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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > July
July 2010
Editorial: Ohio can’t keep locking everyone up
Politicians and judges love to talk about locking up criminals and throwing away the key. There’s just one problem: When the offenses are minor, the cost for all that prison time adds up fast. There has to be a better way.
Other states are showing that there are other options. Minor criminals are better dealt with outside of prison as long as they are well supervised. For Ohio, supervision is the missing link.
A study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center released Monday, July 26, showed Ohio’s uncoordinated probation and supervision processes contribute to a revolving door for minor offenders who constantly return for short stints in lockup.
Those short sentences, usually less than a year, cost the state dearly. Incarcerating a single inmate for a year in Ohio runs more than $25,000 — a figure that exceeds other states.
The pattern also keeps the state’s prisons full. Ohio houses more prisoners than the three closest states by population — Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania — with more than 50,000 inmates.
States like California and Texas are taking action to instead manage minor offenders through enhanced probation. The programs have shown promise both for reducing incarceration costs and for helping the offenders break the cycle of repeatedly returning to jail.
A key is coordination. Ohio has a patchwork system of probation in which different jurisdictions use different standards, follow different procedures and infrequently connect even when managing the same offender who has committed crimes in different counties.
That needs to change. As the report states, Ohio should redesign its system so that it works statewide and follows consistent standards.
Those who have committed nonviolent property crimes and thefts can benefit from better supervision. For example, Ohio can look to drug and mental-health courts in the Dayton area. In both cases, offenders who have drug or mental-health issues are referred to court on days when experts in treatment, diversion and rehabilitation are on hand. They link the offenders with services while judges keep close tabs on their progress.
Those who can’t stick with a probation plan end up in jail. But court officials delight in the success stories of many who have gotten their lives together.
Not every low-level offender needs intense supervision. Statewide standards for assessing them and placing them under the right level of monitoring (with the constant threat of being locked up as leverage) would create a better chance of keeping them out of the prison revolving door.
Ohio’s 32 prisons are 30 percent over capacity. Between 1980 and 2000, Ohio was fourth in the nation for prison construction, tripling the number of facilities. The state found it could not build its way out of its criminal-justice problems.
With a multibillion dollar state budget crisis looming, Ohio has to look for better options. It can’t afford to jail people who can be punished in a cheaper way.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Fisher has much bigger problem than money
2010 ELECTION
Don’t bad-mouth Lee Fisher’s chances in November because you’ve been reading that he doesn’t have any money.
Bad-mouth them because of the prediction yielded by Allan Lichtman’s system for predicting election outcomes.
Regular readers, if any, may recall that this column highlighted the Lichtman system’s prediction in the 2008 presidential election. The column made the flat call of a Democratic victory before anybody knew who the Democratic candidate would be.
In other words, forget about the debates and Barack Obama’s alleged charisma and racial guilt and all that; forget, indeed, everything that happened during the fall campaign. The victory came because it was a Democratic year.
Old readers may remember similarly prescient input from these quarters well before the presidential elections of 2004, 2000, 1996, 1992 and 1988.
Well, Lichtman also has a similar system for predicting Senate race outcomes. It looks at eight factors — or “keys.” Standing alone, each is a pretty good predictor of outcomes. The idea is that if you combine them, you might approach foolproof, as the presidential system (with 13 keys) has, so far.
The Senate system also used to be noted regularly in this column, but it hasn’t been in very recent years. It’s not as powerful as the presidential system. It does often get more than 90 percent of the races right in a year. That makes it better than any other method I’ve come across, especially when you figure that the predictions come before the campaigns.
But the Senate system runs into problems in certain kinds of years. If there’s a great national tide in favor of one party — the Republicans in 1994, the Democrats in 2006 — the accuracy rate can fall. The keys are mainly about local factors.
With that in mind, we come to 2010 in Ohio.
I’m sorry I didn’t run this column sooner, because the system yielded a prediction well before Fisher’s money problems showed up. (He’s being outraised by about 9-1 at last report.)
Let’s look at each of the keys. Four must turn in the direction of the incumbent party if it is to get the prediction. The Republicans are the incumbents, with Sen. George Voinovich.
Key 1 goes to the Republicans if they are putting up the actual incumbent as a candidate. No. Voinovich is retiring.
Key 2 goes to the Republicans if their candidate is a major national figure. No. “Major” means major. We’re talking Hillary Clinton, John Glenn. Not a former Cabinet officer.
Key 3 is Republican if they avoided a tough primary. Yes.
Key 4 is Republican if the party got more than 60 percent of the votes the last time the seat was contested. Yes. Voinovich shellacked Eric Fingerhut.
Key 5 is Republican if they outspend the other side by 10 percent or more. Yes, almost certainly.
Key 6 is Republican if the Democratic candidate has never been in Congress or governor. Yes.
Key 7 is Republican if the Democrats hold the presidency. (Mid-terms tend to be bad for the president’s party.) Yes.
Key 8 is Republican if the Democrats did not have a serious primary. (A primary among the challengers is, for whatever reasons, typically followed by victory for them.) No. The Democrats had a serious primary.
That’s five keys for Portman; four even without the money key, which is enough.
If Fisher wins, he not only overcomes the keys, which is unusual. He does it in an unusual way. The usual way is to ride a party’s national tide. But one thing nobody is expecting in November is a Democratic tide.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Candidates love spinning Ohio tax statistics
Gov. Ted Strickland was just trying to score points when he said it was “appalling” that Auditor Mary Taylor, John Kasich’s running mate, volunteered that, as a private accountant, she counseled people to move to Florida to avoid getting hit with Ohio’s income and estate taxes.
Ms. Taylor’s job was to tell clients what their options were and to advise them how to save money. Do you think a lawyer shouldn’t tell a client how to stay out of jail? Same difference, somewhat.
The context was the usual, with Mr. Kasich and Ms. Taylor complaining that Ohio’s taxes are too high. Oddly, they’re making that case at the moment that much of the news is about Ohio’s coming $8 billion deficit in the next two-year budget.
The estate tax generated almost $334 million in 2009, 80 percent of which went to cities and townships where the decedents lived. Though some places are more dependent on the money than others — think older, wealthier suburbs — none of them wants to eliminate the tax. They have no reason to think the state would make up the loss, and they’re already scrambling to make budget.
Florida’s tax climate has come up in other conversations, too, lately. When LeBron James was deciding where to go, some commentators said Florida would be particularly appealing to someone in Mr. James’ income bracket. (Ohio, New York and Illinois all have state income taxes.)
But talk to accountants and they’ll tell you that deciding where to live based on taxes gets complicated. If, for example, you’re wealthy and believe you’ll be going to the great beyond soon, you might, indeed, want to settle in one of the 29 states that don’t have an inheritance or estate tax.
On the other hand, if you’re planning to live a while, Florida does have financial disadvantages. The property taxes are high, and some people are put off by steep insurance rates and fees. On a per-capita basis, Ohio residents and Florida residents pay about the same in taxes; actually, the latest available data says Floridians pay about $200 more.
In short, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to whether this or that state is cheaper to live in. It just depends.
Both Ohio’s income and estate taxes have, from time to time, come under fire. Currently, Citizens United to End Ohio’s Estate Tax is circulating petitions that would force the legislature to consider a repeal of that levy.
(The best point critics make is that the 6 percent tax rate kicks in at a low threshold — $338,333. Above $500,000, the tax goes up to 7 percent. When a home, for instance, is part of an estate, you can quickly get to $338,333 in assets. Moreover, the tax isn’t indexed, meaning the financial trigger becomes increasingly lower over time. The Ohio Department of Taxation says that one in 14 estates pays some tax.)
There are genuine and important debates to be had about what taxes make sense and how high they should be. But so far, neither the governor or his opponent really wants to have them. They’re content to take cheap shots.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: No excuse for failure in redistricting reform
If Ohio is to end the ludicrous practice of letting partisan politicians draw legislative districts to suit themselves, the state legislature must approve a ballot measure in the next week, for the November election.
On Wednesday, July 28, one newspaper declared the hope dead. After that, however, phone calls and meetings among the various players did happen, with the expressed goal of revival. There is no excuse for failure.
The legislature is in recess and would have to be called back to Columbus. What’s needed is an agreement among leaders of both parties and some urgency.
One might think that agreement would be easily achieved, given that both houses have already voted to junk the current system. The House- and Senate-passed versions are close enough in spirit that it’s hard to imagine why a compromise can’t be reached — assuming the original votes were sincere.
Although the Senate measure was put up by Republicans, and the House measure by Democrats (who needed and won some Republican support to get the necessary super-majority), neither measure is inherently Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal.
Kettering Sen. Jon Husted’s Senate measure would create a bipartisan board and require bipartisan votes to approve the new maps to be drawn after this year’s federal Census. The House version would entail a public contest to see basically who could draw maps that result in the most competitive districts that don’t squiggle all over the place.
Just making the process bipartisan — the heart of the Husted plan — would be an important improvement. Under the current system, the party that does best in certain statewide elections in 2010 gets to design the districts all over the state for the next decade. It gets to rope voters of the other party into a few districts. It gets a lock for itself on other districts that rightly should be play.
However, bipartisanship wouldn’t solve everything. The two parties could still collude to draw districts that are safe for their respective incumbents.
Not under the House plan. It injects more competition into elections, makes the politicians sweat more. If districts are more balanced between the two parties, candidates have to be more responsive to general public opinion than to the opinion of their party’s most strident factions.
Many of the 17 House Republicans who voted for the contest idea in the House plan said they didn’t really like the plan, because it entails complex formulas for judging the contest. But they wanted to keep the idea of reform alive. They were looking for a compromise, they said. The time has come.
If the contest has to be junked, that would be a shame. A bold, ingenious idea (from the League of Women Voters and other reformers), it would make Ohio a national leader.
Acceptance of that idea by one party — the Democrats — was a tribute to the power of the idea. But the newness and complexity put the other party on guard. The contest supporters didn’t get a single important Republican on board. Sen. Husted has been sincere in his bid for reform and willingness to compromise, but he has not gone to bat for the League-associated idea.
Now the reformers in both parties have to figure out what can be salvaged. Anything on the table — or even near it — is an improvement.
A crucial player is Democratic House Speaker Armond Budish. Gov. Ted Strickland has generally stayed out of the fight. He says that if he got involved, that could make the fight even more partisan than it is, a view that some Republicans share.
Speaker Budish has insisted he’s on board. Some people were beginning to wonder, until he finally did put the issue on the House agenda late in the last session, and it passed. So maybe late action is the pattern. If so, it can’t get much later.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Is Kasich’s Indiana really Ohio’s right role model?
The last time Ohio had an election for governor, one candidate wanted to talk about another state: Florida.
J. Kenneth Blackwell, then the Republican secretary of state, pointed out that Florida was doing a lot better than Ohio in a lot of ways. It was growing and prospering. People were leaving Ohio for Florida.
He traced these facts to a difference in tax policies. Florida had lower taxes and, most specifically, no state income tax.
Listening to him, one thought, really?
You want to compare Ohio to Florida? Not Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania or New York, but Florida?
You think that when people leave Ohio for Florida, the reason must be taxes?
Maybe ideologues are impervious to weather.
After 2006, the Florida economy collapsed. It collapsed sooner and harder than economies elsewhere. All of a sudden, property couldn’t be sold and jobs couldn’t be found.
At right-wing think tanks across the country, interns were told to find out who had raised taxes in Florida. Or so one presumes.
Now there’s another candidate for governor with a favorite state. John Kasich likes Indiana, or, more precisely, its governor, Mitch Daniels, a fellow Republican. In making his case for lower taxes and less regulation, Kasich talks about how much better things are going in Indiana because of smart policies there.
Daniels has emerged as a favorite on the political right, even getting talked about for president. He was first elected in 2004. The state had had a string of unbalanced budgets. Daniels, with a combination of cutbacks, efficiency measures, tax cuts and tax increases, brought the budget into balance and even created a surplus. When other states went into the red quickly after the 2008 collapse of the economy, Indiana didn’t.
He was re-elected in 2008 by 18 percentage points, while Barack Obama was becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in decades.
On top of all that, there has been some statistical and anecdotal evidence that businesses are choosing Indiana, and that it is one state in the region that is actually growing.
So at least Kasich’s selection of a role model has a stronger logic than Blackwell’s.
But some statistics cited in Daniels’ favor are kind of like the one about Ohio being named — over and over, under various governors — by a magazine called Site Selection as the national leader in the number of businesses moving here. You know there’s something wrong with that stat even if you don’t know quite what it is.
Sometimes Indiana is identified as a state whose unemployment rate has gone down during a particular period, when most states have seen a rise. And at certain stage this year, Indiana was claiming to lead the country in job creation, seeing 7 percent of the new jobs this year, despite having only 2 percent of the population. (Actually, Ohio led the nation in jobs created for one month this year.)
In the big picture, though, things look different. Take taxes. An organization called the Tax Foundation notes that Indiana is Ohio’s only neighbor that has higher taxes than Ohio, when you combine state and local.
Or take jobs. In June, Indiana’s unemployment rate was 10.6 percent, Ohio’s 10.5, though Indiana used to have a lower rate.
A lot of people think the unemployment rate doesn’t tell you much. So the Brookings Institution think tank decided to simply ask how many people are working?
It found that between late 2007 and mid-2010, the percentage of Hoosiers working dropped from 63.5 percent to 57.2. That was the sixth biggest drop among states, and bigger than any state in the Midwest.
The Columbus Dispatch reports that Indiana has lost 5.8 percent of its jobs since early 2007, compared to Ohio’s 7 percent.
The top of Kasich’s website has a running count of Ohio jobs lost on Gov. Ted Strickland’s watch. The number is the cornerstone of his attack on Strickland, who took office in early 2007. Somebody running against Daniels could have the same kind of counter.
Ohio’s search for a state continues.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: GE expansion can pave way for more wins
The really important news about General Electric Co. deciding to build a $51 million research center in the Dayton area happened in April when the company announced that it was coming here — not to Kentucky, not to Michigan, not to Britain and not to Cincinnati.
GE was looking at all of those places.
