Badin vs. Fredericktown
Miamisburg graduation 2012
Valley View vs. Greenville
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 > 2010 > May
May 2010
Editorial: Current wars too easy to forget about
Last week — May 25, to be specific — a newspaper article noted this turn of events in the country’s two wars:
“For the first time since the United States led the invasion of Baghdad during the Bush administration in 2003, there were more American troops deployed to Afghanistan than Iraq — 94,000 compared with 92,000.”
By late summer, the number of military personnel in Afghanistan is expected to climb to 98,000. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the plan is to reduce the troops there to 50,000 by the end of summer, with a complete exit at the end of next year.
The numbers underscore how long these wars have been — and how few Americans are actually bearing the real sacrifices. The latter is a point worth remembering on Memorial Day, 2010.
In a recent speech sending off some of the 101st Airborne to Kandahar from Ft. Campbell, Ky., Army Maj. Gen. John Campbell mixed inspiration with prediction saying, “Twenty years from now, you’re going to be sitting in a rocking chair someplace thinking about what you did in 2010 and 2011. You can puff up your chests and say, ‘I was in Afghanistan. I was there when Afghanistan turned.’ ”
Then he reminded them of the numbers, “You guys are part of a minority. One-half of 1 percent of our nation is doing what you’re doing. You’ve got to feel pretty good about that.”
We should all wonder. Do the people doing the fighting feel privileged and called? Or are there times when they ask themselves whether anyone really understands or cares about the risks they’re taking, the sacrifices they’re making?
Even if that’s not how trained warriors let themselves think, certainly some in their families ask the questions. Especially if their loved one has given his or her all, or has come home injured or changed for the worse for life.
The country has been in wars which affected virtually everyone: the Civil War, the world wars, Vietnam.
Vietnam, which saw more than a half million Americans in-country at one time, was the last war that entailed a draft, shaping the life decisions of a generation. And, because of enormous public controversy, Vietnam never faded from consciousness.
Today several generations have really never known war in this way or lived through the heartbreak it brings. To them, it’s history, a very sad book or movie. That’s surely a blessing, but it’s also dangerous if too few really understand the dimensions and tragedy of conflict.
Other generations, of course, are not so lucky. They have not forgotten what it means to be a Gold Star mother, to grow victory gardens, to worry about the effects of Agent Orange, to understand why you never wanted to get a letter beginning, “Greetings.”
For the latter, Memorial Day is much more than a three-day weekend and the start of summer.
And that’s also true for the tiny minority that are — today and tomorrow — in some far-flung terrifying place, maybe even unaware that it’s a holiday back home for the people already on holiday from war.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, National government
TweetEditorial: Miami Jacobs can’t promise and not deliver
If students are being scared away from Miami-Jacobs Career College, the school has only itself to blame.
Some students are complaining that the for-profit college’s promises aren’t being kept. Miami-Jacobs is struggling with accreditation issues in both its licensed practical nursing program and its respiratory care programs, which can affect the value of their degrees.
The college is expensive, which helps explain why it has a disturbing student loan default rate. There’s a real question whether students always understand everything they need to know before they sign up.
President Darlene Waite admits that, in the nursing program, the college provided sloppy oversight. She promises a quick turnaround.
State Rep. Clayton Luckie, D-Dayton, who has been putting the heat on Miami-Jacobs, says he plans to introduce legislation that would require more transparency from for-profit colleges about their costs and accreditation. He also wants a more consumer-friendly way for resolving complaints.
The ideas he’s pushing are good ones.
The criticisms of Miami-Jacobs are not unique to it. Many for-profit colleges have gotten in trouble for using hard-sell techniques, saddling students with crushing debt and giving inferior instruction.
Nonetheless, for-profit colleges are booming in the United States. More jobs require college degrees, and some people are in a hurry to get more skills. For-profit schools can make sense for those who are prepared for fast-paced instruction and require the flexible scheduling the schools are known for.
But consider the dilemma, for example, with getting into licensed practical nursing: The wait to get into that program at some (but not all) area community colleges like Dayton’s Sinclair, Piqua’s Edison State and Springfield’s Clark State can be two years (although, students can take some basic courses).
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Miami Jacobs costs about $11,400 a year to attend. The comparable numbers for Sinclair ($1,620), Clark State ($2,900) and Edison State ($3,570) are much lower.
The differential, not shockingly, is reflected in student loan default rates. Miami-Jacobs reported about one in five students defaulted on student loans in 2007 and 2006, the most recent years NCES reports data. Student loan default rates for 2007 were 9.4 percent for Sinclair, 10.2 percent for Clark State and 5.4 percent for Edison.
Ms. Waite concedes her school’s numbers are too high, and she insists its default rate will drop to 11.8 percent in the next report.
Overall, Miami-Jacobs also has by far the lowest retention rate in the group, according to NCES. That’s a big problem because if students start a program, pile on debt and then wash out, they’re inevitably in financial trouble.
(Miami-Jacobs disagrees with the way the national center counts those who drop out, saying it’s at a disadvantage because the center doesn’t look at all students.)
Miami-Jacobs, once locally owned, has expanded dramatically since it was bought in 2003 by Delta Career Education Corp. It’s now up to about 1,800 students — about six times what it was. The rapid growth could be a factor in the school’s problems.
Miami-Jacobs wants its critics to think there’s an innocent explanation for every one of its problems. Trouble is, when you take them all together, the picture is not confidence-inducing. Given that so many of its students are far from wealthy and that they’re often mortgaging their future to quickly get a degree, the school has to deliver.
Having educational options are all to the good. But Rep. Luckie is right that he — or more broadly, the state and the board of regents — can’t just sit by when students are paying good money for less than they deserve.
The responsibility is Miami-Jacobs’ to show it’s providing all that’s required and all that it promises.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEllen Belcher: Foreclosures coming to business property near you
There’s something especially heart-breaking about certain foreclosures downtown.
The Kettering Tower, Dayton’s tallest building and the place from which the late Virginia Kettering watched so protectively over the city, is in receivership. The former Fifth Third Center, a lovely modern building that was built on the belief that downtown would always need classy office space, is, too.
Now the Kuhns building at Fourth and Main, a gorgeously and lovingly renovated architectural gem, is headed toward foreclosure. Oakwood’s Robert Shiffler is struggling to refinance the debt that he ran up to make the building a show place for what can be done with old buildings.
If someone else now gets to come along and buy a stunning piece of history with good tenants at a fire-sale price and Shiffler loses his shirt, that’ll be so unfair. The scenario, however, is not an outlandish possibility.
For the longest time, public attention on the mortgage crisis has been on homeowners whose residences are underwater. (That’s shorthand meaning that the value of a property is less than the amount that’s owed.)
But experts who follow financial matters also are warning that commercial real estate is overvalued, too, and that very many developers who have loans that have to be renegotiated will be out of luck.
Unlike home mortgages, commercial mortgages are written for shorter periods, often five years. Loans that were taken out when real estate prices hadn’t started to tumble are coming due.
One government expert says that half of the commercial real estate loans nationally could be underwater by the start of 2011.
Banks are under pressure by federal regulators to limit their exposure on commercial properties, so they’re not eager to refinance loans or extend the life any that look even marginally risky.
Dayton and indeed the region will not be special. They can’t get through this period without some investors taking hits, even though prices didn’t skyrocket here the way they did in some other places.
Buyers will swoop in and make out because of other people’s losses. But the shake-out won’t be pretty.
Even if the price of office space comes down because new owners are buying investments for a steal, that’ll prompt turnover that leaves someone else hurting.
For instance, if you’re in office space where the rent is X amount, but you know that a building down the street is renting for much less, you’ll want a price break or maybe you’ll even move. If people are just changing spaces but there’s no net increase in tenants, that’s not progress.
It’s hard to even know what’s happening with foreclosures. Montgomery County Clerk of Courts Greg Brush is right that his office needs to start tracking the trends, separating out commercial foreclosures from residential ones.
No one really has a handle on how this is all going to end. Policy makers certainly haven’t gotten far in resolving the home mortgage crisis, and they’ve had plenty of time.
It’s also clear that governments — certainly not state and local governments — will not be rushing in with bailouts or even small handouts to developers. They have their own problems, what with property tax collections down on account of residential and commercial foreclosures, and sales tax collections running tepid because consumers have become more cautious.
The fabled invisible hand of the market is going to be slapping people down and doing so visibly.
Once upon a time, real estate was thought of as a good and safe investment. It was something you could see and touch, and so long as you didn’t speculate wildly, your bet was usually secure.
But like so much about this economy, old truisms just aren’t holding.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Economy, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Local History
TweetEditorial: Stanic’s legacy is the people he put in charge
Dayton school Superintendent Kurt Stanic was a lucky find.
Two years ago, the school board tapped the experienced school superintendent who had already retired twice from districts near Cleveland and asked him to do something about Dayton’s abysmal test scores.
Mr. Stanic, 59, resisted the board’s overtures to stay permanently. He preferred, he said, a short stint during which he’d focus especially on assessing principals and choosing talented people to put in leadership jobs.
In his two years here, due to expire at the end of next month, he lent an outsider’s eye to Dayton’s problems, made tough decisions with confidence and enhanced the district’s credibility using straight talk.
Mr. Stanic describes his time in Dayton as the most gratifying of his career. He says he likes the Dayton area enough that he is going to stick around for a while. It didn’t hurt that the Montgomery County Educational Service Center has given him a $24,000 contract ($400 a day for 60 days) to consult with area school districts.
In an interview with the Dayton Daily News editorial board, Mr. Stanic made some observations about his time here:
• Looking at the city’s high schools, Mr. Stanic said he was appalled by their poor performance. That compelled him to replace four of six high school principals.
Today he can’t stop bragging about the people leading those schools and the gains they are making, such as across-the-board test score gains at Dunbar High School and a big reduction in dropouts at Belmont High School.
• Mr. Stanic said he identified Lori Ward as his logical successor right away. He is insistent that the district has to constantly identify and groom future leaders, noting that Ms. Ward’s first big challenge is to replace herself with a quality deputy superintendent.
• He said principals have to really know what’s going on in classrooms. He overhauled their jobs by requiring them to get much better at identifying good instruction and mentoring teachers who needed to improve.
• The district’s financing is precarious. With the foreclosure crisis in the city, the district is collecting just 87 percent of the property taxes it is owed. At the same time, schools could face a huge cut in state funding in 2011, as Ohio also struggles with a decline in its tax revenue. Those two trends could converge to cause devastating cutbacks. The district is on track to cut 46 teachers next year.
• Charter schools may decide that being part of the district isn’t so bad. Mr. Stanic believes good charter schools may want partnerships that would place them firmly under the umbrella of Dayton schools. Both sides could benefit, Mr. Stanic said.
He points to the success of the former charter schools, World of Wonder and East End Community School (now Ruskin Elementary), both of which are now part of the district. He said he has had informal discussions at times with several quality charter schools that are struggling financially.
Mr. Stanic has been thoughtful, deliberate and persuasive. He is the first to say much work remains, but he left the district better than he found it.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetScott Elliott: Ward must let parents have school choices
Soon-to-be Superintendent Lori Ward is working on a plan to convert Dayton to neighborhood-based elementary schools. On paper, assigning kids to a particular school, close to home, makes a lot of sense.
The problem is, people don’t live on paper. In the real world, she could be trapping kids in poor-performing schools or driving more kids out of the district. Unless the rules are flexible and allow parents to look outside their neighborhoods, the idea isn’t going to go over well.
When Ward talks about her vision, she sees as many students as possible attending a good-quality, nearby school, one that’s strongly supported in the neighborhood. There would be little need, she hopes, for parents to shop around, as the district’s goal is to eliminate inequities among schools.
That’s a nice vision, but it’s unrealistic, at least by 2011. There are huge disparities among the city’s elementary schools, which is partly why some parents look beyond the closest school in search of a better one.
On the whole, Dayton’s elementary schools are very low-scoring when measured by state achievement tests.
Consider this: The lowest-rated elementary school in Huber Heights — Monticello Elementary — has a “performance index score” of 91.9, or 3.5 points higher than the Charity Adams Earley Academy for Girls. It’s the best-scoring Dayton elementary school.
All Dayton elementary schools are in the bottom quarter of all schools rated by the state. (The performance index, with a maximum score of 120, represents total test performance across all grades.)
Twelve of 23 Dayton schools that serve elementary grades are in “academic emergency,” Ohio’s lowest rating. No schools rate higher than the third of six rating categories. The low end of Dayton’s scale is very low. Three elementary schools — Rosa Parks, E.J. Brown and Westwood — have index scores below 60, ranking them in the bottom 3 percent of Ohio’s 3,527 schools that received ratings.
There are many reasons. A big one is that most schools have students that come from extreme poverty. Charity Adams Earley, with two-thirds of its girls qualifying as poor, has the fewest poor kids of any elementary school in the city. Ten schools have at least 80 percent who are poor. (For a family of four, that means an annual income of less than $41,000.)
How can Ward tell parents who live near Westwood Elementary School that they must send their children to a school that is among the highest-poverty schools in the city and one of the worst-scoring schools in the state?
Ward will counter that those parents could apply to one of three districtwide elementary magnet schools — Charity Adams Earley, Dayton Boys Preparatory Academy or a new Montessori school that will open soon. All are solid options, but three decent choice schools simply isn’t enough.
Ward’s argument that neighborhood schools will, by their very existence, create more community cohesiveness and better support for children is weak. There certainly are benefits to the neighborhood school approach, but they all depend on the local school demonstrating at least a decent level of performance.
Until Dayton gets there, any attendance zone policy will have to offer flexibility. It’s perfectly logical for the district to make the local school each child’s default option. But when parents request something better, the district’s answer simply cannot be a blanket “no.”
If conscientious parents aren’t able to send their children to the school they want, they will look to a handful of decent charter schools or elsewhere. The district can have its attendance zones and head off an exodus with a liberal policy at the start. As the schools improve, the district will have a stronger argument for stricter boundaries.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: House right on redistricting — for now
The long, frustrating effort to reform the way the Ohio draws legislative districts showed remarkable signs of life last week. The Ohio House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, 69-28, for a strong plan.
Reform is necessary because political parties can stack the deck in ways that all but prevent lawmakers from having to compete for their jobs. Some districts are drawn so they’re always won by Republicans, no matter what; others are drawn so they’re safe for Democrats.
Sixty votes were needed to approve putting the plan on the November ballot.
A different reform proposal had already passed the Senate. Now the Legislature has to get very busy about finding a compromise.
Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, chief sponsor of the Senate plan and chief negotiator for the Republicans, says the 17 House Republicans he helped round up to vote “yes” deserve special credit for “courage.”
He says some don’t really like the House plan, but voted — against much flak from colleagues — to move the process along. Proponents are in a time crunch because the Legislature has until August to act, but it wants to recess for the summer this week or next.
It was good to see both Democrats and some Republicans from the Dayton area on board.
At various stages in the process, black legislators have been identified as leery of reform, seeing it as a threat to safe districts they have been given even by Republican map drawers (who like to concentrate Democratic voters in a few districts).
But Democratic Reps. Clayton Luckie and Roland Winburn, who together represent most of Dayton, as well as other central parts of Montgomery County, voted for reform.
So did Republicans Rep. Peggy Lehner and Terry Blair, who represent mainly the south suburbs of Montgomery County.
Of the Montgomery County delegation, only Rep. Seth Morgan, a Republican representing mainly northern suburbs, voted “no.”
In adjacent counties, “no” votes came from Rep. Jarrod Martin, from Greene County; Peter Beck and Ron Maag, from Warren County; and Richard Adams, from Miami County. Rep. James Zehringer, representing Preble and part of Darke county, voted “yes.” All are Republicans.
Ironically, legislators from the surrounding counties have the least at stake. Those areas will be represented by Republicans under any map.
Just how much credit for courage the “yes” voters should get depends on how things play out. Yes, they voted to move the process toward compromise. But they might also have wanted to get credit for being for reform in the abstract, even if they vote against the final product, saying that they don’t like the specifics.
Such switches — by Democrats or Republicans — would be a shame. It’s difficult to imagine anything arising out of negotiations that could reasonably be considered a deal-breaker by real advocates of reform.
Under current law, districts in the Ohio Legislature are drawn every 10 years by, in effect, whichever political party has two of the following three offices: governor, secretary of state and state auditor.
Congressional districts are drawn by the governor and legislature. Sen. Husted would put responsibility for both kinds of districts in the hands of a seven-person bipartisan commission, with at least two votes from each party necessary to create a map.
The Democratic plan (which applies only the state Legislature, not Congress) entails a map-drawing contest open to the public. Points would be awarded for, among other things, keeping districts compact and competitive. (A competitive district is one that can be won by either party without a miracle.)
Both sides seem open to using the Husted commission and the Democratic contest, with the commission having some leeway to pick from among the best entries.
That still leaves at least one big question: what about deadlocks? What if the commission can’t agree?
Democrats don’t want the state Supreme Court, now dominated by Republicans, to settle the fight. They have proposed a new tribunal. Republicans say that’s a new branch of government and an unacceptable precedent.
The legislators ought to be able to agree to a plan that gives the Supreme Court the power to reject a map on constitutional grounds or to send the two parties back to work, but not to actually impose a map.
What’s needed now is good faith. And fast work.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetGuest column: Consumers want the option of small-dollar loans
This column was written by Ted Saunders, chief executive of CheckSmart.
Ohio has been hit hard by the economic climate. Many households are making difficult decisions every day to make ends meet.
This reality emphasizes the need — and value — of reliable access to short-term credit.
Unfortunately, short-term loans — usually around $300 — are too frequently undervalued by some legislators (and other critics of retail consumer lending). They seek to take financial choices away from those who need them most.
This misunderstanding was clear when the House passed HB 486 — legislation that will effectively eliminate access to relatively small-dollar loans. This bill was rushed through the House in a highly politicized manner.
Since then, there has been a genuine sharing of ideas on regulating short-term loans. But HB 486 does not reflect this.
Economists, small-business owners and clergy members delivered compelling testimony in opposition to the bill because they understand it will cause Ohioans to lose valuable access to credit while also eliminating jobs.
Additionally, this bill creates an uneven playing field, giving depository institutions a competitive advantage. These institutions will not be subject to the provisions of HB 486, including a limit on the number of loans offered per year, even though they provide a similar service.
Clearly, this bill is intended to shut down certain lenders in favor of others.
Consumers choose regulated short-term loans because other financial institutions do not fully serve them, and other options are often more expensive. HB 486 removes the ability to make that choice, but does nothing to reduce the need for reliable and affordable credit.
Some argue that consumers could use loan services offered by banks and credit unions. But these purported alternatives often involve a variety of restrictions and complicated fee structures. They are not an adequate substitute for the small-dollar, short-term loans offered by retail lenders.
Furthermore, these alternatives are not widely available. Research from Victor O. Stango of the University of California, Davis found that fewer than 6 percent of credit unions nationwide offer comparable short-term loans, primarily because “they see little chance to break even” on a low-cost, high-risk service.
