by Richard Stock, director of the Business Research Group at the University of Dayton.
If you own a home or saved for retirement, you got hit by a train this last year when the collapse in the financial markets destroyed housing and stock values.
The collapse in the financial markets was linked to uncertainty regarding the true value of subprime mortgage loans. As of August 2009, more than two-thirds of all foreclosures are still tied to those subprime loans. Fifteen percent of subprime loans are in foreclosure, while just 3 percent of all prime mortgage loans are in foreclosure.
For years, consumer groups had warned that fraudulent practices in the subprime mortgage market were creating problems for the borrowers and the neighborhoods in which they lived. They proposed modest common-sense reforms at both the state and federal levels.
Here in Ohio, and at the national level, bankers successfully stopped those reform efforts. Like the villain in the silent movies, they tied the consumer to the train tracks and walked away. They did so because they were making money hand over fist on those mortgage products.
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act is pending in Congress. This legislation would streamline financial consumer protection that is currently fractured between seven federal agencies (and regulated by more than 20 laws) into one office, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
The protection agency’s sole mission would be to protect consumers by preventing discriminatory, deceptive or fraudulent loans; ensuring products are fair and suitable to the buyer; and providing transparent, uniform enforcement. The agency would examine the safety of credit products, features and practices, no matter what kind of lender offers them.
This is the kind of oversight that would have stopped the reckless lending that has scarred the Dayton area. It is what we needed five years ago, and it is what we need now.
President Barack Obama put the basic rationale for the act quite simply: “When you buy a toaster, if it explodes in your face, there is a law that says your toasters need to be safe. But when you get a credit card, or you get a mortgage, there is no law on the books that says if it explodes in your face financially, somehow you are going to be protected.”
These days, bankers are once again battling against the reform effort. They argue that the proposed relationship between state and federal regulation will make compliance costly and complex. They used this same argument to stop state legislation in the past, arguing they preferred regulation at the national level.
Now that regulation would be at a national level, it is somehow “too complicated.” Further, the bill is structured so that states have flexibility in putting an end to unsavory practices before they can even reach the national level, thus protecting all of us.
Bankers are saying the proposed agency creates another layer of bureaucracy that we don’t need. Actually, the proposal would consolidate and streamline consumer protection. It would have consumer protection staffers from relevant federal agencies working in one place.
Putting the consumer protection staff and functions into one agency would reduce the burden on banks, not increase it.
So here we are again. We are lying on the train tracks, waiting to be hog-tied by the same financial interest groups that brought us the Great Recession of 2009, waiting on the train to run us down. It’s time to be your own hero. Call your representative in Congress and tell him or her to vote for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Guest Columns
TweetEditorial: There’s no pill for disease of violence
On the surface, it’s hard to see anything encouraging about 2009 when it comes to gun violence in Dayton. By the end of August, the 30 homicides already recorded equaled the total for all of last year.
But there are some hopeful signs in the city’s statistics that suggest Chief Richard Biehl’s Community Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence can help make a difference. Chicago’s similar CeaseFire program, built on the same principles as the chief’s effort, is generating a lot of buzz for its success reducing violence in key neighborhoods in that city.
CeaseFire, which was hailed last week by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, applies public health principles that are used to control epidemics to combating violence. The idea is to focus attention on a small group that is especially at risk — in this case, those most likely to end up on one side or the other of a pointed gun in “hot spot” neighborhoods — and attempt to change their behavior.
In Dayton, the chief’s effort began in November. As a condition of parole or probation, young men who fit a profile that suggests they are likely candidates to be involved with gun violence are brought in for straight talk with law enforcement and community leaders.
The message: We will help you take a better path, but we will come down on you hard if you choose the wrong road.
Chief Biehl said the men were most affected by an ex-prisoner’s words of regret and the grief of a mother who lost her son in a shooting. The Rev. Daryl Ward of Omega Baptist Church liked what he saw when he attended one of the sessions.
“It’s only a start, but it’s a start in the right direction,” he said.
The theory behind these programs has three strands.
First, individuals are coached about what to do in potentially ugly situations instead of grabbing a gun or pulling a knife. Second, they’re asked to think about the risks, from death and prison to causing a mother so much pain. Finally, the hope is to establish new norms that lead to less violence.