What sealed the deal for Dayton was not one thing, but an alignment of forces: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and its Air Force Research Laboratory are here, and the University of Dayton’s research institute is seen as a comer in the research GE wants to do.
The latter helped GE to tap a grant under the state’s Third Frontier program. That money — $7.6 million in capital funding — is conditioned on the company having a university partner.
Meanwhile, the state of Ohio designated Dayton as the state’s “aerospace hub of innovation,” a declaration that’s formalized a pitch that Ohio and the region are making about Dayton.
The next step is that GE has to pick a specific site to land. GE Aviation Systems is located in Vandalia. Understandably, Vandalia is pulling out all the stops to get the research center there.
The center could grow from a dozen jobs initially to 300 in the next decade. Among the sites Vandalia is pointing to are a greenfield near the airport and property near GE’s plant on National Road.
Meanwhile, Dayton wants to see the new facility locate in downtown’s Tech Town or on the vacant land that UD acquired from NCR between Patterson Boulevard and Stewart Street.
GE is saying two things: It wants to look at existing buildings first, before it considers building a new one, and it wants to be close to Wright-Patterson. There may not be a ready-made building that meets GE’s specific criteria — its needs big bays, for instance — but the company could find something that could be retrofitted.
It’s hard to know all of GE’s considerations, but the region’s are obvious: It wants the research facility to be every bit the showcase that GE envisions, in a prominent spot that other aerospace companies and suppliers will want to be near. For the aerospace hub designation to really take hold, a concentration of businesses — outside of Wright-Patterson’s fence — makes a statement. Proximity also creates intellectual synergy that companies and universities say is important in research.
UD is taking the point on working with GE because, without UD, GE couldn’t have gotten the Third Frontier money.
Given what the university is trying to do with its research institute — moving it to the former NCR world headquarters and spending as much to retrofit that building with new labs and equipment as the school paid for it — UD’s people will have a hard time being objective about possible sites. They can easily imagine a stunning new building that would be one of the first things you see coming off the gleaming Stewart Street bridge on its yet-to-be-developed west campus. They can picture other companies following.
GE will do, and should do, what’s best for it. Whatever the choice, the community can’t lose. But there are certain places where the research center could be a force-multiplier, an especially important magnet.
GE just has to forgive the advocates who can’t contain themselves from pointing that out.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Local Business, Suburban Communities, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetGuest column: Baby Vanessa case highlights problems with adoption procedures
This commentary was written by Kevin C. Mulder, executive director of Legal Aid of Western Ohio, Inc.
Re the July 25 editorial, “Baby Vanessa needs a parent”: This legal case is both difficult and heartbreaking. From the start, Benjamin Mills Jr. has sought a remedy through the judicial system that would recognize his relationship as his child’s father and place her in a good home in Dayton.
As the Dayton Daily News noted in the editorial, “Mr. Mills has done all the right things to protect his rights,” and it is “not Mr. Mills’ fault that this case has dragged on for so long.”
Mills wishes to have a relationship with his daughter, and he continues to believe this matter should be tried in the courts, not the media.
The essence of our system of justice is that a court decides such issues based on all the evidence presented to it.
As the late Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Moyer has stated, “We sometimes lose sight of the fact that Legal Aid representation is important to us as a society, not just to those who receive the representation. Because we live by the rule of law, it means that everyone is bound by the same rules and that means that everyone must have access to those who implement or enforce the rules.”
The case raises serious issues regarding the rule of law for involuntary adoptions, in which one of the parents has not consented to the adoption. An involuntary adoption can lead to the loss of parental rights — something that usually happens only when the government decides a parent is not fit to be a parent.
Legal Aid of Western Ohio has had many cases in which clients have presented concerns about the lack of due-process protections for the non-consenting parent in adoption proceedings.
This case raises such concerns, including how the child was taken from Dayton to California without Mills’ knowledge, let alone consent, and whether the appropriate legal process has been followed since to resolve the child’s future.
The due-process issues are serious issues that need to be addressed, not just for Mills’ benefit, but for the benefit of all involved in adoption proceedings.
In addition, aside from Mills, there is a good home for this child with her grandmother and two siblings (all of whom have the same parents) in the Dayton area, or with other family.
The removal of the child to California not only removed her from Mills, but also from her extended family.
The adoption proceedings being pursued in California, despite Mills’ desire to have his child be with her family in this area, have led to the current situation.
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TweetEditorial: Ohio wins, but how much can it collect?
Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray’s settlement with AIG is a good win for Ohio. But how big a win isn’t clear yet.
AIG has agreed to pay $750 million to three Ohio public pension funds (the ones for state and local government employees, teachers, and police officers and firefighters).
The announcement came at about the same time that the federal government settled with Goldman Sachs over that company’s alleged misleading of investors about debts linked to subprime mortgages.
The Goldman Sachs case was the much more ballyhooed one, eyed as the possible debut of a new toughness at the Securities and Exchange Commission. And yet the feds got less, only $550 million.
And, as the Ohio attorney general is quick to note, the AIG $750 million comes on top of other money AIG has already agreed to pay in connection with the litigation, bringing the total to roughly $1 billion.
Unfortunately, AIG doesn’t have that kind of money sitting around. And it can’t use taxpayer bailout money without raising a lot of eyebrows. So, to pay off Ohio, it will have to sell stock, an iffy proposition. Ohio could still end up not getting all it’s owed.
Looking at the big picture, one might reasonably ask if the general public benefits from the settlement. After all, the general public is the main owner of AIG. The government took an 80-percent share as part of the bailout. This settlement isn’t likely to raise the value of AIG stock.
But the settlement is certainly in the interest of Ohio. State pensions have taken a beating from the collapse of Wall Street financial institutions (to the tune of about $800 million for five different pension systems). Then came the beating from the collapse of BP stock after the Gulf catastrophe. All that comes atop the growing recognition that the plans face major long-term problems — because they can’t keep paying the generous benefits retirees get — even in the absence of specific investment catastrophes.
The AIG lawsuit was actually filed by then-Attorney General Jim Petro in 2004. But it is much in the Cordray vein. He’s won a leading national role in a pending suit against Bank of America. He’s won almost a half billion dollars from Merrill Lynch.
The AIG case involves charges of stock manipulation, bid-rigging and accounting fraud dating as far back as 1999. A former AIG executive has already been convicted. That raises questions about just how much credit Mr. Cordray deserves for winning a settlement. A central part of his case was made for him.
Still, his useful aggressiveness cannot be denied.
Now he has joined with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to seek “lead plaintiff” status in a case against BP. The idea is to show that BP misled investors with statements about its safety precautions and its ability to handle a major mishap. That sounds harder to prove than some of the charges against Wall Street firms. But, on the basis of the outcomes so far, nobody can charge that Mr. Cordray is proceeding frivolously.
He’s getting likened to Eliot Spitzer, whose successful pursuit of misbehaving corporations vaulted him from attorney general of New York to governor, before certain misbehavior on his part relegated him to the role of cable television talker.
Mr. Cordray has not simply decided to go after corporations as an easy way to get the government some free money. He’s responding to specific harm done to specific state institutions by specific behavior. That’s fair enough.
Still, if he could come up with a way to address the looming crisis in the state’s general fund — the much-noted deficit of $6 billion to $8 billion — listening couldn’t hurt.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government
TweetEditorial; Shuttle vote right for all, not just Dayton
In a front-page headline Friday, July 23, a newspaper near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center said “KSC Bid for Orbiter Hits Snag in House.”
The snag, which was good news for Dayton and Ohio, also happened to be good policy-making from a national viewpoint.
It certainly didn’t mean that Dayton will get the retired space shuttle it wants as a tourist attraction. But it does mean that Dayton remains in the running. And the selection process won’t necessarily be hopelessly distorted by the political power wielded by legislators from Florida and Texas, who have long focused on space matters.
The House Science and Technology Committee was considering the annual bill on NASA, the space agency. A version had been drafted by the committee leadership and staff. Not long before the deadline for submitting amendments to the draft, Ohio congressional staffers noticed a minor provision. It said that, in distributing the shuttles that are becoming available for display, NASA should give preference to communities with a “historical relationship with either the launch, flight operation or processing” of shuttles.
In other words, forces from Florida and/or Texas were trying to get a leg up.
The office of Rep. Charlie Wilson, a Democratic committee member from eastern Ohio, got busy. Rep. Mike Turner, not a member of the committee, called fellow Republicans who are on the committee. Michael Gessel, the Dayton Development Coalition’s man in Washington, provided staff work.
In the end, the committee’s 18-14 vote to undo the preference for Florida and Texas - a vote which surprised some advocates - wasn’t primarily a triumph of Ohio over those states. A lot of other states want to be in the running for the shuttle, too.
The vote represented a rare uprising against committee leadership. It was the closest vote on any amendment; usually amendments win big with leadership support or lose big with leadership opposition.
The Ohioans approached the fight the right way. They didn’t offer an amendment that would have favored Ohio by, say, giving an edge to a community connected to the “development” of the shuttles. (Some such work was done at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). They basically left the choice of sites up to the head of NASA.
Also “geographical diversity” was added as a criterion.
This doesn’t mean that Congress is now out of the action. The legislative process isn’t complete. A pending Senate bill has a provision much like the original House provision. And, anyway, members of Congress find indirect ways to have impact, given their power over agencies’ budgets.
Still, in the end, a statement that Congress as a whole doesn’t want to limit consideration to Florida and Texas would be useful.
Dayton has a stellar case in the battle to bring a shuttle to the Air Force Museum: the popularity and importance of the free museum; the need for the space program to be visible in the Midwest; the crucial role of aviation in the history and economy of Dayton and Ohio. And Dayton has the Air Force behind it.
But other communities have their cases, too. NASA Director Charles Bolden (who did four shuttle flights himself) has a tough decision.
The decision should be decided on merit, not the outcome of a congressional brawl between states and sections of the country.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Local History, Martin Gottlieb, National government, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: ‘Baby Vanessa’ needs a parent
There isn’t a judge in his or her right mind who is going to give Benjamin Mills Jr. his biological daughter, a 2-year-old named Vanessa who has spent her entire short life with a California woman who’s trying to adopt her.
But the process of formally getting to a decision is making the courts and other authorities appear as if they’ve lost their minds.
Mr. Mills has four other children, none of whom is in his custody, two of whom are being raised by his mother. He served time in prison for domestic violence against his daughter’s birth mother.
Despite this track record, he has filed for custody of Vanessa, thereby throwing a legal wrench in Stacey Doss’ efforts to finalize a private adoption of Vanessa in California, which the birth mother initiated.
Meanwhile, Montgomery County Children Services has been drawn into the legal tug-of-war, and the agency has paid several thousand dollars to fly Mr. Mills to California for supervised visitation of the child.
Mr. Mills has chosen to exercise every right known to man and fathers to prevent his child from going to what, by all appearances, is a good home. And taxpayers are paying the bill. He has Legal Aid lawyers in Ohio and California.
Legal Aid of Western Ohio, which assists low-income individuals with civil legal matters, makes choices every day about what kinds of cases it will and will not take. Just because you ask for help doesn’t mean you get a free lawyer. Judgments are made about the importance of a case, the chance of prevailing and the magnitude of an alleged injustice.
While terminating parental rights is serious business, Mr. Mills and his lawyers have to know that he can only be obstructionist, that he doesn’t have a prayer of gaining custody. And he’s hardly the ideal candidate to make the case that parental rights are sacred.
Also worth considering is that Mr. Mills is pressing his case against adoption in California, not just Ohio.
He can be given his day in court, but he doesn’t have to be assisted in his effort to go to the mat in two places — there and in Montgomery County.
In truth, lawyers on both sides are doing what’s called “forum-shopping.”
Ms. Doss, who has known almost from the beginning that Mr. Mills was opposed to the adoption, wants to be heard in California because her attorneys believe that California’s law is more favorable to her than Ohio’s. They argue that the case should be resolved there because that’s where the adoption papers were filed, adding that Ms. Doss filed them before Mr. Mills went to court in Montgomery County.
Mr. Mills and his lawyer, on the other hand, are here in Ohio, and they want to make this a custody battle rather than an adoption battle. That distinction matters because even if he loses custody — with Ms. Doss possibly getting Vanessa — he’d still be in the picture.
The child couldn’t be put up for adoption without his consent. Or he’d have to have his parental rights terminated, which is a long, torturous process.
Mr. Mills has done all the right things to protect his rights, including adding his name to a registry that requires he be notified if a child he believes he fathered is put up for adoption.
(That registry was created to make it easier to adopt a child when, typically, the father has disappeared. It puts the burden on a biological father to say he has an interest in a child, rather than on the would-be adoptive parents or birth mother to get the man’s permission. The theory is that if a father is so uninterested that he didn’t know he got someone pregnant, or if he has so little contact with the birth mother that he doesn’t even know she’s pregnant, then he forfeits his right to object.)
It’s also not Mr. Mills’ fault that this case has dragged on for so long, with judges punting decisions back and forth between two states.
A custody hearing is set for Thursday, July 29, in Montgomery County Juvenile Court Judge Nick Kuntz’s court. That might not go forward, though, because Judge Kuntz could decide to wait to see if a California court of appeals orders a lower California court judge to proceed with the adoption hearing.
A lot of time, money and emotion are being wasted trying to decide a case that has unusual wrinkles. Let Mr. Mills be heard in California, let him object to the adoption there and let that judge pick.
There’s no splitting the baby.
Permalink | Comments (60) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Social Services
TweetEllen Belcher: Regulators can’t fix Grand Lake St. Marys
You can say a lot of things about Grand Lake St. Marys.
You could, for instance, argue that what has happened there is Ohio’s Hurricane Katrina. No, the bacteria explosion hasn’t killed anyone; the debacle is man-made; and the devastation isn’t nearly as sweeping. But there are the questions such as: do you rebuild, should you rebuild, can you rebuild.
Just as there were people who said New Orleans shouldn’t be brought back, at least not in its old form, there are people who think Ohio’s largest inland lake will cost too much to save or simply isn’t compatible with the concentration of nearby animal farms.