Our critics also dismiss the sophistication of our customers. Indeed, the Daily News recently described them as “unsophisticated” and “desperate.” These assertions are unsubstantiated.
Our customers are salespeople, bus drivers, emergency personnel and even journalists. They make difficult decisions every day on the job and for their families, and are entirely capable of making informed economic choices.
This is confirmed by a study from the George Washington University School of Business. Roughly half of the consumers surveyed considered other forms of credit — such as bank or credit union loans — before selecting short-term, small-dollar loans.
The Daily News has also cited a so-called “will of the people” rationale for shutting down lenders, which overlooks tens of thousands of Ohioans who continue to utilize short-term loans.
Ohioans voted to sustain a severely restrictive fee cap on payday loans in 2008, and, as a result, many neighborhood lenders across Ohio have closed. To be sure, Ohio voters made their voices heard on the issue of payday loans specifically, but not on the need for short-term credit in general.
Some lenders, including CheckSmart, have altered their services in order to continue providing small-dollar loans. Indeed, state lawmakers urged lenders to make these changes and encouraged us to offer loans under the Mortgage Loan Act and Small Loan Act. The consumer loans that we now offer are different loan products than payday advances.
Our company provides a vital financial service; it is cost-competitive, simple and proportional to the needs of many consumers. In these uncertain times, it is imperative for legislators to consider the harmful impact that eliminating these loans would have on real people.
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TweetEditorial: Ohio leading U.S. recovery? Come again?
An editorial here on May 11 noted that, while the national economy added jobs in March, Ohio did not get its share. Seems like Ohio is always — or, too often, anyway — someplace near the bottom of national economic rankings, at least as to the direction of things.
So it should be noted that in April, when jobs materialized faster than in March nationally, Ohio got more than its share.
Remember reading that the country added a promising 290,000 jobs in April? Well, it turns out that Ohio led the nation, with 37,000. That is, it had more new jobs even than much bigger states.
It was the state’s biggest jump in 22 years.
The point is made here not to suggest that happy days are here again. It’s made with an eye on that old Ohio trend of bringing up the rear.
In some measure, the recent good news for Ohio results from progress in the manufacturing and auto sectors. Nationally, April was the best month that manufacturing has seen in 12 years, in job growth: 44,000.
But that may not be the entire explanation. After all, the good news came from all across the state. Construction, tourism, engineering and accounting all added jobs. Montgomery County and Dayton saw their unemployment rates drop a little, from very high levels. The Cincinnati region — 15 counties stretching up through Warren County — added 14,000 jobs.
So why did Ohio lead?
Maybe, Ohio will benefit from the fact that it has fallen so far and stayed down for so long. Maybe it will spring back harder.
Anecdotal evidence suggests this. A national law firm moves its back-shop activities to Kettering, seeking low expenses in an attractive, well-located place. Local promoters and businesses point to the particularly low cost of housing, office space and manufacturing space.
Meanwhile, the availability of good workers who have lost their jobs — whether blue collar or white collar — is seen as an asset from some perspectives.
The strength of the national economy will matter a lot for Ohio. On that score, it’s best not to assume much, what with Wall Street in turmoil because Europe is in turmoil.
The current upswing — modest, but entailing four months of job growth — pretty much obviates a debate about the need for a new national stimulus (not to mention the fact that President Barack Obama would have great difficulty selling any major new spending plan). Now the work seems to be up to forces beyond the federal government.
Meanwhile, many of the most striking stats suggest only a limited role for state and local governments in shaping the current scene. Michigan continues to have the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 14 percent. That’s not the fault of anybody in government in Michigan. It’s about cars.
North Dakota has the lowest, at 3 percent; that’s not because there’s something in the snow that makes people smart about economics.
In Ohio, Clinton County has the highest unemployment rate of any county, at 17.7 percent. That’s about a decision made by DHL, not local or state government.
As for Ohio as a state, it has spent much of this era in the same boat as Michigan, or at least the same fleet. The latest numbers suggest that if the worst is over for that fleet, the recovery here need not lag behind, after all.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Rand Paul faced up to real meaning of his pitch
2010 ELECTION
During the primary election campaign, I had occasion to ask a certain candidate the Rachel Maddow question: what about the civil right laws of the 1960s?
The candidate was Rene Oberer, who was running against Mike Turner for the Republican nomination to Congress. She came out of the Tea Party movement, but had an emphasis that struck me as more libertarian than conservative.
She was a newcomer to politics and was flying solo, that is, without expensive consultants to advise her. So I don’t mean to pick on her. The subject of this column is really Rand Paul, from across the Ohio River. The point is that he’s part of something bigger.
In the 1960s, the federal government made it illegal to exclude people from restaurants, stores, hotels and other “public accommodations” because of race. This was a revolution, the arrival of a whole new social system. It was the end of the 100-year reign of government-sanctioned repression — known as the Jim Crow era — that followed the Civil War and defined the South.
Though opponents had said “You can’t legislate morality,” the laws did precisely that. Within the next decade, the white South largely turned against its old ways.
So how is all that seen by the government-is-the-root-of-evil crowd? (Oberer opposed even the extension of unemployment benefits during the recession.)
Oberer’s reaction to the question was captured by Clarence Page (who wasn’t there) in a column here about Rand Paul.
Paul won the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky in the May 18 primary. He’s been an object of national attention ever since.
Specifically, he got into trouble when MSNBC’s Maddow asked him how he felt about the historic civil rights legislation. He told her he didn’t believe the government should have told private businesses whom to do business with.
Page wrote, “As Paul backpedaled in subsequent interviews, it became clear that he apparently had not really thought very much about issues like race and civil rights versus property rights, beyond the easy one-size-fits-all libertarian dogma.”
That seemed true about Oberer, too. She thought the question came out of left field. She asked, why would anybody do that (exclude people because of race)? After follow-up questions, she referred to the line of questioning as “race baiting.”
My read was that talk radio, Fox television and like-minded Internet outlets do not pause long over the indisputable successes of “big government.” So the people who look to those outlets have a certain gap.
Ultimately, Oberer suggested that civil rights law had done more harm than good, making everything about race and resulting in discrimination against whites, especially white males.
Again, it seemed like the myopic talk-radio take.
There, the issue isn’t fundamental civil rights, but affirmative action and “quotas.” Both Oberer and Rand Paul deserve credit for a certain consistency (at least before Paul backed off).
The people who portray government as the root of all evil, but make exceptions for the popular stuff — civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, wars, defense, veterans benefits, interstates, public universities and federal aid in oil spills and other emergencies — have an incoherent position.
Their own exceptions — acknowledging where government is good — overwhelm their own generalization about how “government is the problem.”
After all, that little list of exceptions entails most of what the federal government does, certainly in terms of spending.
Paul is relatively hostile to the war in Afghanistan. Add that to his civil rights comments, and you get the sense that he doesn’t want to allow too many exceptions to his generalizations about the evils of government.
Some people have always stuck rigidly and honestly to the government-as-the-root-of-all-evil position. Typically, however, they stick to writing articles, calling talk shows and posting on the Internet.
They don’t run for office. Or at least they don’t get a major nomination for a major office.
Rand Paul sometimes looks like he might be happier writing articles and calling talk shows.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
TweetEditorial: Wright brothers ties to Ohio should count
Strange thing about this business of picking a bygone Ohioan to be immortalized at Statuary Hall in Washington: Some of the biggest competitors weren’t really Ohioans.
Thomas Edison? He was born here, but didn’t even grow up here, before going off to fame on the East Coast.
Ulysses S. Grant? He grew up here, but, even outside the military, lived in Illinois and Missouri as an adult, then settled in New York after the presidency.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”? Grew up elsewhere, spent 20 years here as an adult, then went east, where she wrote her book and spent the rest of her life. (She did say she based her book in part on experiences she had in Cincinnati.)
Dr. Albert Sabin, creator of the oral polio vaccine? He did spend 30 of his 87 years in Cincinnati (with time out for World War II).
Wouldn’t it be kind of pathetic to pick somebody who might be picked more legitimately by another state? Does Ohio want to remind people of North Carolina, with its overestimation of its role in aviation history?
The names above are among the 10 finalists culled by a special legislative committee from 90 nominations. Others: Jesse Owens, Rep. William M. McCulloch (a congressman from Piqua who played a role in historic civil rights legislation), astronaut Judith Resnick, Harriet Taylor Upton (a prominent suffragist) and James Mitchell Ashley (a Toledo congressman and abolitionist).
Then, of course, there are Orville and Wilbur Wright, who are counted as one entry.
They started from modest beginnings, changed the world through vision, determination and ingenuity — and spent their lives in Ohio.
Wilbur was born across the Indiana border. Orville was born in Dayton and died here 76 years later.
Is there any point in worrying about which Ohioans are immortalized in statues? Some people have treated the subject as a just-for-fun thing. One journalist nominated Roy Rogers. What the heck.
Well, true enough, the state has bigger things to worry about. But a decision has to be made. And the occasion has functioned as, to use the fashionable phrase, a teachable moment. School children have been confronted with the case for a wide array of people, learning their stories in the process.
But as to who gets selected, there is simply the principle of the thing.
Other finalists might reasonably be considered as worthy as the Wright brothers. But they are not equally Ohioans.
If you traverse the Internet, you will see cases made for Mr. Owens, Rep. McCulloch, Ms. Stowe and others; and for a woman generally. Some of the agitation is local boosterism. Ms. Resnick gets support in her hometown of Akron, for example.
Some people see the campaign for the Wright brothers as local boosterism, too. But come on. The case is so clear.
The Ohio Historical Society is running a vote. You can cast yours at www.legacyforohio.org, or physically at the Dunbar House in Dayton, or the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce. The vote continues to June 12.
But the final recommendation to the state Legislature will be made by the committee. Those who have joined in the push for the Wright brothers include Congressman Mike Turner, the Dayton Development Coalition and the National Aviation Heritage Alliance. So have people from less visible walks of life.
This is entirely appropriate. Having Dayton’s most famous sons officially embraced as the state’s historical representatives certainly couldn’t hurt.
But, really, above and beyond that, it’s the principle. What’s Wright is right.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Local History, Martin Gottlieb
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Can ‘do the right thing’ prevail on redistricting
They say there’s still hope for redistricting reform.
“They” are Ohio legislators in both parties who recognize the indefensible absurdity of letting one party draw all the legislative districts, the current system.
The reformers say change might still happen this year.
For those who’ve been following the issue for half a decade, it’s a little hard to believe. So far, the fact that the case for reform is overwhelmingly strong has not proved important.
Most legislators continue — despite everything — to show little understanding and little interest in the whole issue.
The effort of reformers to get something on the ballot has slipped and slipped again. November is the last hope, because the redistricting process — which will draw districts to be used for the next decade — starts when the current U.S. Census is complete.
To get on the ballot, a measure must be approved by 60 percent of each house of the Legislature. Summer recess is around the corner. The House Democratic leadership is — belatedly — trying to get something passed so that a compromise might be worked out with the Republican Senate.
The Senate has approved a ballot measure pushed by Jon Husted, R-Kettering. Instead of leaving all power in the hands of whichever party holds a majority of certain statewide offices, it would set up a commission on which neither party has a majority. It would require that any new map be approved by a super-majority that includes members of both parties.
The Democratic proposal would go further. It would set up a contest in which the public is invited to submit maps, with entries getting points for, among other things, maximizing (1) the number of districts that are reasonably well balanced between Republicans and Democrats and (2) the number that are compact.
The Democratic proposal — bringing in the public — has the advantage of keeping the parties from colluding. Otherwise, they could agree to divide the state into a bunch of districts that are safe for one party or the other.
One possible compromise would entail using the Democratic contest and giving the commission in the Husted proposal some leeway to chose among the highest-scoring entries.
Absurdly, the Democrats want to exclude congressional elections from reform. (Under current law, congressional districts are handled between the Legislature and the governor, like a regular law. That is, the process is separate from the one involve districts in the state legislature. That would continue.)
There’s no good case for exempting Congress. But party headquarters, labor and some representatives from majority-black districts have had qualms about reform. This resulted in reformers settling for a half a loaf, as a way of getting something done.
A big problem now is simply getting legislators to focus, to learn the issue. Some are under the impression that reformers want to make all districts competitive. Not true. Not even possible.
Take, for example, in all the counties surrounding Montgomery County. The Republican districts there will remain Republican. There’s no way to change that without gerrymandering.
Montgomery County itself, though, is a classic case of where reform would matter. It leans slightly Democratic as a whole but has had three safe Republican House districts and two safer Democratic districts for 20 years.
Look at the district of state Rep. Seth Morgan, of Huber Heights. He gave up his safe Republican seat to run unsuccessfully for state auditor. If reform happens, that oddly shaped district would likely change a lot. It stretches westward across the northern suburbs, takes a left when its well west of Dayton, and goes to the southern reaches of the county. Non-partisans would have no motive to build such a district.
(Interesting to contemplate: Would a more competitive district produce somebody as conservative as Morgan, or would the Republicans look more to the center?)
As that case suggests, a lot of politicians have reason to worry about reform. But figuring out how their interests might be affected is complicated, partly because of term limits. House members are always looking ahead and thinking about Senate and congressional districts. Moreover, for those who want to stay in the House a while, reform would not eliminate the advantages of incumbency.
In that kind of murkiness, the reformers dare to hope that a lot of legislators might actually decide to simply do the right thing. Imagine.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Family ties make county look too cozy
Some of Montgomery County’s elected officials are carrying the whole “family values” thing a little too far.
• Sheriff Phil Plummer should not have three relatives on his own payroll, having already effectively fired another from a contracting job, under pressure. They were all hired before he was sheriff, and he claims no involvement. But, when he was second-in-command, he was the sheriff-in-waiting, sometimes with personnel responsibilities. And his family certainly seemed to see the sheriff’s department as an especially good place to get a job.
• Juvenile Court Judge Tony Capizzi’s wife should be transferred out of his court, where she is a court reporter. Transcripts are important legal documents. Things could get ugly if somehow the relationship between the judge and the court reporter became an issue in a fight over a transcript. His step-daughter also works directly with him. That’s wrong, too.
• Judge Adele Riley, who handles cases in a county court that hears misdemeanors, told her daughter about a job opening, and the daughter ended up working for her and three other judges. Though the daughter is apparently qualified, it’s not a good situation.
• In 2004, Probate Judge Alice O. McCollum hired her son as a temporary file clerk. It wasn’t a big job, but it was an apparent violation of state law. Now he has a job in domestic relations court.
A Dayton Daily News investigation found that 19 county employees are relatives of 13 of the county’s 31 elected officials.
Not all the cases are outrages. Montgomery County is a fairly small town, so to speak, certainly as to the political and legal communities; some legitimate coincidences will happen.
When the clerk of courts took office, his father-in-law was already at work at the job. A second cousin of Prosecutor Mat Heck is an accomplished assistant prosecutor. County Commissioner Debbie Lieberman is certainly not responsible for the fact that her husband, Dennis Lieberman, is on the board of elections. (The former county Democratic chairman is a political appointee because the law requires that.)
But the overall pattern is relatively bad. County (and city) government long ago moved away from the old ways of local government, wherein patronage and favoritism were the norm. The county has tried to project an image of professionalism, and it has done a good job of it for the last quarter century, since scandal and corruption resulted in criminal prosecutions of elected officials.
It can’t allow itself to backslide now, or to be seen as backsliding. It has enough problems.
At a time when the county commission is completely Democratic and Democrats predominate elsewhere, the suspicion that one-party dominance is making the establishment lax will be hard to fight, notwithstanding Republican names among the 13.
Particularly striking is that most of the 13 elected officials with relatives on the payroll are somehow engaged in the judicial — legal — system. Eight are judges. Little that’s going on seems to be illegal. So the problem certainly should not be overstated.
But, of course, the public cannot be assured that everything that’s legal is kosher. The public sees officeholders as having a big role in determining what’s legal. The officeholders are people who make, interpret and enforce the law; and they are seen as having clever lawyers (not to mention actually being lawyers).
The Montgomery County judicial system has long had a good reputation statewide for competence, efficiency and integrity. This investigation shouldn’t endanger that, but it’s still embarrassing.
Montgomery County’s elected officials need to get off their slippery slope and rededicate themselves to the longstanding principles of professionalism and of being above suspicion.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Martin Gottlieb, Montgomery County
TweetGuest column: Patients are at the center of new health care model
This column was written by Dr. Paul Grundy, a former major in the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps and IBM Corp.’s global director of health care transformation. He is also president of the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative.
Ever wonder why your cat gets a note from the vet when it’s time for his immunization, but you don’t get one from your doctor? With the nation’s renewed focus on health care, it seems like improving on the basics is the best place to start. How about your family doctor?
Fact is, the current system is leaving doctors very little time to focus on patient wellness. For example, it’s estimated that administrative headaches take up to 30 percent of doctors’ time.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, along with members of the local Dayton medical community like Dr. Ted Wymyslo, are at the epicenter of a powerful new concept in patient care that is garnering widespread attention. This innovation in primary care — patient-centered medical home — is paying off in better health care, lower costs and happier doctors and patients.
A medical home gives patients greater access to a primary-care physician who can manage all their health needs, coordinate with other health professionals and focus on wellness and prevention, while improving the quality of care.
The Ohio Senate is currently considering legislation authorizing a pilot program focused on the patient-centered medical home. Thirty-nine states are experimenting with this concept.
Studies show that when people have primary-care doctors as their usual source of care, their health care costs are reduced by one-third and they have a 19 percent lower mortality rate. This special patient-doctor relationship is particularly effective when dealing with patients with chronic illness such as diabetes, heart problems and depression, which account for some 80 percent of health care expenditures.
Dayton can find one of the best examples of the patient-centered medical home approach locally with patients at Wright-Patterson, who were among the first in the nation to experience this kind of care.
Last September the Department of Defense announced that every prime patient would receive enhanced primary care and be assigned a case manager. Among the military health systems, the Air Force is the furthest along in delivering coordinated care that helps reduce medical costs from five percent to 20 percent everywhere it is practiced.
Also in Dayton, the Veterans Administration system has stepped up to the high level of care delivered in the patient-centered medical home model.
Employers, health insurance companies and primary-care doctors are coming together to improve how primary care is delivered. A Washington state pilot program saw a 20 percent drop in emergency room visits. A North Carolina project experienced a 40 percent drop in hospitalizations for asthma, while a Pennsylvania health care system reported $3.7 million in net savings in its pilot.
There is something powerful about the healing relationship between a patient and a doctor that is foundational to keeping people well. When there is a real relationship and trust between the doctor and patient, it amplifies how important health and wellness are.
People who have this type of relationship with their doctors are sick less frequently, have fewer chronic illnesses, and this pays huge dividends for society.
Creating a smarter, more connected health care system that puts the patient at the center of care is an important goal for all of us, both physically and financially.
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TweetEditorial: Region won WilmerHale the hard way
This week WilmerHale, the international law firm that is moving its back office work to Kettering, has brought 20 or so of its employees to Dayton to check out the town.
