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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.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > November
November 2009
Guest column: Obesity rate taking toll on society
This column was written by Dr. Jeff Harwood. He practices in Norwalk and is president of the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians.
Flu season 2009 has injected words like “epidemic” and “pandemic” into the news. But a national report just released points to another health epidemic, with alarming results for Ohio.
The report, “The Future Cost of Obesity,” was written by Ken Thorpe, executive director of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease. He paints a sobering picture of the economic impact obesity will have on national health care costs during the next 10 years.
If current trends continue, 103 million American adults — 43 percent of the population — will be obese by 2018. The news is even worse for Ohio.
Thorpe projects that Ohio will be one of six states nationwide where more than 50 percent of residents will be obese if obesity growth rates continue to grow at the current pace.
At present, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that one-third of Americans are overweight and another third are obese. Among children and teenagers, obesity rates have tripled in the last 20 years. Disturbingly, one in every four 5-year-olds is obese.
On a national scale, Thorpe’s report found that these trends in the obesity growth rate will add nearly $344 billion to the nation’s annual health care costs over the next 10 years and account for more than 21 percent of all health care spending.
If we are successful in holding obesity levels to their current rates, the U.S. could save $820 in health care spending per adult by 2018, generating total savings of nearly $200 billion.
In addition to its costs in health care terms, obesity places significant strain on governmental budgets. It adds additional costs to businesses and impedes the competitiveness of our work force due to illness and lost productivity.
In short, the financial toll of obesity ripples through society far beyond the health care system itself.
Obesity increases a person’s risk of developing serious and costly health conditions, many of them chronic. These include Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, stroke, high cholesterol, osteoarthritis, liver and gall bladder disease, sleep apnea and respiratory problems.
Underscoring this reality, the American Institute for Cancer Research found that obesity is responsible for more than 100,000 cases of cancer annually.
CDC studies also have shown that obesity is closely linked to the explosion of chronic disease rates in the U.S., and is directly responsible for 112,000 deaths annually. As daunting as all of our challenges with respect to obesity may seem, it’s within our power to bring the obesity epidemic under control.
We should, for example, make it easier for people to lead healthier, more active lives by such means as lowering co-pays on preventive care, providing more and better nutritional information on food packages and restaurant menus, and offering more effective programs to help overweight Americans.
Support and resources for healthy lifestyles literally should surround us at every turn — in the workplace, our communities and our schools. Above all else, prevention must be a part of any solution to the obesity crisis in America.
While the health reform legislation now being debated in Washington is generating much controversy and disagreement, it nevertheless contains some policy provisions aimed at reducing and controlling obesity that could make a genuine difference. These include programs aimed at preventing obesity among children, promoting workplace wellness and strengthening nutrition labeling requirements.
Contact your elected representatives and let them know that any attempt at meaningful health reform must include a robust obesity prevention and control component.
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Editorial: B-creek board in charge of school design
A debate in Beavercreek about where a new elementary school should go comes down to this: Who gets to call the shots at schools?
There’s only one right answer: the elected school board.
In this case, there would seem to be much overlap between the interests of the Beavercreek board and a developer, who has offered to sell and donate land in and near the 1,200-acre Stonehill Village along Dayton-Xenia Road for a new elementary school and middle school. There should be an opportunity to strike a deal that works for everyone.
Robert Nutter, the developer of the Stonehill planned community, and his attorney say they proposed restrictions on the property, but viewed them as a place to start discussion. They say they are willing to talk more about concerns that apparently have the school board ready to walk away.
But the board said the sorts of restrictions proposed — such as giving the village’s design review board veto power over building materials, colors, styles and landscaping — are deal-breakers; doing so would require the school board to give up too much authority.
A drawn-out debate is a problem because Beavercreek’s enrollment is growing fast, and the district needs more classroom space. With $84 million in hand from a recently passed bond issue, school officials had hoped to break ground in September. Now it may not be possible to have a new elementary school ready to open for the 2012-13 school year.
The school board has another option besides the Stonehill site. It already owns 89 acres on Indian Ripple Road. That parcel has enough space for both a middle and elementary school.
Stonehill Village does not have so many kids that building a school there is a must. Building in the village would, in fact, be a favor to the residents because an elementary school would be a nice amenity.
In short, the school board has leverage.
If developers want the schools on the land they’re offering Beavercreek, they should quickly propose looser rules that would preserve the school board’s authority. Perhaps Stonehill’s design review board could have a formal advisory role, and the school board could pledge to respect the needs of the community and the style and look of that neighborhood.
But no outside entity should have veto power over the elected board. If that’s really what developers want, then the board is right to move on to another site.
An unnecessary political fight, which this dispute has the potential to become, also must be avoided. Nutter family members gave $750 to two successful school board candidates who will go on the board in January. Those two donations amounted to more than the total amounts raised by either of the two incumbents, including one who lost.
Also Mr. Nutter’s lawyer, Tom O’Diam, has family connections to a group that was deeply critical of the school board for its removal of a teacher last year for her role directing the spring musical. That was an unnecessarily ugly controversy.
The two board members-elect who received money from the Nutter family — Robert Dotson and Kim Grant — have said they won’t let the contributions influence their votes and that they hope the debate will be settled before they join the board.
For the sake of appearances and because a decision is needed quickly, that would be best.
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Editorial: Ohio needs health reform more than most
In presidential elections, being a “swing” state can be a pretty neat thing. The whole world watches you.
In legislative fights, however, being a swing state can mean canceling yourself out.
Here we have Ohio’s U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, fighting for the strongest possible health care bill. He wants a version including the “public option,” which frightens off some moderate Democrats. He also wants to strengthen the pending Senate bill to allow the government to negotiate prices with drug companies.
On the other hand, we have Sen. George Voinovich, a Republican, who’s against the Senate package, with the public option being only one reason.
Over in the House, every Ohio Republican voted against the bill that passed, and every Democrat but one (Rep. John Boccieri, of the Canton area) voted yes. That made a 9-9 tie among Ohioans.
So it looks as though, if Ohio sat the whole thing out in Congress, nothing much would change.
That’s not true as to the actual shaping of the bill. On that, for the moment, the fight is among the Democrats.
And yet what’s really important here is the big picture.
More people in Ohio than just about anyplace have experienced firsthand the drastic flaws in the American health insurance system. They have lost their insurance along with their jobs. Now, in the contact sport of life, they are like football players without padding.
Under these circumstances, it is remarkable how many of the state’s politicians can find a reason to oppose a plan that will result in 30 million more people having insurance.
The plan will achieve that not by giving the insurance away, but by requiring people to pay for it (according to their means). And, purportedly, the plan will not increase the federal debt.
The nation needs this. And no place needs it more than Ohio.
The conclusion that the pending bills would not increase the national debt comes from that bipartisan Congressional Budget Office. A few months ago, when the CBO was saying that a pending House bill would, in fact, increase the deficit, opponents were gleeful. They said the CBO made a mockery of the president’s promise not to sign a bill that increased the deficit by one penny.
Now, however, those same people are finding reasons to ignore the CBO. Sen. Voinovich is one of the many Republicans suddenly throwing around the figure $2.5 trillion as the cost over a decade of the Senate proposal, as opposed to the $848 billion the CBO says.
(The Republicans start counting in 2014, not 2010. Even at that, though, the figure appears to be a partisan guess.)
The pending bills would set up insurance co-ops where people who aren’t insured at work can buy insurance from companies that have to compete (and maybe from the government — the public option). And the bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, among other long overdue reforms.
There are downsides, of course. Individuals would be under a new burden to get themselves insured. But, since people who show up at emergency rooms do get treated even if they’re not insured, that seems reasonable.
And businesses above a certain size would have to provide insurance or face a possible fine. But their domestic competitors would have the same problem. And many of those that are big enough to have foreign competitors already offer insurance.
Much has been made of the fact that the various bills are 2,000 pages long. But that’s partly because the reformers started with the determination not to undermine the good aspects of the existing system. Working around what’s in place was complicated.
The effort to plug the holes in the American health care system has been underway — on and off — for many decades. There is no simple, uncontroversial way. But it must be done. Citizens of other affluent countries do not have to go without health insurance. Neither should Americans.
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Ellen Belcher: Mike Peters finds fan in Baghdad
Here’s a Mike Peters story you won’t forget.
Last month, Mike and nine other cartoonists went to Baghdad to entertain the troops.
For Mike, it was the second trip of this sort. On a previous occasion, he and a group of cartoonists went to military hospitals in Germany.
This year they traveled to Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals near Washington, D.C.; to Ramstein Air Base, where seriously injured military personnel are taken from Iraq; then to staging bases in Kuwait; and finally to Iraq.
During their three days in Iraq, the cartoonists were transported by Blackhawk helicopters to multiple bases around the dusty country.
Some flights lasted an hour; others were longer. Two machine-gunners accompanied them.
Mike said he was hoping the security was just for show, but when he asked about the protection, he was told, “No, sir, we do take fire.”
Enough said.
In the hospitals and at the bases, the cartoonists drew cartoons, caricatures and characters from their comic strips.
(The others on the trip were Kettering’s Chip Bok, formerly of the Akron Beacon Journal; Michael Ramirez of Investors Business Daily; Bruce Higdon of Army Times; Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury; Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine; Rick Kirkman of Baby Blues; Jeff Keane of The Family Circus; Jeff Bacon of Broadside and Greenside; and Tom Richmond of MAD magazine.)
Mike said the number of amputees at the hospitals was stunning.
The enemy’s heavy use of improvised explosive devices in both Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in thousands of these crippling injuries.
Mike, being Mike, defused tension with humor. When the cartoonists were leaving Germany, they were instructed not to tell passport control that they were on their way to Iraq.
The other cartoonists worried that Mike would spill their destination.
When his turn came to go through customs, Mike quietly asked the sober and stern female officer if she would rush out of her cubicle, shove him up against the wall, then frisk him.
It was quite the spectacle when she indulged him.
Another unnerving moment was the landing in Baghdad. As part of the approach, the pilots do a maneuver known as a “corkscrew” — an evasive tactic designed to make it difficult for anyone to take down a plane.
In Iraq, some military personnel waited in line for hours to meet the cartoonists and get signed drawings from them. Mike said that, to a person, all those he spoke with were ready to come home.
“They say they’ve done all they can do,” he said.
Mike said he was hoping to walk around Baghdad. “During the campaign, John McCain said you could do that,” he quipped. But, of course, that never happened.
The tail end of the trip was the shocker. On the next-to-last day, the men boarded helicopters once again and were taken to Saddam Hussein’s palace. Among other uses, it serves as a place for troops to recuperate after particularly tragic experiences.
Its furnishings are splendor on steroids.
The balconies are carpeted with AstroTurf so that the Iraqi leader and his guests could hit golf balls from their bedrooms into a man-made lake. There’s a vast playground complete with caves, apparently built as consolation for the children of two of Hussein’s sons-in-law, whom he had assassinated.
Upon arriving, Mike learned that a colonel wanted to see him at the end of the day. Mike couldn’t imagine why, but, hey, occasionally he follows orders.
That evening, slightly worried about what would come next, Mike walked in to an ornate office with a sprawling table made with rare wood and marble. In came the colonel with, as Mike tells it, a dossier.
To Mike’s shock, it contained a collection of some 20 “Open Mike” submissions that Lt. Col. Stuart Kidder had penned. (Our “Open Mike” contest is at DaytonDailyNews.com; readers are invited to submit a cartoon caption and then vote for a winner from a list of several finalists.)
Kidder wanted Mike to critique his entries. He had yet to win, and, being a competitive sort, was looking for an edge.
How did Kidder discover “Open Mike”?
Before he left for Iraq in March, he was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington. The Olympian newspaper also publishes “Open Mike.”
Kidder Googled the phrase and found that “Open Mike” winners receive the original Peters cartoon.
Since then, Kidder, who is 45 and the father of two, has been playing at our site.
Kidder said his entire staff gets in on the fun. Humor keeps them going.
“I’m really a political cartoonist junkie,” Kidder said in a telephone call from Iraq. “I find the guys who do them to be masterful thinkers.”
Referring to Mike, Kidder said, “He is my go-to guy. His politics and mine are not the same on everything. … But they (the cartoonists) are all good Americans.”
I know that you’re not going to believe this, but two weeks ago, Kidder won the “Open Mike” contest fair and square. Cross my heart, his e-mail address wasn’t visible to us when we picked his entry as a finalist, and it really did draw the most online votes.
Now the only problem, Kidder complained, is that he can’t play again for 90 days.
But he’ll be back. It’s great for morale.
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Editorial: Gee’s recognition good for OSU, Ohio
On Saturdays in the fall, Ohio State University is all about football.
But there are six other days of the week, and three other seasons of the year, and, on those days, there is so much more to the university.
Time magazine captured some of those other things in a recent piece in which it named OSU President Gordon Gee one of the country’s “10 best college presidents.”
The acknowledgement was not just important for Ohio State and its popular and proud-to-be-a-dork president. The notice is good for Ohio.
President Gee and most of Ohio’s public and private college presidents get it that the roles of their institutions have expanded. The days when their missions revolved just around students and journal articles are over.
Today they’re seen as originators of the next big things and engines for job growth. Time puts it this way:
“Forget the ivory tower: Colleges and universities are catalysts of economic development, stewards of public health, incubators of social policy and laboratories of discovery. Nearly every great national challenge — from the raising of our children to the quality of our food supply, from the hunt for clean energy to the struggle against insurgent enemies, from the quest for opportunity to the search for sustainable prosperity — depends for a solution on institutions of higher ed.”
Of course, colleges and their students alone can’t save the world. They are very much working with, and for, governments, the military and private businesses.
All of those entities, though, are increasingly deciding that to be good at what they do, they need formal partnerships with scholars, experimenters and the next generation of workers.
When these collaborations go well, everybody wins — most of all the students who get practical experience, real-world exposure and connections to those who can help them get jobs.
Meanwhile, the communities where the schools are located also benefit immeasurably. They become more attractive to young people and businesses, and so often the students’ learning takes them into neighborhoods, schools and government offices to make important contributions.
Gov. Ted Strickland and most lawmakers deserve credit for realizing the shift that has occurred. Though Ohio went through a long period when its colleges were under-appreciated and under-leveraged (and under-scrutinized), that seems to have come to an end.
There’s a widespread understanding that Ohio is rich in both the number and quality of its public (and private) universities and that they’re geographically accessible.
Having such a continuum of choices is nothing but positive for the state.
Under former Gov. Bob Taft and even more so since Gov. Strickland has taken over, Ohio State has been given the enviable responsibility of being the state’s flagship institution.
That’s pretty much always been the reality, but now there’s an explicit acknowledgement that, for Ohio’s sake, it needs a pre-eminent institution.
The other state universities will have their centers of excellence, they will be helped to grow and expand, but Ohio State’s $4.35 billion budget and its sheer size make it an economic development weapon for the entire state.
(That can be a good thing even for the smaller schools. They can compete for grants and projects that, on their own, they wouldn’t have a chance of winning; but, in partnership with OSU, they can be serious contenders.)
President Gee is a powerful and recognized personality in a state that doesn’t have very many. Time’s recognition shows that it doesn’t hurt to have a few.
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Guest column: Charter, city schools have reasons to work together
This column was written by Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio Programs & Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
In the last decade, the Dayton Public Schools have lost more than 10,000 students, seeing their enrollment decline from 24,916 in 2000 to 14,393 in 2009.
During this same period, Dayton has become one of the country’s leading charter school markets.
Annually since 2006, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has reported that Dayton is on its list of top 10 charter communities by market share. In 2009, Dayton is fifth, behind New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Detroit and Kansas City.