An evaluation of Chicago’s program last year by the National Institute for Justice said it was making a measurable impact on reducing gun incidents in the targeted neighborhoods.
Despite the spike in gun deaths here, Chief Biehl said other statistics are not all depressing. In March, a month in which one of the first “call-in” meetings for probationers and parolees was held, the city had a worrisome 31 gun-related injuries. But in April, gun injuries dropped to seven.
Gun-related injury remained at about 15 per month until another spike in late summer. The education and outreach program looks promising. Even moderate success in getting would-be offenders to think twice before they reach for a gun can make a big dent in the violence that is shattering lives and neighborhoods.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetGuest column: UD certainly isn’t missing the boat(s)
This column was written by Douglas “Dusty” Hall, manager of program development at the Miami Conservancy District and a former assistant city manager in Dayton.
It’s no secret to the University of Dayton that young adults are full of talent — the kind of talent that businesses lust for.
Young talent is an increasingly sought-after commodity, and tens of thousands of young people are products of the Dayton area’s universities and colleges. So, where is our flood of new businesses? Or, more important, where are all the new young grads?
A recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that about six out of every 10 of Ohio’s college students will leave, or are leaning toward leaving. This “brain drain” is not good news for a state with an aging work force and stagnant population.
The Fitz Center for Leadership in Community at the University of Dayton understands that a young, talented work force is essential to businesses, and it doesn’t believe Ohio’s and the region’s losses are inevitable. It’s working hard and smart for change that is altering the course of dozens of UD graduates.
Although some graduating students may still leave Ohio, for many that decision will be tougher. And, while a few dozen students staying here won’t trigger an economic windfall, the philosophy that underlies the early success of these efforts can be copied. What is the Fitz Center’s secret? It’s the students themselves — with a little water and a few canoes and kayaks mixed in.
Today, the Fitz Center and the College of Arts and Sciences are basking in the admiration of the McGregor Fund, a private foundation that has committed $180,000 to UD. That money will help develop a multidisciplinary curriculum geared to developing new civic leaders who are committed to the Greater Dayton community and who are good stewards of rivers and our other natural assets.
They can — and should — be new members of our work force.
The cornerstone of this effort is that students are not only leading the process, but teaching and learning in collaboration with Dayton public- and private-sector partners. Connect these dots: talented, civic-minded students; supportive host and collaborating institutions; leaders and leadership; the river; and a growing work force contributing to the economy.
Sound fishy? Maybe not.
Founded more than 60 years before the great flood of 1913, UD is home to a relatively young Rivers Institute. What sets it apart from similarly named institutes around the world is that students have been largely responsible for its birth and evolution. Just like the curriculum development project, the Rivers Institute is a product of student leadership.
Today, the Rivers Institute promotes the mutual interest of more than three dozen river stewards earning degrees in 15 different academic areas. The stewards are enormously talented, and they share an interest in our river.
They are inspired to their cause by the river. In addition to their annual 17-mile two-day river trip, this year’s senior stewards paddled 50 miles from near Indian Lake (the headwaters of the Great Miami River) to just north of Dayton. Elected officials and other dignitaries greeted and welcomed them during their passage.
River trips bring these talented young adults one step closer to the compelling grip of our river cities. In the words of Nolan Nicaise, a 20-year-old biology major: “We’ve formed connections with our place, our city, our Dayton.”
Because the stewards are connected to the community, because they’ve learned to love the river, they will be more likely to stay here after they graduate.
They will be more likely to be an economic force and new civic leaders. Already they are leaders within the university, and some are contributing to policy discussions in city government.
The Fitz Center has discovered a recipe worth copying. Take talented students from a supportive institutional framework, put them in kayaks and canoes, add water, mix in some community partners, and let the creativity flow.
For those of us in local and regional government, the message is clear.
There is a reservoir of local university and college students, many of whom have a desire and the capacity to add value to our communities.
Our challenge is to actively and creatively engage them; to share our experiences, listen to their ideas, provide constructive input, and then to break down barriers so they can do their work.
Although it will take time to quantitatively assess the impact of the Rivers Institute, one thing is for sure, UD and its Fitz Center have not missed the boat(s).