Bruce Pearson, president of the Miami Valley Research Park where WilmerHale is locating, said one woman wanted to know where the parking garage was. Mr. Pearson explained parking was free and a short walk from the front door. The woman, who currently works in WilmerHale’s Washington, D.C., office, said she pays $18 per day to park and then has to hop a bus to the office.
Wait until she sees what passes for traffic here.
Landing WilmerHale was a coup for Kettering and the region. Thirty-one cities east of the Mississippi River were in contention after the first round of cuts for the law firm’s business services center. The firm wants 187 people on the job in September, handling work in human resources, finance and information technology.
The common denominator among these tasks is that the work can be done remotely.
You don’t have to be working out of expensive suites in Washington, Boston and New York City.
Saving money is the explicit goal of the move. A WilmerHale official said all employees whose jobs are being transferred have been offered positions here, but he expects only 5 percent will move.
That means maybe 175 new job openings, paying an average of $49,000.
Has Dayton become China, now that some firms are having buyer’s remorse after sending certain jobs overseas? Is it a place where firms might look because labor is cheaper and the cost-of-doing-business is more affordable than on the coasts?
(WilmerHale is located on Park Avenue in New York, two blocks from the White House in D.C., and on State Street in Boston.)
There is something ironic about a community that has been so buffeted by the outsourcing of low-skilled manufacturing jobs landing the outsourced jobs of a global and prestigious law firm. These positions, like manufacturing jobs, pay well, but, of course, the work is different.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman predicted in his popular book, “The World is Flat,” that white-collar professionals needed to pay attention to the outsourcing trend, that it was not just assembly-line workers who could lose their jobs to global competition. He wrote of lawyers and accountants and radiologists doing their thing from India and beyond.
As it happens, WilmerHale picked Dayton, not Delhi.
Harold C. Gibson Jr., business management director for WilmerHale, said the company was committed to keeping these jobs in the states. Its research convinced directors that they’d have no trouble finding talent in Dayton and at an affordable price.
Mr. Gibson pointed to LexisNexis, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and NCR as evidence that skilled and technical people work and live in the region.
(It also didn’t hurt that a ton of NCR employees weren’t going to Atlanta with that formerly Dayton-based company.)
WilmerHale is receiving generous and expensive incentives to come to Kettering. Over seven years, the state will kick back $1.45 million to the company that its employees will pay in state income taxes. Meanwhile, Kettering is rebating $515,000 in local income taxes.
The firm also is getting $250,000 from Montgomery County for improvements to its new building. All told, the firm is pulling down $3.2 million in subsidies.
Clearly, the local powers that be are betting on a venerable institution continuing to do well, maybe sending more work here.
But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. This was not a situation where the head of a company had a tie to the community or a business had to be in Dayton because of, say, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Rather, Deloitte Consulting, WilmerHale’s location consultant, vetted a bunch of places on measurements of quality of life and their cost of living.
To come out on top in that sort of dispassionate exercise makes the win all the more meaningful. It’s also compelling evidence to use when selling the region, a hard-to-dispute validation that Dayton’s marketing pitches are more than just gloss.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business
TweetU.S. can learn from Ohio on testing changes
Education in the United States may be close to crossing a continental divide when it comes to teacher evaluation.
Spurred by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top stimulus grants, states are hurrying toward using “value-added” test scores to judge teachers.
Just in the past month, political debates have erupted in Florida and Colorado about proposals to greatly expand using test scores in teacher evaluations. The Sunday, May 23, New York Times Magazine includes a long story on the momentum in that direction.
Ohio is well ahead of the game. It’s one of a handful of states that incorporates a measure of the “value added” by teachers in a given school year — a calculation that aims to measure how much academic growth students make.
The state could do itself and the nation a favor by rigorously and transparently evaluating its own testing system and being brutally honest about what works and doesn’t.
Value-added tests ultimately may prove to be a better measure of student learning than traditional tests. But for now, they shouldn’t be the primary tool for evaluating teachers.
Race to the Top’s offer of millions to states that adopt ideas from President Barack Obama’s education agenda, including his proposal that student test scores be part of a teacher’s performance review, has spurred this move toward value-added testing.
Traditional tests that show how students compare to their peers at a point in time don’t necessarily measure how effective teachers are in the classroom. Lots of factors affect those scores, including the big impact of how little or how much a student learns at home and how far behind or how far ahead he or she started the school year.
Value-added testing tries to compensate for these considerations. Using a complex mathematical model (that can’t be explained in simple English), the goal is to hold constant all other factors except the effect that a teacher and a school have on student learning.
As a diagnostic tool, it can help identify problem areas for teachers. But should anyone be fired based on the scores?
Henry Braun, a testing expert at Boston College and the Educational Testing Service, advises caution. Mr. Braun led a commission on value-added testing for the National Research Council.
His verdict: The value-added approach gives better information than traditional scores, but its complexity will complicate public understanding. And, he says, value-added still is based on tests that often fail to measure student learning successfully.
He recommends against drawing too many conclusions from value-added scores. In Ohio, the value-added system is being refined. Some evidence suggests it isn’t yet where it needs to be. (The scores are not widely used here to evaluate teachers yet.)
Earlier this year, Cleveland State Professor Douglas Clay’s review of Ohio’s value-added scores found disturbing inconsistencies. For instance, he pointed to one Ohio grade level that saw 83 percent of schools failing to meet “expected growth” in one year, while 98 percent of schools met expectations with the same kids the following year.
Something is clearly wrong there.
The Ohio Department of Education officials say they’re still learning what’s working with the value-added system. By publicly touting what they discover, Ohio can help lead the country toward a better evaluation system.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: 6 questions about new cancer treatment centers
Dayton as a regional cancer treatment center? Say what?
With the James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State and also the Cleveland Clinic within driving distance, the proposition has people scratching their heads.
And to make the matter even more bewildering, now Dayton’s two manically competitive hospital systems are saying they each have partners that can make this happen — notwithstanding competition from the other.
Before anyone gets too excited, ask to see the money.
Last fall Miami Twp. officials exuberantly announced that they were cutting a deal with Optivus Proton Therapy Inc. The company would be building, they said, on township property at the Austin Pike interchange.
Proton therapy is a radiation treatment that precisely attacks tumors, leaving nearby tissue and organs unaffected. It’s relatively new and expensive, but doctors think it has profound and life-saving applications.
Meanwhile, some investors are being told that there’s money to be made with the technology.
Optivus said its project would draw patients from hundreds of miles because there are only seven proton therapy centers in the country.
Miami Twp.’s discussions with Optivus were all done in secret, and the company and township officials declined to talk even to logical local partners whom they’d need.
Even as local people were kept in the dark, lobbyists were hired to ask state lawmakers to pass a new law that would allow for special financing for Optivus’ tremendously expensive project.
The approach didn’t sit well. The first question people in Columbus asked was, What do the people back in Dayton think?
Moreover, if special deals are going to be cut — in this case, tapping Miami Twp.’s bonding authority — that needs to be out in the open.
Now comes Kettering Medical Center announcing that it, too, is building a proton treatment operation, possibly at Austin Pike. Kettering officials are telling everyone that they’ve been planning their center for three years, long before Optivus came to town.
Kettering’s operation would be smaller — capable of treating 80 patients a day — and cost $80 million. Optivus, which has recently started negotiations with Premier Health Partners, is promising a $170 million for-profit facility that could treat 200 patients a day.
No one believes that there’s money available to build both centers; investors aren’t going to see local competition as good for them. So, one or the other side will blink.
Meanwhile, the hospitals’ announcements about what they’re doing, and how soon they’re doing it, is their effort to make the other sweat.
Kettering, Optivus and Premier each are going to do what’s best for them, but there are questions the community needs to ask:
— If this therapy is good medicine, can the hospitals come together to build just one treatment center? Are there really antitrust issues that would prevent that?
— Is there any threat that, while Kettering and Premier are trying to one-up each other that a Cincinnati or Columbus hospital might beat them to the punch? (Part of the appeal of a center in Montgomery County is that we’re between two big metros.)
— If the treatment is so promising, is there a possibility that in short order, every region will have a proton center? If that’s a possibility, what does that mean for Optivus’ business plan — its ability to pay back tax-free bonds? Even more so than Kettering’s project, Optivus’ depends on attracting patients from across the state and from out-of-state.
— If Kettering isn’t going to ask for any special treatment from government, what’s the case for helping Optivus, effectively putting Kettering at a disadvantage?
— What’s the story on why Kettering isn’t working with Optivus, when Optivus is associated with Loma Linda University and they’re both Seventh-day Adventist institutions? Is the region being used to settle business differences?
— The equipment Kettering wants to buy hasn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It would be buying a commercially produced version of the technology, not a tailor-made system like those that are currently in use. That would save money, but is the product really close to getting the feds’ seal of approval?
There are myriad competing interests involved in whether, how and how soon the region gets into this cutting-edge treatment.
You’d like to think that however things turn out, the result would be nothing but good for patients and the community.
In fact, though, there are things that easily could go wrong — ways that patient care could end up being compromised or an economic development project at an important spot could flop.
Best to nail down what Dayton doesn’t know.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Health Care, Local Business
TweetKevin Riley: Downtown residents wanted
The size of the crowd and its obvious passion for Dayton helped. But the people who turned out for the Downtown Dayton Partnership’s meeting last week were, on their own, feeling good about their ideas and the work that many were promising to do.
The partnership reserved the Racquet Club on the top floor of the Kettering Tower for its unveiling of the Greater Downtown Plan, a project that’s been in the works for close to two years.
About 300 people showed up, including politicians and corporate executives. But there also were lots of supporters of the arts, outdoor-recreation types and others without lofty titles who had volunteered hours and hours of their time.
The plan focuses on economic development, vibrancy and public spaces. Within those broad categories are impressive and doable projects, including development on the riverfront, making Dayton a bicycle-friendly city and changing streets to make them more inviting to pedestrians. Some projects are already under way.
But two elements of the plan are particularly ambitious:
• Creating 8,000 new jobs downtown.
• Developing 2,500 new housing units.
Skeptics will focus on these two pieces. After all, given the economic blows that Dayton has taken, 8,000 new jobs might be more of dream than a plan.
Still, Michael Ervin, a retired physician and former health insurance executive who has led the effort, and other advocates insist the numbers are reachable.
How to make the goals? In part by attracting downtown residents.
People create movement. They eat in restaurants; they buy stuff. When the streets are busy, more people want to be part of the action.
Downtown residents affect the city’s image and economy.
Think of it this way: if someone works downtown, he might go to a restaurant for lunch. Then he’s gone. Someone who lives downtown may go out to lunch and dinner. Then that restaurant gets more popular and even people who don’t live downtown visit.
In one sense, a downtown resident will always be more valuable than a downtown worker. Too simple and optimistic? Maybe. But the reality is hard to argue with.
It’s not a new idea that Dayton needs more people living downtown. Before the days of urban renewal and the multi-lane highways that were built through neighborhoods, the city had bustling residential districts in or near downtown.
City officials say today residential occupancy downtown is above 90 percent. The Landing along the river is nearly full.
Downtown has things working in its favor:
• Trends show that some people want an urban lifestyle. Dayton can be especially attractive to young adults, empty nesters, military people who’ve spent their careers in cities, and others.
• The glut of downtown office space may be an opportunity. When building owners decide that many of their older buildings are obsolete, they’ll have more of an incentive to tear them down, creating new space for residents; or they may convert them into lofts and condos.
• Financing is hard to come by in this economy. And the days of Montgomery County or the city of Dayton pouring public money into developments is over. But if downtown housing were genuinely market-driven, that could be a good thing for the long term. It could result in more housing downtown, say, for first-time homebuyers.
Absolutely, creating 2,500 new downtown residences will take creativity, time and luck. But if the Dayton region is going to thrive in the 21st century, we need a strong downtown.
As Ervin said last week: “The plan is only the beginning of the work.”
He’s right, but at least now we have a plan.
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TweetEditorial: Ohio execution rate shouldn’t be rising
There’s something decidedly odd about Ohio’s death penalty situation.
Having executed five people this year, with another six scheduled, and with two more scheduled for next year, the state is running behind only Texas in putting people to death. The two states are in a class by themselves.
The reason is not that Ohio has suddenly decided to get tough. Quite the contrary. This state has gone the direction of much of the country. Only one person was sentenced to death last year. More convicts are getting life-without-parole, an option the state moved to in the 1990s.
With DNA evidence having vindicated a fair number of convicted murderers, and with the public seeing life-without-parole as a real alternative, public pressure to execute has somewhat waned.
But inertia is at work. Some cases that have long been in the works under old law and practices have continued to grind through the courts.
A constitutional amendment was passed in 1995 that streamlined the appeal process. That’s one reason some defendants who were convicted in the 1980s and 1990s have exhausted their appeals at about the same time. Meanwhile, a moratorium that was placed on executions for a year and a half starting in 2007 created a backlog.
Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer says that people are on the execution list these days who wouldn’t be if they committed their offenses today. He made that argument to the Columbus Dispatch, which called him the “father of Ohio’s death penalty.” He was in the state Senate when the law was created in 1981, to replace an older one that had been found unconstitutional.
However, that 1981 law did not have a life-without-parole option (though Justice Pfeifer says he favored one).
He says the state should not just let the current course proceed.
“When the next governor is sworn in, I think the state would be well served if a blue-ribbon panel was appointed to look at all those cases,” he said.
State Public Defender Tim Young likes the idea of a new look at the situation. He notes, “We, as a society, always have an evolving standard of justice. … A decade ago, you could execute the mentally retarded.” (The U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed that.)
There are plenty of reasons to worry about death penalties dished out under the old rules, when, for example, people who killed whites were more likely to be executed than people who killed blacks.
Margery Koosed, a specialist in death penalty law at the University of Akron law school, says when a new policy is adopted — such as life without parole — the assumption is that it will not apply to offenses already committed. If the government wants to apply it retrospectively, it must specifically do that.
She notes that such a decision would be unconstitutional if the idea were to toughen penalties after the fact; but that problem doesn’t arise when a state wants to reduce use of the extreme sanction. She says the state should take a new look at the old cases.
Although Americans still disagree about the death penalty, the practice of using it only sparingly has a lot of support. It’s the course Ohio has, in effect, decided upon. That fact ought to count for something, even in cases of people who were convicted before.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Ohio bumped as politics epicenter
2010 ELECTION
Ohio is not the heart of it all anymore. Not in the political world. For this week, Ohio doesn’t count.
May 4 saw a primary here in which the Tea Party pretty much flopped and an insurgent Democrat lost a U.S. Senate primary. The establishment prevailed in both parties, raising the possibility that the year might not be so revolutionary, after all.
Forget that.
Our neighbors to the south and east have been heard from, changing the national conversation.
(Our neighbor to the west has also been heard from. Self-described “ultraconservative” Rep. Mark Souder, Republican of Fort Wayne, admitted that he had an extramarital affair with a staffer who helped him prepare videos about family values and abstinence. Republican leader John Boehner, R-West Chester, reportedly responded immediately by advising Souder to resign. Boehner is apparently unworried about what effect such a precedent might have on his ranks. But that’s another story.)
In Kentucky, candidate Rand Paul — who says the Tea Party is the way to save the country — won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. In his first candidacy, he swamped a statewide officeholder who had the support of the biggest guy in Kentucky politics, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the party establishment (but not Sarah Palin and disgruntled outgoing Sen. Jim Bunning).
The race had certain things in common with the Ohio race for state auditor, between official party candidate Dave Yost and Tea Party challenger Seth Morgan, which was also a landslide. But the Kentucky race came out the other way. Maybe the Kentucky establishment candidate blew it.
Paul favored term limits, opposed earmarks and said he’d only vote for a balanced budget. His opponent opposed term limits, favored earmarks and said voting only for a balanced budget would be unrealistic. So the philosophical distinction become clearer than in Ohio.
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic establishment had rallied round Sen. Arlen Specter; never mind that he’s 80 and keeps saying “Republican” when he means “Democratic.” These tongue slips might have more to do with habit than age. But, either way, not good.
The challenger, Rep. Joe Sestak, a retired admiral, got support from national liberal groups and pulled off the upset that Jennifer Brunner couldn’t against Lee Fisher. Maybe Brunner would have had a better shot if Fisher had switched parties or were 80 — or if she were an admiral. So what the Pennsylvania outcome means about the national scene is not clear.
The national media have decided that both party establishments are in trouble, never mind Ohio, or, for that matter, Oregon, where a bunch of incumbent legislators and a former governor breezed in. The high-profile races went a certain way, and that’s that. In truth, the party leaders are looking bad. President Barack Obama’s endorsed candidates keep losing. Meanwhile, the Democrats won a surprising special congressional election where he was not much engaged.
In a special election on the eastern border of Ohio, a former staffer of the late John Murtha beat a Republican in a Pennsylvania district that went Republican in 2008. (Murtha was the former Marine whose courage was once ill-advisedly questioned by Rep. Jean Schmidt, of the Cincinnati area).
Similarly, in Arkansas, Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln survived a challenge from the left — pending a runoff — without bringing Obama in.
But the Republican establishment can hardly make fun of Obama on this score, given its embarrassment in Kentucky, coming after similar events in Florida and Utah.
And yet one might reasonably wonder if the anti-establishment, anti-incumbent dynamic is all it’s cracked up to be. Will it last through November?
November outcomes tend strongly to favor one party or the other, or incumbents of both parties — not challengers of both parties.
Democratic fears about November were somewhat assuaged by the Pennsylvania House race. But the winning Democrat there, Mark Critz, ran to the center, opposing the Obama health care plan, gun control and abortion (while also promising to bring home bacon, like Murtha, and carrying on about trade). Democratic incumbents won’t be able to maneuver so easily.
What’s most striking about his victory, though, is that it required not having a tough primary. In tough primaries, the closer candidate to the center lost in the Kentucky and Pennsylvania Senate primaries. That confirmed a clear national trend for the year.
So, even if the best bet for the parties is to move to the center, the best bet for thriving within parties is apparently to be seen as uncompromising.
Suggestions are needed as to how the country is supposed to work that one out.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Can Judge Wagner sit out death-penatly cases?
Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge A. J. Wagner has asked to be excused from the case of Cody Henderson, 20, indicted on three counts of aggravated murder, including murder for hire. It’s a death penalty case, and Judge Wagner opposes the death penalty. His desire not to serve clearly applies to all death penalty cases.
This is unusual. Several law school professors around the state who follow these matters were contacted by the Dayton Daily News. None could think of a case of a judge making such a request.
Presiding Judge Barbara Gorman approved the request, saying she has approved all requests for recusal.
Judge Wagner made his request not by filling out the usual form, but by putting together a 135-page submission. It includes material from a respected group of lawyers that has studied how the death penalty is applied.
Despite the length, his argument comes down to a simple matter: He cannot justify the death penalty on moral, constitutional or religious grounds. So is he right in recusing himself?
Well, if he is not going to impose the death penalty no matter what, then, of course he should not be sitting on a death penalty case. The law obliges him to proceed on a case-by-case basis. A judge has to follow the law.