You also could liken the toxic algae jungle that caused authorities to tell everyone to stay away from the lake to the BP disaster. The ecological and economic damage isn’t as widespread, but ask the people who own marinas or restaurants or have property on the lake if they feel the Gulf fishermen’s pain. Certainly, the tension between agribusiness and property owners and recreational users at the lake is not unlike that between the oil industry and those who depend on the Gulf waters.
You could also say that Grand Lake St. Marys’ comatose state is that community’s Sherwin-Williams fire. In 1987, a Sherwin-Williams paint warehouse that had been built near Dayton’s wellfield caught on fire. It burned for a week because dousing it would have sent toxic chemicals flowing straight to the drinking water source for several hundred thousand people.
The wellfield could have become worthless. The cleanup after the fire cost between $10 million and $12 million.
Two years prior, the Los Angeles Times had run a front-page story trashing Dayton’s drinking water, saying it was alarmingly polluted. But it took the fire to really gig people into admitting that it was insane to have an industrial park so close to such a sensitive and precious resource.
A year after the fire, Dayton passed a wellfield-protection ordinance that limits the kinds of businesses that can locate near its wellfields, and suburban jurisdictions followed suit. (Water doesn’t recognize governmental boundaries.)
The wellfield-protection rules restrict development on and near the wellfields, and they established a system that limits the amount and kind of chemicals that can be used in the area. Incentives and a loan fund were created to help businesses switch to less hazardous processes and products. And a surcharge was put on ratepayers.
Because of the rules, certain kinds of businesses have been turned away from the restricted areas; some companies have been moved, using money from the surcharge. Lawyers have defended the rules against companies looking to skirt them.
Dayton’s regional compact — its carrots as well as its sticks — is an international model, one that people from around the world have come here to learn about. Today the drinking water quality is excellent.
If Grand Lake St. Marys is going to come back to life, it’s going to take this sort of regional, multi-jurisdictional effort.
Another point worth remembering is that it wasn’t the federal or state government that ultimately provided the protection for Dayton’s seemingly boundless aquifer. (Ninety million gallons of water can be pulled out of the aquifer every day, and that registers as barely a sip.)
The regulators were certainly hounding Dayton — which was the water retailer. But ultimately the rules, backed up with incentives, were decided and written by local people — environmentalists, chamber of commerce reps, farmers, business owners and government types.
Distant regulators can only do so much, even when they think something is going terribly wrong. They can throw around their weight, but, in the end, for a problem like Grand Lake St. Marys, it’s the local people who are going to have to come together to get creative and decide if they want to bring back — or bury — the lake.
In Dayton, walling off thousands of acres to certain kinds of development wasn’t easy. But the alternative was to live with the possibility that if a spark went off in the wrong place, an entire region’s drinking water would go up in smoke. A decision that, at the time, was controversial now looks only sensible.
Grand Lake St. Marys isn’t on fire, but it may as well be. It will take local people taking a stand to get everybody to understand what must be done.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Ellen Belcher, Rural Communities, Sports and Recreation
TweetGuest column: Disabilities act still a work in progress
This commentary is written by Mark Willis, a writer and research coordinator at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine. He is legally blind and writes about accessibility and disability at fairuselab.net.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Twenty years is significant, not because it’s a round number, but rather, because it represents a generation of experience gained since the law was passed.
Many of us who lobbied for the ADA believed at the time that it could take a generation or more, as it had with the Civil Rights Act before it, to fulfill the ADA’s promise of equal opportunity for Americans with disabilities.
I remember the day 20 years ago tomorrow, July 26, when I went to the White House to watch President George H. W. Bush sign the legislation. The event was held outside on the South Lawn, between the White House and the Ellipse. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors to enter. The Secret Service surely had a crash course in disability awareness, because it was the smoothest security check I ever had.
As I walked through the wrought-iron gate, I looked around and marveled, “Wow, they let me in here!” They let me in, and a thousand other people. We had every kind of disability in the human condition, and we used every kind of assistive device available at the time. I like to think we were the most diverse group of citizens ever gathered together at the White House.
The ADA signing ceremony was held outside, not because it was a beautiful summer day, but because the White House itself was not fully accessible. Many in our diverse group of citizens could not have entered the building. Long gone were the wooden ramps installed five decades earlier to accommodate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair.
On its anniversary, pundits will debate what the ADA has accomplished since then. I am no pundit, but I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the signing ceremony. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is the place to start.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act was an unfinished project at the moment it was signed into law, and it remains an unfinished project today. It depends on all of us, and the work we will do, to carry it to completion.
My own work has been greatly influenced by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher of liberation. He taught non-literate poor people how to read by first convincing them that, through the daily work they did with their hands, they had culture and made culture. He believed culture to be an unfinished project that he called “the struggle for human completion.”
Listen to that expansive phrase again. “The struggle for human completion.” That is a worldview large enough to include all of us, whether we have disabilities or not. That is a project in which all of us are engaged. That struggle makes us human.
In the years since the ADA became law, we’ve begun to talk about something called “the culture of disability.” I do not think that disability is a fully evolved culture in the same sense that we speak of Mayan culture or even deaf culture. But I do believe that the work of disability is a significant form of cultural production.
By “work of disability,” I mean the daily problem-solving involved in living with a disability — making adaptations and negotiating accommodations — according to principles set forth in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The work of disability is creative work. It’s work that addresses the impairments of individuals, to be sure, but it’s also work that strives to make society more flexible and tolerant. Many of us, disabled and non-disabled, have significant experience with this work, but it seldom shows up on a job resume.
Recently I was invited to talk about the ADA with graduating students with disabilities at Wright State University. I told them, “As you venture forth in the world, you will have to negotiate with people who see the disability, not the person. Some will look at you and see one more hassle, one more problem added to their plate. When I look at you, I don’t see problems. I see problem-solvers.
“So go out there and get it done, this unfinished project called the struggle for human completion. Claim your rightful place in the public sphere. The Americans with Disabilities Act has got your back.”
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TweetEditorial: Medicaid just one place Ohio will cut
So you might have heard that the health care problem got fixed with the passage of President Barack Obama’s health care plan.
Not so much for states.
At this week’s hearing on how Ohio is going to navigate a budget deficit that could hit $8 billion (representing 15 percent of current state spending), Medicaid was the focus.
The numbers are breathtaking:
— Medicaid costs are approaching 60 percent of the state’s budget.
— Medicaid spending has increased 30 percent in just the last three years. (It was more than a decade ago that former Gov. George Voinovich called it the Pac-Man of the budget. Not much has changed.)
— One in seven Ohioans, and one in three Ohio children, are covered by Medicaid. That number will go up as income eligibility rules are loosened under the Obama plan.
— A $3 cut in Medicaid spending only saves $1 because of the way the state gets reimbursed by the feds.
There are lots of misconceptions about Medicaid. For starters, it’s not a Cadillac plan in every sense of the word. As grateful as many people are to have the coverage, it has drawbacks. Many doctors, for instance, limit how many Medicaid patients they’ll accept, so it’s not always easy to get the care you need.
Though you might think it’s poor families who are running up the bills, one of the biggest drivers is nursing home costs. Many elderly Medicaid patients were not poor until they blew threw their savings paying for their or their spouses’ nursing home bills.
One particularly difficult challenge is that 5 percent of Medicaid cases account for 50 percent of the spending. Cutting costs for incredibly sick, dying or disabled people will never be easy. That limits where the state can go in the program to save money.
All of these issues and more came up at the Budget Planning & Management Commission meeting this week.
So far, the only helpful thing that’s come out of that effort is the media coverage that has exposed how unwilling both Republicans and Democrats are to concede and deal with the depth of the financial crisis. Both sides are more engaged in making the other look bad as the election approaches than with getting down to the nitty-gritty.
Nonetheless, the group is going to keep meeting, even as there’s not much hope that the level of discussion will pick up.
Some groups — the state’s certified public accountants, for instance, and the Center for Community Solutions out of Cleveland — are taking the opportunity to be heard about how they see the financial challenges and choices. Other informed groups should invite themselves to the table; if nothing else, they can help fuel a public education campaign about what’s ahead.
Ohio’s budget problems are not as dire as some other states, but they are monumental. Schools, local governments and all the places — from libraries to hospitals — that depend on state funding have a stake in how the budget gets balanced.
When you’re listening to the candidates for governor and the legislature this fall, don’t settle for platitudes. The people you pick will be making big decisions that affect your wallet, family and the place you live.
This is no ordinary time, no ordinary election.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Health Care, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Social Services
TweetEditorial: Strickland wrong but within rights on tobacco
A bipartisan effort in Columbus to basically defund anti-smoking programs has resulted in a backlash. At odds now, instead of two parties, are the leaders of two successive legislatures.
The issue is playing out at the Ohio Supreme Court, where the question is whether one legislature can bind the next.
At stake is more than the future of anti-smoking programs.
The story starts back when Ohio won $10 billion from the tobacco industry as a result of lawsuits in which a lot of other states won money, too. The money was supposed to deal with the harm to public health and public finances done by tobacco.
Nearly all that money has long since been applied to matters having nothing to do with smoking. But the last quarter-billion or so was set aside for anti-smoking efforts. The idea was not to actually spend that money, but to endow a fund and spend the interest on helping people to quit and encouraging everyone else never to start.
Then, to make a long story short, the economy took a turn for the worse, and Gov. Ted Strickland and the legislature decided they needed the tobacco money for the general fund. They undid the endowment arrangement.
Some anti-smoking people took them to court, saying the money can’t be taken back, because the governor and legislature gave up control over it.
Lawyers for the American Legacy Foundation say that if the legislature can take back this money, it can take back money from state retirement accounts, a potential horror story. That’s in dispute. The retirement funds have not joined in the lawsuit, though many other outsiders have.
Former Attorney General Betty Montgomery and former Senate President Richard Finan, both Republicans, are on the side of the anti-smoking people. They say they meant to make the tobacco endowment inaccessible to future legislatures. On their side in the court case are various health-related organizations.
But current Senate President Bill Harris, a Republican, and House Speaker Armond Budish, a Democrat, say that their predecessors did not make the money off-limits, and that they could not, at least acting alone. That view is shared by a national organization of state legislatures and, also, by various health groups.
(Health groups are on both sides because the money not going to anti-smoking efforts has now been slated for other health programs, though at first it was supposed to go to Gov. Ted Strickland’s economic stimulus package.)
The question is whether the state had a legal right to reclaim the money.
It did. As an Ohio appellate court ruled unanimously, if the earlier policymakers had wanted to seal off the tobacco money, they needed to pass a constitutional amendment, as other states have. Merely declaring in law that only the trustees of the endowment may spend the money is not enough. A law can be rescinded by another law.
That appellate decision overturned a county judge, who had held that the state had broken contract law by changing its position. But what’s at hand is not really a contract dispute. It’s a constitutional issue.
Legislatures need to understand the limits of their power. If they can easily seal off money forever, they undermine the ability of future legislatures to deal with changing circumstances.
The state certainly should have sealed off some portion of the $10 billion. Tobacco can reasonably be considered the nation’s biggest public health threat, in the absence of some other emergency of the moment. The costs in lives, productivity and dollars are monumental.
But the state simply didn’t do what it should have. It can’t do it retroactively.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Social Services
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Boehner mellowing?
Politics being a little bit different, John Boehner is not worried about jinxing his chances of being speaker of the House by talking about it. He’s talking about it all over the place. He’s talking about who he is and what he wants to do.
This is all occasioned by certain facts. He’s the current leader of the Republicans in the U.S. House. And the Republicans are widely conceded a shot at winning control of that body in November, which would make him speaker, absent a challenge from within.
Some of what he says is worth hearing.
He bemoans, for example, much about Congress. “This is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world,” he said, confusing the House with the Senate, and overstating the claim for the Senate. (The word “history” is usually not there.)
“But there’s very little deliberation. And I really think that members are being short-changed. I came out of the Ohio legislature, a place where it was a legislature and you were taught and you learned how to become a legislator. And I think that we need legislators in the U.S. Capitol.”
Of course, he’s talking about the Ohio legislature before term limits. Speaking of which, he told a local audience the other day that he’s against term limits, because “all the power gets shifted to the bureaucrats and the lobbyists.”
This is true. Knowledge is power. Term limits make legislators the least knowledgeable people in the power grid.
But all this kind of talk fills certain conservatives with the dread that their leader has gone native.
He’s been in Washington 20 years, a period which began with him insisting that he is “not a politician.” Now he’s presenting himself as the consummate Washington professional, at a time when, as George Will recently put it, being an incumbent is widely seen as a character flaw.
Though he definitely knows some contemporary history by now, pre-Boehner history is apparently not his strong suit. He said recently:
“There’s a political rebellion brewing, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since 1776.”
This was reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan campaigning in 1986 for a piece of bipartisan legislation known as tax reform. It lowered tax rates and paid for that by eliminating some tax deductions; it did not cut taxes.
Though the bill is not even the one Reagan is remembered for most, he went around the country calling it the “Second American Revolution.”
Bigger, say, than emancipation or women’s suffrage? Or the New Deal, which reinvented the role of government in our lives? Or the coming of the common man to the presidency, via Andrew Jackson?
Sometimes you get the impression that these politicians think there was the American Revolution, and now there’s them, and in between was a lot of, what, boredom?
Boehner may be no worse than the rest of them on this score. But here’s a suggestion to a guy who likes his leisure time: turn off Fox and turn on the History Channel.
As for the issues of this particular day, when Boehner turns to policy, he successfully reassures many conservatives that he is not going soft.
True, a certain restraint occasionally arises. For example, in response to a citizen’s question about health care repeal if he becomes speaker, he said, “I guarantee there will be a bill on the floor that will repeal the health care bill and replace it with common-sense reforms.”
Not much a guarantee: “a bill on the floor.”
When pushed, though, he hands out the political red meat.
A questioner in an audience: “No matter what you guys pass, Obama will veto it, right?”
As reported by Cox Media Group reporter Josh Sweigart, Boehner responded that that isn’t necessarily true, that there is bipartisan support to repeal cuts to Medicare.
Anyway, he said, “They’re not going to get one dime from us to hire these new federal employees to run this.”
In truth, if Obama signs something that undermines his most historic presidential accomplishment, he will amaze a lot of people, starting with Michelle.