Over the years, such numbers and ratings have triggered angst and anger among school officials and their supporters. In 2007, for example, then-board president Yvonne Isaacs captured the feelings of many when she told a gathering of education journalists, “Over the nine years of charter schools in Dayton, the district has lost $283 million that was transferred to charter schools. It would not have cost us nearly that much to educate 6,000 students.”
But, there is more behind these numbers than meets the eye.
Charters have played a role in draining Dayton Public Schools of students, but the city has lost even more children to the suburbs, other states, and private schools. (1,568 children attend private schools in Dayton using a state voucher.)
Consider that in 2000, there were 26,146 Dayton students enrolled in public schools (24,916 in Dayton Public Schools and 1,230 in charters).
In 2009, there were 19,621 Dayton students enrolled in public schools (14,393 in Dayton and 5,228 in charters).
In nine years, the total public-school enrollments shrank by some 6,525 students. But this decline has gone largely unnoticed and unmentioned.
This may be because the pain of losing students has been shared by the charters. Consider two of Dayton’s more established charter schools (both sponsored by the foundation I work for) — the Dayton Academy and the Dayton View Academy. In 2002, their enrollments were 977 and 819 students, respectively. In 2009, their enrollments had declined to 706 and 631 students.
Each school has lost about 25 percent of its students in the last seven years. Further, student enrollment in charters peaked in 2006, when 6,403 Dayton students attended a charter. The number of charter school buildings operating in the city crested at 38 schools in 2005. At the start of this school year, there were only 29. With fewer charter schools in operation, the overall academic performance of those left standing has steadily improved.
Of the 55 Dayton schools (district and charter) to receive academic ratings from the Ohio Department of Education in 2009, 31 got the equivalent of D or F marks (56 percent). Only two — both charter schools — earned an A.
More remarkable, 61 percent of the students in Dayton charters in 2008-9 were in schools rated A, B or C by the state, while 74 percent of Dayton Public Schools students attended schools rated D or F.
What’s surprising to school-choice advocates is that the district results haven’t improved with the charters’. One of the central tenets of school choice is that competition will force all schools to improve. But this simply hasn’t happened in Dayton.
DPS student performance peaked in 2006, when the district was rated a C, and the overall performance of district students was superior to that of charter school students. Since then, charter performance has steadily improved, but the district’s hasn’t. Why?
We don’t know what’s happening. It is possible that, as charter schools have closed, the neediest children (those furthest behind academically) have migrated back to the district. Or, flux within district leadership could be the cause. New school board members have been elected, there’s a new superintendent and leaders at various schools have changed.
The Council of Great City Schools suggests that during recent leadership changes “the administration may have taken its eyes off of the ball and lost its focus.”
Regardless of the reasons for the district’s struggles, Dayton is literally fighting for its survival. On its current trajectory, public education in the city is leading in one direction — to a city devoid of children, families and hope.
The last decade of charter schools and the district fighting each other must be replaced by a new era of “one for all and all for one.” The rallying cry should be quality schools for all, no matter who happens to run them.
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Editorial: Anti-smoking efforts were robbed blind
In the past decade, Ohio has fumbled away a historic opportunity to attack the ills of smoking and get young people not to take up tobacco products.
The really sad part is that there was no excuse. The state had the money, thanks to a legal settlement between major tobacco companies and several states, which brought Ohio $10 billion.
But lawmakers mostly chose to spend it on other things or — most egregiously — to steal back money it had set aside to fight smoking and redirect even that cash to other priorities.
Now the consequences are clear.
Today’s financial crisis, and accompanying drop in state revenue, has public health advocates warning that there probably won’t be money in the future for state-backed anti-tobacco programs, or even enforcement of Ohio’s popular three-year-old ban on smoking in indoor public places.
There is still a way to renew the war on smoking through carefully targeted taxes on existing tobacco products, like cigarettes and chew, and on new candy-like tobacco mints sinfully designed to hook a new generation of kids.
How badly is Ohio falling short? The state is spending $7.3 million this fiscal year on anti-smoking efforts and has plans to cut that amount to $2.8 million next year.
The national advocacy group Tobacco Free Kids recommends a state this size should spend $145 million a year. That means Ohio is spending less than 5 percent of that target.
Not coincidentally, Ohio recently ranked worst in the nation at curbing tobacco sales to kids.
It’s incredible the state could be handed $10 billion from the legal settlement as compensation for the health care ravages tobacco has caused its residents and be spending so little to fight the problem just a decade later.
Not that the state should have spent all the settlement money to combat smoking. But it failed to keep even the modest promises it made in this regard.
The majority of the settlement money was spent on building schools, an undeniably important need for Ohio in 1998. By some measures, Ohio ranked worst in the nation then for the quality of its school facilities. School construction is paying great dividends for schoolchildren.
But at the time, lawmakers pledged to spend a healthy $300 million a year on smoking prevention for kids. Later, state leaders proposed to set aside money in a special fund until it reached $1.2 billion, with the idea that the interest from the fund could be spent on prevention programs.
That, too, has now been junked as lawmakers raided the $230 million fund this summer during the budget crisis.
What Ohio didn’t do then — raise taxes on tobacco products — is the right move now. The higher taxes would discourage some tobacco users, or potential users, from spending their money on these harmful products.
At the same time, a big chunk of the money raised from a new tax could be directed back into prevention programs.
At $1.25 a pack, Ohio’s cigarette tax is below neighboring states. Raising the tax 75 cents — making Ohio even with Michigan — would bring in an estimated half-billion dollars in new tax revenue each year.
Even if just half of that money were spent annually on tobacco prevention and cessation programs, it would make a big difference.
The rest of the money could help the state with its ongoing budget woes.
Even more money could be raised if the tax were extended to new tobacco mints that allegedly are aimed at adults, but that are more than likely to appeal to kids.
A new tax can get Ohio back on the right path after a decade of squandered opportunity.
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Editorial: Donating at holidays is gift to yourself
Today marks the beginning of a long run of holidays that won’t wrap up until the start of the new year. For many of us, there will be many good times in the next six weeks.
For others, however, the season is another stressful reminder of the difficulty they’re having putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their families’ heads. While others are feasting and shopping, they’ll be scrimping or going without.
The unemployment rate is just one of the most obvious measures of people’s hardships. But, of course, that number, high as it is, doesn’t measure those who are working but still not making ends meet; those who have given up looking for jobs; and seniors who can’t work, but who wish they had a pay check.
Maybe it’s good that the season runs more than a month. That gives those of us who are blessed plenty of time to think about how lucky we are. And it creates a large window to find at least a few opportunities to help those in need.
Food drives, coat and glove campaigns and end-of-the-year donation requests are visible everywhere. And there’s something for everyone’s budget.
If you family is richly blessed, this is the right year to dig deeper and to share even more than you have in the past.
Can’t afford to write a check? How about donating mittens? Or maybe you have a coat that’s too big or that you haven’t worn in years that someone else can use.
Your food budget is tight? How about taking the kids to a soup kitchen and volunteering your and their time?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 607,000 Ohio households — 13.3 percent — had trouble feeding themselves last year.
That’s 607,000 entire households, not 607,000 people. And that number came from last year, before the bottom fell out of the economy.
In terms of the percentage of households needing food, Ohio ranked 12th in the country during the three years from 2006 to 2008. The national rate of “food insecurity” — at 14.6 percent — is the highest since the feds started to survey hunger in 1995.
Former Dayton Congressman Tony Hall, who remains active with anti-hunger groups, put out a press release in response to the report recalling a conversation that he once had with Mother Teresa. Her admonition about combatting hunger and the world’s other injustices was, “Do the thing that’s in front of you.”
Her point was not to concede the enormity of society’s problems, nor to suggest big acts or relief efforts are not important. The point was that everyone can contribute, that the scale of poverty is not an excuse for inaction.
The size of people’s needs are especially great this year. There are scores of families hoping that each of us will step up.
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Mike DeWine: Invasion of privacy isn’t fault of Ohio’s taxpayers
This commentary is written by Mike DeWine. The former Greene County prosecutor and U.S. senator is running for Ohio attorney general.
Ohioans should be outraged that Attorney General Richard Cordray is using our hard-earned tax dollars to defend three political hacks who invaded the privacy of an Ohio citizen and then lost their state jobs because of it.
Here are the facts:
In October 2008, Toledo resident Samuel Wurzelbacher gained notoriety as “Joe the Plumber” for challenging then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on his tax plan. Shortly thereafter, three high-level State of Ohio political appointees conspired to cause state databases to be used to dig up confidential information about Wurzelbacher.
Last year, Ohio’s independent Office of the Inspector General initiated an investigation into the search of state records regarding Wurzelbacher. Their report concluded that there was “no legitimate agency function or purpose” and “no reasonable basis” to authorize the searches for confidential information about him.
Three state employees used state time and equipment to target a private citizen and invade his privacy. Their actions were in violation of state law and for the purpose of advancing a partisan political campaign.
Joe the Plumber is now suing the employees. In our legal system, when private employees are sued, they are responsible for hiring and paying for their own attorneys. The only exception is when the lawsuit is against a public employee who was properly acting within the scope of his public duties.
In that case, the attorney general represents the employee.
When state employees are sued, Ohio Statute, Revised Code 109.362, requires the attorney general to review the facts before providing taxpayer-funded representation. The attorney general may not represent an employee who acts recklessly, maliciously or in bad faith outside the scope of his employment.
Despite this, Cordray still chose to use our tax money to defend these wrong-doers, two of whom resigned in disgrace, while the third had his job “revoked.” Cordray’s decision to provide legal representation in the face of Ohio law may provide political cover to the Strickland administration, which appointed the wrong-doers, but it is no way to run the attorney general’s office.
Not only does such a decision show a blatant disregard for taxpayer dollars, but it is also an affront to every Ohio citizen who expects state government to protect their privacy rights.
This is not the only case that calls into question Cordray’s judgment when it comes to matters that may embarrass his political allies.
After disgraced ex-Attorney General Marc Dann left the office in shambles, two of the young women who socialized with Dann and his buddies threatened legal action against the state. Any blame for how they were treated rightfully belonged with Dann and other people who were involved with the women.
But, here too, Cordray decided that taxpayers were responsible. Without first going through the financial approval channels required by law, and after meeting in secret, Cordray agreed to pay nearly $500,000 in taxpayer dollars to the women.
With the case thus settled, there would be no public testimony from them that might reveal other aspects of the growing scandal. They were effectively silenced.
Ohioans deserve an attorney general who will make decisions based on the law, not politics. Sadly, Cordray has failed to live up to that obligation. At a time when every precious state tax dollar must be preserved for the vital services of government, hundreds of thousands have already been squandered by Cordray’s missteps. Taxpayers must speak out and demand change.
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Editorial: Right-wingers thwart reason in Columbus
An editorial here Sunday, Nov. 22, noted that Ohio’s budget problems are — knock on wood — not nearly so intense as those of many other states.
A private study found the state government about average in the short-term challenges it faces, not suffering nearly the kind of crises of Michigan or Illinois, not to mention California.
Good thing. The state legislature is hamstrung by the problem it does face. Let’s not even think about how befuddled it might be if it had to face a really serious challenge.
The problem it faces is that the state is on a path to bring in about $850 million less over the next couple of years than it has budgeted to spend. That happens to be about the amount the state would lose if it were to go ahead with the last phase of a tax-reduction plan it enacted a few years ago. All Columbus must do is suspend the last installment.
The governor has made this proposal (belatedly, after getting behind a bad idea about gambling), and the Democratic House of Representatives has bought in. But the overwhelmingly Republican Senate has not.
The Senate leadership floated a plan that entailed delaying only two-thirds of the final cut, and making up the difference elsewhere. But the plan didn’t have the support of most Republicans, who are holding out against any delay in the tax cut; and the Democrats weren’t willing to provide it any support.
The governor called the Senate proposal irresponsible, and Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, called the governor’s response “almost childish.”
Then the legislature left Columbus for the holiday, with no plans to return this month. When Gov. Strickland put forth his plan, some Republicans called it a tax increase. They pointed out that tax withholding levels for this year have been set on the assumption of a cut. And people have made plans on that assumption. The state is throwing people a curve. True enough.
Also facing a curve ball is the state bureaucracy. The tax agency would need to get revised tax tables out by January. All state agencies need to know how much money they’ll have.
So the need for fast action is clear. The delay — the skittishness — is absurd. The people of Ohio are not up in arms about the idea of sacrificing a tax cut for a while, given the circumstances of the state and the country. Many get it.
After all, Columbus has cut spending again and again over the last couple of years, as revenues have nose-dived.
Meanwhile, the governor’s slot-machines-at-racetracks proposal has been struck down by the Ohio Supreme Court, causing a budget problem.
The Democrats have been willing to embrace the tax cut delay because they know there is no public backlash. Nor are the Republicans’ supporters in big business raising a fuss. The Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, and the Ohio Business Roundtable have signed off.
The Republican senators are worried only about the right-wingers in their base, the noisy, no-tax-no-matter-what crowd. Unable to find a tax increase to oppose, these people are satisfied to have something they can pretend is a tax increase.
The fear they generate in the politicians is sad to behold.
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Editorial: Razing the trestle might not work
Last month’s stabbing of a Miami Valley Hospital nurse by a homeless sex offender has people legitimately concerned about a group of squatters living outdoors near Stewart Street and Patterson Boulevard.
But using a wrecking ball to solve problems of crime or homelessness probably won’t work and may result in something valuable being torn down.
Dayton officials said last week they were in talks with the Norfolk Southern Railway Corp. about demolishing an unused railroad trestle that crosses over Patterson Boulevard just north of Stewart Street. When notified that some homeless individuals are living on the trestle in tents, railway officials told the city they are open to razing it.
But would that really fix the problem?
Homeless people live all around the area of the trestle, including in the woods on the west side of the road between Patterson Boulevard and the Great Miami River. Even if taking out the trestle chases them away, they’ll move some place else, probably nearby.
Periodically police have forced them from the secluded area, only to have them return. It’s also hard to see how demolition of the railroad bridge would reduce crime. James Cundiff, 42, the suspect in the nurse’s stabbing, reportedly lived on the bridge. Who’s to say he wouldn’t still have been in the area, even without the trestle?
For the sake of its employees, patients and visitors who were upset by the incident, Miami Valley has every right to be concerned about people loitering near its campus or intimidating people in the vicinity. That, of course, is why security details, lighting, fencing, and other precautions are essential at any hospital where people are coming and going at all hours, but all the more so at an urban campus.
Dealing with the homeless is difficult. Some can be directed toward shelters that can help get them back on their feet and off the streets. But many reject any sort of helping hand.
Sometimes they’re mentally ill; sometimes they’re addicted to alcohol or drugs. A good step would be to try to coax those living outdoors to go to a shelter. If that doesn’t work, police have to act. You don’t get to build a home on public land or private land that’s not yours just because it’s out of the way.
As for tearing down the trestle, city officials have to think this through. The bridge is in a useful location, not far from the former NCR property that the University of Dayton hopes to develop into a “west campus.”
On the other side of Patterson Boulevard is the river corridor, which includes a popular bikeway and other recreational opportunities. There’s an unused veterans park and parking nearby.
Rather than demolish the bridge, could the area be redeveloped as an attractive connector from the burgeoning Brown Street marketplace, the Fairgrounds neighborhood and the future UD west campus to the river corridor?
It could be a crossing point over busy Patterson Boulevard that wouldn’t require pedestrians or cyclists to navigate a busy intersection at Stewart Street. Improvements and increased activity will permanently discourage the homeless from setting up because what they’re looking for is seclusion.
Though the trestle is dilapidated, once it’s down, recreating something like it would be expensive. Some day soon a bridge could be an important piece of infrastructure. The worst thing to happen would be for the trestle to be torn down and for the homeless still to be congregating in places where they don’t belong. Before the wrecking ball is brought in, people need to be confident that the trestle itself is the problem.