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Guest Columns, Higher Ed
TweetEditorial: Strickland not only problem facing libraries
2009 ELECTIONS
“As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.” — Erma Bombeck
Here is where people, One frequently finds, Lower their voices And raise their minds. — Richard Armour, “Library”
You know you live in troubled times when public libraries are big in the news. More typically, voices are low not only in libraries, but in discussion of libraries.
Generations of Americans have grown up taking them for granted. Readers — and people who want their children to be readers — have loved them. Non-readers have seldom been thought to hold anything against them.
But now, thanks in large part to the bad economy and to Gov. Ted Strickland, Ohio’s libraries are caught up in controversy about taxes.
The governor, needing to make dramatic last-minute changes in his proposed budget for the next two years, came at libraries amazingly hard. He wanted to cut state funding by 30 percent, even though libraries were already absorbing a recent 20 percent cut. The word “revolution” has been used about such cuts (and increases in spending) in other realms, even when they are enacted far more slowly.
In truth, though, the economy and the politicians aren’t the only problems facing libraries, are they? Plenty of people who are not politicians are skeptical about role of libraries today.
They might point out, for example, that finding the quotations at the beginning of this editorial didn’t require a trip to a library or a call to a librarian. It required only a little finger wiggling at a keyboard tied to a computer. The finger wiggling probably didn’t take five minutes.
They might raise questions about whether providing movies is a legitimate role for tax-supported libraries. They might argue that other institutions could provide the computers and Internet-access that libraries offer to jobless and financially strapped people.
And they might note that, after all, the library Erma Bombeck loved was her school library, not a public library.
They might say we could live with fewer libraries overall because some are remarkably close to each other. (In Montgomery County, there are three on a very short stretch of Far Hills Avenue.)
They might note that philanthropic money is available for libraries. From Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates — with many local figures around the country scattered in between — public benefactors have seen public libraries as worthy recipients.
At the heart of their concern is taxes. But let’s look at that.
In library systems across the Dayton area, people are being laid off, hours are being curtailed, charges to the public are being raised or instituted, programs are being ended, purchases are being reduced, and employees are forgoing pay raises and accepting furloughs.
(In the Dayton system, for example, the librarians’ union, to its credit, has agreed to losing every other Thursday of work. Certainly, the librarians don’t like closing their doors or losing the pay.)
And yet, even in these worst of times, the levies the libraries want to pass in the November election are between half a mill and 1.75 mills.
Greene County and Franklin-Springboro are both going for 1 mill, which they respectively say is about $25 or $30 a year for each $100,000 of assessed value of a house.
Wright Memorial in Oakwood is seeking half a mill. Tipp City, 0.75 mills. Troy-Miami County 0.6 mills. The Dayton and Montgomery County system, 1.75 mills. Lebanon and Waynesville are also seeking 1 mill. In some places, the possibility of closure is in the air.
A lot of taxpayers can make up a mill’s worth of money by simply resolving to use the library more.
Still, taxpayers have a right to expect to be met halfway. Questions about whether library systems can be downsized, while still meeting modern needs, are legitimate. Questions about the effort to raise philanthropic money are, too (though such money often funds specific projects, rather than providing operating funds).
Public libraries are, and should be, a cherished part of the American scene. Maintaining the storied tradition is a partly political task, requiring that the libraries themselves to convince people they are a modern necessity and are adapting to modern economic realities.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Social Services, Suburban Communities
TweetEllen Belcher: What if Riordan had said no?
If Tim Riordan were a small person, he wouldn’t be coming back to Dayton to step in when City Manager Rashad Young leaves next month for Greensboro, N.C.
When he was first elected mayor of Dayton, now-Congressman Mike Turner wanted the old guard, high-level administrators at City Hall gone. He pegged them as Democrats (though they saw themselves as professional administrators first and foremost).
Riordan was one of the people who eventually was pushed aside, exiled to the airport by a new city manager, Bill Estabrook, who was decidedly Turner’s guy. In time, Riordan went on to have a fine career in Cincinnati, always keeping in touch with friends and former colleagues in Dayton.
Now Dayton has brought him back, needing its one-time finance director to figure out how to deal with a daunting $15 million to $20 million budget deficit.
Imagine the pillow talk with his wife when he was weighing whether to come out of semi-retirement.