Nevertheless, Boehner paints himself as unusually frank.
“I am not Barack Obama and I am not Nancy Pelosi,” he said. “I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. And those of you who have dealt with me over the years know that that’s a fact and it will remain a fact.”
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics
TweetGuest column: Farm runoff problem can be solved, with big effort
This column was written by Lima resident Tim Lovett, who is president of the Grand Lake St. Marys Improvement Association.
Fact is, an economic and environmental disaster is occurring in the region around Grand Lake St. Marys. Jobs and businesses are being lost and home values and tourist income are falling due to the lake’s poor water quality. Strains of blue-green algae growing in the lake are producing toxins that are hazardous to humans, resulting in public health advisories to avoid contact with the water.
Blue-green algae are thriving because of the excessive phosphorus in the lake’s sediment and in runoff flowing into the lake. The phosphorous originates primarily from agricultural sources. These facts have been well documented by federal and state environmental protection agencies and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
It is also a fact that the lake can be restored, once again making it the driver of a thriving recreational and tourism industry in the region. A recently completed study of the lake’s problems concludes that a two-pronged approach is required:
Stop the excessive phosphorous coming into the lake and remove most of the phosphorous being released by the sediment.
There are proven best-management practices available to the agricultural producers that can reduce phosphorous in runoff. If those practices were adopted by the entire agricultural community in the lake’s watershed, phosphorous would be reduced to a level that would sustain a healthy lake.
Many producers in the watershed have adopted these practices — and they’re to be commended. But the practices must be adopted on a much larger scale if the lake is going to be saved.
Efforts by various governmental and private entities are continuing to encourage producers to adopt these practices and to offer financial incentives to do so.
Controlling the release of phosphorous from lake sediment is technically feasible. A variety of technologies exist, and one or more may be required. That effort will cost millions, and identifying the necessary funding sources will be difficult.
But weighed against the more than 2,000 jobs tied to the lake’s recreational and tourist industry, this is a wise investment.
The state and federal government are spending millions to save jobs in Ohio; some of those funds need to be diverted to saving the lake and the jobs it provides.
The problem with excessive nutrients on agricultural runoff causing algae problems is not just a Grand Lake St. Marys issue. It is a state and federal issue. It is a problem in the Mississippi River basin and in the Great Lakes.
Grand Lake St. Marys has a relatively small runoff zone. If the problem cannot be corrected here, there is not much hope for everywhere else.
I am cautiously optimistic that the lake can and will be cleaned up and that the region’s economy will be restored. We and many other organizations are committed to making this happen.
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TweetEditorial: Anti-debt pitch weak on unemployment comp
The fight over extending unemployment benefits came down to yet another partisan smackdown.
The Democrats said Congress must extend benefits because the economy is still not providing the needed jobs. The Republicans were only too happy to acknowledge that the economy is not providing. But they — with few exceptions, including Rep. Mike Turner, of Centerville — said the extension should only be made if an equivalent amount of spending is cut elsewhere.
Actually, some Republicans simply oppose an extension — with or without offsetting cuts.
They say extensions deter people from looking for jobs. But party leaders insisted they could have provided the votes if not for the deficit issue.
The Democrats said that cutting elsewhere makes no sense, because cuts in government spending now will just delay the growth of the economy. What with state and local governments already contracting, the federal government still needs to provide some stimulus.
The Republicans countered: Look how little good has been done by the Obama stimulus so far.
The Democrats argued that the stimulus might have been what prevented a depression. And anyway, they said, economists agree that the best kind of stimulus is one aimed at people who don’t have any money — the unemployed — because they are sure to spend it.
Behind all the arguments is the belief by many Democrats that they are the ones who have to worry about economy, that the Republicans will be of no help on the Democrats’ watch.
Meanwhile, the Republicans believe that many voters — even non-Republicans — are mainly worried now about government debt.
The argument directly impacts more than 5,000 people in Montgomery County who would benefit from an extension; roughly 1,000 each in Greene, Miami and Warren counties; almost 100,000 statewide.
Finally, on Tuesday, July 20, over the opposition of one Democrat, and with support from the only two remaining Republican senators who voted for the original Obama stimulus, the Senate passed the Democratic measure. (The House had already passed a similar one.)
Apparently you either buy the stimulus idea or you don’t.
It would have been odd for the Democrats — having supported a stimulus of almost $800 billion — to go all wobbly now over $34 billion. Indeed, they’re wondering whether a new stimulus might be necessary.
Make no mistake: Unemployment benefits benefit people besides the unemployed. If, in a county like Montgomery, 5,000 more people are spending money, that makes a difference for the general economy.
Whether that kind of stimulus is offset by the long-term harm of debt is a question worth pausing over. But a new economic downturn now would just make the deficit worse.
For the Republicans, who were willing to add monumentally to the national debt during the last presidency with tax cuts, a pre-emptive war and expansion of Medicare, this is an odd time to get serious about debt.
And yet the right time is certainly coming — for both parties.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National government
TweetEditorial: Grand Lake St. Marys is textbook mess
The ecological and economic tragedy at Grand Lake St. Marys is stunning.
Think of Ohio’s largest inland lake like a bathtub. If runoff loaded with phosphorous from manure and fertilizer keeps flowing into the tub, eventually the water is going to turn so foul, you won’t want to get in it. And anything good in it will die. Cyanobacteria feeds on the phosphorous, which sucks the oxygen — and the life — out of the water.
Grand Lake St. Marys is an especially sensitive lake. Water flows slowly through the 13,000-acre reservoir, meaning it only gets “flushed” every 18 months. In addition, the lake doesn’t have a lot of islands or channels, which prevent erosion and filter out bad stuff.
Most significant, the state’s largest concentration of animal farms are nearby. Manure-tainted runoff is poison to the lake, and it has been building up over decades.
With government now telling people not to go near the water, Grand Lake St. Marys’ tourism business is dead. That’s as much as a $200-million-a-year industry. That business, however, pales in comparison to the local agricultural industry, which is estimated at $675 million. Needless to say, agri-business has intense clout.
In a way, Grand Lake St. Marys is Ohio’s BP disaster. The damage isn’t nearly as extensive, but the cleanup will take years. Moreover, people are feeling their way because no one has a formula for fixing something that’s been so violated.
Unlike the oil spill in the Gulf, however, Grand Lake St. Marys didn’t get fouled in an instant because a specific piece of equipment failed. It happened because multitudes of people failed — over years. The algae blooms have become more frequent, and even as efforts have been made to limit pollution, there was no sense that time could run out.
Some people are comparing Grand Lake St. Marys to Indian Lake. Indian Lake is also shallow and man-made, vulnerable to similar threats. Even setting aside the differences — that Indian Lake recharges more quickly, that it has more shoreline, that row crops are more prevalent in that region than manure-producing animal farms — it, too, could be on life-support today.
But locals came together years ago — the agricultural community and people who valued the lake — and figured out what had to be done differently. One observer notes that both communities live under the same laws, but, in one case, something was preserved; in the other, something was allowed to be destroyed.
It’s hard not to see the different results as statements about local leadership.
At this point, experts are still trying to get their arms around the extent of the problem, whether there’s a way to clean up the lake, and how much it might cost.
If alum is poured on the water, if dredging equipment is brought in, the fix will be expensive, running into the millions. That money won’t come from the local community, but from the federal and state governments. (Just on Tuesday, the federal government kicked in $1 million.)
Whatever is done, all of us will be paying for the fact that the Grand Lake St. Marys community couldn’t come together on how to protect a resource, and neither the federal or state environmental protection agencies knocked heads when people decided to do too little.
Is anybody better off because the agricultural community didn’t voluntarily change its practices years ago if the result today is that Grand Lake St. Marys becomes a poster child for why agri-business has to be strictly regulated? (This debacle will become an example in public debate and environmental circles throughout Ohio, maybe even beyond, about why the ag industry can’t be counted on.)
Are the politicians rushing to the rescue now going to have an easier job mediating between scared farmers and furious property owners than they would have years ago?
The one sure thing is that everyone will have a long time to work out differences. No amount of money can fix Grand Lake St. Marys quickly.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Rural Communities
TweetEditorial: Schools have to anticipate more cuts
Ohio’s education policy makers need to get real.
The Ohio Department of Education’s proposed budget for the upcoming two years is ridiculously unrealistic. Everyone in education knows that — unless they’ve been living under a rock.
Meanwhile, a new school funding commission, charged with recommending and advising how much schools should get from the state in an ideal world, also has proposed a big jump in state aid. Among other things, the commission doesn’t believe that the state is compensating districts for the true cost of paying teachers.
Ohio faces up to an $8 billion shortfall in its coming two-year budget. (Currently, the budget is about $50 billion.) So it’s absurd to think that, in this next budget cycle, lawmakers will be interested in making everything right and fair for schools (or anyone).
Put aside, for a minute, the funding commission’s belief that districts aren’t being given enough state support to adequately pay their teachers. The education department’s plan alone would increase education spending by $929 million. But that’s not accounting for the fact that the current budget was bailed out by $845 million in federal stimulus aid for schools, money that cannot be counted on to be there again.
This means that to do just what the education department proposes, lawmakers would have to find another $1.7 billion. All told, the education department wants spending on schools to grow by 4.5 percent the first year and 3.4 percent the next, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Both the education department’s spending plan and the funding commission’s proposal are designed to keep the state on track to pay for Gov. Ted Strickland’s “evidence-based” funding model.
That program was designed to incrementally create a constitutional school funding system built on eight years of spending increases. The problem, of course, is that no one knows where the necessary new money is going to come from.
What with Ohio’s school funding method having been declared unconstitutional four times, the governor has the right goal and some good ideas. But he has yet to say how he will pay for his changes. With state revenue expected to increase only minimally for a good time to come, there isn’t any easy solution.
The state desperately needs a jolt of realism. Legislators and policy makers are right to be in reform mode. But the reforms they should be promoting need to be about saving money. They have to find ways to maintain critical state services while spending less.
Smart local school leaders and their school boards are already preparing for the worst. They have to believe that the downsizing that many of them have been going through won’t be stopping any time soon. Every school district should be working on a contingency plan for that very real possibility. Teachers’ unions across the Dayton area, for instance, have been agreeing to contracts with low or no raises.
Floating fantasies that a state funding increase could be around the corner is only distracting schools from the hard work that needs to be done.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetScott Elliott: DuBois story shows how charters can go wrong
The first time I met Wilson Willard, he was whisked into the room at a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation event, surrounded by Fordham folks who were giddy for people to meet him.
Willard was the founder of an extraordinary Cincinnati charter school called the W.E.B. DuBois Academy which, in 2004, Fordham had just taken over as sponsor.
The school had outstanding test scores and state report card ratings, despite being located in the inner city and serving mostly very low-income students.
People who visited DuBois came away raving about Willard, his teaching staff and the quality of instruction.
Fordham was thrilled to have the school in its stable and used Willard and DuBois as examples of all that was good about the charter school movement.
Then, suddenly, it all went to pieces.
Willard, it turned out, had so botched the school’s financial record-keeping that the state couldn’t even audit its books. But things got worse. Fordham began to hear horror stories — that Willard could be explosive and inappropriate, that he sometimes used students to do work around his house during school hours.
Then the big bombshell: Willard was charged with theft of school funds. In 2008, he pleaded guilty, was sentenced to four years in prison and was ordered to pay $179,000 in restitution to the state, and the now shaky school’s state rating had fallen to “academic emergency.”
The DuBois Academy story is the most stunning and fascinating chapter in a new book written by Fordham’s Chester E. Finn Jr., Terry Ryan and Michael Lafferty. How could Fordham, the nation’s foremost advocate for charter schools and a consistently strong voice for tough school accountability, be taken in by a fraud like Willard?
In “Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines,” the authors say they were fooled much the same way Bernie Madoff’s investment clients were fleeced in his Ponzi scheme. Like Madoff, Willard was dynamic and had an unimpeachable reputation. Unlike Madoff, Willard was also the real deal, at least when it came to academic results.
In the book, the authors describe how Willard’s fans recounted repeated examples of his heroism. The guy worked incredible hours at the school and was personally involved in nearly every aspect of the operation, they said. He hired great teachers and carried the school’s successful curriculum mostly in his head. What he did — build a high-performing school full of very poor kids from scratch — is a rare feat.
Among the last to believe the charges against Willard was the governing board that employed him. The board was made up of Willard’s friends and supporters, who had been with him from the school’s beginning. Despite Fordham’s increasingly harder nudges, the board resisted taking action against him for far too long, which helped seal the school’s fate.
Ohio has gotten much better at screening new charter school applicants. In the early days of the charter movement, the Akron Beacon Journal reported how the Ohio Board of Education approved stacks of charter applications, sometimes without even reading them. That put state money in the hands of too many people with agendas that had more to do with their own personal gain than with educating kids.
Those early charters were often overseen by boards hand-picked by the school operators. Sponsors were, by design, kept at arm’s length to allow charters freedom to innovate. In too many cases, such schools still exist today.
Deregulating schools in this way was supposed to unleash creativity and encourage reforms. But it also gave cover to the ill-intentioned.
Oddly, Willard was on both sides of that fence. His creativity and academic success made it that much harder to spot his sinister side.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Link the funds for clean coal to bigger plan
“Clean coal.” Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Renewable energy — wind, solar, geothermal — requires big new investments and threatens the jobs of people in West Virginia and Ohio who work in the coal industry.
But the old fossil fuels are dirty and otherwise threatening to the environment. Most specifically, coal gives off carbon dioxide that is linked to global warming by the overwhelming majority in the scientific community.
So how should society choose between the old and new forms of energy?
Cleaning up the coal sounds perfect. (Well, almost perfect. It does still leave the coal industry changing the face of Appalachia, to the distress of many.)
But money is a problem. The coal industry — though it provides half the electricity in this county — can’t afford all the needed research.
The government has put up $3.4 billion through the federal stimulus. There was also government money in the 1980s. Now there’s talk of more.
Some environmentalists are skeptical about whether affordable clean coal is achievable. But some credible scientists say the effort is starting to come together.