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Editorial: Poor children need quality teachers, too
Ohio looks good when lined up against the Obama administration’s newly released guide telling states how they can get in on $4.35 billion in stimulus grants designed to encourage education reform.
But there is more that the state has to do — for children and to assure that Ohio can compete well for this money.
Specifically, it needs to be more aggressive about ensuring that poor kids have access to good teachers and that evaluations of teachers and principals are partially tied to student performance.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week released a “scoring” system that will be used to evaluate states applying for “Race to the Top” grants.
Twenty-eight percent of each state’s grade will be based on its efforts to create “great teachers and leaders.” The administration says each state must have a plan to improve teacher and principal effectiveness.
Last summer Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland pushed through the legislature his own reform plan that emphasized improving teacher and principal quality. For instance, Ohio is working on a new teacher “career ladder” that allows top teachers to move from beginner, or “resident educator,” to higher rungs of accomplishment termed “professional,” “senior professional” and “lead professional.”
That squares nicely with Secretary Duncan’s request for “high-quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals.”
Other changes are focused on improving teacher preparation and ensuring support for new teachers.
One area Ohio falls short on relates to teacher evaluations. The administration wants states to count student test performance as at least one factor in judging their teachers’ and principals’ effectiveness. That idea hasn’t made its way into any state laws or onto state report cards.
Additionally, the federal guidelines say states need to see that quality principals and teachers — especially in math and science — are equally distributed in high-poverty schools and those with large minority populations.
This is a glaring problem in most states, Ohio included. High-poverty schools, in both rural and urban areas, are avoided by many veteran teachers. Teaching in suburban districts and high-scoring schools is less demanding and frustrating.
Getting great teachers in front of kids who need them the most is difficult. It may mean battling with teachers’ unions about rules that traditionally let more senior teachers pick choice jobs within their district.
Or it could mean providing extra money or other incentives for teachers who agree to harder assignments.
What’s clear is Ohio needs a plan to attack this problem. Right now, it doesn’t have one.
If “Race to the Top” money nudges Ohio and other states to keep at their reform initiatives — education reforms that proponents on the political left and the right have hailed as steps in the right direction — the administration is getting more for your tax money.
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Editorial: Grass isn’t greener across Ohio’s borders
Headline shocker of the year: “Other states in much worse budget shape than Ohio.”
And it’s not a joke. The nothing-if-not-sober Pew Center on the States set out to compare the states systematically on several different measures relevant to the economic crisis.
Most striking about the report is that it doesn’t amount to a lot of hair-splitting. At hand here are some serious differences.
Set aside California, which everybody has heard about. Illinois faces a budget gap — a shortfall of revenues — of 47 percent. Arizona, 41 percent. Nevada, 39 percent. Compared to these, Ohio’s single-digit problem looks sweet.
On the overall drop in state revenues in the last year, Ohio is at 9 percent. Several states are almost twice as high.
Ten states were singled out by Pew as heading toward economic disaster. Far from being in that group, Ohio is just about average on Pew’s total score, at 22nd best.
Several Midwestern states are in the 10-worst category: Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois.
The other big cluster is California and its neighbors: Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. One might add Florida, a Sunbelt state hit particularly hard by the collapse in real estate values.
Pew says the affected states are “from different geographic regions with different types of economies, tax structures and political leanings.”
Some of the measures can be said to reflect Pew’s political inclinations. It gives better marks, for instance, to states that do not require super majorities to raise taxes. That figures into the overall marks.
But the revenue numbers speak for themselves.
To some degree, luck is at work. Michigan has the misfortune to be the center of the auto industry. It was destined to make the bottom-10 list. But, on that score alone, one might expect Ohio to be there, too.
Inevitably, Gov. Ted Strickland and the Democrats claimed vindication in response to the report.
But the larger and better point to be made is simply that Ohio’s lawmakers do not face the enormous financial problems that other states face, at least for the short term.
Judging from current numbers, they have the luxury of being able to make the numbers come together by simply delaying the last increment of a 21-percent income tax cut. That 4.2 percent reduction took effect this year.
By comparison, Florida has had to raise taxes, including adding a dollar-a-pack to cigarette taxes.
(It’s worth remembering that in 2006, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell pointed to Florida as proof of how low taxes help a state. He and others said that the fact that Florida doesn’t have an income tax is drawing Ohioans to that state. But now Florida is actually losing population.)
The Ohio Senate needs to approve the income tax cut delay, which has already been approved by the House. The state needs to move on to, among other things, worrying about the next budget, when federal stimulus money will not likely be available.
Some $7 billion in federal money has helped fill gaps created by Ohio’s declining economy.
As Pew points out, “States historically have their worst years shortly after a national recession ends, as they cope with higher Medicaid and other safety-net expenses at the same time revenues lag because of stubborn unemployment.”
At any rate, with an eye on economic competition with other states, it’s good to see some important statistics in which Ohio is holding its own, relatively speaking.
Ohioans are not the only ones who will find something notable in the fact that Ohio is not listed among the worst basket cases, given all it has been through.
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Guest column: Overhaul colleges that flunk teacher prep
This commentary is written by Gregory Bernhardt and Thomas J. Lasley II. Bernhardt is dean of the College of Education and Human Service at Wright State University. Lasley is dean of the School of Education and Allied Professions at the University of Dayton.
It’s time for Ohio to get tough with colleges that aren’t making the grade when it comes to preparing future teachers and turning out graduates who know what works in the classroom.
Getting good new teachers in Ohio classrooms is an essential goal. Underperforming institutions, whose graduates show a pattern of failing to get their students to make at least one year of academic growth, should be closed or reconstituted with new leaders, new curriculum and better instruction.
That’s a severe punishment, but a necessary one if Ohio wants its kids to compete against the rest of the world, which is where today’s bar is now set. To make this work, the state will need a system that tracks and compares new teachers and their impact on student test gains over time in such a way that allows the colleges they came from to be fairly compared.
Other states are now beginning to recognize this need. Wisconsin and Texas recently joined Louisiana as the only states with a mechanism for tracking the effectiveness of their teacher-preparation programs.
Ohio, which has moved toward such a system, must join that group.
Problems of funding, individual privacy and a viable testing and data-collection system have slowed progress. The state is still not close to implementing what is needed to assess the impact the state’s teacher-preparation programs have on student learning. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for reform of teacher preparation. Critical to his approach is to ensure effective teachers for all classrooms. He wants to measure that, in part, by studying the connection between student achievement and teacher performance.
Duncan says the nation must ensure it has effective teachers — those who know their subject matter, can create a classroom where learning can occur and are committed to a career of professional growth.
At Wright State University and the University of Dayton, we have taken steps to ensure graduates know their disciplinary content well and have the clinical experiences necessary to manage the classrooms they will encounter when they leave school. Both Wright State and UD require their students to begin classroom clinic and field experiences early. They both have a long history of creating critical partnerships with schools that ensure student teachers will have academically rigorous experiences. These experiences are not simple exposure; rather, they focus on learning how to teach content in ways that foster student academic growth.
Both UD and WSU place a premium on recruiting and graduating quality students. The average ACT score for teachers in Ohio is about 21, while at UD, the average is 25. At WSU, students preparing to teach grades 4 through 12 must earn a bachelor’s degree, then spend a year working in a school while earning a master’s degree.
Both institutions also are involved in the Teacher Quality Partnership, an initiative to identify teacher education practices that most effectively promote student academic growth. Both also are part of a national research effort through Stanford University that seeks to create a performance-assessment system for new teachers.
UD and WSU are deeply committed to being part of Ohio’s effort to turn out new teachers who can help kids grow academically.
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Editorial: UD’s winning plan is working
For University of Dayton sports fans, last weekend had the feel of a dream being fulfilled.
Since the early 1990s, Dayton has aimed for a day when it would field intercollegiate teams that earned respect for the way they competed, succeeded and represented the university. That time seems to have arrived, considering the accomplishments in 2009 in men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, football, volleyball and baseball.
The blossoming of UD athletics has resulted from a purposeful effort to improve management, facilities and coaching.
The men’s basketball program, the flagship sport for UD, is getting lots of attention, and justifiably so. After former Coach Oliver Purnell returned the team to respectability from the lost years of defeat in the early 1990s, Brian Gregory was hired with the expectation that he’d take the program to the next level.
The school and its fans wanted a team that competed for its league title regularly, played in NCAA tournaments and earned a top 25 national ranking.
Under that criteria, men’s basketball — ranked No. 18, the preseason favorite to win the Atlantic 10 and coming off an NCAA tournament second- round appearance — certainly seems to be living up to these high hopes.
But basketball success isn’t confined to the men. The Flyers’ opening game win over Creighton Saturday came the same weekend that the UD women’s team defeated 10th-ranked Michigan State and lost a two-point squeaker to 19th-ranked Louisville. It was an especially nice start to the new season coming off consecutive 20-win seasons.
It was also a big weekend for UD soccer, which saw the women finish the season among the nation’s 32 best teams in the NCAA tournament’s second round, while the men finished the regular season as league champs and hopeful for their own tournament bid.
At the same time, UD volleyball won its 11th straight game Saturday, Nov. 14, to claim at least a share of the Atlantic 10 title, while a big win at Drake put UD football back into a tie for first place in its league.
In case anyone forgot about the success of UD baseball last spring — when it won the A-10 title and had one of its best seasons ever — the team was honored at halftime of the men’s basketball game Saturday.
All this success celebrated since Friday follows a report last month that ranked UD’s 96 percent graduation rate for athletes in the top 10 nationally.
Ted Kissell, who retired in July after 16 years as athletic director, deserves a lot of credit. UD was a low performer in most sports in a bad-fit league when he arrived; he launched a rebuilding effort.
This year’s success and the seamless transition to the new athletic director, Tim Wabler, during the summer are a testament to his leadership.
At the start of Mr. Kissell’s tenure, the university chose carefully those sports it wanted to commit to and then added resources and support for them. This included some painful early decisions to drop some minor sports.
The turnaround took time as UD rehabbed sports venues like UD Arena for basketball, Baujan Field for soccer and the Frericks Center for volleyball and built new baseball and softball stadiums.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kissell demonstrated a good eye for coaching talent, and those coaches have taken the right approach of steady, consistent improvement.
UD’s athletic program, as a rule, now attracts quality student-athletes. That’s worth cheering for.
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Editorial: Clearcreek Twp. firms should foot water tower bill
Warren County has a serious public safety concern when it comes to a fuel terminal in Clearcreek Twp. — one that the 10 companies doing business there have a responsibility to address.
Everyone would benefit if a water tower big enough to douse a major fire at the terminal is constructed. Negotiating a deal about who pays would prevent a legal fight, which would be costly. In any agreement, though, the companies must pay the most for a project that primarily protects their interests.
The water tower idea grew out of a concern raised three years ago by now-retired Clearcreek Fire Chief Bernie Becker. He felt his crews did not have the resources to contain a serious fire at the terminal.
Underground tanks and pipelines contain up to 85 million gallons of gasoline, diesel, kerosene, ethanol, propane and natural gas at any given time there.
The new chief, Tom Morrison, also believes the current water system could not provide enough water to the site, should something catastrophic happen.
Since Mr. Becker started this discussion, the companies and Warren County and township officials have proposed four options to increase water supply — a water tower, a ground-level water tank, a reservoir or a water line extension. The easy favorite was a water tower, with an eventual price tag of $4.8 million.
The tower is not needed either for the county water system or for general fire protection, only if a serious fire occurs at the terminal. It would be financed by bonds and the cost assessed to the 10 companies based on several factors. Their costs would range from $95,000 up to $1.9 million each. The companies all had an opportunity to review the assessment method.
But now a majority of the businesses — seven of the 10 — are balking at the cost and want to scuttle the plan. On Tuesday, Nov. 17, the Warren County Commission decided to hold off on a decision, ordering more public meetings.
The companies cannot be allowed to shift the burden for protecting their interests to taxpayers. Their arguments against building and paying for the water tower are not persuasive.
Their attorneys have said each company has the capacity on its own site to contain any fire. Hogwash. The combined disaster plans of each business do not add up to a coherent plan to protect the public if more than one becomes involved in a serious fire. Plus, each of those plans depends to some extent on the fire department.
The companies also argue that the wider community will benefit from the water tower and, therefore, should help pay for it. This is, to put it mildly, a stretch. Everyone could get by just fine without the tower but for the danger of the terminal going up in flames.
County Commissioner Michael Kilburn said he found the argument compelling that water would not even be the best option to douse flames at some facilities, especially the gas companies. He shouldn’t be swayed by that view.
Even if a particular fire shouldn’t be extinguished by water, there is still a need to wet down roads, buildings and other structures nearby to keep the disaster from spreading. And the foam used to douse some fuel fires must be mixed with lots of water.
A water tower is needed to protect the companies themselves. An inferno would threaten everything around it. The companies should foot the bill.
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Kevin Riley: Street-smart officers have bright ideas for downtown
Do you feel safe when you’re walking alone on a dark, unlit and abandoned street that lacks signs?
Of course not. We go out of our way to avoid those situations.
Therein lies one of the challenges for people trying to revitalize downtown Dayton.
Even though downtown is safe — and statistics prove it — many people have the perception that it isn’t. In other ways, it can be intimidating if you don’t go there often.
Michael Ervin, a retired physician and health insurance executive who is behind an initiative called the Greater Downtown Plan, believes his group has to address safety. And Ervin says it will.
Two Dayton police officers who work downtown have become key contributors, and they have innovative ideas worth supporting.
Officers Bill Parsons and Shawn Huey, with the backing of their Central Business District boss, Lt. Larry Faulkner, advocate coupling tried-and-true safety and crime-prevention practices with efforts to create a vibrant downtown.
Here’s what they suggest:
— Use inventive lighting of buildings, parks and other key downtown areas to create a sense of excitement and safety.
— Install lighting, trim trees and fix sidewalks in areas that look unsafe to people. The officers’ ideas, which are cheap and easy to do, fit into what the Greater Downtown Plan is trying to do.
“With relatively little money, their ideas could literally be transformational for the city,” said Ervin. “People tend to focus on the big-dollar projects. Sometimes the really big changes are right in front of us and don’t cost a lot of money.”
Parsons and Huey are advocating for these ideas because they believe in Dayton and want people to feel safe there. They have led citizens and business owners on a late-night downtown tour, pointing out problem areas and opportunities to make them more inviting.
Ervin recalls them simply placing a flashlight at the base of statue to show how even a little light can make a big difference.
Last month, they organized a special presentation that drew ooohs and ahhhs from an audience at Sinclair Community College. The officers showed their concepts for lighting up buildings and areas of downtown. They took real buildings and created pictures of how they could look.
(Click here to see some before and after photos.)
They also convinced companies that sell lights and signs to assist in the presentation.
How did they come up with these ideas?
Parsons and Huey can give you an explanation based on theory and law enforcement studies, while Faulkner has a master’s degree in the subject. But their recommendations also reflect the pragmatism of experienced street cops.
They routinely work with bar owners to improve safety and behavior around their establishments. One of the first things they do? Check the bathroom at the bar. A messy, unkept bathroom with graffiti sends a signal, they say.
“They are going to tolerate the wrong behavior,” Parsons said. A clean, neat bathroom tells people they need to behave.
They also advise bar owners on lighting and music as a way of making sure things don’t get rowdy — and dangerous — at the wrong times. So they are applying the same principles of environmental psychology to making downtown streets safer. Make it look safe and that will help assure it is, they say.
Parsons and Huey specifically point to efforts at Cooper Park near the Montgomery County Public Library as a place where their concepts have worked.
Of course, these ideas all by themselves won’t completely turn around downtown Dayton. But they can help.
And their approach also fits in with getting grass-roots involvement for improving downtown.
Ervin has engaged an army of citizens, and these officers show that the approach is working.