The larger question here is whether somebody who can’t follow the law should run for a position as a common pleas judge. Capital cases are part of the territory, after all. Could he have done something short of recusing himself?
Lori Shaw, assistant dean for student affairs and professor of lawyering skills in the University of Dayton School of Law, suggested one option might have been hearing the case but then ruling that the death penalty is unconstitutional. That ruling wouldn’t prevail, but it would fight the fight, at least more than simply passing the case on to somebody else.
Judge Wagner wonders, however, whether it would be appropriate to preside all the way through a capital case in the full knowledge that he wouldn’t apply the ultimate sanction.
Judge Wagner isn’t slated to face voters until 2014. Whether pro-death penalty voters should be upset with him is not so clear. After all, if he refuses to hear a case, the case might go to a judge they might like better.
Still, some voters are likely to have an opinion on this matter.
Even before that, though, the question arises: Should a judge stay in a job in which he refuses to do the biggest, toughest tasks?
Judge Wagner says the question isn’t compelling because death penalty cases are rare. This is his first, except for one in which a plea bargain had been arranged, he said.
Recusing oneself from a case is a respected mechanism. It’s used when a judge knows a person involved in the case or has some other potential conflict of interest. But it’s typically used one case at a time, not for a category of cases.
And not for such a tough category. After all, many judges dread death penalty cases. Some oppose the death penalty as law, but feel they must enforce the law. When a judge declines to take up the burden, that means somebody else ends up with it, in this case Judge Mary Wiseman.
Judge Wagner says that when he first ran for judge at the beginning of the last decade, he thought he could handle a death penalty case. His thinking gradually changed. But he was last elected in 2008 (unopposed).
He has now thrown the court and the public a curve ball, and some people have a right to be upset.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Will Dayton parents accept fewer school choices?
For a decade, Dayton has been known as a school choice mecca.
So Tuesday’s announcement that the school district plans to push really hard to get elementary school students to attend their neighborhood schools in 2011 raises an interesting question:
Will a city conditioned to expect widespread school choice accept the notion that children should stay in their neighborhood?
From the advent of charter schools in the late 1990s, Dayton quickly emerged as a national leader in the percentage of kids who attended them, mostly because of the dissatisfaction with the school district.
Choice advocates here helped pioneer private-school scholarships before that, and Dayton became a heavy user of state vouchers that gave public money for kids to attend private schools for the past five years.
But the history extends even further. Following Dayton’s court-ordered integration in the mid-1970s, the district tried magnet schools, a lottery-style school assignment system, and other open-enrollment programs.
Dayton superintendent-in-waiting Lori Ward believes those practices did more harm than good, even as they were a way to make busing for integration more accepted. Establishing attendance zones around neighborhood schools, she believes, will strengthen ties between school and home and offer better access to after-school programs for kids. (It will also save transportation costs, but Ms. Ward said that is not a primary goal.)
“Choice is a major inhibitor of strong relationships between schools and families,” she said.
But the conversion could be tricky. Parents choose schools for all sorts of reasons. Will they accept being told where their kids will attend? (Three schools — the district’s Montesorri school and the all-boys and all-girls schools — will still draw from across the district.)
“This might have worked really well in 1985, but I’m not sure about 2010,” said Terry Ryan, the Dayton-based vice president of the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. “Folks have grown used to choice, and they like it.”
For an example of what Ms. Ward has in mind, look at Ruskin Elementary School. Partnering with the University of Dayton and East End Community Services, Ruskin offers programs after school and has attracted 80 percent of its enrollment from the neighborhood.
The integration of Ruskin into the fabric of the Twin Towers community has been a plus for the kids, their families and the neighborhood.
Four other Dayton schools have, or will have, similar designs. Ms. Ward would like to build on that approach.
How the districtwide plan is crafted will be key. Ms. Ward said she wants to propose a new student-assignment system by December for adoption by the school board next January. She said she announced the effort early in hope of attracting lots of input from parents.
A series of feedback meetings are in the works. Ms. Ward is open to ideas for making the change gradually, allowing exceptions that could be phased out over time.
That’s a good approach. School leaders need time to gauge the community’s wants and needs. The board must demonstrate that its final decision will truly benefit kids, not trap them in places their families don’t want to be.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Jobless would be out in cold but for feds
It’s an election year, so the politicians want to make you happy. That’s why Gov. Ted Strickland and both Republicans and Democrats in the legislature aren’t talking about the fact that the state’s unemployment trust fund is bankrupt.
Going on a year and a half — since January 2009 — Ohio has been borrowing money from the federal government to pay for out-of-work people’s unemployment benefits.
By the end of this year, the debt could total more than $3 billion. Unless the federal government relents, it will start charging interest — 4.66 percent — next January.
Because more than 30 states are in the same boat, there will be lots of pressure to keep delaying the payments.
Even if that reprieve happens, you might think that the powers that be in Ohio would be trying to prevent the situation from getting worse. Not so.
When the state got a gift as part of the federal stimulus, to help pay for unemployment benefits, it used that money to cut unemployment taxes.
The savings was miniscule to individual employers, but could be almost a $70 million loss to the state, according to Policy Matters, a liberal think tank based in Cleveland.
Here’s how that happened:
Employers pay a tax on the first $9,000 of employees’ pay. The rate varies by employer and depends on a number of factors, including how much money the unemployment trust fund has to pay out because companies went out of business and, therefore, couldn’t kick in to the fund.
This so-called “mutualized” rate factor has dropped from 0.4 to 0.2 percent, saving employers about $18 per full-time employee.
That’s because the law requires that any unexpected infusion of money into the trust fund automatically go toward reducing this part of the tax — notwithstanding that the system is broke and deeply in debt.
Businesses and advocates for workers know things are a mess, but they’ll never agree about what the fix should be. Employers don’t want to pay more in taxes, and representatives of workers argue that Ohio already is overly stingy about benefits.
They do agree, however, that this problem has been building for years. In almost every year for more than a decade, Ohio has been taking in less in premiums than it has paid out.
More important, there’s been a shift in Ohio — and nationally — away from building up the unemployment reserves in good times.
If taxes can’t be raised in a down economy and businesses want reductions in good times, where’s the money going to come from?
Something is going to have to give. Businesses and/or workers are going to have to “pay” in the form of higher taxes or reduced benefits to build up a depleted fund and to settle a debt.
When employers bellyache, it’s worth noting that the $9,000 threshold that employers pay taxes on hasn’t changed since 1995. That’s significant because it means that, as wages have gone up, the tax is on a smaller and smaller percentage of salaries.
Moreover, in 2009, the average weekly unemployment benefit was $321, hardly enough to get rich on.
Finally, the average length an out-of-work Ohioan receives benefits is 21 weeks. That’s pretty solid evidence that the unemployed aren’t eager to be without a job.
At any rate, whenever the politicians get around to deciding how to make sure that unemployed workers have a solvent safety net, one easy change will be eliminating automatic decreases in premiums as the system is drowning in debt.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Prescription-drug death stats way out of whack
Modern medicine has made great advances in the battle against physical pain. But nobody has figured out how to handle the side effects of misuse of those advances. Like death.
To the surprise of everybody, Montgomery County is in a class by itself in Ohio in the number of accidental drug-overdose deaths.
The numbers are striking in themselves. But when you ponder the possibility that the numbers represent only a portion of the people who have a prescription-drug problem, the stats are all the more alarming.
Statewide, the death figures now exceed auto-accident fatalities.
So it’s all the more notable that people in Montgomery County were almost twice as likely to die than people in any other urban county in Ohio.
And they were about twice as likely as people in the non-urban surrounding counties. Specifically, the Montgomery County death rate was just shy of 24 out of every 100,000 people every year.
The phenomenon has grabbed the attention of local and state officials, sparking studies at both levels. At this stage, experts can only speculate about the cause.
What’s known for sure is that we’re not talking about an inner-city phenomenon here, but a more general one. Actually, one need only follow the news about celebrities to know that many of the people with prescription-drug problems are loaded with money.
And many of the victims never have any contact with any public agency before ending up dead.
Public agencies are, nevertheless, overburdened with the drug problems they do know about.
Montgomery County does have Project Cure, funded largely by the county’s Alcohol Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board.
It’s a methadone clinic on James H. McGee Boulevard in Dayton. Ninety percent of its clients are white.
Other communities are not eager to have such a clinic — even aside from the question of who would pay for it.
As for who would pay, mental health and drug programs are among the first to be cut in bad economic times like these. So, if studies now suggest the need for a new government attack on the overdose problem, it’s hard to imagine where the money would come from.
Some questions need answering:
Is there something about Dayton’s economy? Is it that a lot of unemployed people around here have good health care plans because of past employment in the auto industry and are accessing dangerous prescription drugs to deal with job-related injuries?
Is too much use being made here of methadone, a tricky prescribed drug? Local usage is known to be high, to use an unfortunate term.
Can something more be done to prevent people from going to multiple doctors in search of prescriptions, or misusing pharmacies, sometimes to get drugs to sell?
Fatal, accidental drug poisonings aren’t a new thing, of course. But they have more than tripled in Ohio in this decade, to more than 1,400 in 2008.
Sometimes it takes that kind of trend to get attention focused. Montgomery County needs, for its own reasons, to be the Ohio epicenter of that focus.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Health Care, Martin Gottlieb, Montgomery County
TweetGuest column: All Ohio candidates must answer 6 core questions
This column was written by state Sen. William Seitz, a Republican from Cincinnati who also has been a state representative and Cincinnati school board member.
Ohioans will elect their governor, all members of the Ohio House of Representatives, and half of the Ohio Senate in November.
Only six issues really matter. These are the issues voters should be demanding candidates talk about.
• Ohio confronts a fiscal crisis of epic proportions about which neither the current governor nor the General Assembly has done much.
Most voters are unaware of the coming debacle. Ohio’s current two-year $50 billion operating budget relies on nearly $8 billion in one-time money — money that will disappear in the next budget, much of it from the federal stimulus.
Never in Ohio history has economic growth been robust enough to make up an $8 billion hole in less than two years.
The next budget — which has to be decided in June 2011 — must be balanced. That’s required by the Ohio Constitution.
What fix will the candidates propose? New taxes? Or what cuts in state spending?
• Ohio’s unemployment compensation fund is completely broke. In fact, we will owe the U.S. government more than $4 billion in 2011, and Uncle Sam will start charging interest on that debt in 2011.
This problem is independent of the $8 billion shortfall.
How will our candidates propose to repay that staggering debt to Washington?
• Ohio’s five public pension systems for all government employees and teachers are each underfunded. The good news is that they are not as badly underfunded as are most other states’ pension systems.
But three of the five cannot meet their obligations that are due in the next 30 years. (That’s the standard for actuarial soundness.) The other two are able to do so only by eliminating any payments for retiree health care benefits.
Each fund recommended legislation last fall to restore the funds’ actuarial health, and these suggestions have been presented to the Ohio Retirement Study Council, the independent umbrella commission that oversees all the funds.
Neither the legislature nor the governor has taken any steps to enact the recommendations.
Do the candidates support changing the pension funds’ rules? Which ones?
• Gov. Strickland successfully advocated for revamping our K-12 education system and its funding. The trouble is, the price tag for the reforms will add between $3 billion and $4 billion per year to the state’s K-12 education budget by the time the changes are fully phased in in 2019.
An analysis by the Columbus Dispatch found there will have to be an 82 percent increase in the state K-12 education budget from 2011-2019 to pay for this.
This multi-billion problem is on top of the $8 billion operating budget problem and the $4 billion unemployment compensation problem.
If we’re going to stick with Gov. Strickland’s education reforms, how will they be paid for? If not, how should they be scaled back?
• Most Ohioans are not aware that part of the federal health care law that narrowly passed Congress requires the states to increase how much they spend on Medicaid. The federal bill pays the states to do this for only a few years. After that, state taxpayers must pick up the tab.
Precise cost estimates will depend on how many Ohioans earn less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level when the mandate kicks in. However, estimates are that this will cost Ohio at least $250 million more per year.
Should Ohio fight Obamacare? If not, how will the candidates pay for it?
• Most state workers (including all legislators) have gone without a salary increase for the last several years. Some union contracts now in place require added benefits to resume in 2011.
Neither management nor rank-and-file workers can be expected to supinely accept flat to declining wages forever.
How do the candidates propose to address the coming restive workforce, or fund the benefit increases that the Strickland administration has committed to?
Surely, candidates’ views on all of the other issues of the day are important — be it casino gaming, abortion, guns, taxes, economic development, energy independence, school curriculum, capital punishment, campaign finance reforms, the foreclosure crisis, etc.
But voters will be electing charlatans if they elect candidates who won’t address the six issues that collectively conspire to put Ohio in a fiscal straitjacket from which Houdini himself would have trouble escaping.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment |
TweetEditorial: Fisher, Portman should meet for serious debate on trade
2010 ELECTION
Judging from the two campaigns, the race for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican George Voinovich is about who has done more harm to the state:
• Rob Portman, because he was an integral, high-ranking part of the George W. Bush administration, under which began the worst economic downturn in the lives of most Americans; and specifically because he forged trade treaties that sent Ohio jobs overseas?
• Or Lee Fisher, because he was the guy in charge of bringing jobs to Ohio at precisely the time when jobs were disappearing in Ohio like almost never before?
Quite a choice, huh?
Some might say — or assume — that there’s something wrong with a political system that brings the choice for such a high-ranking job down to these two. But that’s too glib.
Imagining an alternative who might have a chance of garnering widespread public support is not easy. You could pick less experienced people, of course, but that has its own hazards.
From the campaign rhetoric, you might never guess that each of these guys is actually considered by peers to be quite capable and to have admirable qualities.
The uncomfortable truth is that failure doesn’t always result from mistakes.
What could the Strickland-Fisher administration have done to prevent Ohio’s stunning job losses? Nothing much. Ohio was simply overwhelmed by a national phenomenon.
Holding the national collapse against the Bush administration has a certain logic. But Mr. Fisher is on dangerous ground when he focuses on trade. One of the few bright spots in the Ohio economy has been exports, which could dry up if the country turned away from free trade, as the Democrats are suggesting.
Is it hoping for too much that the candidates might actually have a full and dignified debate about trade issues, rather than just sling sound bites around?
Ohio has never seen such a debate. If any state should host one, it should be Ohio, where so many workers’ lives have been devastated by foreign competition.
Mr. Portman has always said he would welcome such a debate.
What’s happening now is the common campaign process whereby loose talk drives out tightly woven arguments. Each candidate assumes the worst about the other side’s campaign — an assumption already borne out by childish behavior on the Internet by both camps. And each proceeds accordingly.
So we get from the Republicans a gutter-level attack video that features a shirtless Lee Fisher. The Democrats respond with one about how Republican policies have taken the shirts off the backs of millions of Americans. So clever.
Each Senate candidate seems to have decided to pursue the goal of being judged the lesser of evils by swing voters: I trash you. You trash me. May the least bad man win. They both deserve better.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Strickland attack on Kasich lame
2010 ELECTION
Gov. Ted Strickland barely waited for the votes to be tallied in the May 4 primary before hitting the television airwaves with ads denouncing his November opponent, Republican John Kasich.
He attacked the former congressman for his connections to Wall Street in precisely the years when Wall Street was doing all that stuff that people in Washington are now trying to pass laws against.
The ads don’t actually say that Mr. Kasich did anything untoward, much less illegal. Just that he was tied to Wall Street.
The Kasich camp responded that it’s instructive that the governor launches his campaign by going negative, rather than touting his own accomplishments. Tells you something about his accomplishments.
Undeterred, the governor followed with a speech to Democrats about the meaning of his opponent’s Wall Street ties.
Political consultants will insist this is the only way to go. Former Rep. Kasich has been taking potshots at the governor for years. And in this economy any incumbent has a lot of “negatives” tied to him. So the governor needs to make sure his opponent has some, too. Early.
That said, the Strickland critique is lame.
Democrats like to believe that Republican politicians, deep in their hearts, are really working in behalf of large corporations. About specific individuals, it’s often a tough sell. But the Strickland people are hoping that Rep. Kasich has played into their hands.
When he tied himself to Lehman Brothers for eight years, he gave them an opening. When Wall Street collapsed because of its own practices — bringing the economy down — the opening developed the power of a vacuum.
And yet, in truth, one need not have worked on Wall Street to have Mr. Kasich’s basic political orientation. Democrats and Republicans, liberals, conservatives and moderates come from poverty, privilege and the vast ground in between.
Professionally, they come from Wall Street, Main Street, academia, the bar, whatever. Gov. Strickland ties Rep. Kasich’s support for free trade to his alleged Wall Street obsession. (The speech is below, on this blog). But such support is common to a lot of people who have never met a Lehman brother.
The governor also criticizes his opponent for believing the minimum wage is too high. In truth, though, Wall Street worries less about the minimum wage than do many on Main Street.
One might reasonably sympathize with Democratic incumbents. They see Republicans — on whose watch the economy collapsed — now trying to get a political advantage out of the fact that the mess has proved so hard to clean up.
And one must note that there’s nothing over-the-top ugly about the Strickland attack, given the norms of politics.
But it’s a political strategy, not a serious case.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetTed Strickland: John Kasich is ‘Wall Street to the core’
2010 ELECTION
On his first day on the job, the new CEO was told he really should call a meeting to say a few words to the employees. They didn’t have a room big enough for everybody, so they gathered outside.
It was an unusually cold early spring day and about halfway through his introductory remarks, it started to snow.
He heard a growing murmur among the hundreds of employees. The CEO couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, so he turned to his assistant. “They’re saying ‘stop the snow,’” the assistant said.
The CEO was a bit startled, and said, “Do you think I can?”…
On the one year anniversary of his hiring, the CEO decided to have another outside meeting to greet all the employees and talk about what a fantastic, profitable year it had been.
Once again it was unusually cold. And once again it started to snow.
The CEO heard the murmurings.
He turned to his assistant and asked, “Are they saying ‘stop the snow?’”
The assistant nodded.
And the CEO said, “Do you think I should?”…
Now there are a lot of fine business leaders out there who do their jobs well, who make sound decisions, and who help their businesses succeed and grow. But there is also the kind of business person you find - particularly on Wall Street - who is convinced the world will conform to their every whim, that what they believe in business applies to every question they are ever asked.
There’s a perception out there that Wall Street is a rough and tumble, unforgiving place. That Wall Street types run wild in a winner-take-all frenzy.
But what concerns me more is that on Congressman Kasich’s Wall Street, it’s not always winner-take-all, sometimes it’s loser-take-all.
Because when Lehman Brothers plummeted into the largest bankruptcy in the history of the United States, Congressman Kasich and the top people at Lehman Brothers put out their hands and kept getting paid.
And while he was taking home a massive salary and bonus, living on the fruits of a bankruptcy, people who saved all their lives for retirement took home the rind.
Lehman Brothers’ losses were felt across the country, across the world. In Ohio alone, our state pension funds lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of Lehman Brothers’ collapse.