Now Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is joining with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, to propose $20 billion in federal spending over the next decade, combined with industry money, to develop a way to burn coal cleanly and make money doing it. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, also says he’s interested.
To their credit, the sponsors provide a source of funding in their legislation, rather than just adding the cost to the deficit. They’d put a fee on utility bills. That helps sustain Sen. Voinovich’s cherished reputation as a “deficit hawk.” Whether it helps pass the legislation is another question.
A similar approach didn’t help the health care bill get any Republican votes. And there’s going to be opposition to what amounts to a tax.
The two sponsors say that a sweeping energy bill that has been much talked about in Washington — sometimes referred to as “cap and trade” or “Kerry-Lieberman” — is dead. That effort is designed to limit the release of carbon into the atmosphere by aiming incentives and punishments at emitters.
Sens. Voinovich and Rockefeller say the death of the bigger idea should not mean the death of carbon-related legislation.
But some ask: Why put money into a dying industry using an exhaustible resource when there are clean and inexhaustible alternatives?
Of course, renewable forms of energy are getting government aid, too, including $16.6 billion in the stimulus. Indeed, the stimulus has been widely sold as promoting the country’s move to cleaner energy.
The case for an “all-of-the-above” approach to our energy future has much to be said for it. So long as the coal companies are not digging in their heels against change — not insisting the old ways are good enough — they should have a place in the discussion and a shot at some money.
However, Washington should be focused on a passing a larger bill. If the coal industry gets what it wants in a piecemeal way, that will affect its attitude toward the larger bill. Best to keep the research money at bay, in hopes of putting a coalition together for a more systematic approach.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Energy, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, National government
TweetEditorial: Financial reform was needed after dereg flopped
Once upon a time — back in a much-forgotten part of 2010 — financial regulatory reform was supposed to be the one major bill that Republicans and Democrats in Washington might be able to get together on.
After all, the nation’s financial system had collapsed, bringing the economy down with it. Nearly everybody cited irresponsible behavior in the financial sector that the government did little or nothing about. And all this came after a long period of financial deregulation under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Obviously, there would be a turning of the corner on regulation, with new government activism.
In fact, though,
the bill passed the U.S. Senate with all but three Republicans opposed (just as in the House). The Republicans in support were the women from Maine who have helped the Democrats before and the new guy from Massachusetts, Scott Brown. Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich was not there in the end, though he had earlier helped on a procedural vote. He offered four main reasons for objecting.
The first was, “The bill fails to address the main catalysts of the financial meltdown, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose push to acquire subprime mortgages … helped produce a bubble that burst.”
Those two agencies did play a role in the collapse. But they have been put under a sort of government conservatorship and are not behaving the same way now. They may still need further attention. But this bill does an awful lot of stuff. A line had to be drawn someplace. To oppose it primarily for what it doesn’t do seems odd.
His second criticism was in the same vein. He said the heart of the crisis was the awarding of home loans to people who couldn’t afford them. And he said a Republican senator put up a provision to prevent that.
“Amazingly,” he said, “my colleagues rejected this amendment, and thus virtually nothing in this bill addresses this problem.”
The bill actually has a number of measures to restrict predatory lending and regulate mortgage brokers. And it creates a new consumer agency to hear complaints.
Much is left up to regulators, to be sure. For example, there’s no flat ban on “adjustable-rate” mortgages, the kind under which people start out paying little, only to get blasted with much bigger bills later.
So, for sure, the passage of the new bill leaves problems unresolved.
Sen. Voinovich also said the new consumer agency will have too much power to harass businesses. And he has a problem with new regulations on “over-the-counter derivatives.”
Reasonable people can certainly disagree about various aspects of this complex legislation, almost two years in the making.
Though it entails more government, it is not extreme in that regard. It doesn’t even completely undo the deregulation of banks that happened under President Bill Clinton. (It does restrict bank investments.)
Immediately after the Senate vote, House Republican leader John Boehner called for repeal, just as he and others did after passage of health care. This seems to have become a strategy: every fight must go on and on, lest the president get credit for accomplishing something, and lest Republican financial contributors stop contributing.
Nevertheless, with passage of this historic legislation, on top of health care and his stimulus, President Barack Obama has now unmistakably established himself as an effective force for major change.
As many have noted, this does not seem to be helping him politically so far.
Presidential success on party-line votes seems to scare independent voters. And yet, in these highly polarized times, it would be quite a challenge to conceive an activist agenda that appeals across party lines. Perhaps it will be the challenge of Mr. Obama’s second two years.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, National government, Predatory lending
TweetEditorial: Ohio should force counties to cooperate
Late in June, overcrowding forced Miami County Sheriff Charles Cox to close the county jail in downtown Troy to any offenders who aren’t violent or who hadn’t committed a felony.
A couple miles away, a second jail constructed just a decade ago sits empty. Earlier this year, Miami County shut it down and laid off 40 workers.
Before you lay blame on the county commission and the people who work for them, think again. At one time, building the second jail was a smart move. And, believe it or not, the project didn’t cost Miami County a dime.
Miami County was able to get “free” money from the state to fix a problem it had. But there were no requirements to determine if solving Miami County’s problems might also fix problems at other nearby county jails.
That’s just the way things work in Ohio. Counties and other local governments, too, are allowed and even encouraged and rewarded financially when they act as islands.
It’s bad policy and a wasteful approach, as evidenced by a 240-bed jail going unused at the same time the sheriff is releasing inmates for lack of space.
In the late 1990s, Ohio simply didn’t have enough jail space. Counties with overcrowded jails were shipping prisoners out to neighboring communities that had open beds, and they paid good money for those prisoners to be housed.
Counties like Miami and Auglaize saw an opportunity: they could build updated jails with extra space, solve their own overcrowding problems and help pay the operating bills by attracting out-of-county prisoners.
Miami County, which was spending more than $80,000 in 1999 to house its overflow prisoners in other counties, took a particularly shrewd approach. It proposed a jail with four 60-bed units, each of which could be closed down in lean times and reopened when the population surged.
Planners emphasized that housing out-of-county prisoners could actually be a new revenue source. Even better, the state was awarding grants to build new jails.
Miami County eventually won more than enough funding to cover the entire $5.8 million cost. It even turned money back to the state at the project’s end.
For a while, things worked exactly as planned. But over time, nearby counties built their own new jails. Some places, notably Montgomery County, also got much better at managing their jail populations, further reducing the need for beds in Miami.
Today, there simply isn’t enough business to support the second jail, but Miami County has too many prisoners for one jail.
What if, instead of just handing out money for new jails, Ohio had insisted neighboring counties collaborate on a joint plan to manage their prisoner populations and made that a condition of getting grants? Before Miami County built its second jail, it tried and failed to get its neighbors to go together on a jail.
If counties were grouped regionally and the combined prisoner population was jointly managed, there is no doubt everybody could save money. Left instead to fend for themselves, each county naturally did its best to get what it needed and, if possible, profit from the challenges faced by neighbors.
Had everyone been on the same page, Miami County probably wouldn’t have an empty jail and former prisoners wouldn’t be walking free before their time was up.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetPaul Leonard: Animal rights agreement a fine start, but only that
This column was written by Paul R. Leonard, past chairman of the board of directors for the Animal Legal Defense Fund. The former Dayton mayor and lieutenant governor teaches political science and animal law at Wright State University.
It’s amazing what a tough re-election campaign can accomplish.
Take Ohio’s governor’s race. Ted Strickland was a newly-elected Democratic governor in 2006 with sky-high poll ratings. Those days are gone. Now, he’s struggling to keep his head above water.
Recently, Strickland reached an agreement with the Humane Society of the United States intended to improve the lives and status of animals. The governor promised to promote legislation that gets tough on cock fighting and puppy mills. He also committed to backing rules requiring humane crates for farm animals.
These changes are long overdue in a state with a national reputation for disgracefully weak laws on the protection of animal life.
When he was in Congress, Strickland was never a favorite of animal welfare organizations. His move toward reasonable, humane protection for farm animals would never have happened had it not been for the threat by the Humane Society to take its views directly to voters.
Last year, the governor was out-front on an ill-advised ballot issue that was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Ohioans passed the issue, which created a new board charged with overseeing humane treatment of farm animals.
But the foxes will be in charge of regulating the hen houses. Ohio voters were fooled by the politicians in that campaign, and animals in Ohio were the losers.
So, the Humane Society decided to take action this year with the threat of an initiative that would trump last year’s vote. The governor got on board.
Give the devil his due. Better late than never.
The new agreement is a step forward, albeit a small step. It will require some legislative action (good luck with those Neanderthals) and continued commitment from the next governor, whether Strickland or John Kasich is elected.
Even with full implementation of the new agreement, Ohio has a long way to go if we are to be recognized as progressive on animal welfare issues.
Here are 10 suggestions for Strickland and Kasich to consider as they hit the campaign trail looking for the support of animal-rights advocates:
• Support legislation requiring cross-reporting to appropriate agencies of animal violence and family domestic violence. Those who abuse animals often graduate to abusing family members; and those who abuse family members will often abuse the family pet.
• Support regulation and licensing of professional breeders who often over-breed female animals. Over-breeding is animal cruelty.
• Support enactment of a law that exists today only in North Carolina that allows private animal-advocacy groups to bring a criminal prosecution against animal abusers and obtain custody of abused or neglected animals. In many counties and cities, police and prosecutors cannot “be bothered” with animal abuse cases.
• Support elevating the status of animals. Under the law, animals are not recognized as “living things.” They are classified as inanimate property with no more rights than a television set or a couch. The law should recognize that there is a difference between inanimate and animate property, with tougher penalties applied to those who abuse or neglect animate property.
• Require state and local bar associations to create an Animal Law Committee and offer continuing legal education for lawyers, judges and prosecutors who, for the most part, are uneducated about animal law.
• Make animal abuse a felony, with mandatory jail time.
• Outlaw animal auctions. They supply sick and weak animals to pet stores.
• Outlaw the sale of animals by retail pet stores. Pets should be sold by regulated breeders, rescue organizations and shelters operating on a not-for-profit basis. They care. The pet business is a $45-billion-dollar-a-year juggernaut. The industry can afford to get out of the business of selling pets.
• Raise the license fee for dogs to cover all necessary government regulation of the pet industry. Most dog owners would gladly support this if they could be sure that the fees would go toward animal welfare.
• Enact a law that prohibits the ownership, possession, or possession for sale of exotic and wild animals.
These are 10 reasonable suggestions. Ohio’s animal sensitive-community is a growing bloc of voters who are beginning to understand politics — and the difference that can be made, especially in an election year.
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TweetMartin Gottlieb: Holbrooke’s old mojo not there so far
“Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it.” — Gen. Stanley McChrystal, quoted in that famous Rolling Stone article
Watching Richard Holbrooke these days, one is reminded of John McEnroe — and not because of the temper, though some similarity reportedly arises there.
When McEnroe retired from tennis, he decided he wanted to be a rock star. He put together a band and he worked hard on writing, as well as performing. Things didn’t go as badly as you might imagine.
But eventually — the story goes — his wife told him, look, this just doesn’t happen: nobody gets to be the No. 1 tennis player in the world and a rock star.
Holbrooke is known in Dayton — and around the world — as the driving force behind the 1995 peace accords that ended the Bosnian war after talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. His imagination conceived of the talks, his drive made them happen, and his negotiating skills made them work.
So, despite a reputation in some quarters for abrasiveness and ego, he became a rock star. He made the short list for secretary of state.
And when Barack Obama decided that putting Hillary Clinton in that role would solve more problems for him than picking Holbrooke, Obama nevertheless came up with an extraordinary role for Holbrooke: the “president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
That region was the most troublesome of the world’s trouble spots. A simple ambassadorial appointment would not be in keeping with Holbrooke’s stature, and he was the rare person who be able to make an undefined role work in a big way.
But the McChrystal quote above symbolizes how things are going. That kind of friction between big players is likely to be at its most intense when they are not going well. American casualties are up. The Afghanistan government is corrupt and ineffective. The Taliban thrive.
As a result, political problems are arising back home, putting pressure on everybody. For Obama’s political enemies — who typically don’t like going after generals — Holbrooke is a likely target. He has the role that springs from the president’s head.
What the heck is a “special representative”? And who is Holbrooke to be irritating the top general?
The administration, Holbrooke and journalists have no difficulty explaining what Holbrooke does. He shuttles between Afghanistan and Pakistan, working on the problems between those two countries, most specifically along the treacherous border where terrorists are ensconced.
He goes to Europe and to Arab countries trying to stimulate and buttress support for Afghanistan and the American-driven effort there. He works on the civilian side of the war effort, trying to make agriculture pay off in a way that stabilizes the country, rather than adding to its problems.
Fine. But the job description was rock star. Miracle worker.
Speculation arises at intervals about Holbrooke resigning or even being removed. Such talk has been fostered by his reported conflicts with Hamid Karzai, head of the Afghan government.
The possibility still exists, though, that at another stage of this story he will be able to bring his negotiating skills and experiences to bear in a way that achieves some sort of resolution.
Timing is crucial, after all. His success in Dayton happened — he knows — not simply because one man got really determined. It happened because one man recognized an opportunity. Things had come together in a certain way, after years of war. Holbrooke thought all sides might be made to see that further war was fruitless and that peace was now in their interest.
He never claimed that he could bring peace anyplace at any time.
He is not one to give up easily, though. If he does come home, that won’t be a good sign.
And yet, one man probably does not get to bring peace to both Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Dayton Peace Accords and Other Peace Initiatives, Martin Gottlieb, National government, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
TweetEditorial: Great Miami cleanup helps bigger effort
In the seven years Piqua’s Jeff Lang has been helping organize cleanups along the Great Miami River, he has seen all kinds of things pulled out of the water. There was, for instance, a twisted ball of coat hangers numbering in the thousands and a safe (minus the contents) that had been stolen from Sinclair Community College.
Today and Saturday, July 17, hundreds of volunteers will be walking along, or canoeing on, the Great Miami River cleaning up after those who dumped their tires or refrigerators or who left their trash after fishing. The effort has been known as operation Clean Sweep since 2004 when the Miami Conservancy District encouraged groups involved in isolated cleanups to come together.