“These guys are the perfect example of talented citizens listening and then getting excited about what they could do to revitalize the city,” Ervin said. “As a community, we are smarter when we all put our collective heads together in trying to figure out how to make a great future.”
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Editorial: Dayton Region Rally never revved
Good intentions, awful form.
That’s how it felt at the Dayton Region Rally on Tuesday, Nov. 17.
Seventeen speakers on a program that ran two-plus hours. Maybe if the event had been less passive, maybe if even the spontaneity hadn’t been scripted, it might have been energizing.
But, man, this was homework. Thank goodness there weren’t many young people there, the very people the community desperately wants to attract to “work, live and play” in Dayton.
They would have been unimpressed. They would have been out of that arena.
After all, here we have an event — billed as a rally, as in pep, as in get excited, as in feel good about your team — that was built on lectures.
Who gave out those instructions? Who thought this design would whip up anyone?
There are some take-aways that just have to be on the table:
— This is the second marketing misstep by the Dayton Development Coalition.
Its branding effort — Get Midwest — is pedestrian and uninspired. Now this.
The coalition has bright, dedicated people doing important work. But the organization’s marketing instincts aren’t cutting it.
This event had money behind it; it was technically polished. But it did nothing meaningful to advance people’s perceptions of the region.
The crowd, estimated at 1,500 or so, was small. A great many in the audience either know about Dayton’s assets or they are employees of companies or organizations that asked their people to attend.
At 5 o’clock, the exodus was so pronounced that you’d have thought someone had rung a bell and yelled, “Quitting time.”
That must have been painful for the speakers who hadn’t gone yet. Some of this community’s best minds were asked to take on speaking roles that aren’t natural to them, that even they would say they’re not good at it.
— Dayton’s old boys need some new heads at the table.
If 20- and 30-somethings had planned this event, it would have looked so different. Speeches wouldn’t haven’t been allowed. There would have been memorable video mash-ups, there would have been skits and comedy, there would have been real audience participation.
Think about the scores they would have settled — hilariously — at NCR’s expense.
(Bruce Langos’ litany of reasons why his Teradata Corp. chose to remain in Dayton when the company spun off from NCR just touched on what could have been done.)
You got a taste of this difference in approach when the folks from Five Rivers MetroParks poured out of the audience and onto the arena floor with kayaks, bikes and backpacking gear when their boss started to speak.
The frolicking, of course, was staged, but it was possibly one of the lone moments of energy. That it was produced by a young workforce that is actually engaged in the things that the speakers were asked to talk, talk, talk about is telling.
If the event had been truly a community one, the big act wouldn’t have been an out-of-town artist. Michael Israel is gifted and entertaining, but what does producing a painting of the Statue of Liberty have to do with inspiring Dayton? Where were our artists?
There was not a person on the stage who isn’t passionate about Dayton or isn’t doing tremendous, important work in the community; some of the individuals are positively brilliant.
The projects they are involved in — developing insect-sized aerial vehicles that can attack, or spy on, our enemies, for instance — are great, even sexy, Dayton stories.
Their and their colleagues’ presence is transforming this region from being mainly a manufacturing hub to one where entrepreneurs and researchers are doing world-class work that is central to this country’s high-tech edge.
Those innovations are being cooked up in secret labs and in small start-up companies that are Dayton’s future and that already are competing well in the global marketplace.
The problem is not with Dayton’s stories. It has great ones. There’s just no innovation in how we tell — and sell — them.
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Editorial: Hospital’s rules slam into the rights of single women
The idea that a woman seeking in vitro fertilization would be asked to first show that she had a husband — and then get turned away only for being unmarried — feels like a throwback to another age.
That’s what happened to 40-year-old Karri O’Reilly at an office on the campus of Kettering Medical Center . Ms. O’Reilly is single, wants to have a baby and was seeking fertility treatment at Kettering Reproductive Medicine. The center is affiliated with Kettering Health Network, one of two large health care organizations — the other being Premier Health Partners — that dominate Dayton’s market.
Kettering is a private hospital, affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist faith. It is common for faith-based hospitals to decline to perform services, such as abortions, that violate their teachings. Apparently helping an unmarried woman become pregnant falls in this realm for Kettering, although the hospital says it is rethinking its policy following Ms. O’Reilly’s complaints.
After declining to treat Ms. O’Reilly, the center referred her to other clinics in Cincinnati that don’t have its restrictions.
Ms. O’Reilly, a Dayton filmmaker, believes Kettering must provide its services without regard to a patient’s marital status because the network receives federal dollars. The rule against serving unmarried people, she notes, also would prevent gay couples from being treated. (Ms. O’Reilly is not gay.)
Finally, she argues that these rules discriminate in a way that violates the network’s own non-discrimination policy.
The hospital has a strong defense in asserting that its doctors can legally decide whom to see as patients, especially for elective services. While the hospital network receives federal Medicare and Medicaid money for treating patients in its hospitals, it does not receive this money at its reproductive center.
The argument that this sort of policy discriminates against gays and unmarried individuals has been raised elsewhere. Last year, California’s Supreme Court ruled that, under that state’s anti-discrimination laws, religious considerations cannot be used to make judgments about who can receive fertility treatments.
Kettering, of course, is entitled to practice its religious principles, especially when they involve an elective procedure. But those who disagree are as entitled to be offended that a hospital would put itself in the position of presuming to judge who should be a mother.
Pregnancy is such a private matter, such a personal choice, that the prospect of having to explain and justify yourself feels incredibly invasive.
At a minimum, Kettering’s posture creates public-relations challenges for the network. It has been expanding its influence in the region. In parts of the Dayton area, Kettering is the primary provider of health care services. Kettering and its sister hospital Southview, for instance, serve much of Dayton’s south suburbs. Greene Memorial Hospital, which Kettering operates, is the only hospital in Greene County. The coming construction of a new Kettering-run hospital in Beavercreek will extend the network’s reach.
As it expands, Kettering seeks to provide health care for a wide spectrum of people. Drawing dividing lines between patients based on considerations like marital status could get dicey.
Kettering suggests that there might be some give in its position. Possibly if its relationship with the center is an arm’s-length one, it can side step the religious conflict and back down.
Meanwhile, Ms. O’Reilly isn’t alone in being taken aback.
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Editorial: School dress code sacks Bengal haircut
One young Bengals fan let the team’s unexpected success this season go to his head, literally. The next thing you know, it’s a national talk story.
In fact, there isn’t much to discuss. As recently as 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court said schools have wide latitude when it comes to making and enforcing rules about student behavior, including how they dress and wear their hair. But that reality won’t keep a kid with an eye-catching haircut off CNN.
Last week’s in-school suspension of Dustin Reader, an eighth-grader in Hamilton with Bengal stripes shaved into his head, should demonstrate to parents and school officials everywhere the value of clear rules, consistent enforcement and common sense. It’s when there are misfires in one of those areas that tempers flare.
Dustin’s barber, Chris Campbell, told the Hamilton Journal-News that he has done special designs for many kids who attend the city’s schools with few complaints. Dustin, however, acknowledges that a prior design cut from Mr. Campbell had brought a warning and required alterations to avoid punishment.
What’s wrong with a stand-out haircut? Garfield Middle School’s discipline code includes common school language forbidding “unnaturally colored hair, extreme/distracting makeup, haircuts and hairstyles.”
Principals and teachers argue that extreme fashion statements can be disruptive, causing other students to focus on style instead of instruction.
It’s a fair concern. Schools have to have well-established rules about appearances or things can get out of control quickly. That’s the point judges make when they invariably side with schools in these situations.
In fact, the 2007 Supreme Court case had a fairly strong free-speech defense for the student, but still went the school’s way. A student who was not at school held up a nonsensical sign bearing the phrase “bong hits 4 Jesus” while standing with other students and his principal as the Olympic torch was carried through his Alaska hometown.
The student, who got a 10-day suspension, said the sign meant nothing. He just hoped it would get him on TV. That worked out well, but school officials were not amused. The student’s lawyers argued the school had no right to limit his speech away from class, but failed to persuade the court.
Generally, these cases result from similarly nutty pranks. Last May, 15 Jefferson Twp. High School students were suspended for knowingly violating a school dress code by wearing flip-flops to school in a coordinated effort. They thought they were being funny, but school officials were not laughing as they handed out punishment.
It can be upsetting to parents when their children are disciplined for doing something silly and seemingly harmless. But so long as school officials are being consistent, families can’t legitimately complain. Let them try to run a school district or a school building if they think order and discipline don’t matter.
At last word, Dustin and his parents weren’t budging, and he was going to stay in in-school suspension apparently until his hair grows back. A simple buzz cut would get class back to normal — and send the TV cameras home.
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Editorial: There’s a better way to pick judges
If you ever think about judges, it’s probably at election time when you’re asked to vote for some.
Or maybe if you go to court for a ticket or are called for jury duty.
There are, however, some people who are thinking about them a lot these days — and specifically about how Ohio chooses its seven-member Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Tom Moyer, the Ohio League of Women Voters and the Ohio State Bar Association believe there has to be a better way to choose the people who decide what the state constitution and Ohio’s laws really mean.
(This court’s role is important, to name a few for instances, in fights about how to fund schools; whether jury awards for damages can be limited; and, to cite a recent example, whether thousands of slot machines can be put at race tracks.)
Chief Justice Moyer, the bar association and the League are having a conference Nov. 19 and Nov. 20, and the headliner is former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
She opposes the practice of judges raising goo-gobs of money, then deciding cases that cost, save or beget the interest groups that funded their campaigns tons of money.
Ohio has been down this path before, in 1987. Voters overwhelmingly rejected a “merit selection” plan for choosing judges. The political parties were against the idea, as were plenty of interest groups.
Voters, the thinking goes, didn’t want anyone taking away their right to choose judges, even though they readily confess they frequently don’t know much about these candidates.
Proponents think opposition may have lessened in the intervening two decades. Because supreme court contests have become so expensive, the interest groups are getting tired of shelling out money to elect “their” people.
The bar association’s research shows that, during the five occasions since 2000 that Supreme Court races were on the ballot, Ohioans have been pelted by more than $20 million in television ads.
That makes us possibly the most insulted people in the country. The ads are often annoyingly overdone and under truthful.
The conference organizers are offering up two approaches: public financing of judicial elections or an appointive process that requires justices to run to keep their seat after they’ve served a number of years.
Either option would substantially reduce the role of money.
Americans like to think of their court system as having integrity. Even though plenty of people who go to court come away disappointed (somebody has to lose), the widespread perception is that judges and juries do a pretty good job at sorting out people’s disagreements.
However, when money plays such a powerful role in the election of very low-profile people who have the final word on so many issues, public confidence is at risk.
The reformers want to capture the moment, not blow it.
So they’re committed to working with interest groups and the politicians to craft something good and salable.
Then they say there will have to be an aggressive public education campaign to assure voters that supporting a change would improve a tarnished system.
Let the work and the education both begin.
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Editorial: Human trafficking issue gets useful look from UD, Cordray
How’s this for a coincidence:
Just as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize was going to a young writer named Ben Skinner for his book about modern human slavery (“A Crime So Monstrous”), the University of Dayton independently had a conference on human trafficking in Ohio.
Because of the serendipitous convergence, Mr. Skinner accepted his award at the Schuster Center on Sunday, Nov. 8, and got to make a speech the next day at UD.
And yet maybe the word coincidence doesn’t quite cover the situation.
In how many other communities, after all, is there a civic organization that gives a nationally recognized peace prize and a university that has a human rights studies program that holds such conferences?
The answer is zero. The Literary Peace Prize is unique. And the human rights program is one of about a dozen such undergraduate programs in the country.
On Tuesday, a big part of the Kennedy Union ballroom at UD was overfilled for a forum featuring four women talking, mainly from personal experience, about various forms of slavery and trafficking abroad and at home.
These are not new evils, but a lot of people are just starting to learn about them. The first question people have about domestic trafficking is how common is it, especially in Ohio?
The feds use 17,000 as a figure for people trafficked into this country in a year. Specialists outside of the government think that number is way low.
There’s also a purely domestic variant, wherein American women and children are lured or dragged into the sex trade. The UD audiences heard from a UD grad who said she was raped at 15 and blackmailed into life as a prostitute under threat of her conservative, Catholic parents and others being shown photos of her in sex acts.
As a result of newspaper attention to the conference, one local family was prompted to come forth to report they believe their very young daughter has been forced into gang-related prostitution.
UD’s Mark Ensalaco, head of the human rights program, says that when one such victim is found, she can usually tell about five others.
At the conference, people in and out of government who work with victims met with local police chiefs and sheriffs, as well as national experts, on how to recognize human trafficking and what to do about it.
Attendees heard about a local woman who paid her landlord with the sexual attention of her underage daughter. That, the gathered were told, meets the legal definition of trafficking.
Attorney General Richard Cordray was there to discuss the Ohio Trafficking in Persons Study Commission he has set up. It is in the early part of its work and is hoping to answer questions about just how much of what kinds of trafficking are prevalent in the state, and what can be done. Several members of the commission were present.
Mr. Skinner called his listeners to a new abolitionism: the cause of eliminating worldwide slavery in our time. A game plan toward that goal is hard to envisage.
But cracking down at least on Americans who use foreigners or Americans against their will for sex or any other industry, or who use children, has to be doable.
What’s going on now is — to use an inelegant phrase out of the 1960s — a sort of consciousness-raising. Most people’s awareness of modern human trafficking might be limited to what they have gleaned from occasional television cop shows.
What’s needed at this stage is a sharp focus on the murky world of traffickers, a focus that two Dayton organizations have done their part to foster.
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Editorial: Voinovich on right path with debt plan
The most radical proposal being taken seriously in Congress these days is being put forth by a group of legislators typically referred to as the moderates: Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich, for example, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut.
In a Congress that has been so extraordinarily polarized along party lines, and where a lot of huge stuff is pending, this genuinely bipartisan effort could be the biggest initiative yet.
The proposal: to create a bipartisan commission to make recommendations for dealing with the national debt, and to require Congress and the president to either accept or reject those recommendations as a whole.
Congress would be scaling back its role profoundly.
As the maker of the laws, it has always been the primary shaper of the laws.
There is a precedent, however: the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission that periodically recommends the closing of military bases. It works on the same take-it-or-leave-it basis. That process works. But this proposal is so much bigger. It would presumably affect Social Security, Medicare, military spending and taxes.
The moderates say the radical approach is justified because the debt is out of hand to a degree that threatens the well-being of the country, and because Congress has demonstrated its inability to handle the problem.
The deficit is record-breakingly monstrous, at $1.4 trillion. That is several multiples of what was considered horrendous just a couple of years ago.
The difference between deficit and debt needs to be understood. The deficit is an annual number. It’s off the charts this year because 2009 has been an off-the-charts year: extreme recession, bailout, stimulus. Some of the factors pushing the deficit up are expected to go away.
More troublesome is the debt, the total amount the government owes. That’s now in the range of $12.1 trillion. Some nonpartisan specialists say that in 10 years, the government will be spending $800 billion a year just repaying debt. That’s a fourth of the entire federal budget just a year ago.
Nobody knows for sure how much borrowing is too much for the economy. At what point do foreigners stop buying U.S. bonds for fear that they’re not a good investment? At what point do interest rates rise because of all the borrowing?
Everybody knows the current direction is bad.
President Barack Obama says, with good reason, that the heart of the problem is rising health care costs. He has promised (to some sneers) that the pending health care reform bill won’t increase the deficit. But others are saying it also won’t accomplish the original goal of reducing projected deficits.
Though the president has handled the economic problems of 2009 reasonably, at some stage he’ll have to turn a corner. He’ll have to say, OK, we did what was necessary then, but now we must focus on the debt.
He has blessed the commission idea, but only in general terms.