Hundreds of millions in hard work.
Hundreds of millions of dreams.
And it was gone, gone to greed.
Let me be very clear. Lehman Brothers wasn’t a victim of a shaky economy, they were the architects.
In fact, we now know that they were cooking the books. Among other things, they were selling their own loans to themselves to make it look like they had more money and less debt.
If that sounds a lot like Enron to you - there’s a good reason for that.
Lehman Brothers worked for Enron, helped make Enron possible. And when they were caught with their sticky fingers in Enron’s shady cookie jar, Lehman Brothers had to pay hundreds of millions in settlements to investors who were victims of the Enron scam.
But this time there’s nothing left of Lehman Brothers to pay settlements, there’s nothing left to make whole those who have lost their futures.
Now all of a sudden Congressman Kasich wants to downplay his eight years at Lehman Brothers. Go to his biography on his website today, you’ll see he doesn’t mention Wall Street. He doesn’t mention Lehman Brothers. Not even once.
And now, to hear him tell it, Congressman Kasich’s role as investment banker and managing director at Lehman Brothers left him with little more influence than the company groundskeeper.
But that wasn’t always the story he told.
Congressman Kasich used to brag on his website that he was, quote, “An investment banker on Wall Street.”
Later he went back in and erased that part. You can actually see all this online - because tiny electronic footprints are left behind every time Congressman Kasich rewrites his story.
But, here’s the thing Congressman. The Internet never forgets who you are and what you’ve done - and neither will the people of Ohio.
Congressman Kasich used to drop the names of his fellow business big shots, saying that he worked closely with Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld.
In one interview, Congressman Kasich said Fuld inspired him: calling Fuld, quote, “an awesome guy,” saying, “He is the kind of guy you want to go into battle with. He is a great leader.”
And then he said, “I like people who are really smart and really great leaders.” And, he forgot to mention, really, really unethical.
Today Congressman Kasich doesn’t say much about Dick Fuld, doesn’t say much about Wall Street or Lehman Brothers.
But he’s not exactly ready to learn from his mistakes.
In fact, Congressman Kasich’s biography still says that he was, quote, a “business leader” and that he “understands what makes businesses successful.”
And just last week Congressman Kasich’s spokesperson did some more bragging. He said, and I quote, “John’s experience and success in the private sector, both on corporate boards and as a banker, have given him insights on how businesses create jobs.”
His success? As a banker?
Just so that I’m clear on this, Congressman Kasich, exactly how much of the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history are you taking credit for?
Because, I don’t know about you, but before I’d go to John Kasich for lessons on successful banking, I’d go to Dick Cheney for lessons on safe hunting.
I have the deepest respect for creative folks - I really do. But here’s an important distinction.
The author John Grisham makes a good living from his fiction.
John Kasich makes a good fiction from his living.
But it’s not that Congressman Kasich worked on Wall Street, it’s not that Congressman Kasich idolized Wall Street, what concerns me most is that Congressman Kasich has represented Wall Street his entire political life. He’s Wall Street to the core.
“A man becomes his attentions,” a philosopher once wrote. And Congressman Kasich’s attentions are focused on the notion that Wall Street has the answers.
Let me ask you all a question.
Should China have received special trade status?
No.
Not if your concern is for the people of Ohio. Not if your priority is creating fair trade agreements.
But Wall Street said yes, and Congressman Kasich voted yes, because there’s money to be made by someone, somewhere else.
And in all that greed, 91,000 Ohio jobs were lost.
Should NAFTA have been approved and expanded?
No.
Not if your concern is making sure trade agreements don’t lower our standard of living. Not if your concern is the spread of workplaces with low wages and lax environmental standards.
But Wall Street said yes, and Congressman Kasich voted yes, because there’s money to be made by someone, somewhere else.
And in all that greed, 50,000 Ohio jobs were lost.
Should we throw away the support system for workers whose jobs are shipped overseas?
No.
Not if we value the American dream. Not if we value Americans.
But Wall Street doesn’t care. And apparently, Congressman Kasich doesn’t care. Perhaps that’s why he proposed ending the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program that provides job training and job search assistance to people who lost their jobs to imports.
You know folks, his votes are his values.
And that’s why it’s so important for the people of Ohio to understand Congressman Kasich’s priorities. Because if he wants to sell himself to the special interests, that’s his business. But if he wants to sell the state of Ohio to special interests, that’s our business.
Look at his record and it’s clear, there’s not one bit of difference to him whether Ohio companies are exporting products or exporting jobs.
And now he wants to run government more like a corporation. In fact, he wants corporations to do nearly all of what government does today.
He says if a service is listed in the phone book, then government shouldn’t do it.
And in response to that, I would say to Congressman Kasich, here’s a lesson they don’t teach on Wall Street. Not everything has a dollar sign on it.
There’s a difference between Ohio values and Wall Street values. On Wall Street, they look down from their office towers and see winners and losers. In Ohio, we look out and we see a state filled with people concerned about their families and their communities. People willing to work in common purpose for the common good.
I didn’t learn my values from Wall Street. I didn’t learn my values from a bankrupt investment bank. I didn’t learn my values from modern-day robber barons.
I learned my values on a little dirt road in Southern Ohio called Duck Run.
I learned my values from my father, the hardest working man I’ve ever known. I learned my values from my mother, the kindest, most giving and generous person you could ever imagine.
There weren’t a lot of luxuries on Duck Run. When I was young, we didn’t have a television. We didn’t have indoor plumbing. What we did have were 11 people to feed on a steelworker’s salary.
But my mother - she never felt sorry for herself or for her children. She never once asked why struggle was our constant companion.
And through it all, she saw what really mattered. In fact, the best advice I was ever given came from my mother. She said, “Love your family and look out for each other.” Always.
And not for one moment have I forgotten that. Not in my life, and not in my life’s work.
Because in this great Ohio family of ours, we look out for each other.
Those are my Ohio values. Those are our Ohio values.
In Ohio, we value our children.
We now have comprehensive education reform that strengthen our schools and enables our young people to graduate ready to thrive in their lives and in their careers.
The Education Commission of the States hailed our plan as the most innovative in the country; giving us their award for “bold, courageous, and nonpartisan” leadership in education reform.
Education Week examined 150 indicators of school quality across the fifty states. And when they tallied the results, Ohio schools stood first in the Midwest and fifth in the nation.
I am committed to our public schools - because there isn’t anything more important to Ohio’s prosperity than having an outstanding school system.
In Ohio, we value a strong middle class.
One the things I’m most proud of is that today we have 65,591 more Ohioans enrolled in our public colleges and universities than we had before I took office.
More than 140,000 Ohioans have received job training from the state in the last three years.
And we’re investing in jobs that can’t be outsourced. In fact, Ohio was one of the first states in the nation to fight the global economic downturn with targeted investments in energy, logistics, and public works.
In Ohio, we value our senior citizens.
Expanding the Homestead Property Tax Exemption was a central part of my first budget and has cut property taxes for seniors an average of 400 dollars per year.
Of course, that’s not how they see things on Wall Street.
Affordable college loans are essential to middle class families and to families scratching for a foothold in the middle class. And Congressman Kasich voted no…several times.
Raising the minimum wage is a matter of basic fairness, a matter of making work pay. And Congressman Kasich voted no.
In 2008, the one year Congressman Kasich has revealed his income, he made well more than 1 million dollars. Working a minimum wage job, it would take 95 years to earn what Congressman Kasich took home that one year.
95 years.
And that’s at a minimum wage that Congressman Kasich thinks is too high.
Every time he’s had the chance to stand on our side, he’s chosen to stand with Wall Street.
Now there’s a remarkable woman that the people across Ohio are going to have a chance to meet during this campaign whose Ohio values are deep within her bones.
My running mate - Ohio’s next Lieutenant Governor - Yvette McGee Brown - grew up the child of a unwed teenage mother.
Her mother worked low-wage jobs and second jobs to take care of Yvette and her brothers. Every single day was a struggle.
But through it all, her mother never complained. Yvette saw her mother’s strength as a lesson that anything was possible in her life.
And Yvette’s mother and grandmother never missed a chance to tell her that it was school that was her great opportunity. “Once you learn it, they can never take it back,” her grandmother taught her.
Yvette took that lesson to heart and became the first member of her family to graduate from college. But she wasn’t the last. Because by the time Yvette was in law school, her mother had mustered the will to fight her way through, course by course, for 10 long years, until she earned her own college degree.
Yvette marveled at her mother’s commitment. She didn’t know where her mother found the strength to push herself so hard. But Yvette didn’t realize how truly transformative the experience was in her mother’s life until some years later.
While she was studying part time, her mother had worked on an assembly line pushing wires into wire boards.
But, with a college degree she was able to find another job - only to watch her friends and former coworkers lose theirs when the plant shut down. They not only lost their paychecks, they lost their pensions invested in company stock. Just like that - no job, no retirement, no security, no future.
Yvette saw this happening and saw firsthand how incredibly important it is for our people to have good jobs they can rely on.
And not one day has gone by in her work as an attorney, a judge and as the leader of a child advocacy center that she hasn’t stayed true to her Ohio values, helping Ohio families and Ohio children.
And I am incredibly proud to have her as my running mate.
The election this November offers a clear choice. Congressman Kasich embraced the values of Wall Street. I remain committed to the values of Duck Run.
I believe in Ohio because our schools are winning national awards and are ranked among the best in the nation.
I believe in Ohio because we are investing in jobs that can’t be outsourced making products like advanced energy for which demand will only grow.
I believe in Ohio because we are protecting our senior citizens, reducing their property taxes, and helping them stay in their homes.
None of these are Congressman Kasich’s priorities. But then again, I’ve never heard an Ohioan say we should ask Wall Street what to do.
My friends, I believe in Ohio values and I believe in Ohio.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Elections, Guest Columns, Ohio politics
TweetEllen Belcher: Bad times would have done in lesser place
“Montgomery lost 20% of jobs” read the top headline on Wednesday’s front page. And that wasn’t even the worst part.
More than one in two — 53 percent — of the county’s manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 2001.
In one sense, George Zeller, the Cleveland economist who compiled the numbers for Ohio, didn’t unearth anything new. But Zeller used a less common statistical measure to quantify the drip-drip-drip loss of jobs that has been occurring in the last decade and that sometimes has gushed — when, for example, the Moraine truck plant closed or NCR announced it was leaving.
And, as if this compilation weren’t enough, these numbers don’t account for what happened in Dayton for two long decades before 2001 — when, for instance, Dayton Press, Dayton Tire, Frigidaire and NCR’s manufacturing operations were closing.
If you were looking just at the numbers from the last three decades and had never set foot in Dayton, you might assume the place has become a ghost town. How can any community take so many big and relentless hits and live to fight another day?
Look around, though. Can anyone really say Dayton has been defeated?
The untold story of this region is its resiliency. The fashionable notion of the day is that struggling, and especially manufacturing, communities have to “reinvent” themselves. But Dayton was doing that long before there was a name for the effort.
This is not to minimize the wrenching loss to individuals who’ve been put out of work recently, in this decade or earlier. The families that have been hurt by the various downturns and the ongoing loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs have, in many cases, been devastated.
Their situations are evident in whole neighborhoods that have been wrecked or weakened because formerly middle-class people had their livelihoods taken from them altogether or they’re simply earning far less. Reinventing yourself at 50, because all the rules have changed since you graduated from or quit high school, doesn’t require a plan. It demands becoming someone else; it’s really hard work.
But back to the wider community. Dayton didn’t fall and it is doing better than just still standing. Even as its population is smaller and less dense because of sprawl, the region is rich in amenities and assets that were created, grown and protected as the economic hurricanes just kept pounding away.
Look at downtown. The Schuster Center is the envy of much bigger communities. The Victoria Theatre sits across the street, and there’s nothing tired or small-town about it. RiverScape is lovely, and even now, there’s a new amphitheater being built. Who doesn’t enjoy Fifth Third Field?
Thirty years ago, the University of Dayton, Wright State University and Sinclair Community College were shells — physically and in reputation — of what they are today. The plethora of high-quality higher-education options that exists in Dayton — don’t forget Central State, with its focus on first-generation college-bound blacks — is amazing.
Why is Dayton so resilient? Why doesn’t it look like Youngstown?
Anchor institutions, especially Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, have been critical. But there are other factors, too.
The University of Dayton’s Richard Stock believes the region has been helped in bad times by the fact that the population is older. Most people’s pensions keep on coming regardless of what’s happening in the broader economy. He points specifically to Air Force retirees, which the region has in abundance.
Lavea Brachman, of the Greater Ohio Policy Center in Columbus, says Dayton’s philanthropic institutions don’t match Cleveland’s, but that they’re significant. Individuals — think Virginia Kettering, Oscar Boonshoft, the Mathile Family — and institutions, like the Dayton Foundation, have been steadying forces.
Brachman’s co-director, Gene Krebs, says that, going forward, what’s left of the manufacturing sector has been adept at moving away from dependence on the auto industry. He says preliminary numbers show that even after the job losses, Dayton is 56th among the country’s top 100 metropolitan regions for exports.
If those businesses are the survivors they appear to be, that could mean good things for the future.
Paul Leonard, Dayton’s former mayor and a former director of the Ohio Department of Development, said he thinks the lack of “mean political discourse” matters, too; when major problems or opportunities have come up, he said the region’s elected officials typically come together.
Finally, Montgomery County has an impressive history for not neglecting the poor. Its consolidated Human Services Levy and its respected Job Center, for example, are both investments and statements that people here don’t want the down and out to stay down, that there’s help for them.
More than 60,000 jobs are gone. But that’s not the whole picture.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, City of Dayton, Columns, Dayton Creative Class Initiative, Dayton's Arts Community, Economy, Education, Ellen Belcher, Higher Ed, Montgomery County, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Blank Kagan slate not such a bad thing
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is being reasonable when he says that the U.S. Senate should do an “exhaustive review” of Elena Kagan’s record. Nothing wrong with exhaustive reviews of U.S. Supreme Court nominees.
But the reviews the Senate typically conducts bring to mind the word “exhausting” more than “exhaustive.” Confirmation hearings have degenerated into “a repetition of platitudes,” according to Ms. Kagan, herself. The phrase comes from a 1995 law review article she wrote. Things have, if anything, gotten worse.
Nominees of both parties downplay the degree to which their judicial views are influenced by their political views. They get away with this by saying they can’t commit themselves on matters that might come before the court. That would be pre-judging. Ms. Kagan will play the same game.
Sen. Voinovich, who notes with concern that Ms. Kagan has never been a judge, shouldn’t be listed as an automatic opponent, though he voted against her confirmation as solicitor general. (That’s the federal government’s courtroom lawyer in the biggest cases.)
The opposition of others is predictable. President Barack Obama has given them plenty of material with which to play political games: she’s the second consecutive New Yorker and second consecutive single woman he’s put up for the court; she’d be the third Jew on a nine-member court that has no Protestants; her whole life has been built around Washington and elite institutions, from high school to Princeton to Oxford to the University of Chicago to Harvard.
One Senate warrior, John Cornyn of Texas, already has his little sound bite: How can somebody who “has spent her entire professional career in Harvard Square, Hyde Park, and the D.C. Beltway” understand “how ordinary people live?”
Even Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a supporter, has raised that issue, sort of. “I’d like to see the president nominate people from Ohio State or the University of Toledo or Indiana University, too,” he said. “I am kind of amazed that … people come out of the same universities (and) get nominated over and over. But that’s kind of the way things happen.”
Thing is, though, those people come out of law school with a running start, having had the opportunity to impress important people. Then they end up with big resumes at an early age.
Ms. Kagan certainly has the big resume, having been, among other impressive things, a high-level White House adviser and dean of Harvard Law School, where she led a sort of resurgence.
The fact that she hasn’t been a judge creates some uncertainty about her judicial philosophy. Nothing wrong with that. Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush appointed justices who turned out to be liberals or moderates. Democratic President John F. Kennedy appointed one who voted against Roe v. Wade, the liberal landmark. Conservatives didn’t like how all that balanced out.
Now we get agonizing by the nation’s political warriors about every nominee’s views. The nation would be better off without this habit. It polarizes the body politic and diminishes the court, tying justices to political movements.
Not that there’s really much uncertainty about Ms. Kagan’s views. Though some Democrats think she may not be much of a liberal, she’s always been an active Democrat and has worked for iconic liberal judges. If she’s a conservative, she’d be the biggest surprise in a very long time.
The search for reasons to oppose her is the game now. Ideological opponents will be looking for “issues” that might undermine her with the political center: elite detachment, lack of judicial experience, an unusual lifestyle (which does not include being a lesbian, according to friends and the White House).
No matter that her opponents wouldn’t worry about this sort of thing if they liked her views.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, National government
TweetMartin Gottlieb: High-speed Internet access in rural areas not easy, but doable
Lots of people in this country still don’t have access to high-speed Internet service. At least not via cable. They might be able to get satellite service, but it’s expensive and often just doesn’t provide what the many millions now take for granted.
The reason for the absence of high-speed cable is that stringing it in sparsely populated areas is often not profitable.
So no one would be too surprised to learn that most of the places in Ohio that do not have broadband are in the rural eastern part of the state and along the southern border, east of Cincinnati.
But if you think in terms of the main Ohio cities,
the one that is closest to the most areas that don’t have broadband is Dayton. There are large swaths in Greene, Miami, Preble and Darke counties.
Most of eastern Greene County is without. County Commissioner Alan Anderson estimates — and emphasizes that it’s just a guess — that 30,000 people in the county are not covered.
(We’re not talking about people who don’t have high-speed; we’re talking about people who couldn’t get it if they wanted to.)
It’s a pretty important thing. Businesses can find themselves at a disadvantage, to the point of having to leave. And a kid growing up without access is not likely to end up with the Internet skills that others have, and is not going to have as easy a time coming up with certain kinds of information.
Just as the federal government stepped in with rural electrification during the Great Depression — to bring large swaths of the southeast into the 20th century — it is stepping into the broadband issue. Projects in five rural areas in Ohio have received stimulus money to expand broadband service.
None of the money is getting very close to Dayton. Commissioner Anderson says one of the problems is that the federal application forms — running to a couple hundred pages — are too much for the very small operations that are interested in attacking the problem, at least in Greene County.
However, a company called Intelliwave, in Athens, said it had only six employees when it applied, and now it has federal money for two different projects, one near Athens and one north of Columbus.
It does seem surprised by that, however. A spokesman calls the company’s success a “David and Goliath” story, a victory for small business.
In the absence of federal money, the effort to find a way to spread high-speed access is proceeding in Greene County, according to Anderson, but slowly.
There’s also no local or state money. There’s mainly the thought of finding existing towers off which signals might be bounced, then, perhaps, asking residents if they’d be willing to pay for such service.
Gov. Ted Strickland in 2007 set out to not only expand high-speed service, but to generally move Ohio into the next generation of Internet-access technology. A non-profit operation called Connect Ohio — growing out of a similar national operation — sort of oversees the effort. Some of the federal money also goes to non-profits.