The fact that he said yes makes the point that Turner missed back when: Truly professional public administrators can roll with the politicians. They know their obligation is to the institution and the people whom voters put into office. The good ones believe in taking orders — or quitting in the face of stupid ones.
A few points about this juncture:
Young has talent. He’s a loss. But Dayton is an amazing place. This community is almost inexplicably resilient, regardless of who’s been in important offices. It has been taking punches for almost 40 years, yet look around.
As deep as some problems are, there are always good people tackling problems and trying to fix things. Important, impressive amenities are still here, still being looked after, and new ones have continued to be built as Dayton and the larger community have shrunk.
(Of course, many of these investments have occurred with less of the required money coming from Dayton or its city government.)
No matter how awful things have been, resignation and abandonment just haven’t been in the water.
The opportunity Young’s leaving creates is that Dayton has an interim person doing a job he can afford to lose. As with Dayton schools’ energetic superintendent, Kurt Stanic, Riordan needs this work like he needs a hole in his head. That gives him license to act and lead without fear or favor.
Riordan is not a shrinking violent. He’s not coming here to mark time and leave the next person a mess that’s bigger than the one he knows is his for however many months.
He’s had experience with tough times. Fifteen years ago, Riordan was acting Dayton city manager for a time. He was in charge when the city cut $8 million to balance its budget, but that effort involved eliminating a mere 78 jobs. (The cost-cutting included more than just cutting people.)
This year the city’s employment is 1,409, which is 125 fewer than last year, and almost 500 fewer than in 2001.
If all $20 million of the coming shortfall had to be saved by eliminating jobs, Dayton would have to cut more than 200 positions.
That scenario — an unlikely one — is complicated by the fact that Dayton negotiated labor agreements with its firefighters and service workers saying that, in exchange for wage freezes and furlough days, the city will not lay off any of them through May 2010.
Not all the facts, however, are negative. Dayton is offering an early-retirement plan, which will result in some people leaving voluntarily and some savings.
And there’s this: Ohio’s police and firefighters have a great gig that allows them to freeze their pension benefits and take an annuity instead of adding to their pension. To get into the program, however, they have to leave after a set number of years.
In 2011, 59 of the 160 Dayton police and firefighters who signed up for this deal must retire. Some are expected to go early, in 2010.
That’s not to say it’s good that police and firefighters are retiring; but it makes saving through restructuring somewhat easier.
One option that’s not out there is tapping its reserves, which Dayton did heavily in 2001 and 2002 — Turner’s last year as mayor and Rhine McLin’s first. The policy is to keep six to 10 weeks’ worth of city expenses on hand, and today there’s barely cash for six weeks in the bank.
Quite possibly only someone who doesn’t need the job would step into Dayton’s spot. Lucky for Dayton that Riordan forgives and forgets.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Miami Valley Politics
TweetGuest column: Heritage Awards recognize work of Shifflers, McCarren
This column was written by Kenneth J. Kuntz, professor emeritus at the University of Dayton and a member of the Dayton History Preservation Advisory Council. Send e-mail to him at kenneth.kuntz@notes.udayton.edu.
This summer, Dayton History presented its annual Heritage Awards. This column was adapted from remarks about the winners. First up: The Kuhns and McCrory buildings.
Kuhns and McCrory buildings
It would be difficult to identify any square block that is more important in the revitalization of downtown Dayton than the one bordered by Fourth, Ludlow, Third and Main streets. That block harbors the Arcade, and it would be difficult to find any corner more central to that revitalization than the corner of Fourth and Main streets.
In 1883, on the corner of Fourth and Main, the Kuhns building, a majestic structure of the Romanesque style, was opened. Over the next many decades, it was home to a wide variety of commercial and office occupants.
In the early 1980s, the building had its first major renovation when the Chemineer company established its headquarters there.
A score of years passed before the building’s second restoration began. With Robert and Nancy Shiffler as developers, the remarkable brickwork of the building, typical of Romanesque architecture, was cleaned and restored.
Inside, the lobby is graced with magnificent murals. The ceiling is adorned with elaborate crown molding and lighted by elegant chandeliers. The restoration continues throughout the upper floors, where workers patiently restored vaulted ceilings, ornate moldings and walnut paneling.