Moderate Democrats want to turn the corner now, so they don’t have to run in 2010 looking like big spenders.
Moderates in both parties want Congress to make a commitment to the commission idea in December, when Congress has to raise the debt ceiling to allow more debt to be issued.
Before too long, Congress does need to embrace the commission idea or come up with something else credible. It’s hard to image the latter happening.
The staunch conservative warriors are leery of the commission because it might raise taxes. Staunch liberals warriors are leery because it might cut spending in the wrong areas. But who sees them coming together?
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Ellen Belcher: County won’t do well if it stops investing
What a difference 10 years make.
This week Montgomery County Administrator Deborah Feldman and Commissioner Dan Foley met with this newspaper’s editorial board to talk about the county’s budget. Let’s just say there was not much cheer in the room.
Numbers can be deadly, but stay with me here. There’s telling stuff to come.
Next year, the county’s general fund budget will be $140 million; this year’s is almost $152 million, propped up by rainy-day money and reserves. That drop figures out to about 11 percent.
Obviously, this is a big loss to swallow, but step back in time: The county’s strategic plan from 1998 estimated that expenses this year would be $179 million — representing an annual average increase of 3 percent.
No one, back then, was thinking things could slide so hard, so persistently, and, in the big picture, so fast.
Feldman said that she thinks the worst is over and that the county has hit a financial plateau of sorts. But she’s the first to say that she’s been surprised before and that she can’t be sure.
As further evidence about the need for humility:
The 1998 strategic plan said the county’s investment income would be $30 million this year; it will be about $15.5 million.
The plan estimated that the local government fund — that’s money the state sends to counties and cities — would hit $19 million; it will be about $13 million.
Even back then, the prognosticators were worried about what was going to happen with the sales tax, the county’s largest revenue source, what with people and shopping centers sprawling. It was projected to be $80 million this year; the true number will be about $59.1 million.
You get the picture. Things are bad, even ugly.
Somehow county government and the community have been able to adapt, even to start transforming themselves in important ways.
Still, you can’t look at the trend lines and not be worried about the next 10 years. If this isn’t rock bottom, how much more creative can people get about cost-cutting without gutting things that citizens want and expect?
One initiative that the 1998 strategic plan was bullish on was an economic development program know as EDGE. The county committed to putting $5 million a year into a pot for grants designed to create jobs and retain businesses.
Communities apply for the money for things like site development, relocation costs and road improvements. Everyone’s requests are stacked up, and a diverse group decides who wins and who has to wait to try again another time.
Once a deal is complete, a portion of the new tax proceeds are shared among participating local governments.
The program dates back to the early 1990s, and, though it wasn’t universally embraced initially, it has a good reputation among government leaders across the county today. Next year the county will put just $1 million into EDGE, and, after that, it could end altogether.
Besides trying to encourage local governments not to outbid each other when wooing a prospect — using tax-sharing as both an incentive and a reward — the fund exists to make sure that Montgomery County can compete when a new business opportunity comes along.
Invariably, if the opportunity is a good one, the company is looking for some public assistance and, oftentimes, smaller communities don’t have enough resources on their own to make themselves competitive with another region or state.
EDGE has been written up in textbooks and recognized by planners and national journalists as a smart way to pool resources and get communities to think regionally. Cutting it back so much — in anticipation of letting it die — is a mistake.
It’s a statement that Montgomery County can only see as far as the sheriff’s jailhouse doors and the courthouse. Those are the places where it spends most of its money.
Even in a budget that’s declined so steeply, there has to be money to invest. When things start to turn around, the region has to be ready to act.
No community can cut its way to prosperity.
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Editorial: Mentally ill not getting care they need
Vulnerable, sometimes dangerous, people are not being treated well — morally or medically — partly because of a fight between Montgomery County’s mental health agency and local hospitals.
The failure to come together could get someone — a mentally ill patient, a family member, a doctor or nurse or some unsuspecting soul on the street — hurt.
Last year Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare was closed by Gov. Ted. Strickland. It was the Dayton area’s state psychiatric hospital, the place where acutely disturbed people were treated sometimes for long periods.
Since Twin Valley closed, patients generally are sent to a similar facility in Cincinnati. Local hospitals complain, though, that they can’t get the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board to sign off on this intense treatment.
If a mentally ill patient is taken to a hospital emergency room by police or a family member and needs to be admitted, local hospitals are equipped to keep these individuals for short stays. Their facilities aren’t built or staffed, however, to allow people to remain for a week and more.
But hospitals have to get county mental health officials to agree that a person needs to be in a state facility — and they have a financial incentive to resist.
So long as a patient is in a hospital, the mental health board doesn’t have to pay for the care. Either the patient pays (which is rare) or the hospital eats the cost and hopes to collect from the county’s uncompensated health care fund.
Because of cuts in the state budget, the local mental health board has taken a $7 million hit, representing 30 percent of the money it was previously receiving from the state.
That loss, of course, has mental health officials scrutinizing every placement to a state facility.
(Montgomery County used to get funding for having an average of 31 patients per day in a state facility; that’s been cut to 20.)
Even as mental health officials can’t send every patient who needs intensive care to Cincinnati, they’re plowing ahead to create a new facility called Morningstar that would take patients for short periods.
The hospitals are throwing up their hands, saying they are able to treat those individuals; it’s the longer-term treatment — for the most complicated and most violent patients — that they can’t provide.
Of course, the state has had a big hand in creating this mess by closing Twin Valley. But, nonetheless, Columbus officials have to be fed up with the bickering. They’re aware that things are not working well here for patients and their families.
The hospitals that are complaining have a financial stake in getting a certain outcome. They are not unbiased victims.
But Montgomery County’s mental health board, under Joe Szoke, has abdicated. When Twin Valley closed, the agency could have been all over the sorts of problems that easily could have been predicted — this being just one.
Montgomery County’s mental health agency can’t let this chaos continue. Its funders at the state and at the county need to tell it just that.
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Martin Gottlieb: Can Leitzell avoid being Carter?
Let’s compare Gary Leitzell with Jimmy Carter. No offense intended. To either.
It’s just that certain similarities present themselves.
When Carter was elected, a fellow Georgian who had worked for him all along said that if Cyrus Vance became secretary of state, he, the Georgian, would eat his hat, or words to that effect.
Vance was a Washington insider and was one of the first names to come up for the job. But Carter had run as an outsider, an alternative to a Washington establishment that had given us Watergate and Vietnam.
But Vance got the job. And no hats were eaten.
Carter knew that campaigning is one thing and governing is another. He was going to need some local expertise to help him.
But the story is misleading. Carter never really worked out relations with Washington. The instinct about the Washington establishment that animated his aide in the discussion of Vance represented something in Carter, too. And it never went away. Carter did bring a lot of Georgians in with him: chief of staff, press secretary, political adviser, attorney general, budget director.
In that context, he pretty much had to appoint a couple of Vances just to keep the peace. It didn’t quite work.
His presidency was not successful and was not renewed.
The Leitzell connection? Welll, Carter had been a relatively obscure, one-term governor before launching a presidential bid against much better known people and against long odds.
If you win a race like that, the tendency must be powerful to stick with what worked, to trust your own instincts and your own people, to look upon the establishment as the people you beat, the people the public rejected.
Leitzell, too, came out of no place on his own instincts and with his own friends to get elected mayor of Dayton.
He’s got to feel pretty good about what got him here.
Thing is, though, there’s a lot of luck in campaign outcomes. And luck tends to run out.
Anyway, governing will be a very different undertaking. It will be less about winning than about working things out. He’s only one vote on a five-member commission.
He’ll need support from a commission that is otherwise all Democratic. To get it, he’ll need support from outside: from the general public, the business community and others on a case-to-case basis.
Alternatively, of course, he could just go to war against the commission majority. He could aim toward election of like-minded commissioners in two or four years.
But it’s a dicey, dangerous path. And little in his 2009 campaign suggests the necessity of that course.
Little even suggests what being “like-minded” would consist of.
Leitzell is fortunate about one thing: His campaign didn’t lock him into ideological stances or promises that rule out cooperation. That’s the upside of a campaign that was mainly just about being the alternative.
When Mike Turner defeated a Democratic incumbent in 1993 to become mayor, he was pretty much committed to a house cleaning at City Hall. That made things a lot tenser than they need to be now.
Still, tensions there will be. After all, more elections will be coming up, and people do have their ambitions.
Another thing that could work out nicely for Leitzell is the independent label. It makes him freer than most to reach out in several directions and expect sincere help. He should be able to talk with Rep. Mike Turner and Paul Leonard. Former city managers could be helpful, too, including Rashad Young and Jim Dinneen. Though gone from Dayton, they both know the personalities and issues he’ll confront.
Important among the things he might learn from them is whom to ignore. Every city has some very insistent people seeking the mayor’s ear, people who are fueled by misinformation and misunderstanding. Listening to them will send a public official down multiple dead-end paths.
Leitzell doesn’t have to abandon his own nature to become some cookie-cutter, establishment version of what a mayor should be. He just has to recognize his strengths — neighborhood affairs especially — and weaknesses.
In some realms, he is a fairly blank slate, as was, no offense, Jimmy Carter.
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Editorial: Homeless sex offenders can be tracked
An unsettling attack in Dayton by a homeless sexual predator has raised a serious question:
Is there a better way to track and monitor people convicted of major sex offenses, but who don’t have a permanent addresses?
Montgomery County has the chance to blaze a trail in the right direction by experimenting with electronic monitoring as a solution.
The sheriff has been promised support from state Rep. Clayton Luckie, D-Dayton, and Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering.
James Cundiff, 42, labeled a sexual predator after serving 18 years in prison for robbing, raping and assaulting a girl when he was 17, was arrested last month for allegedly robbing and stabbing a nurse in a parking lot near Miami Valley Hospital. He had been living under a railroad bridge near Patterson Boulevard.
During the past 15 years, state and federal laws related to sex offenders have gotten increasingly tougher, with both good and bad results. New Jersey’s 1994 Megan’s Law first began requiring sex offenders in that state to report where they live and notify neighbors. Similar laws have spread to all 50 states.
These laws have the positive effect of raising awareness about the need for extra vigilance, especially for those with children who are in close proximity to someone with a history of serious sex offenses.
But in some places, the rules for sex offenders are suffocating and unreasonable. Limits that block sex offenders from getting too close to schools, child care centers, churches and other places where kids may congregate have made it difficult for them to find work or places to live.
Ohio’s law is sensible. It restricts all sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, requires them to register their address with the state and stipulates notification of those living nearby.
But there is a loophole. When sex offenders declare themselves homeless, they are more difficult to track and notification of neighbors becomes harder.
Homeless sex offenders do have to register and describe a general area where they spend most of their time. In Montgomery County, about 12 of the most serious sex offenders — those considered to be sexual predators — are listed as homeless.
One thought is to require electronic monitoring only for this class of offenders who declare themselves homeless. It seems like a sensible approach.
There are different types of electronic monitors, but in most cases, they allow the wearer’s location to be tracked in real time by satellite.
Some systems allow officers to see when an offender enters a restricted area (getting too close, say, to a school), and some of the bracelets will actually emit an alarm, drawing attention to the offender.
Any system will require dedicated officers keeping tabs on these individuals. That could be costly, but Sen. Husted said he believes grant funding can be found. That would give the county an opportunity to try out the system. If it proves effective, Sen. Husted said lawmakers could look at incorporating this approach into state law.
Electronic monitoring will not prevent all crimes by sexual predators. But it would be an aggressive attempt to fill a gap in efforts to make sure offenders aren’t where they shouldn’t be.
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Editorial: Kettering newcomer right to back down
The 2009 election will be remembered for the high-profile mayoral upset by Gary Leitzell over Dayton’s Rhine McLin. While those two candidates were going at each other in the city, a Kettering candidate was running against Dayton, inventing new slang that’s offensive and divisive.
“Daytonization” is the brainchild of Ashley Webb, a Kettering City Council candidate who joined Mr. Leitzell in unseating an incumbent. Mr. Webb now says he regrets coining the term and says he has dropped it from his vocabulary, going so far as to scrub his campaign Web site to remove all references to it.
What is “Daytonization” shorthand for?
Here is how Mr. Webb explained himself in a videotaped interview with the Dayton Daily News from earlier in the campaign:
“First, I want to help stop the Daytonization of our northern neighborhoods, and I’m not just talking about property maintenance issues. I’m talking about the fact that our neighborhoods on the northern side of the city are starting to look like neighborhoods just on the other side of the border in Dayton.
“It does include property maintenance. But it also includes how neighbors treat each other, how they treat the property and just a general sense of community. We have a lot of community groups in Kettering that are thriving. But there are places where we don’t have any.
“I’d like to be an instrumental part of making sure we develop those community groups and enable neighbors to help neighbors fix problems, whether it is something wrong with their house or just general issues that we all experience in life.”
Mr. Webb said he did not, at first, realize how derogatory toward Dayton he was being, nor did he grasp that he was whipping up sentiment that, at best, over generalizes and, at worst, encourages people to stereotype. Mr. Webb said he began to rethink the way he was speaking after he was criticized by fellow candidate and Councilwoman Amy Scrimpf, who suggested he cut it out.
“It’s not a helpful term,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is to be tearing them down to make a point. We are inextricably connected with Dayton — as our central city — as a first-tier suburb.”
Mr. Webb, who campaigned relentlessly and seems to have his eye on higher office, said he first became concerned about neighborhood deterioration based on what he was told while going door-to-door.
“There were people who moved into Kettering because they wanted to experience Kettering, and they were fed up with things in Dayton,” he said. “Over time, they said their neighborhoods were beginning to look like the neighborhoods they came from in Dayton.”
Mr. Webb sees community activism at the neighborhood level as an antidote to some threats and deterioration. Citing neighborhood associations and neighborhood watch groups as examples, he said such initiatives connect people and prevent problems.
Indeed, those are good ideas, ones that are exemplified in Dayton’s most tight-knit neighborhoods.
Mr. Webb’s change of heart and mouth is encouraging and instructive. There is nothing inherently wrong with the Dayton neighborhoods bordering Kettering. Certainly, there is nothing that must be “stopped,” as Mr. Webb said early in the campaign.
What is true for Kettering and other older suburbs is that the urban issues that were once small problems for them are growing. Kettering and other so-called “first-tier” suburbs have increasing numbers of poor families, aging houses and rental properties.
If you’re poor, it’s hard to keep up your house. And, of course, poverty can foment crime and family turmoil. Old homes are expensive to maintain, and rentals can drag down a neighborhood if landlords aren’t doing the necessary upkeep.
Dayton has faced Kettering’s problems on a larger scale for a longer time. Both communities can learn from one another. Their relationships, though, can only be productive if their leaders show respect and sensitivity.
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Martin Gottlieb: Honoree has the story about Clinton and ‘Dayton’
In his visit last weekend for events surrounding the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, author Taylor Branch was more interested in talking about his latest book than about the work that won him the Lifetime Achievement Award last year.
He had won for his trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. Now Branch is in the news for a book about Bill Clinton.
It’s natural for a writer to want to talk about his latest work. He has moved on emotionally, and, after all, there’s not much point in rehashing what he said last year. And, after all, the new one is the one being marketed right now.
But beyond that, Branch had excellent justification for raising the Clinton book in Dayton: Bosnia.
The peace prize itself grows out of Dayton’s hosting of the 1995 talks that brought peace to Bosnia. (Yes, the talks were actually at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; but come on.) And Branch’s new book has a lot on Bosnia.
He couldn’t talk about the book last year, because it was still a secret.
What a concept for a book. Clinton, who knew Branch from a political adventure 20 years earlier, suggested that Branch might be a sort of official historian in the Clinton White House. Branch did not want that role, but they worked out a deal whereby Branch would interview Clinton regularly, in the White House, toward the goal of producing a history of his presidency.