This year the campaign has drawn so many volunteers that “section leaders” have filled all the spots in the canoes they’ve reserved for the event, and they expect to have enough people to walk the local riverbanks in their entirety.
During the two days, 150 canoes will be hauling trash and maybe as many as 900 volunteers will be grabbing plastic bags out of trees and picking up soda and beer cans. Last year 20 tons of junk was hauled away.
The marvel is that between a cleanup effort in May in Butler and Hamilton counties, this event and another one next weekend in Logan County, a 150-mile stretch of the Great Miami will be cleaned up. When the volunteers are done, they’ll all be dirty, sweaty, bug-bitten and probably wet. Then many of them will do it all again next year.
This event, like so many volunteer initiatives, has a core group that never seems to get tired of the ongoing leg work that goes into leveraging and multiplying their own passion.
Their cleanup initiative is becoming more, not less, important. For a host of riverfront communities, the Great Miami River is their backyard. Dayton, Miamisburg, Troy and Hamilton, just to name a few cities, are energetically trying to exploit the river and get businesses to locate on the river’s edge.
They also want more kayakers, bicyclists and festival-goers meeting on their riverbanks. If there’s a water heater rusting nearby, that’s hardly inviting.
The regional nature of the cleanup was something of an example for another newer river initiative that’s partly organized, partly organic.
The University of Dayton has for three years now hosted what it has dubbed the River Summit. Some of the same communities participating in Clean Sweep — from Sidney to Fairfield — are getting together annually to learn about each other’s riverfront development projects and to brag about what they’ve achieved since the previous gathering.
The participants have taken to calling their stretch of the river “Ohio’s Great Corridor,” in recognition that, besides the waterway, nearly 100 miles of bike paths have been built near the river.
The competition among the communities to get things going is friendly because, at the end of the day, the more events, businesses, restaurants and bars that locate on the Great Miami, the better it is for them all.
While this process of making things happen keeps bubbling, it’s good to know that so many are making sure that the people who don’t pick up after themselves and who dump in the dark aren’t going to be allowed to destroy something good.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher
TweetEditorial: Cutting polling places didn’t cut turnout
2010 ELECTION
In Tuesday’s special Democratic primary, the number of voters in Warren County roughly equaled the number of Democratic poll workers.
The northern part of the county — 96 precincts with 91 polling places — is in the 3rd Congressional District. The district was having a special primary because the winner of the regularly scheduled May primary withdrew from the race.
The other counties in the district took advantage of a new state law that was passed for this election. Given the lack of public interest in the race, the law allowed counties to open only four polling places, while sending all registered voters an invitation to request a mail-in ballot.
Warren County didn’t go that route, in part because that would have required buying new equipment, the future usefulness of which would be in doubt, said elections director Keir Holeman.
The fact that different counties used different procedures allowed for a useful comparison between the counties. Some people have wondered whether dramatically reducing the number of polling places might reduce turnout. Answer: Apparently not. After all, how much lower could turnout have been in Warren County?
(By the way, the Warren County part of the 3rd District, though Republican territory, does have 14,000 registered Democrats, though the figure is somewhat inflated by the Rush Limbaugh effort to get warrior Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary.)
Actually, Mr. Holeman speculates that the arrangement used elsewhere might have increased turnout, by offering voters the mail-in option.
The Tuesday experiment came off well enough, allowing for the fact that every change brings confusion and irritation. The success, however, does not mean much for elections in which a lot of people want to vote.
So many voters still prefer the traditional way that cramming them into a few sites would be asking for trouble. (Montgomery County has already cut the number of its polling places in half.)
The 3rd District includes most of Montgomery County, which provided 87 percent of the votes, and all of Clinton and Highland counties.
The election was won largely by default by newcomer Joe Roberts. He got 44 percent of the vote in Montgomery County and districtwide. His opponents were a candidate who is in bankruptcy and behind in his child support and another who runs all the time.
Districtwide turnout, 5,647, was in the same 1-percent-of-the-population range as a very similar election in 2006, though slightly lower. That election had a stronger, more qualified candidate — former federal prosecutor Richard Chema — and came later in the year, nearer the general election.
At bottom, every indication is, as Montgomery County elections director Steve Harsman said, that the few who voted this time (and in 2006) were going to vote no matter what; and those who didn’t just weren’t going to, no matter what.
In a very low-profile race, Mr. Roberts had the least name recognition going in. That suggests that the few who voted took the race seriously. That seems a better theory of the outcome than the possibility that some people were attracted to the name Roberts, which has often been on local ballots. These particular voters were not likely confused.
The vote totals are on the laughable side. Some homecoming queens have won more votes than Joe Roberts. Most Democrats just didn’t see much point in worrying about which of three weak candidates goes up against entrenched Republican incumbent Mike Turner in the fall.
And yet, it’s worth knowing that 5,000 Democrats in the district take their citizenship seriously enough to feel that if there’s an election, they have a job to do, whether they like it or not. If you assume a like number of Republicans, that’s not such a small core.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetEditorial: Ohio schools closed to Teach for America
If more people worked in a classroom not just for a day, but for a couple of years, there’d be better public understanding of how hard successful teachers work.
This is just one more reason why Ohio, as a state, shouldn’t be so uninviting to Teach for America, the selective program that places bright, young college graduates in mostly classrooms with low-income children.
Many Teach for America participants don’t intend to make teaching a career, and, in fact, are using the two-year commitment as a steppingstone to other professions. If they do move on to other things after having had personal experience with being responsible for 30 children day in and day out, they’re certain to have an appreciation of what teachers are required to do. Or, on the other hand, if they catch the bug and choose teaching as a career (which some do), that’s nothing but good, too.
Now in its 20th year, Teach for America isn’t operating in Ohio partly because the state has such strict licensing rules. Meanwhile, because most Teach for America graduates aren’t education majors, they can’t easily get jobs in the state when they’re done with their two years because they haven’t had the requisite course work that Ohio requires for a teacher’s license.
(NOTE: For more on TFA see The brand that is TFA at Get on the Bus)
Tough, highly specific licensure rules are pushed by teachers’ unions, which historically have resisted efforts to allow anyone but classically trained math teachers, for example, to teach math.
At a time when schools are laying off teachers and rarely hiring new ones, it might seem odd to be talking about adding new paths to the profession. But the pendulum will swing back; someday jobs will open up again.
When that time comes, it makes no sense to be on the wrong side of a policy question — not when Teach for America is bringing passion and energy to classrooms and creating new advocates for both teachers and students.
The New York Times recently profiled the program, noting that in some cases getting into elite law schools is easier than being chosen for Teach for America. This year there were 46,359 applicants, up 32 percent over last year. Just 4,500 were selected.
So respected is the program (and so tight is the job market) that 18 percent of this year’s Yale University graduates applied.
One unenthusiastic academic complained to The Times that experience is what sets the best teachers apart, continuing that many Teach for America participants don’t stay long enough to become good, let alone exceptional. (Other researchers disagree, insisting the program is an unqualified success story.)
But Teach for America’s philosophy is not to search out only those young people who will always be teachers; its recruiters are looking for grads who will throw themselves into hard work and be the leaders and doers in whatever profession they choose.
Needless to say, 4,500 young people aren’t going to change the face of American education. But, over time, a corps of alumni is being built that has a rich and firsthand understanding of the teaching profession. That can only be good for education — and especially for teachers.
Republican state Sen. Jon Husted, of Kettering, has legislation pending that would allow Teach for America grads to work in Ohio without having to jump through additional academic hoops. They’d get a “residency” license for four years, after which time they’d have to meet additional requirements that could require taking special coursework.
The legislation, after having passed the Ohio Senate, is stuck in the Democratic House of Representatives. Even when hiring is at a standstill, this is the wrong message to be sending. The state should be welcoming young people and programs aimed at getting the best and brightest into classrooms.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Fordham finds school reform isn’t so easy
Markets can’t fix everything.
Ironically, it’s the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a right-leaning think tank and one of the nation’s chief proponents of market-based education reforms, that will tell you so.
Some conservatives say school choice will force reform by making schools compete for students and funding. Good schools will attract more students while bad ones will wither and die.
Fordham’s use of Dayton as a laboratory for seeding charter schools and voucher programs during the past decade helped make the city one of the country’s earliest and most crowded education marketplaces.
But things didn’t work out as planned. The buyers in the market (parents) didn’t always focus on academic quality, allowing too many poor performing sellers (schools) to stay in business.
In a new book out this week, three authors associated with the Dayton-rooted foundation — Chester E. Finn, Jr., Terry Ryan and Mike Lafferty — chronicle its experiences in the school reform trenches here.
“Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons From the Front Lines,” amounts to a short history of Dayton’s charter school movement. It also should be a call to arms for tougher rules to address failing schools.
“The education marketplace doesn’t work as well as we believed,” the authors say, “… it should lead to either the improvement or closure of weak schools as the good ones gain market share. But in practice, really atrocious schools can languish for years when nobody intervenes.”
Consider Moraine Community School, one of the area’s first charter schools, still in operation today despite a decade of low scores.
Fordham — newly minted as a charter school sponsor in 2005 — was delighted to take on the reclamation project to turn Dayton’s only south suburban charter school into a high performer.
But less than a year into the arrangement, the Moraine school had had enough and bolted from a stunned Fordham for a new sponsor with a reputation for tolerating poor schools.
“In hindsight, we were deluded about the Moraine school and our ability, through tough love, to turn it around,” Fordham leaders say today. By the end, “It was clear to us they did not see their primary mission as delivering academic success to children.”
This example is one of many in the book that show a continuing need for more accountability. The explosion of more than 300 charters in Ohio since 1997 has added some great new schools in the state. Sadly, though, a disturbingly large percentage of terrible schools have been allowed to stay open, doing more harm than good.
Lawmakers took several important steps to tighten charter rules in recent years, but they need to go further. A few ideas:
• Force swift action for consistently terrible schools. Schools that see their scores dip need a chance to fix the situation, but Ohio has too many schools — traditional and charter — with long track records of failure. That can’t continue.
• Reward schools with track records of success. Top-notch charters, for instance, could be allowed to earn per-pupil funding that matches the local school district, or maybe get a chance to take control of a quality district school building (perhaps one that was closed for poor performance).
• Get tough on charter school sponsors. Too many sponsors have abysmal histories of managing schools with embarrassing academic records. Ohio should have a high bar that strips sponsorship from those that don’t really oversee the schools they’re responsible for.
• Prevent sponsors from charging schools under their control for services. Fordham, to its credit, has refused to charge fees to schools for services it provides, seeing the practice as creating perverse incentives that turn sponsored schools into cash cows that sponsors then can ill-afford to shut down if they fail. But that’s just what’s happened with some dubious sponsors.
Dayton has long been one of the most interesting places to examine the impact of school choice. Fordham’s honesty about what went wrong in its experience here is an important contribution to the greater understanding of school reform.
Ohio shouldn’t miss the chance to learn from it.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetInterested in education issues? Look here
The DDN’s education blog, Get on the Bus, is back active, after more than a year on hiatus, with new contributors. If you like to delve deeply into the issues of schools it will be worth your time to check in on it occasionally.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Blog entry only, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Classroom work is what matters most
New Dayton Superintendent Lori Ward knows a few things about data, having been the school district’s manager of information services.
That’s a good thing. Ms. Ward is not one to make decisions off the top of her head, without running some numbers.
Even so, she has to keep in mind the big picture as she starts putting her stamp on things. While she knows that kids’ success comes down to classroom instruction, it’s easy to become distracted by non-academic issues.
Two issues Ms. Ward is grappling with now — attendance zones and the grade configurations of schools — are good examples of decisions that might appear to be related to academics, but don’t really have a big impact. The issues need to be addressed, and it’s Ms. Ward’s job to set the district’s direction, but most everyone’s energy is better spent on what’s happening in classrooms.
Ms. Ward is making a big push for attendance zones. Details aren’t worked out yet, but in concept, she would draw lines around each school and mostly require students who live within those boundaries to attend the nearest school. This is a big break from Dayton’s long tradition of offering school choice.
There is a logic to the approach. The district’s data shows that the longer students remain in one school, the better they score on tests.
For instance, a district study showed about 63 percent of third-graders who attended the same school for four years beginning in kindergarten passed the state math and reading tests. Scores fell for those who had been in the same school fewer years. For those with only one year in a school as third-graders, only about 50 percent passed reading and math.
That 13-point swing is big.
Ms. Ward hopes to limit kids from changing schools on a whim. She said parents often say they change schools because of non-academic reasons, such as a preference for a later start time or because the school is closer to a day care provider. Attendance zones would limit transfers for those reasons. Ms. Ward wants schools and their neighborhoods to be connected.
Another big factor in the movement of schoolchildren in Dayton is that poor families move a lot. If those moves require changing schools, then the problem Ms. Ward is trying to resolve remains. This is a tough challenge.
Changing the grade configuration of Dayton’s schools is an effort begun by just-departed Superintendent Kurt Stanic. He wanted high schools to have grades 7 to 12.
The big academic advantage, Mr. Stanic said, is that high school teachers are certified to teach more advanced material and they’d be on site.
That matters, considering that the goal for students in grades 7 and 8 is to get them ready for high school material.
Putting seventh- and eight-graders in with older students reverses the school board’s move during the last decade to abandon middle schools in favor of elementary schools with grades kindergarten through eighth.
At the time, the board cited research showing kids ages 10-14 performed slightly better academically when grouped with younger kids.
The research has remained consistent, recently persuading cities like Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles to move to K-to-8 schools. So Dayton’s switch back doesn’t seem promising if the goal is higher scores.
In fact, for all the effort put toward reconfiguring the district in these ways, there is little evidence to support the belief that any one school structure offers a big advantage over the others when it comes to promoting student achievement.
Learning is not about building design or attendance zones.
Quality teachers and lessons are what Dayton schools have to have at every school, regardless of how the school building and attendance borders are set up.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Too many units trying to sell the region
The Dayton area doesn’t have a charismatic figure leading the effort to grow jobs and expand the local economy. Whether you’re talking about elected officials or appointed heads of economic development agencies or private-sector leaders, nobody is a symbol of the effort.