The restoration was done to preserve the architecture of the past, while providing upscale office space like none other available in downtown. The results are stunning, and the building is fully occupied.
When the work of the Kuhns Building was finished, the Shifflers turned their attention to the neighboring McCrory Building that dates to the 1920s and is in the popular Art Deco style of that day. The recent restoration preserves the ceramic facade of the building and stands as an excellent example of the ornate ceramic facades of that era. Someone once said, “There is nothing lonelier than an envelope that has a stamp on it, and no address.”
Nancy and Bob Shiffler found such an envelope, and wrote an address on it — Fourth and Main Streets, Dayton, Ohio 45402 — and then mailed it to future generations.
Lifetime Achievement Award: Lucy McCarren
Harveysburg is a small village 20 miles southeast of Dayton that has a rich history, but requires a person dedicated to preserving its heritage. For Harveysburg, that person is Lucy McCarren.
Lucy’s record for preserving the history of her community is a litany of accomplishments, with the preservation of the Free Black School, the first in Ohio and the Northwest Territory, foremost among them.
On Jan. 2, 1829, the Quaker Village of Harveysburg was established. Important in the development of the village and the history of education in our country were Dr. Jesse Harvey and his wife Elizabeth.
Dr. Harvey set up a medical practice and built a seminary to educate white children. Elizabeth saw a need to educate black children, so together they built a school in 1831 to educate nonwhite children.
The school remained in session for 78 years until 1909, when black children were integrated into the local township school.
In 1976, an effort began to acquire and restore the school house. Through Lucy’s leadership, members of the community signed a bank note for the purchase of the land and building. When the note was retired, energy was focused on restoring the school and converting it to a local museum.
This unpretentious school house in Harveysburg is so much more than just bricks and mortar. It is a strand in the DNA of an entire race that links the passage of that race from addresses like 23 North St., Harveysburg, Ohio, to addresses like 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C.
For her many preservation efforts and her firm belief that “a school is a building that has four walls — with tomorrow inside,” Dayton History presented its 2009 Lifetime Achievement Heritage Award to Lucy McCarren.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Local History
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Can Leitzell pull off a Turner
2009 ELECTION
It’s a little known fact, but true: Dayton is having an election in November. So we are officially in the election season.
Mayor Rhine McLin is being challenged by Southeast Priority Board Chairman Gary Leitzell.
So the question arises: can a first-time candidate — known in certain circles, but lacking a public reputation — who is endorsed by the Republican Party beat an incumbent Democratic mayor in a hugely Democratic city at a time when there’s a lot of public dissatisfaction with the state of things?
The first part of the answer is, of course, Mike Turner. He came out of political no place to do it in 1993. He beat Mayor Richard Clay Dixon.
One difference presents itself immediately, however:
In 1993, a whole slew of people ran for mayor, meaning they actually gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot. When that happens, the city holds a “primary.” The word appears in quotes here, because this kind of primary isn’t about picking a nominee for a party. Party labels don’t appear on ballots in city elections.
Everybody runs against everybody, and the top two finishers meet in November. Well, in ’93, Turner came in second in the spring primary to Dixon. This won him not only name recognition but — more important — a certain credibility. He was no longer just a guy who decided to run for mayor.
A lot of attention focused on him. Having rare abilities, he came to be widely seen as ready for the job. That’s a crucial, tough hurdle for a first-time candidate. Most can’t cross it.
Meanwhile, he didn’t take any positions that detracted from his desire to be seen as a “moderate.” And Dixon ran into embarrassments during the campaign.
Turner’s victory was a big upset. At the beginning of the year, the Montgomery County Republican Party refused to put up a candidate, saying Dayton had become too Democratic. Turner put up himself, and the Republicans endorsed him.
(That’s what happened in Leitzell’s case, too. However, Leitzell, unlike Turner, is calling himself an Independent.)
One cannot honestly discuss Turner’s victory without mentioning race. He did not make a racial appeal, but he won almost exclusively on the basis of white votes, including some liberals.
That would be harder today. The city now has a larger proportion of non-white voters, and Turner just barely won in 1993 (and finally lost to McLin in 2001).
So Leitzell has less time, tougher demographics and apparently limited money. (At the last deadline for filing his financial report, he had raised so little he didn’t have to report the amount.)