The resulting book, “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President,” gets to Bosnia on page 9 out of 663 and returns to it often.
Branch told Dayton audiences that Clinton was frustrated that some European leaders where unwilling to help a defenseless, besieged Sarajevo arm itself against well-armed enemies. These leaders, said Clinton, saw something inherently untenable in the very existence of a Muslim community (Sarajevo) in Europe.
In his speeches here, Branch didn’t name the names of the leaders Clinton had in mind. But in a conversation, he said Clinton did name names: Francois Mitterrand of France and John Major of Great Britain.
(Actually, Branch spoke more of “the British” than Major by name, and the book doesn’t actually use Major’s name in this context.)
In truth, a lot of people in Europe and this country thought it a bad idea for NATO or anybody else to risk much for the cause of peace in the Balkans, because the cause was hopeless. The idea was that people in the Balkans were always at each other’s throats over religious and ethnic differences.
It was an exaggeration. Political violence does recur in the Balkans, but it is not the norm. As Branch said in conversation here, if it were, there wouldn’t have been all those mosques and other accumulated treasures to destroy in the wars of the 1990s. For those who remember the atmosphere in Dayton during the talks — or have heard about it — the Branch book fills in a blank: What was Clinton doing?
One thing he was doing was talking to Branch.
It was a particularly tumultuous period in Washington. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the new Republican majorities in Congress were trying to shut down most of the government in a battle over spending.
Branch was interviewing Clinton one night toward the end of the talks when Secretary of State Warren Christopher called to report that things were going badly in Dayton.
The specific problem at that stage was Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic. His territory was being cut up, and he was having a tough time with it, down to balking over what seemed to others like details.
Branch heard Clinton give Christopher permission to give up. This came after a lot of guidance about how to get Izetbegovic on board — by telling him he could end up bearing the blame for the failure of talks, and telling him a now-or-never point had been reached.
But eventually Clinton said, “Well, Chris, go ahead and do it. Walk away. I trust you. I’ll back you up. Eventually, you’ve got to shut it down if they won’t take the peace.”
Richard Holbrooke, the lead American negotiator, often talks about how the talks almost broke down. There’s a story about how Holbrooke had his bags packed and displayed so that the other negotiators would understand he was serious about shutting things down if they didn’t come to terms. It’s an after-dinner story that gets a lot of laughs, having to do with the fact that reporters were watching the luggage as a clue about what was going on.
But apparently Clinton was serious.
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Editorial: Literary peace prize good for Dayton, the cause
Ever since the Dayton peace talks of 1995, civic-minded and outward-looking Daytonians have struggled to sustain the connection between the word “Dayton” and the word “peace.”
That connection was in much of the world in the decade after the talks. Those talks ended the Bosnian war and brought a troubled peace to the Balkans.
The Daytonians have not approached the task through gimmickry and marketing. Instead, they have looked for ways to make a continuing contribution peace.
They understand that the presence of the talks here was something that just happened to Dayton. Why not actually do something to merit and continue the local connection to the word?
They have put together impressive international conferences where experts and influential people have confronted the continuing problems of the Balkans. They have awarded a peace prize to political and philanthropic figures. They have fostered people-to-people connections between Daytonians and Bosnians and others in the Balkans.
Sustaining these efforts has not been easy. But one project that clearly has legs, that bids to become an ongoing institution, is the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Over the weekend, the fourth annual prizes were awarded. The Lifetime Achievement Award went to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. Readers of this newspaper are familiar with the kind of selfless work they do that won the judges’ attention.
The award for a 2008 non-fiction book went to E. Benjamin Skinner, for “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.” It’s an eye-opening piece of journalism that sent the now 33-year-old author to the hellholes of the world. The fiction prize for a 2008 work went to Richard Bausch for “Peace,” a book about war. This story of three Americans in World War II explores the relationships of mortal enemies in prolonged horror.
Also present for a series of events over the weekend were past winners, including Taylor Branch, last year’s winner of the lifetime award for his trilogy about Martin Luther King Jr. He presented this year’s lifetime award. (His current book, “The Clinton Tapes,” is his report on years of private conversations, meant for the historical record, with President Bill Clinton.)
Like many of the winning authors during these last few years, Mr. Branch has clearly connected to Dayton. He talked publicly about his mother’s presence last year and how she had wanted to come back this year.
Mr. Skinner said the award has been a “game changer” for his book (if not necessarily for the cause of abolishing slavery, which is germinating, at best). He meant the prize had won him the kind of attention a book needs to make an impact.
When making his acceptance speech on the stage of the Schuster Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Skinner put his phone behind him, turning on its speaker, so that his elderly parents at home could hear the event.
Novelist Bausch spoke movingly about the role of the written word in pursuit of peace and movingly about the event, saying he, too, would be back to Dayton.
More than one speaker jokingly referred to the assembled audience as “radicals” for their pursuit of such an unlikely goal as world peace. But there was little of political bias about the event. It was, indeed, an effort to recognize those who rise above combat with fellow Americans to find what they can do that really matters.
The effort — led by volunteers Sharon Rab, Mark Meister and Doris Ponitz, among so many others — graces Dayton.
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Paul Leonard: 3 obstacles Rhine McLin couldn’t overcome
This commentary is written by Paul R. Leonard, a former mayor of Dayton who teaches in the political science department at the University of Dayton.
Rhine McLin now knows what it feels like to be blind-sided by a 260-pound linebacker in football.
She couldn’t have seen her mayoral re-election defeat coming. No one did. After all, she had the name recognition and the political pedigree; she was the incumbent with plenty of money. Her opponent was a political novice, not well-funded, with few endorsements and no government experience.
So much for conventional wisdom in politics.
But if we take a closer look, there were signs of trouble for McLin on the campaign trail. From the outset, she was in the “wrong place at the wrong time.”
She was mayor when NCR left town. It makes little difference that the mayor could have done nothing to keep NCR. She’s the face and voice of Dayton.
The mayor’s job is called the “hot seat” for a reason. When voters look for someone to blame, the mayor is an easy target. At least she’s in Dayton. The CEO of NCR lives in New York.
If 25 years ago someone would have asked me what would happen to the mayor of Dayton when and if NCR decided to put the town in its rear-view mirror, I would have said, “That person’s political career is over.” NCR was not just another Dayton business leaving town. It was part of our soul. That loss would have been hard for any elected official to survive.
Then, there’s the mayor’s friend, former City Manager Rashad Young. Why in the world he gave himself and other Dayton managerial employees a raise just before he left town is hard to figure.
Even if the raises were deserved, the timing stunk. Obviously they don’t teach political sensitivity in city manager’s school. Or, if they do, Young was absent that day.
That decision, at a time when many Daytonians are out-of-work and without an income, was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. If the mayor knew about it and gave him the go-ahead, shame on her. If she didn’t know about it and Young did it as his going-away gift to Dayton, shame on him.
Mayors need to know that the city manager form of government is not necessarily a friend. Managers are immune from direct accountability to the electorate. The mayor isn’t.
Finally, the decision of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a group of Dayton African-American ministers, chose not to endorse McLin. That was hard to understand.
Some of their members cited her support for municipal legislation preventing discrimination against gays and lesbians. It’s as if they were saying: We’ve got our protection now, so no one else should be entitled.
There’s a disconnect in their logic.
Anyway, the ministers once were part of her base. Their decision gave license to McLin’s base-voters to stay home. In an election where turning around about 450 votes would have made a difference, the IMA’s silence was deafening.
McLin should hold her head high. She gave eight good years to the City of Dayton. She walked the neighborhoods, talked to average Daytonians, and felt the honor of growing up and becoming mayor of her home town. The McLin family has been in public service in the Dayton community for more than 40 years.
That’s something to be proud of.
On the other end of town, Gary Leitzell had better fasten his seat belt. He doesn’t have a clue how rough it’s going to get.
Finally, for Rhine McLin, a little unsolicited advice: There’s life after elective service. Lots of it.
Paul R. Leonard is a former mayor of Dayton and teaches in the political science department at the University of Dayton. Also a former lieutenant governor and state representative, he was defeated in the 1992 Democratic primary for Montgomery County prosecutor.
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Editorial: Incumbents struggled; levies didn’t
Tuesday’s election generally went well for schools, but not for every incumbent school board member.
The majority of the school levies on the ballot passed, including some that supporters were worried about.
Xenia passed a slimmed down bond issue to build new schools after two failed tries, while a bond issue for a new school in Cedar Cliff passed on the first try. Financially embattled Jefferson Twp. schools renewed a hefty 9.5-mill levy. In Beavercreek, where no levy is a guarantee, a renewal for permanent improvements passed easily. A notable exception is Trotwood, where a 7.5-mill levy for operations was soundly defeated.
So were voters just happy with their schools? If they were, a handful of incumbents learned the people could still demonstrate their displeasure with policies they don’t like.
Exhibit A is Springboro schools. The district has been squeezed for years by a peculiar set of circumstances. Its growth and wealth work against it in the formula that decides how much state aid it receives. The pressure really ratcheted up last school year as state auditors recommended aggressive cost-cutting, which included closing an elementary school (despite steadily increasing enrollment).
The school board has long taken much criticism for what some feel is overspending, even after making lots of tough cuts.
Among those hard cuts last year was the elimination of bus service for students within two miles of a school, which saved $371,000. The new rule, however, caused traffic bottlenecks and put a lot of kids on the streets.
Kelly Kohls and Scott Anderson ran for school board citing busing as a primary complaint. They were the top vote-getters.
School board member Don Miller survived, while board President Ira Thomsen was ousted. All this, despite the board’s decision to restore busing just before the election. To voters, apparently, that move came too late.
In other districts, teacher support was a big key. Some Kettering teachers were angry when school board member Frank Maus voted last spring against a contract that called for a 1.5 percent raise for teachers. It was approved 3-2.
The two incumbents who voted for the contract — Julie Gilmore and George Bayless — were re-elected, while Mr. Maus narrowly lost to challenger James Brown.
Oftentimes teachers know a lot about how a school board is operating, but they also are an interest group. Their interests don’t necessarily always line up with what administrators or taxpayers think is right.
Even where there is no apparent anger, teacher support — or lack of it — appeared to make a difference. Beavercreek’s teachers’ union passed over incumbent Joyce Carter’s election bid, but did so nicely. The union’s press release announced teachers were backing Peg Arnold, Rob Dotson and Kim Grant, including an unusual statement of “appreciation for the service of Joyce Carter, who admirably served the district in her appointed role on the board.”
The union’s endorsed slate of candidates won, and Ms. Carter, vice president for human resources at the University of Dayton, was out.
Managing schools is a tough business, especially in today’s environment. The skills required to be a good board member are underrated. Board members must make prudent decisions and know how to manage money well. In the end, they should always do what’s right for the kids, even if that requires taking heat.
But part of the job also is to persuasively explain why certain decisions were made. That’s the only way to stay in the job.
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Martin Gottlieb: DId McLin loss reflect shrinking population in west?
A couple of post-election notes:
• Among election watchers, much attention has focused on the fact that fewer voters turned out Tuesday in some west-Dayton wards than in previous mayoral elections.
Specifically, turnout was down from 2005 by twice as much in the heavily Democratic, heavily black wards, where Mayor Rhine McLin was strongest, as in the eastern, largely white wards, where challenger Gary Leitzell was strong.
The turnout pattern seems to have helped Leitzell. At least, that’s true if you assume that you know how the people who didn’t turn out would have voted if they had voted.
So why was McLin’s turnout down?
Some have pointed to economy and the trajectory of Dayton. Some have noted that a group of black ministers got a lot of attention for not endorsing in the race. (They also they didn’t endorse in 2005).
Another point worth considering: Former City Hall official — and political junkie — Paul Woodie suggests much of the explanation might simply be that people aren’t there anymore.
Look, after all, at all the empty houses, resulting from the country’s foreclosure crisis. Sure, that crisis has hit eastern wards, too (as well as suburbs). But the damage has been greatest in western and northwestern parts of the city, notes Woodie. The naked eye confirms that, showing vast stretches of emptiness.
You might recall, in fact, that one neighborhood between Salem Avenue and Main Street was listed earlier this year as one of the 10 emptiest in the country.
(Hard population numbers aren’t available on a ward-by-ward basis. They will come in next year’s national census.)
One reason that a lot of political junkies thought Leitzell would have a particularly difficult time in the election was the widespread assumption that Dayton is becoming less white all the time.
But nobody really knows where the evicted people have been going.
Of course, even if they remain somewhere in the city, they are probably not deeply motivated — given how things have been going for them — to get out and vote for the incumbents in any contest.
Nor, presumably, are a lot of people who live near the devastated areas.
• Neat little irony in Franklin County, which gets a casino, even though it voted against casinos.
In the past, people who have tried to get the state electorate to approve casinos have thought that the way to win votes was to include a local option. In one statewide election, the deal was that any section of the state would get a casino if, in a future election, the local voters approved one.
That allowed advocates of the statewide issue to say it wasn’t really about whether to have casinos. It was about whether to allow specific communities to decide whether to have casinos.
But that sales pitch didn’t work. The statewide issue was defeated.
So now a statewide issue passes. And Columbus gets one of the four casinos, ready or not.
The other metropolitan areas that were slated to get casinos as a result of Issue 3 supported Issue 3.
The Columbus exception raises a good question:
What’s the logic of letting places outside Columbus tell Columbus it will have a casino?
This is not the first time the local option principle has been ignored in Ohio politics. But how often does it get balanced so perfectly on its head?
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Editorial: Dayton, region can’t afford small leaders
Gary Leitzell, Dayton’s mayor-elect, and the city commission have to come together in the face of Rhine McLin’s upset. If they don’t, Dayton risks having a smaller place in the region and the state.
What does coming together look like?
Mr. Leitzell is the new guy. He has to school himself aggressively on how to do a job that would be intimidating to anyone in his or her right mind.
He needs grounded, respected, experienced people helping him, and he has to be confident enough in himself to know what he doesn’t know. Whom he surrounds himself with will tell a lot about his judgment.
The four Democrats on the commission need to help him. They can’t be eager to see Mr. Leitzell twist or fail. They can’t be gunning for him or his job. They have to be engaged.
What’s the threat if Dayton becomes an increasingly smaller place in the region’s and the state’s orbits?
The region takes its name from the city. If the city government becomes consumed by political infighting or paralysis about how to responsibly deal with a stunning $15 million to $20 million deficit, citizens and leaders will notice.
That behavior will scare away people, investors and, most immediately, the administrators that the commission depends on. The staff people at City Hall can’t be good at their jobs if the politicians don’t back them up or if they refuse to do the right things.
Dayton deserves to be at the table when regional decisions are being made, whether the issue is how to boost Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, what roads are going to be built or how to court companies.
But if the commission is seen as dysfunctional or unable to help the region put its best foot forward, people will find ways to go around Dayton.
The city manager form of government has served Dayton well. If you look back over the years, strong administrators have propped up both good and bad politicians for decades. Among public administrators, Dayton has historically been seen as a place that respected talented professionals in hard as well as comfortable times.
That has helped recruit good people.
Every time Dayton has done something big or important for the city or the region — think the Schuster Center, Tech Town, Fifth Third Field, RiverScape — it has had the help of others. That help has included business leaders, state government, the federal government, other local governments and plenty of well-intended local activists.
The city needs all these forces today more than ever.
But they might walk away if the commission doesn’t play well together.
Dayton’s access to Columbus will be set back without Mayor McLin. Gov. Ted Strickland is fond of her, and she had his ear on matters relating to Dayton and cities generally.
Political relationships like this matter when Dayton and the region are asking for money and consideration.
Of course, governors (like mayors) come and go. But Dayton’s reputation will precede it. How the city presents itself to the department of development and in the legislature will be important. There will be times we’ll want their help.