So far the feds have put up about $12 million in Ohio; it’s supplemented by local money. According to the Columbus Dispatch, that money will extend service to about 18,000 households. But Connect Ohio says a couple thousand households have no access to broadband.
But there’s apparently more federal money available. A few billion is set aside in the stimulus. A federal administrator, Jonathan Adelstein, said in March:
“This is the Super Bowl of broadband stimulus. We are really trying to get the money out the door. We are encouraging as many companies and parties to get involved as possible.”
That talk about trying to get the money out the door will rub some people the wrong way, signaling waste.
But there’s another message here: The way to broadband is apparently there. But local communities, entrepreneurs and public-service types are going to have to show some will.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National government, Rural Communities
TweetEditorial: Homeless fuss didn’t have to happen
Tina Patterson says eight of 10 longtime homeless people will be sleeping in their own apartments tonight because of a decision that she and people from the city of Dayton and Montgomery County quietly made last summer when they moved the individuals into an apartment building on West Grand Avenue.
As for the two others in the group, all of whom were living in tents near Veterans Park off Patterson Boulevard, one man is now in a nursing home and one woman can’t be found.
Two of the 10 were so sickly that they most likely would be dead today, Ms. Patterson believes, if someone hadn’t stepped in.
Ms. Patterson is executive director of The Other Place, which works with the homeless and operates a daytime shelter. She is right that there is way more good than bad that came from her and others’ intervention.
But the people who complained about such a large number of homeless people moving into one place in their neighborhood are not villains.
Recently, a federal audit of The Other Place came out with the trivial finding that $970 in federal stimulus money was misspent. That audit came about because residents in the Grafton Hill neighborhood accused The Other Place (and the city and county) of illegally using stimulus dollars to effectively start a group home at 604-06 W. Grand Ave.
The auditors said that’s not what happened. But The Other Place was dinged for overpaying, on average, about $30 in rent subsidies for three months. The rules the agency was supposed to go by were new, in flux and conflicting; it was an honest and piddling mistake.
Even though The Other Place isn’t seriously faulted, that agency, Dayton and Montgomery County were wrong on a different front.
They moved the people — all of whom were chronically homeless, some with arrest records and known addictions — into one apartment building without letting the neighbors know what was up.
No, they weren’t creating a certified group home. But, without the help of a government-led social services SWAT team, the men never would have ended up all in one spot.
Think of the subversion like this:
Imagine there’s a rule that says you can’t spend more than $100,000 without going through a competitive bidding process. You can’t avoid that hassle by writing ten $10,000 contracts to beat that requirement.
It’s an apt analogy here. There wasn’t one big lease with a group home; but there were 10 separate ones.
All the people involved in the placement decision are defensive of the homeless individuals. They say the clients are entitled to some choice in where they live, that they’re entitled to their privacy, that there are limits to what neighbors should know about them.
Yes, but: It was government — via a social service agency — that was shepherding this large relocation.
Since the dust-up, Dayton has adopted a new policy about how many people on this sort of rent subsidy can be put in one apartment building. (The individuals have since been scattered among various apartments.)
Had that policy been in effect last summer, three — not 10 — could have gotten leases in this small building.
Montgomery County, Dayton and advocates for the homeless have, for several years now, been trying to humanely, strategically and aggressively get homeless individuals meaningful help that will keep them from ever becoming homeless again. That effort has been heroic and largely unseen except by those who need to know, including neighbors who deserve to be consulted.
Because a spirit of candor and transparency wasn’t followed in this instance, the Grand Avenue situation became a wrangle. Desperate people did get critical help, but distrust was created where it could have been avoided.
Even good work can be done in a bad way — a way that hurts the cause long-term.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Montgomery County, Social Services
TweetEditorial: Wildlife officers being hunted too hard
People in law enforcement have to follow the law, but a case against wildlife officers that touches Greene County is nutty.
Brown County wildlife Officer Allan Wright, who is supervised by the Xenia regional office, made a mistake when he helped subvert state hunting laws by letting an out-of-state wildlife officer give Officer Wright’s home address to purchase a hunting license for the in-state price of $19.
That was deception.
Ohio Inspector General Thomas Charles was right when he issued a report saying Officer Wright’s punishment — a verbal reprimand — was not enough. His superiors were justly criticized for not taking the violation seriously.
But other public officials are wildly overreacting.
Brown County Prosecutor Jessica Little has charged Officer Wright with two felonies and a misdemeanor. And Ms. Little did not stop there.
She has also charged five of Officer Wright’s superiors, including Xenia-based District 5 Manager Todd Haines, with felony counts of obstructing justice and complicity because they did not pursue criminal charges against Officer Wright.
All five supervisors are on paid administrative leave while the criminal case unfolds — at a cost to the state of nearly $10,000 per week for their salaries. The law that allegedly was violated is designed to keep the state from losing money by allowing for cut-rate licenses. In this case, the total loss was $106.
From a purely financial standpoint, the response to the violation has been grossly more expensive.
Ms. Little argues that there is a greater principle at stake. The officers enforce a law that sometimes leads to similar prosecutions against ordinary Ohioans.
Records show that the wildlife department leadership is tough on crimes. During the past three years, the division made 20,765 arrests and only 115 charges were dismissed, mostly through plea bargains.
For that period, $1.4 million in fines were collected and $150,719 was paid in restitution.
But, when it came to one of their own, wildlife supervisors were quick to give Officer Wright a pass, Ms. Little argues.
There was bad judgment in the case, but prosecuting six people for felonies over a single phony hunting license is overkill. Even Inspector General Charles’ highly critical report did not recommend criminal charges.
The case is muddied by the fact that swapping in-state licenses the way Officer Wright did was common practice among wildlife officers in Ohio and several nearby states for years. Indiana law allows wildlife officers from another state to buy a hunting license at the in-state rate.
In the past, wildlife officers say, licenses were available for free to out-of-state officers in some states.
Ohio has explicitly banned the practice only since 2008, two years after Officer Wright’s misstep.
Give the entire Wildlife Division explicit orders about what’s not allowed and be done with this craziness.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Ohio government, Rural Communities, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Don’t confuse politicians with facts on bailout
Used to be, you could always find people who would say they were for whatever works. Not bigger government; not smaller government; whatever works. Strip out what doesn’t. Put in what does.
Confronted with such a world view, the people on the left and right would say, well, of course we’re for what works. That goes without saying. But my way is the way that works.
In that sense, everybody was bowing to the same deity, the God of pragmatism.
No more.
Here we have the bailout, the $700 billion the feds put into the financial sector in the fall of 2008, back when nobody had ever heard of spending so much money so fast, and when few knew the government could even do that.
Judging from what one hears these days, the bailout was the worst idea ever. Every single candidate — Democrat and Republican — who wasn’t in Congress at the time is against it.
Even some who voted for it are against it. Poor John McCain, caught up in an Arizona primary, is reduced to pretending he didn’t know the money was for bailing out the big Wall Street institutions. He says he was told it was for addressing the housing-loan problem. (For details, Google “McCain” and “I was misled.”)
Over the weekend, a conservative Republican senator from Utah was denied renomination, the main charge being that he supported the bailout.
Meanwhile, the politicians who voted against it, including Dayton-area Rep. Mike Turner, are eager to make sure everybody knows that. (He says that the more that is known about the bailout and how it was applied, the worse it will look.)
Washington is now drawing up a new law regulating the financial industry. Throughout the fight, when the politicians have wanted to go nasty, they have charged that the other side is allowing for future bailouts. They seem more eager to avoid bailouts than collapses of the financial system.
And yet, even as the consensus has developed that the bailout was a terrible thing, evidence has mounted that the bailout worked.
First, there is the matter of what didn’t happen: a depression. Avoiding a depression was the whole idea. One major financial institution after another was collapsing. The public wasn’t outraged about the bailout in 2008, when the prospect of a depression was more than the vague memory it is now.
Both presidential candidates supported the bailout, almost matter-of-factly, as something that simply had to be done. John Boehner, as leader of the House Republicans, put his anti-government rhetoric on hold.
Some of the politicians who voted no didn’t mean it. The Democratic minorities in the House and Senate just didn’t want to bail out the Republican president. They wanted to put the Republicans on the spot. That’s one reason two votes were necessary in the House. People like southwestern Ohio’s Jean Schmidt finally had to step up (if not Mike Turner).
But few who voted for the bailout paid a political price in 2008.
Now it becomes unpopular, with the economy on the upswing. Go figure.
Speaking of the economy, much of the bailout money is being paid back, including from some of the biggest institutions: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The Treasury Department has estimated the bailout will only end up costing about 12 percent of the original $700 billion.
Critics contend that, when you calculate all government involvement, the costs will be a lot more than that. That debate becomes complicated.
But what’s striking is that nobody seems to care. Nobody’s listening. Bailout bad. Period. Don’t confuse me with facts. The principle is bad.
Well, yes, on principle, both sides of the American political spectrum have excellent reasons for being against bailouts on principle. The gargantuan Wall Street firms screw everything up, and then expect to be saved by the people, the government? It’s an affront to conservative ideology about the marketplace and limited government; it’s an affront to liberal ideology about millionaire wrongdoers. And the public is every bit as affronted as the political warriors.
They’re all right about one thing: the system broke down.
But the question was what to do next. The politicians made the mistake of doing what worked.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics, National government
TweetGuest column: Comatose budget panel needs to begin its work
This commentary was written by Rick Yocum, president of the Ohio Public Expenditure Council.
Shortly after the General Assembly patched together the state’s two-year budget last year, the Ohio Public Expenditure Council cautioned that Ohio could be $8 billion short when the next budget came due.
Why? Because the 2010-2011 package was balanced with a disturbing amount of one-time money — money that will not be available the next time around.
The funds came mainly from the federal “stimulus,” but the state also has run through its “rainy day fund.” And there were other one-time dollars.
When Gov. Ted Strickland formed the Budget Planning and Management Commission last September, we thought that decision was a stroke of genius: By getting an 18-month headstart on the burgeoning budget crisis, a wide variety of ideas for tackling the problem could be considered. When push gave to shove, the state wouldn’t have its back against the wall.
Now, some eight months later, the coming crisis is no less severe than it was last September, yet the commission hasn’t held one meeting.
It’s understandable why it’s hesitant to meet: Discussions will center on cutting state programs or raising state taxes — or both.
Stilll, that’s no excuse.
Ohioans need to understand the depth of the state’s financial troubles, and they need the chance to give input about solving the problem. The issue also deserves to be discussed in this fall’s general election; it’s difficult to imagine any solution that doesn’t affect all Ohioans.
Remember: It’s $8 billion, give or take a few hundred million. That’s approximately 16 percent of the current $50.5-billion, two-year budget.
To put it another way, the deficit represents the general revenue fund budgets for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (both of which pull significant money from other sources), plus the funding for Health and Human Services and for Justice and Public Protection. (The latter both rely heavily on the general fund money for their existence.)
The problem will not go away. Even during the “good old days” of the mid-’90s, revenues only grew in the range of $1.4 billion a year. For the past three years, revenues have decreased.
There is no major turnaround in Ohio’s immediate — or intermediate — future. In fact, given Ohio’s aging population and the recently enacted federal health care legislation, pressure on the state budget is likely to increase.
Raising taxes to cover the shortfall would be devastating. Each 1 percent increase in the state sales tax generates approximately $1.2 billion a year. With individual county sales rates as high as 7.75 percent (Cuyahoga County), there’s little appetite for sales tax increases.
In the personal income tax arena, the General Assembly just delayed a scheduled decrease to keep the current budget in balance, so the path to that well may similarly be rocky.
Plus, the current budget imposed significant fee increases to bring in an additional $1 billion.
On the other hand, cutting $4 billion in each of the two years in state programs will bring outcries from every corner of the state — from schools, those who enjoy our state parks and those who depend on state dollars for a roof over their heads and food on the table.
The process promises to be arduous, if not explosive and lengthy. If left to the normal budget cycle timetable, Ohio will have a parade of temporary budgets — not to mention tumult.
The process should have begun months ago, when the budget commission was first created. Those months, of course, are lost. The state needs to tackle this beast now, and there is no better way to start the process than by immediately convening the first meeting of the so-far-existing-in-name-only Budget Planning and Management Commission.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment |
TweetEditorial: Why would any school, union reject money?
School districts and teacher unions that have been wary of Race to the Top have run out of excuses.
This is the week when they need to join in with the state to compete for $400 million in federal stimulus money. Friday is the deadline for school districts to submit statements saying they want to be part of the state’s application.
This time, nobody can credibly argue that Race to the Top money would lead to unfair teacher evaluations or that applying isn’t worth it for some districts. Schools aren’t going to suddenly be able to unfairly fire teachers, and all districts that participate will get a chunk of money if Ohio wins funding. That’s clear.
Race to the Top is an interesting mix of reform ideas — some liberal, some conservative — that comes with a burst of cash attached, unlike some underfunded federal education mandates of the past.
Back in January, Ohio made its first run at the money. It was one of 15 finalists. But the state ultimately finished far down the list. Judges pointed to poor support for the state’s application from local districts. Less than half were part of the application. Support was terrible in the Dayton area.
Now a second round of funding is being given out.
Last time, the process was plagued by quick deadlines and misinformation.
Teacher unions were fearful of a federal requirement that test scores be part of teacher evaluations for participating districts. (Ohio required local teacher unions to sign a letter of support as part of each district’s pitch for some of the money.) Some teachers worried that would mean districts could evaluate teachers by test scores alone.
In fact, Race to the Top only requires that test scores be part of a teacher’s evaluation, leaving it up to the district and the union to negotiate how big a part. Both statewide teachers’ unions are unfazed by the requirement and are supporting districts that apply.
Using test scores for evaluation — a polarizing proposal often pushed by conservatives and resisted by liberals — is a good idea if correctly applied. Test scores, influenced heavily by student experiences outside the classroom, aren’t reliable enough to be the entire basis. But they do give useful information about instruction; it’s foolish to ignore the results.
For round one, some superintendents said they didn’t apply because not enough federal money was involved to justify the effort. They can’t say that now. To entice participation, the state is guaranteeing that districts would receive no less than $100,000.
Any district that decides it doesn’t need $100,000 will have a tough time selling its next school levy.
Race to the Top isn’t perfect, but its primary goals — improving the use of test data, overhauling teacher training and evaluation, turning around the nation’s very worst performing schools and raising standards and expectations for students — are good ones.
Most Dayton-area districts, even those that took a pass in January, appear poised to sign up this time. But a few are on the fence.
Ohio faces a huge budget deficit in 2011. Schools undoubtedly are going to be taking cuts from the state. Ohio can benefit from the reforms Race to the Top offers. Local school districts need to get on board.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Jobless Ohioans hoping for more stats like this
What to make of a day on which the stock market is in a plummeting tizzy even though the government is reporting that the American economy just added 290,000 jobs — the best one-month showing in four years.
That was the combination of events on Friday, May 7. The markets worry — on some days more than others — about debt problems in Europe having an impact on this side of the Atlantic.
But, pending more news about Greece, the good news should not be missed.
Of course, an added wrinkle in the Friday news was that, despite the job growth, the unemployment rate actually rose. That’s because the unemployment rate measures how many people are looking for work. When an economy improves, unemployed people jump back in the job market.
You’ve often heard how, when the economy gets bad enough, the unemployment rate understates the problem, because some people give up looking for a job. Well, this is the flip side of that.
The more informative statistic is job growth — or loss. The economy lost 8 million jobs during The Great Recession. At one point, it was losing 750,000 a month. Now it has gained jobs four months in a row.
It needs to gain 125,000 to 150,000 a month just to keep up with population growth. It has only been above that pace for two months, having gained more than 200,000 in March, too.
The numbers released Friday were national and were about April. Ohio’s numbers for April aren’t in yet. Ohio didn’t get its share of the growth for March. It would have needed more like 10,000 jobs than the 5,000 that actually materialized.
Still, in the long run, nothing is likely to do as much good for Ohio as national progress. The tendency for the state’s economy to go down and up with the nation is strong, though slow national growth has sometimes meant even weaker performance here. The auto and manufacturing sectors have suffered more than most.
One good sign for the state in the latest national figures: manufacturing added 44,000 jobs nationally. That’s the most in any month in 12 years.
It’s going to be a very long road back to pre-recession job levels. This recession has scarred the economy like few others. The spring-back phenomenon that produces job-growth after a recession — because demand has built up because consumers and businesses stopped spending — has been relatively weak this time around.
Still, the uptick has survived early concerns about a possible double-dip recession. One of the next tests, economists say, is whether it will survive when the federal stimulus stops helping.
CBS news was in Dayton last week and came up with a basically positive story about “signs of change” here. (Online, go to cbsnews.com and search for “Dayton.”)
Somebody else in a different mood could have come up with a negative take. But whether the cup is half-empty or half-full, it is starting to fill.
Now stay tuned for news from Greece.
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TweetEditorial: New U.S. tax best left off table, if nearby
The value-added tax (VAT) isn’t exactly on the table in Washington. But it’s on a rolling cart next to the table.
A VAT — widely used in Europe — is sort of like a sales tax in that it’s paid when an item is bought. But it’s paid not only by the consumer, but at earlier stages. Any time value is added to an item, a tax is paid on the value added (not on the entire cost of the item).
The VAT is being talked about because the federal debt is expected to grow by about $12 trillion in the next decade. For purposes of comparison, the entire federal budget is now about $3.5 trillion a year.
In a sense, it’s a shame that this idea surfaces now,
after all the talk about runaway spending in the last couple of years. People might get the impression that the problem is all the new spending projects. Not true.
The banking bailout is largely being paid back. The new health care plan is not one of the problems fostering the $12-trillion projection, being officially paid for by provisions in the plan.
And the federal stimulus was one-time spending, which doesn’t worsen the deficit like ongoing, growing programs, especially Medicare and Social Security. The stimulus might even reduce long-term debt, if it hurried the end of the recession.
The real debt problem has been long in the making, under congresses and presidents of both parties and varying philosophies.
Two questions need answering now:
• Is there an alternative to raising taxes?
President Barack Obama has appointed a bipartisan commission to examine what needs to be done about the entitlement programs that are central to the debt problem.
If that group agrees that something must be done to increase revenues, as well as hold down costs, that could go a long way in swaying open-minded people. At this stage, the case has not been made to the public.
• Is the VAT the right way?
Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich — one of the more responsible Republicans in holding open the possibility of a tax increase — thinks it might be. He points out that many Americans pay no federal income tax now because their incomes fall below a certain point. He says “everybody ought to pay.”
If, he has said, a VAT “is a way of getting the money on an across-the-board basis, then that’s something to be looked at.”
This is not a good case for the VAT. Everybody with income does pay taxes, just not necessarily federal income taxes. The fact that federal income taxes are progressive — the rates go up with your income — counterbalances regressive state and local taxes and results in all economic classes bearing roughly the same burden, in percentages.
Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown also seems conditionally open to the VAT.
“If we reduce income taxes somewhere else, I’m willing to look at that,” he has said. “I don’t think there is any real interest in starting a new tax without cutting taxes somewhere else.”