But he does have an unprecedented political situation. The city gets hit by wave after wave of bad news, while under the complete political control of one party. (Party labels don’t appear on the ballot, but they do appear on foreheads.)
Meanwhile, the same party is on the defensive in Columbus and Washington, as the bad news extends across the country.
Make no mistake: the national scene matters. When Turner won in 1993, Republicans also took several other mayoral spots they never take (Los Angeles, New York, Jersey City). That presaged the Democratic debacle of 1994.
Leitzell couldn’t have picked a better time to run.
Whether he’s a good candidate has yet to emerge. As to the issues, he sometimes seems to have the perspective of a community activist, complaining about the city’s unresponsiveness to citizens and businesses. But that sounds like what challengers always say.
The fact that McLin has a challenger who’s been involved in some of the issues of city life is a good thing.
To the degree the Republicans get involved as a party, that’s a good thing, too — if they think they have a qualified candidate.
Notwithstanding the shortage of Republican voters in Dayton, the endorsement of a political party adds a certain credibility to a candidate. And advice to the candidate from people who’ve been around the political track can be useful.
Neither sitting on the sidelines nor supporting a bad candidate is going to help the Republicans live down their reputation for aloofness to inner-city problems. The scene is set for a real election. Now it’s up to the players.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetEditorial: Money counting for too much in state Senate
Warren County is newly represented in the Ohio Senate by Springboro’s Shannon Jones.
She was a staffer to former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, former Congressman Steve Chabot and former state Treasurer Joe Deters, three people whose political careers have not gone as well as hers lately.
In 2006, she was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives. This year, after the sitting senator died, she was elevated to the Ohio Senate by Republican senators.
Obviously, she has impressed her colleagues in Columbus. Among her fans is Sen. Jon Husted of Kettering, the former House speaker.
Not getting the Senate nod was, among others, former state Rep. Tom Brinkman, of Mount Lookout. (The Senate district includes eastern Hamilton County.)
Rep. Brinkman, who’s been in the public eye longer and had a reputation as an especially conservative legislator, is complaining that Ms. Jones got the job because of money.
“The bottom line is that they sold it to the highest bidder,” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “The criteria was not how many votes you get or whether the public likes you. It was how much money you’ve got.”
More: “Who the heck does she represent? Certainly not the people from this area. It is not even close. She’s bought and paid for.”
Sounds like there might be a primary brewing for next year.
Truth is, Sen. Jones is valued by the Republicans for her ability to raise money. Before the 2008 election, she was part of the party’s House leadership team, and was the only one who wouldn’t be term-limited. She says she felt a responsibility to help the party maintain its majority, without which life in the Legislature is much different.
“I don’t apologize for raising money to help Republicans get elected,” she says. She adds that she “hates every minute” of the task.
She won’t say how much time she spent fundraising, but says it was “a lot.”
But, she insists, “I didn’t sacrifice anything,” in terms of time spent legislating. She points to a substantive record, taking particular pride these days in a booster-seat law that is about to take effect.
Since 2006, she has raised more than $1 million. Of that, she has needed approximately nothing to win in her hugely Republican district. So she has given almost two-thirds of her cash to other Republicans.
The Enquirer and Ohio Citizen Action (a Common Cause-type group) and Mr. Brinkman highlight $230,396 just in the first half of 2009, including $67,000 that essentially traces back to people associated with one utility, FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, of all places.
As a committee vice chair last year, she played a role in ironing out the specifics of complex utilities legislation that was ultimately passed almost unanimously. FirstEnergy acknowledges it was happy with what it got.
If the rules of the political game were different — if money weren’t taken so seriously by the politicians — Rep. Jones might still have been chosen over former Rep. Brinkman. Priding herself on willingness to dig into details, she’s more the type to do well with colleagues from around the state.
Mr. Brinkman, on the other hand, more the ideological warrior, might be at his strongest with Republican activists closer to home.
Nevertheless, let it be said: This business of raising money is one incredibly messed up measure of merit.
Voters seem to have become largely reconciled to the role of money in elections. They know it shows up all across the political spectrum, not just among Republicans. Many know that it is not all-powerful. (The Republicans lost the House, despite Rep. Jones’ money.) Some know that there are big constitutional bars to limiting campaign spending.