Dayton’s struggles are huge, worse that they’ve been in modern memory. The politicians in charge have a chance to show their talent — or their smallness.
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Editorial: 2nd regs on strippers were unneeded
Last week’s election, as it applied to Harrison Twp., brought back into the headlines a sexy statewide flap from 2007 — the one that saw strippers going to Columbus to lobby elected officials.
To refresh memories: A Cincinnati-based group of morality police called Citizens for Community Values was pushing a bill to regulate strip clubs. This despite the fact that in the previous year the legislature had already acted on the problem at hand.
That problem was that the clubs had located in townships because townships didn’t have the power that cities had to restrict them.
In 2006, the legislature gave townships that power, along with the right to go to the state attorney general for help in drafting regulations in this constitutionally complicated realm.
It turned out, however, that the townships generally weren’t taking the state up on its grant of authority or offers of help. So Citizens for Community Values moved to pass restrictions that would apply everyplace.
In an important sense, that went in exactly the opposite direction from 2006. Instead of increasing the power of local governments, the new law set up a one-size-fits-all standard.
The alleged conservative interest in limiting big government and keeping power close to the people was, shall we say, set aside for the moment.
Specifically, what the 2007 act did was ban stripping after midnight and ban contact between dancers and customers.
The whole thing was in the headlines for much of the year, with various sides threatening to go to the ballot.
Citizens for Community Values leader Phil Burress insisted that his effort was not about policing morality. He said his cause was the control of crime in the strip club neighborhoods. He insisted that the clubs breed crime.
If that were often true, however, one might expect that the pressure for a new law would come from the townships. But it came from Citizens for Community Values and whatever public opinion that organization could mobilize.
The 2007 law is not being enforced in Harrison, Miami and Washington townships. Township officials say the law is being challenged in court, and they don’t want to get sued.
Meanwhile, public and local government demand for action is hard to detect. In Harrison Twp. this fall, a candidate for township trustee, Steve Adams, pushed for harder action by the board of trustees. He, too, insisted that he wasn’t trying to legislate morality. He said it’s a zoning issue, a matter of where these businesses should be. He lost the election.
As for crime, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Papanek, commander for Harrison Twp., said the strip clubs cause no more problems than bars. There are some rowdy customers, and, yes, the occasional prostitution arrest inside the bars.
In past times, when there were many more sex-oriented businesses — including massage parlors — there were more complaints. The possibility of trouble shouldn’t be laughed off.
But the right approach to that possibility was to give the townships the power to enact their own laws.
Instead, in 2007 the political activists did their thing, satisfying their contributors, getting a lot of attention, getting the politicians to cave to their bogus arguments, and giving the news media a good time writing about strippers going to Columbus.
The upshot is that the good that might, at least theoretically, have been done by the sensible 2006 law has been put on hold because of concerns about the constitutionality of the unnecessary 2007 law.
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Editorial: Pay raises sent all the wrong signals
The dust-up in Dayton about managers getting a pay raise — even as the city faces a stunning $15 million to $20 million deficit next year — is much ado about something.
Labor contracts — at the city and in the public sector generally — requiring regular and sometimes hefty “step” pay increases on top of negotiated cost-of-living raises create a culture wherein employees think the sky’s the limit with respect to their pay.
That’s a problem if governments ever hope to control personnel costs.
Meanwhile, unionized workers who, for long stretches of their careers, get two raises a year quickly end up making more than their supervisors or, more likely, their supervisors get nice raises, too. The vicious cycle is a good deal for everybody except taxpayers.
Even in these financially dicey times, former Dayton City Manager Rashad Young furthered this tradition, deciding to give about 381 managers teeny-tiny raises on the justification that, if some union members were getting a pay hike, so should managers.
The managers’ raises averaged a token 1.19 percent, costing about $300,000.
Specifically his rationale was that 442 unionized employees — about a quarter of the non-management staff — were entitled to “step” increases that ranged from slightly more than 1 percent to double-digit hikes. These automatic raises were given even as there has been all sorts of attention on Dayton for wringing concessions from its employees.
The other three-quarters of Dayton’s unionized workers have already run through their “step” increases.
They are the ones most affected by the decision to accept four furlough days or four unpaid holidays and a suspension of cost-of-living raises.
(Incidentally, the furlough days also apply to managers. Police, however, are refusing to accept any financial concessions.)
Even though the management raises were inconsequential in the big picture, they were still bone-headed for these reasons:
— Managers set the tone as to what sacrifices are expected. The message had gone out — and a public perception had been created — that city employees had agreed to accept a pay freeze because money was tighter than ever.
Why confuse that message, especially when the amount managers were getting was so piddling?
— The decision undermines the sense of urgency about Dayton’s problems.
The city doesn’t just have a one-time deficit; it has a structural deficit. It doesn’t have the revenue stream it had in the past and that money isn’t coming back soon. It has reduced staff, and will have to reduce still more. Those employees who remain have to have different expectations about how well they’ll be paid.
— Mr. Young poked his finger in the unions’ eyes. He had to know that they’d make a fuss if people who are generally well paid get even just a little extra.
— If there’s anybody who shouldn’t be getting “step” increases — or anything that looks like a reward for solely being on the job — it’s managers.
Moreover, supposedly managers were only eligible for “merit pay.” Now there’s understandable confusion about what the city’s management compensation structure really is. The appearance is that it’s whatever management wants it to be.
Before the bottom fell out of the economy, it was common for public-sector workers who hadn’t topped out in their job classification to get raises of 6 percent and sometimes much more when their “step” and contract raises were added together.
Combine the two raises with the series of different job classifications that ambitious employees can move through and you have an unsustainable system.
The argument for having “steps” is that government pays lower salaries than the private sector, and it needs some means of attracting talent. In fact, though, government employment is pretty appealing today — because of generous health care and pension plans and even the job security (when compared to the private sector).
Mayor Rhine McLin and the city commissioners knew in advance about Mr. Young’s plan, which meant even a self-awarded — and unseemly — increase for Mr. Young.
Given the times, given how many people would be grateful to have a job, they should have nixed the idea.
The move has created doubt about how committed Dayton’s commission is to making difficult cultural change and leveling with workers about what the city can afford to pay. (It probably also didn’t help the mayor’s re-election bid, a problem she should have anticipated.)
Absolutely Dayton’s workers deserve a fair wage. But like everyone else, they have to sacrifice in unprecedented times. And the sacrificing needs to be exactly what it’s publicly presented as.
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Kevin Riley: A Browns fan finally gives up — maybe
When the time comes to end a long-term relationship, maybe it’s best to think about how it started.
I became a loyal Cleveland Browns fan when I was 9, on Christmas Day of 1971.
The Browns were playing the Baltimore Colts in my hometown of Cleveland the next day. My cousin had an extra ticket to the playoff game, and my brothers and I drew numbers to see who would go.
I won.
The Browns lost — as they would most of the time from then on.
Like most Browns fans, I’ve endured the decades of disappointment, the gut-wrenching defeats and the recent humiliations as a badge of honor.
After all, loyalty is about the tough times — the worst moments in a relationship. And there have been plenty of those.
One came in early 1981. During my freshman year at the University of Dayton, when identification with my hometown team mattered more than ever, the Browns made the playoffs.
In the playoff game against the Oakland Raiders, they were driving for a sure late score to win the game. They could have kicked a field goal to win. Instead, quarterback Brian Sipe threw an interception.
Then there was the game I attended where the Browns played themselves out of a spot in the 1987 Super Bowl.
In freezing Cleveland weather, the Browns were up by seven against the Denver Broncos. The Broncos needed to go 98 yards in five minutes — just to tie the game.
Of course, Denver did it. And then won in overtime to go on to the Super Bowl.
Nicknamed “The Drive” game for Denver’s incredible comeback, it remains among the most famous in professional football history. You can often see it replayed on ESPN Classic. Or just go to YouTube.com.
I still can’t watch it.
But I, like all Browns fans I knew, stuck with them. And I told myself that all fans of all teams have stories like that. (You can’t get sympathy about the Browns from a Chicago Cubs fan, for example.)
Plus, the Browns were still respected, and they have a rich history, even if it mostly happened before my time. (In my lifetime, the Browns have lost more than half their games. Their last championship was in 1964.)
But then things got strange.
In 1995, the Browns packed up, left Cleveland for Baltimore and became the Ravens.
Whole books have been written on why this happened. I can’t get into it here.
But fans were devastated. If ever I had a chance to get out of this relationship, this was it.
Somehow, Cleveland got its team back — sort of. The NFL actually created a new team, and put it in Cleveland.
And I got sucked into rooting for a team that was just dressed in my team’s uniform.
And again it came back to loyalty. In the end, most Browns fans pride themselves on that.
Deep down, we believe it sends a message to those we care about: I’ll stick with you, no matter how bad things get.
But some are wavering.
The Browns don’t play today. But next week, some fans want to humiliate the organization and its owner, Randy Lerner, on Monday Night Football.
Two longtime season-ticket holders, Mike Randall and Tony Schafer, are urging fans to stay out of their seats at Cleveland Browns Stadium until after the kickoff — in hope of creating an embarrassing television moment for the team and calling attention to fans’ anger about how the team is being run.
Since their return in 1999, the Browns have lost two-thirds of their games and have had just two winning seasons.
They’ve gone through numerous coaches. The owner fired yet another general manager last week. The Browns have made so many incompetent player decisions that I have to get my son a new souvenir player jersey almost every year.
At some point, when a team is this poorly run, sticking with them isn’t loyalty, it’s stupidity.
The current Browns are a joke — and the punch line for network football show talking heads.
The team has lost seven out of eight games. Almost none has been close.
And it’s been this way for the 10 years since they returned.
It’s one thing for fans to suffer disappointment in close playoff games — when bad luck or a bad bounce can mean you lose.
It’s another thing when an organization takes fans’ money with no ability to get even basic results.
I’ve realized that I care more about this team than the guy who owns it.
Well, I’m done. My Sunday afternoons are free.
I’m not wearing my Browns cap, coat or sweatshirt anymore.
I’m moving on.
At least for the rest of this season.
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Martin Gottlieb: Political lightning strikes; how did THAT happen?
What were the odds Dayton would elect as mayor a British-raised, home-schooling, earring-wearing, figurine-painting, political novice, stay-at-home dad as mayor?
That list is not meant to suggest that those characteristics make Gary Leitzell unfit to be mayor. Most of them don’t matter to me. I’m just saying, what were the odds? Let’s deconstruct.
On Oct. 9, this column reported, “Leitzell — though he surely started with a hard-core anybody-but-McLin base — had an uphill battle to gain credibility and generate enthusiasm. It’s not clear, however, that he has even generated curiosity.”
That view doesn’t look so great now.
And commentators who are surprised by events — as I was — have no reason to expect anybody to care about their retrospective analysis. After all, if they were so stupid before the election, what makes them so smart now?
Still, the Oct. 9 analysis might have been basically right. There was very little evidence then of public interest in the race. When the candidates went out to neighborhoods to engage each other before voters, turnout was minimal, even compared with some other years. Other signs of interest were also lacking.
So what happened? We tend to think of campaigns as endless affairs, droning on month after month. Sometimes, they are, even locally.
When Mike Turner came along to defeat a Democratic mayor in 1993, he was in the news for the better part of a year, first going through a primary, then through a high-profile fall campaign.
When Leitzell’s path turned out to be so much lower in profile, that looked like a problem for him.
But maybe a campaign should be timed from when voters first take note. Campaigns differ on that score. This year, it seemed, the election had to be right on top of people before they tuned in. When they finally did, in the last couple of weeks of October, they saw what seemed to be a respectable alternative to the incumbent at a time when they were predisposed toward change.
Many candidates go through a short period when everything is right for them: they have just gained the requisite name recognition to win, but they are too new on the scene to be much tarnished.
Just as that happened to Leitzell, Election Day arrived.
Well, it’s a theory, anyway.
Alternatively, one might look at race. Neighborhoods voted roughly the way they typically do when the mayoral candidates are of different races. And the Democrats got particularly low turnout in black neighborhoods.
(About 29,000 people voted overall, as against 32,400 in the last mayoral election, 36,500 in the one before that, 36,900 before that, and 44,300 in 1993.)
Democratic Party Chairman Mark Owens had recognized turnout as his candidate’s potential weak spot from the beginning. He focused on it. But generating enthusiasm was tough. Maybe he should have focused more on winning votes elsewhere.
But whether you see the crucial factor as turnout or as a widespread predisposition toward change, you’re talking about two sides of the same coin.
Some people who have voted for the incumbent in the past don’t turn out, because they can’t really be convinced that change would be so awful; and others who are up for grabs go for change.
One other point: When Mike Turner came out of no place to be elected mayor, it was a similar year nationally: The Democrats were losing even in their strongholds. New York, Los Angeles and Jersey City also elected Republican mayors.
A lot of people have trouble believing that national moods affect a race like Dayton mayor, but it’s true.
And, just for the record, I really am much smarter now than last week.
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Editorial: Voters offer lessons for office-seekers
Kettering City Council candidate Ashley Webb had loads of signs around the city, his supporters gave out leaflets at polling places, and he had backing from Republican Party activists. He was the second-highest vote-getter in his race, defeating an incumbent.
In Trotwood, City Council candidates Mattie Clay and Janice Chinn have been behind on their property taxes for more than a decade. Both lost their races to represent the first and second wards, respectively.
These results — one hopes — are not a coincidence.
There’s a temptation after elections to wonder what really matters because, at times, voters can make seemingly odd choices. Some worry that familiar names and candidates’ money too often carry the day.
Tuesday’s election offered some encouraging signs that voters do pay attention. Numerous local races offered sometimes bad, sometimes difficult, choices that required a discerning eye.
In many cases, voters made quality choices and provided free lessons for future candidates:
Hard work and grassroots support can pay dividends
The two winners in the Kettering City Council race — Amy Schrimpf and Mr. Webb — were easily the hardest-working campaigners.
Both Republicans, they courted key party leaders. Mr. Webb was able to get the party to only endorse him in the race, while Ms. Schrimpf left her job to focus on the campaign. She had the endorsement of her predecessor on council, state Rep. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering.
Defeated incumbent Frank Spolrich was not as visible.
Similarly, Scott Paulson ran an aggressive campaign that helped him win a seat on the Washington Twp. Board of Trustees. He defeated Lee Snyder, seemingly an entrenched incumbent.
Mr. Paulson walked door-to-door and had a visble yard-sign campaign. He also raised $10,000 more than Mr. Snyder and out spent him 8-1.
In Beavercreek, two hard-charging challengers won seats on the school board, knocking out incumbent Joyce Carter.
Robert Dotson, an active community volunteer, and Kim Grant, a Parent-Teacher Association president, courted voters hard. In fact, Mr. Dotson got into some hot water when a non-profit athletic booster club appeared to endorse him in an e-mail after his visit. His opponents asked whether the group had jeopardized its tax-exempt status by appearing to be involved in politics.
Pay your taxes, keep your distance from strip clubs
Trotwood voters showed good sense by taking a pass on Ms. Clay and Ms. Chinn, who complained that the city needed to do a better job providing basic services. Voters apparently understood what the candidates didn’t — that the quality of city services is dependent on people paying their share of property taxes.
The same sensibility was on display elsewhere.
West Carrollton’s lowest city council vote-getter was Edward Jones, who last year was convicted of receiving stolen property. Kettering council candidate Mark Allison, who has been charged with drunken driving three times since 1995, also was the lowest vote-getter in his race.
In Harrison Twp., voters noticed Julie Caserta’s and Georgeann Godsey’s disturbing associations. In a community where adult-oriented businesses have been a long-running concern, both candidates had ties to the adult entertainment industry.
Ms. Caserta’s husband co-owns Naughty ‘N Nice on Dixie Drive, and her husband’s business partner is related to the owners of The Living Room strip club. Ms. Godsey works for the management company that owns the shopping center where The Living Room and Naughty ‘N Nice are located.