But this business of cutting some taxes while creating others is something Ohioans have experience with. In 2005, the state was able to sell such a package to some people as tax “reform” — designed to foster growth — and to others as a tax cut. The result was a problematic reduction in state revenue without any particular economic growth.
The country certainly has a big long-term debt problem. If some elected officials are willing to talk about taxes, good. But the VAT is not just a tax. It’s a new, intrusive, complex system.
For now, it’s best left on the rolling cart — making other options look more appetizing.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National government
TweetEditorial: Republican video attack on Fisher was gag-worthy
Overstating the “ick” factor of an Internet ad posted on YouTube attacking Ohio Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Lee Fisher is impossible.
Even by the ever-sinking standards of political gamesmanship, the ad was beyond gross. It sets a shirtless photo of Mr. Fisher against a sultry soundtrack and uses special effects to create the impression Mr. Fisher is engaged in a solo sexual act. How low — how juvenile — can you get?
Today’s Internet-fueled politics allow for lots of silly, and sometimes ugly, shenanigans. Fringe groups on the left and right make all kinds of outlandish charges and routinely cross the line of good taste.
But this attack ad didn’t come from the fringe. It was produced by none other than the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s official arm for supporting its candidates for the Senate. A spokeswoman said the ad had the full approval of the committee.
Mr. Fisher’s Republican opponent is former Congressman Rob Portman. Mr. Portman declined to criticize the ad, and his spokeswoman implied that it was fair game in politics.
Really? An ad that wouldn’t meet the gutter standards of reality TV is OK by Senate Republicans and OK by Rob Portman, who has spent years cultivating a choir-boy image?
There has to be some standard of decency in politics. Just because the Internet exists and crackpots across the political spectrum use it for crass attacks shouldn’t make it OK for legitimate political parties and their candidates to follow suit or to stand mum when others do.
This race, after all, is for the Senate, a body with a self-image of mannered gentility. If that’s the likeness senators want to portray on Capitol Hill, then can’t those seeking to join them be expected to show at least a hint of campaign decency?
The ad — which was taken down because it may have violated copyright rules, not because it was disgusting — and Mr. Portman’s unwillingness to condemn it should make Democrats and Republicans gag.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Ariss’ late attack was in poor form
Former Sheriff Tom Ariss on Tuesday, May 4, won the Republican primary race for a seat on the Warren County Commission. But his victory is tarnished by political attacks on his biggest rival late in the campaign.
(No Democrat or independent has filed to run in November, so the seat belongs to Mr. Ariss.)
Mr. Ariss and Tom Grossmann, a former Mason mayor, engaged in a hard-fought and, at times, prickly campaign that divided the Warren County Republican Party. Mr. Ariss has been a fixture on the local political scene for years, and Mr. Grossmann is the county’s Republican Party chairman.
On Election Day, Mr. Ariss narrowly came out on top with 38 percent of the vote to Mr. Grossmann’s 35 percent in a five-person race. The close nature makes it all the more concerning that voters might have been influenced by Mr. Ariss’ last-minute mailings.
The Ohio Elections Commission on Monday — the day before the election — found probable cause that Mr. Ariss’ mailings in the final week of the campaign were likely false or misleading. That judgment came too late to mitigate any damage to Mr. Grossmann’s campaign.
A hearing will be held this summer to make a final ruling. If the initial finding stands, the commission could reprimand Mr. Ariss or even refer the case to the county prosecutor to consider a criminal case.
No one is going to jail here, but, for a former lawman who built his case for election on his integrity, a negative ruling would be more than embarrassing.
The mailings were a case study in political trickery. One referenced a Mason newspaper headline stating, “Mayor suggests giving raises for council,” that came from a story written after Mr. Grossmann had given up the mayor’s post. Mr. Ariss acknowledges, lamely, that his campaign team didn’t realize Mr. Grossmann was no longer the mayor when the story was written.
Another claimed Mr. Grossmann had attacked Mr. Ariss on “the jail issue.” Mr. Grossmann insists he doesn’t know what the ads are referring to. Mr. Ariss admits “attacked” may have been too strong, as the ad refers to fairly general statements Mr. Grossmann made in interviews.
One of Mr. Ariss’ chief assets for the commissioner’s job was his track record of playing fair and working well with others. (He was recommended by the Dayton Daily News.)
This is a shabby way for him to start his time on the commission.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Miami Valley Politics, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Jones has a shot at a big role
Ohio Sen. Shannon Jones, R-Clearcreek Twp., turned a hot campaign against Michelle Schneider into a fairly easy win Tuesday, May 4, as she cruised to victory with 64 percent of the vote in the Republican primary.
Sen. Jones, who jumped to the 7th District Senate seat after less three years in the Ohio House, is clearly ambitious. The knock on her before this contest was that she hadn’t had a serious test in her short political career.
Former state Rep. Schneider ran, in part, because she wasn’t convinced Sen. Jones’ name had enough cache with voters in the heavily Republican district (Warren County and part of Hamilton County), especially since she had been appointed, not elected. Sen. Jones flexed some muscle in fundraising, as well as vote-getting.
It’s easy to imagine that the 39-year-old Sen. Jones has her eye on higher office. Before entering elective politics, she was a political consultant and staffer for former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner and former U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot.
In the primary, Sen. Jones ran to the right of her conservative opponent, painting herself as a stauncher opponent of tax increases. But she insists she wants to tackle tough issues in the legislature and describes her approach as bipartisan.
Most notably, she has pitched herself as a driving force trying to get a bipartisan budget commission off the ground to take a serious run at tackling the state’s money problems. So far, the effort has gone nowhere.
She came in for some criticism after Gov. Ted Strickland’s State of the State address in January for overly snarky comments made on her Twitter page while the governor was speaking. Stunts like that won’t help if she wants to be seen as bipartisan.
An opportunity exists for Sen. Jones if she wins in November, as expected. The state legislature has a shortage of members willing to work hard to master complex issues, show leadership and work collaboratively. She is seen by some in politics as that sort of legislator. She has an opportunity to stand out.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetGuest column: Public-employee pensions gobbling up tax revenues
This column was written by William D. Duncan, a certified public accountant and mayor of Oakwood.
Re “Police, firefighters need cities and townships to pay what they owe,” April 9:
Gary Monto, president of the Police & Fire Retirees of Ohio, argued that employers have not increased their contributions to Ohio’s public pension funds in 24 years and that public-sector pension benefits pale in comparison to the private sector. Both arguments are false.
Ohio cities and counties contribute 19.5 percent of police officer salaries, and 24 percent of firefighter salaries, to their pension plans. Ohio local school districts contribute 14 percent of teacher salaries to their pension plans.
The percentage contribution has not changed, but the cost of the contributions has risen as workers’ salaries have increased.
In contrast, private-sector employers match 6.2 percent of their employees’ salaries into Social Security.
Ohio’s public-sector pension plans are invested in a diversified mix of fixed-income and equity investments, both domestic and international. Social Security is invested in IOUs from the federal government.
Which plan would you like to participate in?
Under Ohio law, local governments have no ability to negotiate with police unions. If the parties cannot agree on a contract, Ohio law requires a fact-finder to evaluate each side’s position and make a recommendation. If either party objects, the dispute goes to binding conciliation.
Oakwood’s experience has been that any conciliator who rules against a union never gets to decide another disagreement.
During the last 10 years, Oakwood’s public safety officers’ compensation has increased by 47 percent. Accordingly, the city’s contribution to the police pension plan has also increased by 47 percent.
Many, but not all, private-sector employers offer defined-contribution benefit plans to their employees. The normal employer matching contribution is 3 percent of employee compensation.
Some employers will make discretionary contributions to employees up to an additional 4 percent. These contributions come from employer profits. If there are no profits, there are no employer matching contributions.
As a CPA, I have spent the last several months preparing income tax returns for my clients. The highest Social Security benefit I have seen is about $30,000. The average is $15,000 to $20,000.
In contrast, I routinely see pension benefits reported by our retired public-sector employees in excess of $50,000.
The Ohio Retirement Study Council recently recommended an increase in the employer pension contribution from 19.5 percent to 24 percent of police officer salaries, and an increase from 24 percent to 25 percent of firefighter salaries.
It has also recommended an increase in the employer pension contribution from 14 percent to 16.5 percent of teacher salaries.
If approved by the Ohio General Assembly — an unlikely scenario — it would be an unsustainable unfunded mandate on local governments and school districts.
In fact, government defined-benefit pension plans themselves are unsustainable.
A generation ago, the private sector realized you cannot work for 25 years and retire at age 48 with a lifetime pension benefit and an annual cost-of-living adjustment.
The United States automobile industry has billions of unfunded liabilities in its defined benefit pension plans. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, in all probability, will assume these liabilities.
Ask a Delphi retiree how that worked out.
Democrats will not address this issue for fear of offending the public-sector unions. Republicans will not address the issue because they want to support police officers and firefighters.
Others will say eliminating defined-benefit pension plans and replacing them with sustainable pension benefits is unfair to our hardworking public-sector employees.
I believe it is unfair for an employer or a government to promise a benefit to its employees when it has neither the will nor the ability to deliver that benefit.
I have advised my clients for 35 years that you should not let an accountant run your business, but you should listen to your accountant. I have also told my clients there is no such thing as a fixed cost.
My advice to Gov. Ted. Strickland and the General Assembly is: If you do not reform our public pension system, you need to read Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Permalink | Comments (57) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Tax increase is hard sell in Dayton
Though the people who run the City of Dayton are staring at a devilish amount of red ink, they have one thing on their side. Nobody can seriously doubt that the shrinking city has genuine financial problems.
Any disagreements can only be about how to fix them.
Just five years ago, Dayton’s budget was just under $170 million. Today the city hopes — emphasis on hopes — it will collect $149 million. That’s $6 million less than the projection just a few months ago. Over and above the size of the drop, the speed of it is mind-boggling.
City Manager Tim Riordan says that before he makes yet another round of cuts, he wants citizens and businesses to hear the options he’s presenting to city commissioners.
The decisions the commission will make, incidentally, aren’t just important to people who live in Dayton. If you work in the city, you pay the income tax even if you don’t live there. Moreover, because Dayton is the hub of the region, its financial health and its competitiveness matter even to those who work or live elsewhere.
Mr. Riordan says that, in broad terms, the choices are:
— Raise the income tax from 2.25 percent.
— Cut services.
— Stop investing in technology, infrastructure, equipment and economic development.
The danger here is not with having public conversations. Of course, people deserve to be educated and have the opportunity to ask questions. But the
Though the city certainly has its advantages, it struggles mightily to recruit new businesses and new residents. Exactly how much the income tax figures into prospects’ considerations is hard to quantify. But it certainly isn’t irrelevant; and having the distinction of a tax rate that’s higher than almost every other community in the region can’t be a good thing.
Even though Dayton deserves more credit than it gets for downsizing dramatically without creating chaos, most people probably would say that there’s more that can and should be done to bring down costs. For most, this will be a gut feeling. Citizens aren’t public administrators. Many can’t point to specific ways of doing business that will markedly change Dayton’s costs, even though they’re sure that there must be some.
But what everyone who’s affected does know is that they and their businesses have been battered, too.
The presentations city officials make will be important statements about how serious administrators are about giving elected officials and the community choices.
— Will they be specific about what investments they believe must be made or that really should be made — and their cost? Will they spell out the danger of not making them, as well as acknowledge what can reasonably be put off?
— Will they present options, with their upsides and downsides, that would be politically hard to do — say, privatizing services, combining services with other governments, charging more or higher fees, eliminating people and services?
— Will they spell out what employees should or could be asked to give up in practice or in their labor contracts and how much that would save?
Dayton absolutely has to have a conversation about where it’s heading. But those talks have to be honest and comprehensive. The commissioners should demand that, and City Manager Manager Riordan is in charge of steering them.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher
TweetKevin Riley: Stivers is one of Dayton’s selling points
Last week we got a dose of tough news about the Dayton Public Schools when the school board announced it would cut 70 positions as part of its effort to tackle a $6.3 million deficit in next year’s budget.
The school district seems to be fighting a non-stop list of problems that take the spotlight off some of its schools and students who are achieving remarkable things.
Of course, one of those remarkable schools is Stivers School for the Arts.
But it’s more than just a gem for Dayton and the school district. For two families I recently spoke with that are planning to move to our region, the school and its staff have been a recruiting tool. At a time when many families avoid urban school districts, Stivers is a school that is being sought out.
In fact, Stivers gets hundreds of inquiries from parents in the Dayton region who are interested in sending their children there. The school’s supporters have funded a part-time position to handle all of those calls.
But back to those two families.
Anne Gunter and her husband live in the Phoenix area, where she works for the Air Force Research Laboratories. They have a son who will graduate from high school in 2011, and their daughter will start high school that fall.
Her job with AFRL in Mesa will move to Dayton as part of the Base Realignment and Closure process. She hopes to time things in a way that allows her daughter to start high school in the Dayton area. Her daughter, who sings and acts, attends a performing arts school in Arizona.
“I really want her to continue in a performing arts school,” Gunter said. She has been part of three productions in the past year. Gunter’s research online and conversations with folks from Dayton led her to Stivers.
Gunter toured the school a few weeks ago. Her daughter couldn’t come because she was in the middle of rehearsals for yet another production.
Gunter’s reaction to Stivers: “That’s where she belongs.”
She was impressed with both students and teachers.
“That’s where you can see the true dedication,” she said.
Lisa Brown-Hite works at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. She’s also moving to Dayton to take a job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, to be closer to family and her son, who will be attending a Kentucky college. Her move is not part of the BRAC process, but rather a personal choice.
She has two daughters, a 15-year-old who sings and plays piano, and a 14-year-old who sings and plays the saxophone. Brown-Hite teaches piano.
As she explored school options in Dayton, her research sent her to Stivers.
In April, Brown-Hite and her daughters flew to Dayton for auditions at the school. “It’s phenomenal,” Brown-Hite said.
Brown-Hite also said her daughters’ enthusiasm for the chance to attend Stivers is helping with the challenges of moving two teen-age daughters. Her youngest was at first unwilling to audition, but changed her mind.
“It gives the kids something to look forward to,” she said. “It’s a special high school.” As we in the Dayton region rebound from the recession and transition away from our dependence on manufacturing jobs, individual stories like these show what’s possible; they instill confidence.
Recall that about 1,200 jobs are coming to Wright-Patterson because of the BRAC moves.
Each one of those jobs involves an individual family’s choice to make a major change in their lives. The base has the potential to draw others to the region as well. In these two cases, Stivers has made the choice to move a lot easier.
At this point, both of these families continue their preparations to move to Dayton. And they await word from Stivers about whether their kids have been accepted.
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TweetMartin Gottlieb: Weak week not Tea Party story
2010 ELECTION
The big news on primary election night was that the Tea Party did not fare well. In Ohio, it lost overwhelmingly where its hopes were highest: in state Rep. Seth Morgan’s bid for the Republican nomination for state auditor.
By the next day, however, political “experts” who had been looking at the big picture were delivering a different message: the Tea Party had had a serious impact that was not necessarily visible in the numbers. This is now the conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, it is right, unlikely as that might seem.
One stat: In Ohio, turnout was higher among Republicans than Democrats, even though the Democrats had the marquee race, the one for U.S. Senate. Almost 70,000 more people voted in the Republican race for secretary of state (742,000) than in the Senate race. A humiliation for the Democrats.
This is partly because Republican energy levels are generally running higher this year. But the Tea Party added a lot of energy to the races — all of it on the Republican side.
That said, the Tea Party didn’t really get the kind of one-on-one fight where its role might prove decisive. The closest was the Morgan race. But his opponent, David Yost, was also a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, not from the relatively moderate Taft-Voinovich-DeWine wing of the party.
And, after all, the important question about the Tea Party is how far to the right the movement can pull the Republicans.
Rather than test that, the Yost-Morgan fight tested mainly the importance of the Tea Party label and endorsements, compared, say, to the input of the official Republican Party. But that’s an inside-baseball matter, important mainly to Tea and Republican party officials.
On the tug-to-the-right issue, the more interesting case is that of state Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering. Facing an opponent who didn’t have a shot in the world — but who had some Tea Party support — he went out of his way to associate himself with the Tea Party. He went to its events, broadcast that fact, and declared himself — on his campaign material — to have “Tea Party values.”
The question now is what does that mean. Probably not the same thing to everybody. Husted supported the Third Frontier issue on the ballot, like the party establishment, but unlike, say, Seth Morgan. And Husted supported the school levy where his vote is counted, in Kettering, whereas the local head of the Tea Party took credit for its defeat.
Husted says his levy vote was consistent with Tea Party values, because the original Tea Party was about taxation-without-representation, the precise opposite of a situation in which people get to vote specifically on a tax.
He also says the Tea Party’s concern about spending is fundamentally about the federal level, where he agrees with it. OK, but others have the distinct impression that the Tea Party people generally vote against local levies.
Husted’s views about spending wouldn’t be much tested in a stint as secretary of state. But a lot of Republican politicians will soon be dealing with the state’s huge budget problems.
They will not read the primary returns as an indication that they needn’t worry much about the Tea Party — only that it has been largely contained so far by being flattered and courted.
Meanwhile, Tea Party members ran for and won many slots on the state Republican Party’s governing committee. They didn’t win a majority. But their numbers include former U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen, who will presumably be looking hard for ways to maximize their role.
Look beyond Ohio. John McCain is thrashing in agony in Arizona — denying that he ever saw himself as a “maverick — because he’s opposed by a well-known Tea Party/talk-radio candidate.
In Florida, a once-popular moderate Republican governor has had to leave the party for an independent race for the U.S. Senate. In Utah, a very conservative senator is in jeopardy among Republicans because he supported President George W. Bush’s bank bailout.
The Republican Party has moved to the right in 2010 — away from George W. Bush. Nothing that happened Tuesday changes that direction.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Suburbs face tougher battles over taxes
Suburban school districts have a new reality that’s making passing levies tougher. They need new strategies to drum up community support.
On Tuesday, three of five districts seeking new money — Kettering, West Carrollton and Trotwood — lost out. Kettering and West Carrollton already have promised to be back on the ballot in November.
Miamisburg and Northmont passed their levies, but Miamisburg was coming off a prior defeat, and Northmont expects to be back on the ballot for new operating money again in 2011.
These districts — and other districts — are asking to raise taxes in one of the worst recessions in history. They’re doing so, in part, because of changes in the way the state funds schools.
Take Kettering. Until a levy was defeated in May 2007, the district could pretty well bank on voters saying “yes” when it sought new money. In the 12 years prior, the district passed every new levy on the first try.
Tuesday’s defeat marks the second consecutive time a Kettering levy has gone down on the first try. (In 2007, a request was defeated, then passed six months later.)
Factors affecting Kettering are common to other close-in Dayton suburbs. The recession has increased the number of poor students. Kettering, West Carrollton, Miamisburg and Northmont have all seen their school poverty rates jump between 9 and 29 percentage points in the past five years.