That role requires special talent, commitment and energy. It’s not often that somebody comes along who is up to being a community’s cheerleader, negotiator, ambassador and arbitrator, all at once. And that work is hard to succeed in.
At the state level, Gov. Ted Strickland made Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher his point man for the economy. That did about as much for Mr. Fisher’s political career as the opportunity to lead in Afghanistan did for Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s.
What Dayton — broadly defined — does have is a lot of people who focus on economic development, some for a living, and some as volunteers. A Dayton Daily News investigation, published last weekend, found 26 organizations in four counties spending $23 million a year on the cause.
That’s a stunning amount. It’s also too much. Duplication of effort and pointless competition are inevitable. A less splintered, more regional approach would save money and be less small-town.
But, as in other elements of government and public affairs, the road to regionalism is uphill. People want their own organizations, feeling ignored or worse by larger ones. And the truth is that no way of organizing the local effort guarantees success — or failure.
After a long period in which so much local economic news was bad — think GM, Delphi and NCR — the community has received a surprising spate of good news. A national law firm locates its “back office” operations here. Caterpillar, CodeBlue insurance claims manager, Cintas uniforms and Crown Solutions water management services bring new jobs. ConAgra foods brings its Slim Jim operations to Miami County. The University of Dayton grows.
Motoman robotics decided it needed to consolidate at one new site, and ended up staying in the area, at the new Interstate 75 exchange south of the Dayton Mall. Even in the period when the bad news was predominating, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base won new jobs.
Meanwhile, local action is resulting in such projects as the transformation of Brown Street near UD and good things at Tech Town. And visionary work proceeds toward the revival and expansion of downtown.
And yet not much really changed in the way the Dayton area approaches economic development between the periods when the bad news was omnipresent and good news started occurring.
The lesson is that the region does have much to offer a lot of employers: a hard-driving workforce, a good location, clean, cheap water, low costs, plenty of space and more.
Despair is not in order. The effort to compete with other parts of the country — and other countries — is realistic and must continue.
The key is playing to local strengths. That means some fights will be lost. The fact that Ohio has relatively low housing costs did not seem to influence LeBron James much, did it?
The American economy into which Dayton fits will continue to be dynamic, ever-changing. That will continue to bring bad news and good news.
The community needs to think and act as a community. It needs to understand the implications of Dayton’s lack of a star system, including the fact that there will be no miracles. It can’t be bashful about selling what it has, but it has to be smart, efficient and transparent about how it does that work.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEllen Belcher: Strickland, Kasich owe you answers
So there was this big meeting in Columbus last week about how much money Ohio is not going to have next year.
The politicians stayed calm during the tap dancing done by the Strickland administration presenter and throughout the matter-of-fact recitations from out-of-towners who noted that states across the country are drowning financially.
But if the committee members had expressed what they had to have been thinking, they would have asked, “Which way to the bar?”
In response to state Sen. Chris Widener, R-Springfield, who suggested that maybe local governments (which get a lot of their money from the state) need to be explicitly warned that the Ohio is in a “severe situation,” Rep. Vernon Sykes, D-Akron, said lawmakers should “not necessarily alarm the public about what could or might happen.”
“Severe situation”? “Alarm the public”? What “could” happen, as if there’s doubt that a shortfall of as much as $8 billion — representing 15 percent of the budget — isn’t real?
The willingness to downplay what’s ahead is stunning. People — voters who will be electing a governor and a new legislature — are entitled to know what’s coming down the pike.
Already the governor is giving a whiff of how his administration — if he’s re-elected — is going to spin things. “$.85 of every dollar goes straight back to Ohio’s communities,” read one PowerPoint slide that was presented.
The implication, only somewhat true, is that Columbus isn’t spending your tax dollars. What the Strickland people are not saying, however, is that, far and away, the most money in the state budget — more than 80 percent — is being spent on education and for health care for the poor under Medicaid.
Of course, the governor and lawmakers have a hugely significant say on how that money is divvied up and what it must be spent for, even as it is going to local schools and local doctors, nursing homes and hospitals.
There are a lot of people running for office this year — Republicans and Democrats, incumbents and challengers — who don’t want to talk about how tough things are going to get. Best to talk about that after you vote, they think.
The Ohio Society of CPAs — which has presented its own blueprint of the depth of the problem and has outlined options — has the right idea. It’s saying that it’s not giving money to candidates or endorsing anyone who won’t be specific about how they’d handle what will be an all-consuming issue as soon as lawmakers and the governor take office.
I know, you’ve heard this before; yes, there are always budget cuts that have to be made. But, this time is different. Coming on the heels of the cuts that have already been made, including reducing the state payroll by 4,500, this problem won’t be solved by cutting out travel.
Ohio has what the bean-counters call a structural deficit. Even if good times come back, there’s still not going to be enough money to pay the bills. That means either taxes have to go up or a huge amount of state spending has to be eliminated for a long time.
Moody’s, according to the Office of Budget and Management, says “that key economic indicators will not recover to pre-2007 levels until 2013-2016.”
Get ready, in other words, for schools, local governments and the state to be complaining about the need to cut back and hold down spending possibly until your sixth-grader is ready to graduate from high school.
After four years of actual declines in the amount of tax money the state has been taking in, the proceeds might tick up by a meager 2.3 percent in 2011.
The changes that are going to be required will touch everyone — parents of school children, students at state universities, public employees at all levels.
Do you think the state should be tougher on criminals? That’s going to be harder to do. Do you want low-income elderly people to get help to stay in their homes? Waiting lists for assistance are going to get longer.
Ohio candidates — especially Democrat Ted Strickland and Republican John Kasich — are scared to death that people are going to start asking hard questions of them. They want to plan their fundraisers and campaign commercials, not worry about how they’re going to raise or cut billions, with a “b.”
The politicians will do what they do best: obfuscate. If we let them, we deserve whatever they do to us.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: If Duke wins, Ohio schools could lose big
It shouldn’t be the Ohio tax commissioner’s job to decide what the law is with regard to utility taxes, but that’s basically what Duke Energy is asking.
The stakes are huge, potentially affecting every school district in the state.
Duke, the power company for most of the Cincinnati area, is asking the tax commissioner to junk the tax-calculating method prescribed in state law for utilities, substituting a method that would allow Duke to pay $40 million less in property taxes. Most of those tax dollars go to local schools.
This appeal process is incredibly unfair to schools. Duke is allowed to begin paying the lower tax rate it wants right away. The company doesn’t have to reveal its tax return or spell out its argument until a hearing, which might not come for years. In the interim, schools have no voice in the process.
The board that handles tax appeals has undergone deep budget cuts and is down to three examiners from 11 just three years ago. Attorneys involved in the case are estimating it could take six years before a final resolution.
Meanwhile, Cincinnati-area districts are scrambling to readjust to lost revenue. The argument Duke is making is similar to those made by other types of utility companies, most of which have prevailed in their efforts to cut their tax bills. Should Duke win, other power companies could quickly make similar requests, resulting in revenue cuts for school districts across the state.
Ohio law says that taxes are based on the historical cost of property. But there is a big loophole. If a company can persuade the tax commissioner that the historical cost standard does not represent a fair value for a property, it can propose a different yardstick.
Dating back to the late 1990s, utility companies have argued that basing their taxes on a method that estimates the current market value of a property is fairer. Doing so also generally slashes their tax bills.
The Ohio School Boards Association said it feels betrayed by Duke. The school board association’s Damon Asbury said utility companies were at the table back in 2005 when the latest rules were established. The utility’s position, however, is quite simply that it’s being overcharged.
This is a bad way for the state to do business. The legislature is the proper place for determining how companies are taxed. If elected lawmakers agree that a new method makes the most sense, so be it. Changing state law would presumably include a transition period to allow schools time to adjust their budgets for the lost revenue.
The legislature should get involved to protect Ohio’s kids from getting ripped off.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Wright brothers creep up
The Ohio Historical Society is, so far, sticking to its story that Thomas Edison beat out the Wright brothers for first place in the public vote for an Ohio spot in Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C.
On the surface, the outcome seems to be some sort of mix-up, given that Mr. Edison was a New Jersey resident. He was born in Ohio, but one measure of how he has been treated by history is that the five million pages of Thomas A. Edison papers are, quite appropriately, at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
The Ohio Historical Society has admitted that the first “final” vote totals it put out were wrong. Those numbers were printed in an editorial in the Dayton Daily News (though not in the online version) Thursday, July 8. The society said a recount was needed “due to ballots that were inadvertently not counted.”
Total votes counted eventually came to about 47,000, not the originally reported 37,000. That represents a percentage difference seldom seen even in Florida.
The new returns did not overturn the Edison “victory,” but they did narrow his margin from 1,237 to 898, suggesting that perhaps what the contest needs is a couple more recounts.
The most concrete change among the leading candidates was that Jesse Owens rose from fourth place to third, ahead of U.S. Rep. William McCulloch, of Miami County. But attention must focus on the top two, who ran away from the field.
Major errors in first reports are always an embarrassment to people running an election. But if the Historical Society wants to find some more votes and report a couple more recounts, that might be easier to explain and defend than the Edison victory.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Local History, Martin Gottlieb, Offbeat, Transportation
TweetGuest column: Property tax rollback will be a tempting target
This column was written by Karl Keith, Montgomery County auditor and member of the Democratic Party.
It was just a matter of time.
Sooner or later, someone was bound to propose eliminating Ohio’s tax rollbacks for residential properties in response to the state’s budget crisis.
In his June 28 column (“Dodging blame for this fiscal fiasco will be hard work”), Thomas Suddes listed the rollbacks as one of the big-ticket programs that could be cut to help plug the projected $8 billion hole in the coming two-year budget. Eliminating the rollbacks would save the state about $1 billion a year.
The rollbacks reduce real estate taxes on owner-occupied properties by a combined total of 12.5 percent and have been in place since the early 1970s. The state reimburses local jurisdictions from its general revenue fund for the loss in revenue due to the rollbacks. That totals more than $64 million annually to support local schools, libraries, human services, parks and a variety of other services in Montgomery County.
To propose the elimination of this tax break for homeowners would normally be considered “crazy talk.” Indeed, Suddes suggested that a governor who messed with the rollbacks would be committing political suicide.
Yet, a report last month from the Center for Community Solutions proposed a reduction in the state’s property tax-relief programs through some sort of means testing, removing or reducing the rollbacks on properties with higher values.
The report estimated that a reduction of 10 to 20 percent would save the state between $320 million and $640 million “with no adverse impact on most homeowners.”
A 12.5 percent jump in their tax bill would be shocking to any homeowner. Most would consider such an increase unacceptable. Taxpayers would be wise not to ignore as “crazy talk” any proposal to wipe out the rollbacks.
In fact, we should have seen this coming. Not long ago, all properties in Ohio received the benefit of a 10-percent tax rollback. Then the state legislature, as part of its 2005 tax reform package, removed the rollback for commercial properties.
Overshadowed by other elements of the reform package, eliminating this break for commercial property owners didn’t result in any great public outcry at the time. Some may see that as a precedent and hope that removing the rollbacks on residential property will be met with a similar response.
For some state officials, doing away with the rollbacks may be just too tempting to resist. This is a way to save millions of dollars each year without reducing any programs or forcing any service cuts.
And, since property taxes are administered and collected at the local level, most of the wrath from angry taxpayers would probably be directed toward local officials.
Eliminating the rollbacks would certainly help deal with the state’s budget dilemma, but it would do so by dumping a greater tax burden on Ohio’s homeowners. For the average Montgomery County homeowner, that burden would amount to about $350 per year in additional taxes.
There are other negative consequences as well. Local jurisdictions would realize no additional revenues as a result of this tax increase, yet they would undoubtedly find it more difficult to pass levies for schools and other agencies. A number of local school districts are already struggling to pass tax levies without this added burden.
Further, an increase in property taxes resulting from abolishing the rollbacks would add another bruise to an already weakened housing market.
The leaders of the special legislative commission formed to study ways to deal with the state’s budget woes have voiced their opposition to a tax hike. They need to be reminded that any reduction in the state’s property tax rollbacks is just that — a tax hike — one that homeowners should not be expected to bear.
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TweetEditorial: Animal lovers, farmers found a compromise
Deciding how to treat farm animals at the ballot box would have been like making sausage. You probably wouldn’t want to see it.
Now you won’t have to watch, what with the Ohio Farm Bureau and the Humane Society of the United States deciding that neither of them really wanted to pay for, or to fight, this fight.
The Humane Society was threatening to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall that would have regulated egg, pig and veal farms. Specifically, the amendment would have started restricting the tight cages that certain farm animals can be kept in. National and even international movements are building for more humane treatment of animals on the grounds that living things should not be abused and that “factory farm” practices are unhealthy for humans.
At literally almost the last hour before a filing deadline, the farm bureau, several associations representing farm commodity groups and the Humane Society worked out a compromise. The Humane Society wouldn’t file its petitions to go to the ballot, while the farming interests effectively would phase out certain practices:
• New egg farms can’t use the small “battery cages” where hens are packed so tightly that they can’t extend their wings. (Existing farms may replace their cages with similar ones.)
• New hog farms can’t use “gestation stalls” for pregnant sows after 2010, and the stalls will be phased out in 2025. (The stalls last at least 15 years.)
• By 2017, the state has to have standards for “group housing” (rather than small individual crates) for veal calves.
The Farm Bureau says that one in seven Ohio jobs is tied to agriculture, which is why agri-business and farmers were terrified of this measure being decided by people who have never set foot on a farm. They — probably rightly — believed that if voters saw commercials showing the crates and pens animals are kept in, farm advocates would have a hard time defeating restrictions.
At the same time, though, the Humane Society wasn’t sure it could prevail. It needed 400,000-plus signatures to get its proposal on the ballot; it had 500,000-plus, but because many signers just think they’re registered to vote (or say they are, even though they’re really not), the organization might have been short the necessary valid signatures.
By choosing not to file the petitions now, the Humane Society can hang on to the petitions it has already collected and, down the road, the names will still be valid and can be supplemented with more. If the organization had filed its petitions and had come up short, it would have to start all over again if it decided to bring the issue up again in a different election year.