Both finished far behind winning candidates Darrell Lairson and David Woods. Future candidates can learn from the 2009 results.
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Editorial: Leitzell’s first moves matter
Gary Leitzell’s education about the work ahead — and efforts to reach out to him — can’t start too soon.
His request to start sitting in on the city’s budget discussions is a good sign. Of course, he’ll be welcomed. If he hadn’t asked, he would have gotten an embossed invitation from Mayor Rhine McLin and City Manager Tim Riordan.
They understand how transitions occur. They know they are only temporary custodians of their offices.
Being a good winner is harder even than being a good loser. How Mr. Leitzell starts off with people — his fellow commissioners, the city administration and the many people in the community who don’t know him — will set the stage for the next four years and the relationships he’ll need to be successful.
The mayor has ceremonial power, but after that, the position doesn’t come with much authority. Mr. Leitzell’s ideas and agenda will rise or fall on their merits and the relationships he has.
He isn’t being picked on or singled out if he quickly finds out that not much happens in government if you can’t persuade others of the wisdom and value of your plans.
Mr. Leitzell also has to understand that people are already taking stock of him. He has been around his neighborhood block, but not the wider community. If he approaches his victory by reminding people that he has a lot to learn, that humility will go a long way toward building bridges.
Outsiders always have overly simplistic views about complex enterprises and how to improve them. That’s the benefit — and the curse — of being a fresh face.
Absolutely, complexity can be used as an excuse not to do hard or unpopular things. But making the stunning budget cuts Dayton is facing, for example, will not be easy.
Creating a new organization chart, which was one of Mr. Leitzell’s campaign pitches, would have limited value in getting there.
More important, the mayor doesn’t get to decide how City Hall is organized. That’s the city manager’s responsibility.
Finally, Mr. Leitzell’s naivete — for example, when he suggested that half of the $15 million to $20 million budget deficit could be eliminated with new revenue — is real.
He needs to listen to city administrators who can be a reality check for him; the city’s financial problems are so immediate that he can’t afford to go down blind alleys.
In her last months in office, Mayor McLin can honor her career and Dayton by ensuring Mr. Leitzell feels brought in. But he has to understand how tough this defeat is for her.
For more than 40 years, a McLin has been in some office serving Dayton. Mayor McLin’s paternal grandfather was the first black to run for city commission in 1947; her father was a reluctant candidate who was elected in 1966 and went on to have an influential 22-year career in the Ohio House of Representatives.
Mayor McLin succeeded him, and then became the first black woman to serve in the Ohio Senate, and finally the first female mayor of Dayton.
Rhine McLin is a warm person who won the appreciation of past city administrators for recognizing their expertise and for her willingness to give them political cover when their recommendations would please few but were necessary for Dayton’s health.
Though the mayor has her faults, there still are things Gary Leitzell can learn from her.
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Editorial: McLin couldn’t beat the times, and Leitzell
The mayoral election in Dayton looks like one of those that comes along once a decade or so to put the so-called experts in their place and show just how unpredictable democracy can be.
From the beginning, even the experts could see that it was a bad year for any mayor to be seeking re-election. With the local economy doing even worse than the national economy, with a Democratic president falling in the polls and disappointment with him rising, and with the incumbent having her own weaknesses as a candidate, it was the kind of year that could upset all patterns.
And yet the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. The Democrats had all the money. The challenger was a low-profile, first-time candidate with no polish in the business of politics and no identifiable issue, except what everybody knew: the city is hurting.
Challenger Gary Leitzell had one other major force working for him. But it also worked against him. That force is race. The white challenger and black incumbent each went into the contest with much better chances in some neighborhoods than others.
Fortunately, however, the campaign itself was not much about race, at least until some late mailings by the Democrats that focused on obscure quotes allegedly from Mr. Leitzell about race. Waiting until the last minute to attack undercuts the possibility of any useful discussion. At any rate, the mailings don’t seem to have done much good.
Give Mr. Leitzell credit for taking the plunge into the contest, for putting himself out there for everybody to judge. It’s not easy. And he did give voters a choice, which they should have. And he did improve as a candidate — figuring out how amateurish some of his ideas were — as the campaign progressed.
Unfortunately, however, he did not give much reason to believe he could handle the problems of the city any better than the incumbent. He had not studied the issues enough to present a critique that made Rhine McLin the city’s problem, as opposed to the times being the problem.
He might have been helped by a televised debate. Conventional political wisdom holds that only a challenger can be helped by a debate, and that all a challenger must do is hold his own, which he did.
Mayor McLin has defeated two men who were better qualified than Mr. Leitzell: then-Mayor Mike Turner and community activist Dave Bohardt. But the years were different.
She deserves credit for having done a credible job in handling the multiple problems that the times threw her way. But when the times got worse and worse, her personal limitations seemed to be held against her more than when the times were better. That’s the way in politics.
Gary Leitzell is an unknown quantity. There’s an awful lot he doesn’t know about government and politics that he should know. The fact that he was struck by political lightning doesn’t change that. He will need a lot of good advice.
The voters — those who showed up — seem to be saying that they think somebody can do better than the incumbent. He will not find that easy.
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Editorial: Get ready to be disappointed by casinos
The casinos are coming.
Voters on Tuesday reversed the decision they made on four earlier occasions and said they’d allow casino gambling in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo. The vote was a reflection of just how receptive people have become to any promise of new jobs, however dubious the numbers.
The decision is especially sad for people in and around Columbus.
It’s hard to imagine how a casino will make that city’s new Arena District — where the casino will be built — a more inviting place. The crowds the gambling will draw likely will be holed up inside, off the streets and not in the bars and restaurants that have created a bustling entertainment zone.
In time, many other Ohioans are going to be disappointed, too. There’s no way the casinos can deliver all they’ve promised — certainly not the 34,000 new jobs that were promised in the relentless television commercials; most likely not even the tax money that’s being projected.
Gambling profits and tax proceeds are down, partly because of the recession. In addition and more important for the long term, there are so many casinos elsewhere nowadays that the money is being spread over an increasingly large number of spots.
In this environment, not many people from outside Ohio are going to come here to gamble; they can stay at home in Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia and Pennsylvania and spend what they would have spent on gas on tokens.
Quite simply, the days of using gambling to promote tourism or create a destination are over. Casinos today have all the uniqueness of outlet malls.
Yes, Ohioans will be more likely to gamble at home, but their money is going to make gambling interests richer before it solves any great financial problems for governments.
Remember, the casino backers wrote their own tax rates and established their own licensing fees.
Not shockingly, they took good care of themselves.
Even though Dayton won’t have a casino, the decision to allow the new gambling is not without ramifications for the region. People have a finite amount of money to spend on entertainment, and some of the money that is now being spent in Dayton on the arts, at restaurants and at events will be lost at the blackjack tables or in the slots.
The outflow will be hard to quantify, but it will be real.
Meanwhile, many people will believe that so much money is being raised at the casinos that the resulting tax proceeds should go a long way toward solving local governments’ and schools’ financial needs.
They’ll wonder — just like they did after the Lottery was passed — why they’re still being asked to approve tax increases, especially for schools.
One newspaper columnist calculates that schools will get about 69 cents per day per student if the money rolls in as projected. That’s hardly even pencil money.
While the decision to have the casinos has been settled, new and other important debates begin. The developers and operators will be subject to laws implementing the amendment.
You can bet that, starting now, the pro-casino forces will be spreading around money in the legislature just like they did to former public officials who became their spokespeople; to labor who shilled for them; and to police who backed the idea in exchange for a cut of proceeds going to training for law enforcement.
The coming laws and rules the casinos have to abide by will be the only way to keep a greedy industry in check.
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Editorial: Ohio can end ACORN-like voter-registration flaps
Voter registration has long been a fairly odd, largely American custom.
It is all about letting authorities who run elections know where you live, even though the people who give you your driver’s license already know. As do tax and Social Security authorities and probably many others.
Yet potential voters are required to do file more paperwork. Some don’t take the trouble, for whatever reasons. This leads some well motivated and/or politically motivated groups to reach out to them.
What results is registration paperwork that has to be processed by government employees; sometimes there are problems with the paperwork.
Does the word “ACORN” ring a bell? Last year saw a big flap about that well-meaning, but decidedly flawed, operation registering the likes of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.
That’s not as big a problem, since nobody is likely to show up to vote and declare himself to be Mr. Mouse. Moreover, ACORN insisted that it uncovered those who were playing games and reported their abuses.
At any rate, big flap. Lots of anguish. Lots of work.
And it was all largely pointless.
For many years, a lot of people who are knowledgeable about election management have said that the registration process can be eliminated, or at least combined with the voting process. Other states, not to mention other countries, have combined the processes. Their efforts have worked fine.
But this approach has been a tough sell in Ohio.
Now, however, comes along another idea that might be easier to sell, thanks to the arrival of the online age: automatic voter registration.
The idea is that, when the state gets information from you about where you live, in the process of giving you a driver’s license, the information is passed on to election boards, and — voila! — you are registered.
And when you move, and update your license info — voila! — you are re-registered. That practice wouldn’t get everybody registered, of course, but darn near. And there are other ways to reach most others in the same way: through their interaction with government.
Less hassle for voters. Less government bureaucracy. Fewer fights about how to prevent fraudulent registrations. Less involvement by the likes of ACORN. The idea hasn’t percolated long in Ohio, which is a problem, given how long it takes here to enact common-sense reforms.
But Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is behind the idea. She has the support of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. That operation has also helped her run a couple of “summits” of election administrators and others after the 2008 election, with the goal of creating consensus on modern reforms.
Several proposals have resulted from the summits about early voting, voter identification, disputed ballots and more. However, automatic voter registration really didn’t get much attention at those sessions.
It deserves attention. Ohio should be eager to take advantage of the easy links between government agencies that result from the digital age. Many in the state want us to be seen as heavily into the new age of technology. Let’s see if the legislature agrees.
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Editorial: Climate-change regs could spur Ohio to help itself
The debate about climate change has developed civil war elements. People claiming to speak for the Heartland are saying: Whatever impact pending legislation might have on the two coasts — where most of the political support comes from — it would be disaster for states like Ohio, which are especially dependent on coal and manufacturing.
If you put restraints on carbon emissions associated with coal, you hurt Ohio. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a “cap-and-trade” bill. It sets a national limit on the amount of carbon that can be released, then allows companies that can’t reduce their emissions to buy credits to release more.
Republican House leader John Boehner has said it would raise energy costs in Ohio — and worse. Specifically, he says it would put AK Steel out of business.
In September, Reps. Steve Austria , R-Beavercreek, and Jean Schmidt, R-Loveland, joined him at a Republican-sponsored hearing in Columbus to highlight these points.
All along, proponents have said the bill would — on balance — create jobs, by fostering new energy businesses and by fostering energy conservation, allowing money to be diverted in other directions.
Now comes a study that says the positive economic impact would not only be bigger than the negative, but would actually be greatest in states like Ohio.
“Heartland states will gain more by reducing imported fossil fuel dependence because they are generally spending a higher proportion of their income on this low-employment, high- price” source, says the study.
The point is that Ohio doesn’t produce oil, but it could produce plenty of sustainable energy forms, such as solar and wind, thus fostering new industries and keeping its money at home.
The study was done primarily by the University of California at Berkeley, and was funded by The Energy Foundation, which describes itself as a partnership of foundations interested in sustainable energy.
Promoting the study locally is the Ohio Business Council for a Clean Economy, an organization of businesses interested in the “green” field.
As for oil, Ohio uses more than it digs, says the study’s main author, David Roland-Holst. And, he says, the fossil fuel industry produces relatively few jobs, and they pay poorly.
Ohio businesses and universities are poised to move into the new world of sustainable energy in a big way. Central State University and the University of Dayton are among the eight designated as having “Ohio Centers of Excellence” in specific “green collar” realms. They’re participating in a state effort to have all electricity sold in Ohio by 2025 come from advanced or renewable resources.
Still, this country is falling behind others in the new technologies. Professor Roland-Holst says the great threat ahead for Ohio is not that its coal and manufacturing industries will be hurt by new laws, but that the state will miss the “green” boat while focusing on coal.
He recognizes that industry’s problems, but says it has been like the auto industry — which, for example, fought higher gas-mileage standards for many years — in failing to adjust to modern times.
The coal industry points to cap-and-trade studies with different conclusions than this one. Unquestionably, there will be downsides to cap-and-trade. Some attention must be focused on problems of communities now most dependent on the coal industry now.
But the times are changing. There will be winners and losers. Ohio can fear that, or it can recognize that few other states are more in need of change than Ohio.
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Editoral: Races aren’t too sexy, but they really count
There is no race for president, nor will voters get to choose a governor, a U.S. senator or anyone for statewide office on Tuesday.
In what’s officially considered an off-election year — because all the candidate contests involve municipal, township and school board positions — there is just one marquee issue. Casino owners are trying again to open the state to gambling.
But as strongly as some people feel about that issue, it still doesn’t have the drawing power of major national and state political races.
As a result, a strong majority of registered voters probably will stay home Tuesday. Turnout for Montgomery County is projected to be less than 40 percent.
The reason to take a stand and pick a side is that many of the races will impact you in direct and concrete ways.
Choices for city council, township trustee and school board play a big role in determining the level of services residents receive and, yes, the taxes we pay. And, as happens every year, this election has cases that require a discerning eye from informed voters.
In some instances, the choices raise questions about what’s acceptable behavior for elected leaders. In other cases, voters must pick the best choice from among multiple strong candidates.
Consider the Harrison Twp. trustee contests. Two candidates on the ballot have ties to the adult entertainment businesses in a community where frustration with strip clubs and sex shops is a continuing theme.
Candidate Julie Caserta’s husband co-owns the Naughty ‘N Nice adult store on Dixie Drive. Her husband’s business partner is related to the owners of The Living Room strip club.
Also running is Georgeann Godsey, who works for the management company that owns the shopping center where The Living Room and Naughty ‘N Nice are located. Trustees make key decisions about zoning and law enforcement that can affect adult businesses.
Meanwhile, Trotwood is in such a financial bind that it has four tax issues on the ballot. They affect the city’s most basic operations, like filling potholes and keeping ambulances on the street. Even if voters approve all of the requests, the city will remain on shaky finanical ground. Yet, two candidates for city council are delinquent on their own property taxes.
Janice Chinn, a candidate for the 2nd Ward council seat, owes $4,254, while Mattie Clay, a candidate for the 1st Ward seat, owes $2,602. Both have been behind on their taxes for more than a decade.
As financially strapped as Trotwood is, every dollar in unpaid taxes makes it that much harder for the city to offer the services residents need.
In West Carrollton, Edward Jones wants to be one of the city’s council members just a year after he was convicted of a felony charge of receiving stolen property. He was caught on video taking merchandise from a discount store that ended up on the shelves of a store owned by his ex-wife.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are the Washington Twp. trustees contests. There, incumbents Joyce Young and Lee Snyder are opposed by newcomer Scott Paulson in one race. Incumbent Dale Berry is opposed by Harry Drain and Kenneth Parks in the other.
All six candidates have strengths. Ms. Young, Mr. Snyder, Mr. Berry and Mr. Drain have experience as trustees, while Mr. Parks is the former township fire chief. Mr. Paulson is an active community volunteer and a key player who helped grow a start-up company into a significant employer in Springboro.
Township voters who do go to the polls Tuesday will have the pleasant job of picking three winners among six good candidates.
There are similarly strong fields running for Centerville’s, Kettering’s and Beavercreek’s city councils, and for school board in Kettering and Springboro.
If you’re a registered voter, it’s not too late to get educated. Making an informed vote is the only way to ensure your community has thoughtful people making decisions you can live with.
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