Still, if she hates doing it, if she has to spend a lot of time doing it, if her political opponents get to tag her as somebody who is thick with big-money interests, and if the money doesn’t do much good anyway, something is wrong here.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Ohio needs better report cards
Ohio should junk its school report card rating system.
Report card ratings have evolved to a point where they don’t give Ohioans straightforward, useful information.
Put simply, the rating categories have seen so many add-ons in recent years that some of them have completely lost their meaning.
Is it really possible that only one district in the state (Youngstown) qualifies for the lowest rating of “academic emergency”?
How can Dayton rate a full step higher than Youngstown (it’s in “academic watch”) even though its Performance Index Score — a measure of test performance across all grades — is virtually the same?
Or how about this: Marion City Schools, located about an hour north of Columbus, is in “continuous improvement,” but it meets none of the state’s 30 standards for test scores, attendance and graduation rates. Also in “continuous improvement” are Lebanon and Kettering, each of which met all but one of the standards.
The report card is trying to do too much.
Two years ago, Ohio began giving extra credit to districts for testing gains year-to-year, and it also started penalizing those that failed to meet expectations for test score growth. These factors have pushed ratings down — and, in other cases, up — in ways that are both unfair and confusing.
In fact, the growth measure — called the “value-added score” — is difficult to understand altogether and is based on a professor’s secret, copyrighted formula.
Trying to measure the impact of a school or teacher on student test scores is a good idea, but doing so is tricky. And the effort shouldn’t distort how a district is doing overall.
There also is the sticky issue of “adequate yearly progress.”
The federal No Child Left Behind law requires school districts to track “minority” groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, as well as low income and special education children. If those kids don’t keep up, federal sanctions can kick in.
This has good effects. It forces districts to pay attention to kids who, in the past, were overlooked. Ohio has attempted to incorporate its own sanctions for missing “adequate yearly progress.” If, for example, minority groups consistently fail to keep up, a district can be knocked down on the report card. That’s what happened to Kettering and Lebanon.
The problem is, some of these add-on sanctions result in districts getting ratings that suggest that they’re seriously troubled schools. That makes it harder for parents and the public to make sound judgments. Is a family shopping for schools getting good information if it concludes Lebanon, meeting 29 of 30 state standards, is essentially performing the same as Springfield, which meets just four benchmarks?
Both districts rank in “continuous improvement.”
An overhauled report card should be far simpler. Concepts like AYP and value-added scores should be built-in and have a purposeful effect on district ratings. The oddly named categories — what does “continuous improvement” mean anyway? — should be dumped in favor of something more straightforward, perhaps just an A-F grading scale or a 1 to 10 rating.
This next time around, the state should settle on a system that will work for more than a few years and then leave it alone.
NOTE: Dayton’s performance index score is 70.8 while Youngstown is 70.2, the two lowest scores in Ohio. This editorial previously stated incorrectly that Youngstown was higher.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Rashad Young passed test in Dayton
There are two schools of thought about Dayton City Manager Rashad Young leaving for Greensboro, N.C.
Borrowing from Kenny Rogers, one says, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.”
The other goes, “If a bright, young man can get a $30,000-plus raise in this day and time, run for it. Good for him.”
This is an awful time for the city to lose its manager, what with Dayton looking at a $15 million to $20 million deficit next year. That means its budget is at least 9 percent out of whack, with the emphasis on “at least.”
Of course, knowing what Mr. Young knows about Dayton — indeed what anyone who has lived here long knows — there hasn’t been a good time to cut out, and won’t be any time soon. The City of Dayton has been being battered in one form or another since the 1970s.
The city particularly, and the region, too, have to resign themselves to being smaller places. Not inevitably worse places, but smaller and assuredly different.
If you’re 33, ambitious and ready to make your mark, managing an operation that isn’t done downsizing probably isn’t the challenge that you dream about.
Mr. Young has been on the job a little over three years if you count the time he was interim city manager. He has survived long enough and well enough to show that he has many of the right instincts and isn’t in over his head at the helm of a complex organization.
He was here for the hiring of a new police chief, unquestionably an important appointment, and he’s continued to cut spending and jobs. The payroll is down by 8.2 percent or 125 full-time positions from last year.