More poverty drives up costs for districts, as poor children often need more services. At the same time, a poorer community is less able to afford new taxes.
On top of those poverty problems is a new state funding formula that expects more from the suburbs. The formula directs more money to very poor urban and rural districts. Suburban districts are seeing smaller increases in state aid. This has forced those districts to go to the ballot more often.
These factors will require suburban districts to be more aggressive in their levy campaigns. Miamisburg’s successful campaign is a good example of strategies that may succeed.
Its approach was to start early and deliver its message to voters in a personal way. The pitch was explicit, but not overhyped, about the cuts that would result from a defeat.
After the levy narrowly failed in the first try in February, Superintendent Dallas Jackson said the campaign committee redoubled its efforts.
More than 200 volunteers were asked to create lists of at least 25 people — friends, relatives and neighbors — to contact. Their job was to explain the levy and make sure questions were answered. Some volunteers contacted more than 100 people.
Part of the message was that dozens of teachers were going to be let go, and sports, music, art, gym and a lot of busing would be eliminated if the levy didn’t pass. But campaigners were careful to avoid a threatening tone and made a point to thank everyone — even those who said they planned to vote “no” — for their past support.
The approach seems to have worked. Turnout in Miamisburg was more than 40 percent — the highest for a school issue there in recent memory. And a solid 58 percent of voters said “yes.” The issue won in 26 of 30 precincts and lost narrowly in the others.
Already Kettering and West Carrollton are talking about taking a similar tone — more straight talk about cuts and more extended outreach efforts. In hard times, voters need to hear specifically about the challenges facing their schools. If the districts make a compelling case, they can get levies passed.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Third Frontier win was big, not easy
A lot of people voted for Issue 1 — the $700 million bond issue for the Third Frontier — without being able to pass a quiz on how the money would be spent.
They got the drift, just not the details.
That says something about the mood in Ohio and the concern there is about creating jobs.
The issue passed by a margin of 62-38. It failed in only 10 of 88 counties, and, in two of those cases, the spread was fewer than 30 votes. Five years ago, when the program was a $500 million piece of a $2 billion package — with most of the borrowing slated for popular public works projects — the measure passed 54-46.
In 2005, the issue was on the ballot in the fall, not in a primary, so 1.1 million more people voted. But, still; give credit where credit’s due. The margin is a big increase in support, coming at a time when borrowing is definitely not in fashion.
Republicans should take a bow.
They could have made this question into a controversy, they could have fueled doubts, they could have ranted and raved. They did not — because to have done so would have been bad for the state and especially its universities, and the business community would have been all over them.
Big and small companies that are invested in Ohio see the Third Frontier as the state’s way of declaring that it’s serious about moving into the knowledge economy, even if that costs money.
But, strange things do happen. Ken Blackwell, who in 2006 was the Republicans’ choice for governor, opposed the 2005 borrowing plan.
Funding for the existing Third Frontier program isn’t going to run out until 2012. Its supporters, however, wanted to get back on the ballot for renewal before that expiration was staring them in the face.
Researchers and businesses that think they’re good enough to compete for Third Frontier grants have longer horizons than politicians. They want to know that the state’s financial incentives for them to work here are going to be around for the long haul, that the money is not a passing fancy.
The campaign to pass Issue 1 was billed as being all about creating jobs. Some voters undoubtedly heard that pitch and didn’t bother to think or read further. Would they have still voted “yes” if they grasped that the Third Frontier is a long-term investment, that the big payback will come over time, not overnight?
Given the disappointment in the federal stimulus for not creating enough jobs fast enough, hoping for patience might have been asking too much.
In the end, Third Frontier backers got the word out to the people who counted. They, in turn, are counting on the program being run with integrity and the highest of standards.
Former Gov. Bob Taft’s legacy includes starting the Third Frontier. Now Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has to prove that the grants can be continued without anyone even being tempted to violate taxpayers’ trust.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Big insurgent year didn’t happen
In statewide races, Ohio voters of both parties opted for experience and credentials in Tuesday’s primary, even if that meant choosing people who were favored by the bigwigs in their parties.
With Lee Fisher winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, Kettering’s Jon Husted winning the Republican nomination for Ohio secretary of state and Huber Heights’ Seth Morgan losing the Republican nomination for state auditor, the political world did not get turned on its head. Notwithstanding all the talk about political ferment in the air in 2010, all the wins went to candidates of what might be called the party establishment.
Meanwhile, voters embraced an extension of former Gov. Bob Taft’s Third Frontier — a program to stimulate high-tech-related economic development through state investments in promising research projects. That smart decision is an outcome that might have been expected in a normal political year — given strong support from both Republican and Democratic leaders.
But in this year, when hostility to government spending has sparked demonstrations across the country, the outcome couldn’t be taken for granted.
In the Senate race, much attention has been focused on the fact Lt. Gov. Fisher had money and his opponent, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, did not. But that wasn’t the heart of the matter.
The heart was that Ms. Brunner failed to articulate a powerful case for the Democratic Party turning against the senior candidate. Sometimes there is such a case to be made. Mr. Fisher certainly didn’t have the nomination coming to him automatically.
Ms. Brunner complains that the Fisher team — headed, in a sense, by Gov. Ted Strickland — pressured Democratic contributors not to give money to her campaign. But that’s awfully hard to do successfully when the challenging candidate really has strong support.
In state Sen. Husted’s race against Sandra O’Brien, who’s been a county auditor in Ashtabula County, there was simply no question about who was most qualified. Sen. Husted has not only been a leader in Columbus; he’s been particularly active on election issues, which are the secretary of state’s primary responsibility.
Politically speaking, he was clearly worried about the much-discussed, insurgent Tea Party, claiming on his campaign material to have “Tea Party values” himself. But even if the Tea Party had turned out to vastly exceed expectations in voter support, a defeat for Sen. Husted would have been very weird, indeed.
The real Tea Party hope was state Rep. Morgan. He could make a decent case for himself on credentials, and the circumstances surrounding how his opponent got in the race angered a lot of people.
David Yost, prosecutor in Delaware County (suburban Columbus), had been a Tea Party favorite when he was running for attorney general. But when he bowed out of that race — apparently at the urging of the state Republican Party — to run against Rep. Morgan, he became a symbol to many of backroom political gamesmanship. Rep. Morgan got the support even of Republican Party organizations in many counties. But that wasn’t enough to overcome the backing of the state party, and the resources the party put into the race.
Rep. Morgan was in a special category among Tea Party favorites, having an elected position before anyone heard of the movement. So he was the big hope. If he had won, he would have been a hero to many, and his name would have become known in national political circles.
The fact that he didn’t win suggests — along with other statewide outcomes — that not all the energy in Ohio politics is about insurgency, even this year.
Locally, three of five school districts that sought new money saw their levies defeated.
But Miamisburg, the district facing the most dire cuts, had its levy approved. Northmont’s levy also passed, and on the first try.
In Trotwood, it was the third straight loss. Leaders in Kettering and West Carrollton had good cases. Managing will be tough for all.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Strickland gives inmates too much rope
So much for the effort by top officials at the Ohio Department of Public Safety and the State Highway Patrol to spare Gov. Ted Strickland embarrassment.
The state’s independent watchdog released a 48-page report last week criticizing the head of the Department of Public Safety and the Patrol for nixing a criminal investigation that would have been routine but for the fact that it was to occur at the governor’s home.
The Patrol suspected that so-called “honor” inmates who work at the governor’s mansion were running a lucrative tobacco-smuggling operation. Since smoking has been outlawed in prisons, cigarettes are a hot commodity, with cigarette butts going for as much as $25 behind bars.
At the last minute, Public Safety Director Cathy Collins-Taylor, who oversees the Patrol, canceled the operation, according to the Office of the Inspector General, out of fear that the sting would make the governor look bad.
Director Collins-Taylor denies the conclusion, as does the head of the Highway Patrol, who says he called the whole thing off because he was worried about the safety of the governor, his wife and former U.S. Sen. John Glenn and his wife. The Glenns were going to be dining with the governor at the appointed time.
Even if the cancellation happened exactly the way Director Collins-Taylor and Patrol Superintendent David Dicken insist it did, the procedure was nuts. Director Collins-Taylor ordered law enforcement to go to the home of the woman scheduled to make the tobacco drop and tell her not to do so, warning that she would face arrest.
Inspector General Tom Charles didn’t find that Gov. Strickland or his top advisers had any role in stopping the sting. But the governor, a former prison psychologist, is implicitly criticized for insisting that inmates working at the mansion — a practice that dates back to the 1960s — have so much autonomy and freedom.
In an effort to show trust, reasonable precautions haven’t been taken. The inmates sometimes are supervised by maids; they have access to axes, chain saws and knives; they are allowed outside the mansion’s fenced area; they’re not required to wear clothes identifying them as inmates, and on and on the license goes.
Meanwhile, there are no clear rules about who’s responsible for the prisoners.
Prison officials don’t have supervisory authority (at the request of the governor and his wife); the Patrol, which is responsible for the governor’s security at and away from the mansion, isn’t in charge; and the Department of Administrative Services hasn’t taken responsibility, though it oversees the mansion.
If only for the sake of his neighbors — who are entitled to know that the inmates are under somebody’s watchful eye — Gov. Strickland can’t be so dismissive of the investigation or the criticism of his appointees.
“I don’t know that decisions were made to protect me from some kind of embarrassment,” he said. “If that occurred, it was certainly unnecessary. I believe that the actions were … undertaken in good faith with no nefarious or bad intent.”
He also needs to take responsibility for his own role in creating a climate that allowed prisoners to stash tobacco in his home and to think they could get by with picking up contraband on the street in broad daylight.
Finally, there’s the matter of Director Collins-Taylor, who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate. Inspector General Charles accuses her of lying, hampering his investigation and of putting politics above police work.
Some people think Inspector General Charles is being too harsh. He’s a former state trooper, and the Patrol has been at war with the Strickland administration. In addition, his wife, Patrol Capt. Brigette Charles, is one of 11 people who interviewed for the Patrol superintendent’s post, but she did not get it.
Director Collins-Taylor is undoubtedly going to have a tough time before the Republican-controlled Senate. But when there’s a serious suspicion that she lied under oath, she should face brutal questioning.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Primaries show parties in different worlds
Two different worlds. We live in two different worlds…
So far apart.
They say we’re so far apart
And that we haven’t the right
To change our destiny.
That old pop tune — carefully excerpted here to minimize the boy-girl aspect — comes to mind if you listen much to the candidates in Tuesday’s primaries.
Not that the candidates actually facing each other are in different worlds. But the candidates in one party’s primaries are in a different world from those in the other’s.
In the world of Democratic candidates, the nation’s economic problems derive from the excesses of deregulation under a Republican president and Congress, and from the resulting excesses on Wall Street. In the Republican world, the problem is big government. And that’s just the beginning of the description of the great divide.
It’s like people haven’t been living in the same place.
In neither party is there any hot debate about the big issues, though in the Republican Party, some candidates are trying to pull incumbents even further from the center.
(An exception is U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s run for re-election. His politically weak Republican challengers find him too predictably conservative.)
In Florida, the rope pulling candidates away from the political center has finally snapped. Moderate Gov. Charlie Crist has given up on being nominated for the U.S. Senate by the Republicans, and has decided to run as an independent.
He got in trouble with the Republicans for hugging President Barack Obama and for praising the Obama stimulus package that virtually all Republicans in Congress had opposed.
Independent candidacies like Gov. Crist’s may be the best bet for lubricating the political system. So long as the two parties are always in reach of legislative majorities (or, in the case of the U.S. Senate, a 40-percent minority), they tend to put all their hopes on success through party loyalty, that is, through partisanship.
(A new study from the Brookings Institution finds that the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican. “The center has disappeared,” says the author.)
But a Crist-like candidacy is terribly difficult to launch. A candidate who doesn’t have a major party vouching for him typically has to start with a major public reputation.
But people who have already been elected under a party’s banner don’t want to split with the party if they can possibly avoid it.
They have to be practically kicked out.
In 2006, Connecticut’s popular Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman lost a primary entirely because his opponent was a staunch opponent of the Iraq war. So he ran as an independent and won. That was the last time something like this happened.
In Ohio, it’s possible to imagine a relative moderate like Sen. George Voinovich being challenged in a primary, facing defeat and turning in the Crist direction.
But such a scenario is way against the odds for a lot of reasons, not the least being that Sen. Voinovich (who’s retiring) has been with his party on the biggest issues.
There’d probably have to be some really big, hot-button issue separating him from the conservatives.
If such a candidate did break free of a party, a lot of voters would be receptive. Look how easily Gary Leitzell was elected mayor of Dayton as an independent, without big money, a big organization or name recognition. True, he’d have a much harder time at a higher level, because the fighting conservatives and liberals concentrate their efforts there. They shape the playing field.
But the point remains: the public doesn’t start out hostile to the idea of an independent.
The song ends:
But we will show them,
As we walk together in the sun,
That our two different worlds are one.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Primaries feature juicy, important races
2010 ELECTION
Don’t sit out Tuesday’s primary election. There are interesting and important races at both the state and local levels.
Among the most important and hotly contested races are:
State Issue 1
Few regions have benefited as much from the state’s Third Frontier initiative as Dayton. If the issue passes, it would allow the state to borrow $700 million to use for job creation, principally by supporting research at Ohio’s universities and in concert with businesses.
More than $120 million has been awarded to Dayton-area ventures.
Ohio is smart to sponsor targeted research and development to incubate good ideas that otherwise might not get off the ground, or that might blossom in another state that would back the effort.
Dayton is especially well-positioned to benefit because of the increasingly sophisticated research and development work that its universities are doing, not to mention Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s focus on research for the military.
Statewide races
• In the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, Jennifer Brunner and Lee Fisher have similar political views, and both have reputations for working hard. But Mr. Fisher’s wide-ranging experience in the executive and legislative branches of state government — and especially his work in job development — tip the balance to him. He knows the state and its issues. He is the stronger candidate.
• For secretary of state, the easy choice in the Republican primary race is a familiar name — Jon Husted, Kettering’s state senator and the former speaker of the Ohio House.
Sen. Husted has a long track record of interest in election issues, including supporting reforms that would make Ohio’s political races more competitive and eliminate gerrymandered districts designed to ensure that a particular party always wins certain seats. He is the clear choice over former Ashtabula County Auditor Sandra O’Brien.
• Another local legislator — Rep. Seth Morgan R-Huber Heights — is seeking the Republican nomination for statewide office as state auditor. His opponent, Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost, is the better choice. Mr. Yost is more qualified to run a major statewide office based on his county-level experience. Both are conservatives, but Mr. Yost is more practical and less fixated on purely ideological fights.
Local school levies
Five area school levies are worthy of voters’ support — in the school districts of Kettering, Miamisburg, Northmont, Trotwood-Madison and West Carrollton. Each district is either a high performer or has demonstrated significant academic improvement in recent years.
In each case, the districts have made cuts and hope to avoid the kind of deep reductions that can bring down an academic program.
Local races
Two of the most hotly contested races locally are in the Warren County Republican primary.
Shannon Jones and Michelle Schneider want to be the Republicans’ choice for the state senate seat that Ms. Jones was appointed to last year.
Meanwhile, a five-way battle is under way for to replace Commissioner Mike Kilburn on the Warren County Commission. This is the election for that race because no Democrat has filed to run in the fall.
Ms. Jones and Ms. Schneider have been engaged in an intense campaign. Ms. Jones has hit the ground running in her short time in the Senate. She brings energy to the job.
Tom Ariss, the retired Warren County sheriff, can be counted on to work collaboratively on tough issues. He is well respected and has a reputation for making good decisions and getting things done.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEllen Belcher: Ohio’s running short; Central State pays price
Two years ago, financially eligible students attending Ohio’s public colleges could get a scholarship from the state for as much as $2,500 annually.
Multiply that check by four years, and it’s a significant number.
This year the maximum grant is $1,008. Next year it will be $888.
This is a cut that the state is making that you probably don’t know about unless it affects you. But even if you aren’t writing tuition checks now, you might be one day. If you’ll never be paying tuition, know that the decision undermines efforts to increase the number of Ohioans who have college degrees.
Meanwhile, the impact is hurting more in some homes than others.
Though Ohio’s tuition rates have been high compared to other states, the state historically has been a leader in giving financial aid, offering it since 1969. Though the programs have changed over the years, the current one is need-based.
Eligibility is tied to a federal formula that spits out the amount a family is expected to contribute toward a student’s education — depending on income, number of children in the home and so on.
Besides reducing scholarship amounts, Ohio has changed other rules. Whether that’s a good thing depends on where your student goes to school.
If you have a family income of, say, $50,000 and two children, and your daughter is going to Miami University or Ohio State, you’ll probably like the new formula. If, on the other hand, she wants to go to the much-less expensive Central State University — Ohio’s only historically black public university — you’ll be put out. She will get no aid.
That’s because Ohio has changed its calculation so that students going to schools with higher tuition get more assistance. However, Central State, which has historically kept its tuition low as a part of its mission, is being penalized.
Here’s how:
Ohio’s financial aid policy requires that students who get federal Pell grants, which are also need-based and have been raised significantly to $5,350, must use that money toward tuition. If a student’s Pell money covers the entire tuition, then she’s not eligible for Ohio’s scholarship.
Central State’s tuition is $5,294 — $56 less than the maximum Pell amount. This year, 431 students there were dropped from the Ohio scholarship rolls.
Prior to this change, if a student qualified for Pell money and an Ohio scholarship and the total was more than the cost of tuition, she could use the remainder for books, room and board or transportation. (This was true of students attending community colleges and branch campuses. They, too, are no longer eligible.)
Because the changes were made in the state budget and after financial award letters had already gone out to incoming students, Central State used funds slated for other expenses to make good on the promise of a state scholarship.
If it hadn’t done that, the college would have been reneging on what it told students they would have to pay. That $2,500 (the typical aid at Central State before the cuts) makes all the difference in the world to low-income families.
Other universities also had students who thought they were going to get state money, and they, too, did what Central State did. The difference, though, is that massive Ohio State, for instance, had an easier time finding the cash.
No one set out to punish Central State. But the effect is the effect.
The board of regents — which had a big hand in setting the policy — has its reasons.
The scholarships were an entitlement. The more students who qualified, the more money the state had to put up; enrollment was going up in the recession, even as state revenue was dropping.
Meanwhile, with the federal Pell grant being increased, the state could justify reducing its help.
The regents also argue that students who choose higher cost schools haven’t been getting the same proportional help as those who were choosing low-cost schools; the state’s first priority should be making sure students have enough tuition money.
Central State does get a special supplement from the state, but almost every time Columbus does something to assist the financially strapped university, it turns around and does something else that undermines it.
The regents can rationally say that Ohio has to limit how much it’s going to spend helping low-income students get to college. It can decide that low-income students deserve a shot at going to higher-price schools.
But in making this decision, it also decided that Central State gets no consideration for not raising its tuition through the roof when virtually all of Ohio’s colleges were doing so.
Fairness looks different depending on where you sit.
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