In one sense, it’s a credit to Dayton that Mr. Young has been picked off. The alternative — to be led by someone whom others don’t think much of — is hardly a compliment.
Moreover, that’s not a situation that a struggling city can afford to be in.
Though too many people in Dayton and in the region forget this fact, the City of Dayton has a long reputation for attracting quality professional managers and letting them do their thing. That tradition means something to talented people who might be wondering whether they should uproot their families and move to a place that unquestionably has problems — problems that will require difficult, painful, controversial solutions.
The appointment of former Daytonian Tim Riordan to be interim city manager is a great move.
He worked for many years for Dayton; he’s kept his eye on the city from Cincinnati, where he’s recently been; and he has a sincere affection for the city. Mr. Riordan also knows many of the players in Dayton, he knows the city’s culture, and he deserves the trust of a commission that needs a hard-headed numbers person who will tell them everything they need to know, no matter how unpleasant.
It could take a while to find a replacement for Mr. Young, and Dayton’s finances are so tenuous that a lot could go wrong quickly. Anyone who’s considering taking the job permanently has to be reassured by the fact that someone with Mr. Riordan’s integrity, ability and stature isn’t going to let a bad situation get worse while the commission is scouting the field.
What Mr. Young owes Dayton before he leaves is candor and full disclosure.
Mr. Riordan shouldn’t have to guess what problems he’ll discover, or about what decisions Mr. Young knows must be made quickly. He owes the commissioners who took a chance on him when he was just 30 an honest appraisal about how they’ve helped him to succeed and how they’ve let him down. His exit interviews need to show deep loyalty and political courage.
If he wants to go out the door doing right by the city that treated him well, he owes Dayton that.
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TweetEditorial: Judges slow to help save homes
Montgomery County’s judges must become players in efforts to stop home foreclosures.
The foreclosure crisis has hit Dayton and this region harder than most parts of Ohio. Notably Cleveland and Columbus have been more aggressive about trying to help and protect homeowners who could still make their payments if they could negotiate a sensibly reworked mortgage.
One tool other counties are increasingly using is court-ordered mediation. That effort is not happening here, and it should be.
Montgomery County has been too cautious and too slow. While the common pleas court system is proud of its progressive reputation, in this case, its inaction is causing families and neighborhoods to suffer. Right now, more than half of the cases on the docket in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court are foreclosures. A stunning 5,000 families just this year will enter the process that could lead to losing their homes. Many of them can’t be saved — but some can be.
Fair housing and consumer advocates are pressing the judges to use Ohio Supreme Court guidelines that favor mediation and are asking them to order lenders to negotiate with homeowners.
In Franklin County, the court has taken steps such as creating a form that allows homeowners to ask for mediation, and then it quickly responds with orders to lenders to talk. The result has been a relatively small — but growing — number of homes being saved.
For homeowners facing trouble, foreclosure is a terrifying and intimidating process. Some owners have made too many bad choices or can’t afford even a reworked mortgage. Some give up and don’t even try to fight for their home. Others want to find a way out, but don’t know how.
Montgomery County has tried the soft approach — sending letters, for instance, outlining options along with foreclosure notices. That isn’t working.
More aggressive outreach is needed to identify bad loans held by good homeowners — such as those with track records of paying on time and incomes to support a sensible mortgage payment. In those cases, court-ordered mediation is worth a shot.
County Recorder Willis Blackshear has a program that targets just that sort of homeowner before foreclosure, and he raised outside funds for a full-time employee to directly contact people who aren’t totally in over their heads financially. The early success rate of the program is promising. Nonprofit groups like the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center perform similar functions. These efforts should be more closely coordinated with the court.
One possible way to address the problem is to replicate “drug courts,” creating a “foreclosure court” of a similar design.
In drug court, defendants with drug problems are screened, and those deemed likely to avoid trouble get special attention. A judge with expertise in drug cases sets aside designated times to hear those cases. Experts and service providers stay on the defendants and ensure they’re getting help.
A foreclosure court, perhaps led by a judge and a mediator, could work much the same way.
New talks are underway between court personnel and advocates for homeowners. Other ideas must be considered and tried.
Given the scope of the foreclosure crisis and the devastation that’s continuing to occur, the judges must catch up — fast.
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