In short, the Humane Society has something of an insurance policy if the terms of this agreement aren’t followed.
The Farm Bureau was anticipating having to spend $10 million to defeat the proposed constitutional amendment. Even with emotion on its side, the Humane Society would have had to spend time and money to counteract the other side’s arguments.
When the campaign was all done, we might have been more knowledgeable about farm animals and food production, but a lot of resources would have been wasted.
Agri-business is big business in Ohio. It is unquestionably influential in state policy making, sometimes to the detriment of small farmers and consumers. In pushing Ohio to be more cognizant of animal rights, the Humane Society also pushed the state to be more protective of food safety, public health and the environment. Many of the policies that are most abusive of animals are also detrimental to people, the air and water.
If the Humane Society is excessively focused on animal welfare, the farming industry can be too fixated on efficiency and production. Consumers are increasingly becoming conscious of that tug of war, and they’re favoring more checks on farms, especially the big corporate ones.
Ohio is better off for the Humane Society insisting on new, stiffer farm rules.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Rural Communities
TweetEditorial: Wrights still best pick for statue after vote
It comes down to Thomas Edison versus the Wright brothers for Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.
But whoever had the idea of letting adults vote — as well as students — has caused some trouble.
In a statewide vote open to the public, Mr. Edison got the votes of 14,261 Ohioans to be immortalized in one of the two statues Ohio gets. (The other one is not in contention). The Wright brothers came in second with 13,363 votes. That was far more than any of the other eight names on the ballot (who had been selected by a committee).
Among students alone, the Wright brothers won 7,180 to 4,884.
(These are all revised numbers since today’s, July 8, Dayton Daily News came out.)
An Ohio State University effort in behalf of Olympic legend Jesse Owens brought in 4,921 votes, for an un-Owens-like third place.
Fourth went to William McCulloch, a congressman from Piqua who fought for civil rights for blacks. He got 3,749 votes, perhaps splintering the Dayton-area vote. (Figures have not yet been released as to where the votes came from.)
The final decision as to who will be immortalized will be made by the legislature’s National Statuary Collection Study Committee, chaired by state Sen. Mark Wagoner, a Republican from the Toledo area.
The committee has said that it will consider the public vote to be the “greatest single factor” in its decision.
That standard pretty much eliminates anybody but the top two vote-getters, given that nobody else came close.
The committee has good reason to pause in a decision between the top two. Mr. Edison got fewer than a third of the votes, and the margin at the top was close (30.5 percent to 28.6 percent).
Another reason to pause:
Apparently a lot of the grown-ups don’t know that Thomas Edison was about as much an Ohioan as your cousin who left when he was 7.
That’s when Edison left. He did his childhood experimenting in Michigan, left home early and ended up in New York in 1868, 21 years after his birth. From there, it was all about New York and New Jersey. He’d be a great subject for a statue in the New Jersey part of Statuary Hall.
Some people might be under the impression that there’s also a problem in the matter of the Wright brothers’ connection to Ohio. After all, for many years, people who heard about the Wrights heard first about North Carolina, not Ohio.
But, as Daytonians know — not to mention an apparent plurality of the student voters — Kitty Hawk was just a place whose topographical and climatic characteristics suited the needs of the Dayton-based experimenters. They spent most of their lives in Dayton, doing business, conducting experiments and more.
There’s another case for the Wright brothers:
Ohio is trying to a carve out and sustain for itself a major place in the aerospace future. Dayton has been named the state’s aerospace hub. Between Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Air Force museum, and work at various universities and private companies, the investment and potential are both huge.
The more the state can connect itself with aviation in peoples’ minds, the better. Putting the Wright brothers front and center can only help.
Offering the public a chance for input on the statue was a fine idea. It focused attention on Ohio history, getting notice for admirable dead people who normally don’t get much. And it showed respect for the public.
But using the vote to narrow the field to two would be no act of disrespect, given how the vote came out.
And once it’s down to two, the adults whose job is to focus on the issue have a clear path.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Local Business, Local History, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Transportation
TweetGuest column: Cracks showing in Ohio’s passenger snail-rail plans
This commentary was written by Brent Larkin, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer’s editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.
Gov. Ted Strickland thinks his passenger rail plan for Ohio is chugging along quite nicely. “I believe we are now on track,” the governor replied, when asked about the controversial and pricey plan June 25 at the (Cleveland) City Club.
Of course, optimism is an election year requirement — especially when the outcome of that election is very much in doubt.
An abundance of anecdotal evidence tells me a sizable majority of voters who know of the governor’s rail plan think it’s a lousy idea. We know it’s an expensive one: a $400 million federal handout, a $17 million annual subsidy from the state budget and — I believe — cost overruns that eventually will total hundreds of millions.
All for a train network that will average 39 mph on the 250-mile trip from Cleveland through Columbus to Cincinnati.
The problems of cost and snail-rail speed will haunt the state for years to come. In the present, there are also troubling indications that, despite the governor’s rosy outlook, things aren’t quite “on track.”
On April 19, the Strickland administration was in such a hurry to get the rail project under way that it used a legal loophole to get permission from a badly divided State Controlling Board to award a $23 million no-bid contract for planning and design work to the transportation engineering and construction firm of Parsons Brinckerhoff.
ODOT spokesman Scott Varner correctly insists other firms competed for the contract, but those evaluations fell short of an actual bid process.
Ten days later, the California state auditor released a blistering audit of California’s high-speed-rail project, which said the poorly managed project had been plagued by unauthorized purchases, millions of dollars in misspent funds and contractors charging $268,000 for work outside the scope of the agreement with the rail authority.
The project manager of high-speed-rail planning for California is Parsons Brinckerhoff, which has a nearly $200 million contract with the state. Telephone and e-mail attempts to contact Parsons Brinckerhoff for comment on the California audit were unsuccessful.
The audit prompted one state senator to tell the San Jose Mercury News he fears the California rail plan may become “the ‘Big Dig’ west.” In 2008, Parsons Brinckerhoff and its partner, Bechtel Corp., agreed to pay $400 million to settle a lawsuit for their joint role as manager of the most expensive — and arguably worst-managed — highway project in U.S. history: the “Big Dig” central artery and tunnels in downtown Boston.
With interest, The Boston Globe pegged the project’s total cost at $22 billion — a tad more than the original $2.8 billion estimate. Globe editorials have been bitterly critical of Parsons Brinckerhoff’s role in the “Big Dig.” Just two weeks ago, the newspaper reminded readers that the company was allowed to “charge up billions of dollars in overruns for its own mistakes.”
ODOT’s Varner said Parsons Brinckerhoff’s work in California and Boston has been “very different” and “far more difficult and complex” than what it will do in Ohio.
In the other projects, Parsons Brinckerhoff is or was the project manager. In Ohio, the state will run the rail project, with Parsons Brinckerhoff performing an environmental impact study and doing railroad engineering and design work.
• Speaking of railroads, most of the railroad companies are extremely unhappy with the ground rules the Federal Railroad Administration is attempting to implement that would govern President Barack Obama’s $8.5 billion rail initiative.
Most of the new train service will use tracks owned by freight haulers. Crain’s Chicago Business recently reported the railroads like little about this whole arrangement and are hardly thrilled about sharing tracks with trains that chug along at 19th-century speeds.
• Meanwhile, contrary to repeated claims from ODOT officials that existing tracks can be eventually upgraded to accommodate speeds of up to 110 mph, evidence mounts that medium-speed rail will require spending billions on entirely new tracks.
In late May, CSX Transportation and federal rail officials reached an agreement that new track would be needed to carry passengers at speeds of 110 mph on a line linking Buffalo to Schenectady, N.Y. CSX also owns most of the track and right of way that would be used for passenger rail service in Ohio.
If and when Ohio’s passenger rail service begins, a trip from Cleveland to Cincinnati will take nearly seven hours.
A 1935 schedule of passenger service on the New York Central shows a daily train departing Cincinnati at 12:25 p.m. and arriving in downtown Cleveland at 5:45 p.m.
Do the math. Then explain to me how this is progress.
Permalink | Comments (32) | Post your comment | Categories: Guest Columns, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Transportation
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Kasich eager not to be Bush, Taft or Blackwell
Notes on the appearance before the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce of Republican candidate for governor, John Kasich, last Thursday, July 1.
• In the audience was former Gov. Bob Taft, also a Republican. Now working at the University of Dayton on education issues, Taft was also present when Gov. Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate, appeared before the same group a week earlier.
Taft got better treatment from the podium at the Democratic event.
Strickland waxed enthusiastically about his work on the Third Frontier program, and about the relationship their spouses have forged.
Kasich only mentioned Taft once, noting that he created the Third Frontier, the effort to bring researchers and entrepreneurs together to bring new products to the marketplace. That mention was made almost in passing, on the way to a point Kasich wanted to make about how the program should be run.
(He said he wants business people, not academics or bureaucrats, determining where the state’s money should go. As is, the decisions are made by a commission that gets recommendations based on vetting by the National Academies of Science.)
Kasich’s desire to keep his political distance from the last Republican governor is clear. But Taft shouldn’t be too insulted. The candidate was much more aggressive about distancing himself from the last Republican president.
Kasich referred to George W. Bush’s presidency as the time when the Republicans “lost their minds.”
(An editorial about Kasich’s speech appeared on this page on Tuesday, July 5. It can be found at DaytonDailyNews.com/go/opinionblog.)
But they were in office until the beginning of last year. And he’s presumably going to staff his administration with them. Won’t they need more time to recover?
• Kasich made a fair share of local references.
“God bless you,” he said, on the subject of Dayton’s openness to charter schools.
He talked about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the struggle to get technology “over the fence” and into the marketplace. He reported being lobbied on that by former state Sen. Chuck Horn, who has long pushed the cause. (Horn, a Republican, was at the appearances of both candidates for governor.)
Kasich half-jokingly called upon retired U.S. Rep. Dave Hobson to stop focusing on making money and get involved in the over-the-fence effort, lest Kasich make sure that some things that are now named after Hobson get renamed.
Also on local matters, Kasich again threw blame on Strickland for NCR’s departure. He said that if people don’t return his (Kasich’s) calls, “I show up on their doorstep.”
And he dropped some other local names, of both businesses and individuals. Truth is, though, that was the part of the speech when he used his notes most. He’s clearly in a learning stage about Dayton.
• Besides focusing on his record in Washington, he wanted to tell this audience of business people that his work for Lehman Brothers was a good thing, no matter how much political mileage Strickland might think he gets out of his tying him to Wall Street.
Without business experience, Kasich said, a politician becomes “cavalier” about taxes and other government burdens on business.
Anyway, he said, he was only one of 700 managing directors (not the guy who caused the collapse of the financial system).
• He did not say how he’d fix Ohio’s looming budgetary shortfall of $4 billion to $8 billion. He did reiterate, in general terms, his belief in cutting taxes and government. And he attributed the budget problem to “special interests” and mismanagement.
• Nobody who saw the speech would be the least surprised by his past success as a vote-getter. He communicates energy, enthusiasm, frankness, good will.
Though he abounds in ideological faith, he knows that only goes so far with voters.
He seems to be trying not to be J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican nominee for governor in 2006. Blackwell didn’t settle for distancing himself from Taft. He pretty much ran against Taft. He called the Republicans and the state to the right — hard. He had a specific tax plan that caused him so much political trouble he had to abandon it in the middle of the campaign.
Kasich talked much last year about eliminating the state income tax. But last week he kept his remarks about taxes general.
High on ideology, low on specific proposals, his campaign now is much about himself, the person. He clearly sees himself as an eminently salable product.
Not Blackwell. Not Taft. Not Bush.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: So what are Strickland, Kasich plans?
If you’ve been paying attention to news out of Columbus, you know that dark days are coming. As soon as the election is over in November, the politicians who have jobs will be hit with balancing the state budget, which could be out-of-whack by 15 percent or more.
Their decisions will matter to you. We all pay taxes, which could be raised; we all get certain tax breaks, which could go away; we all count on schools to educate the kids; the state subsidizes local governments, which send out the police and firefighters when we need them.
If elections were all they are cracked up to be, there would be a way to get Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and Republican challenger and former U.S. Rep. John Kasich to spell out the changes they favor — before we vote.
As states across the country — from New Jersey to New York to Illinois to California — are showing how not to respond to astounding financial problems, Ohio could distinguish itself. A cradle of common sense, the state really doesn’t have to stoop to political denial and partisan gridlock, resulting in, say, a threat to cut nearly all state workers’ pay to the federal minimum wage. (That could happen in California.)
Who knows? Maybe if Republicans and Democrats here could be grown up and come together to solve the problem, that would be a net gain for the state. If you’re a business in California right now, you can’t possibly be feeling good about the fiscal meltdown there.
Last month a nonpartisan research group out of Cleveland, the Center for Community Solutions, put out a report aimed at getting Ohio policy makers and the public to start thinking about the options going into next year. It’s clear-headed, authoritative and specific.
The conclusion? There are ways to make the numbers work, but the solutions won’t be popular. The report proposes a three-pronged approach for what it says is a $6 billion to $7 billion problem: raise taxes for one-third of the shortfall, claim money the state shouldn’t be forfeiting for one-third and cut spending to come up with the final third.
Critics, of course, will say that this is not the “balanced” solution the authors claim, that it relies too heavily on raising taxes. But here’s the thing: all those exemptions and credits that have been awarded to special interests and certain industries cost everyone else.
If things are falling apart, isn’t that a perfect time to ask if the dispensations make sense? “… (T)he sales tax alone has 54 exemptions (many of which go to business) that cumulatively reduce state revenues by approximately $5 billion annually,” the report says. And there’s no process for reviewing the exclusions periodically to see if they really result in the promised effect.
In the end, the important contribution the study makes is that it lays out Ohio’s landscape:
a) State taxes aren’t enormously high; it’s when you add state and local taxes together that Ohio looks bad (ranking 12th highest nationally as a percent of personal income and 26th highest on a per capita basis).
b) The effort to make the tax burden progressive through the state income tax is undermined by the state’s reliance on sales taxes, local income taxes and property taxes.
c) The share business pays of state and local taxes has dropped significantly, going from 40 percent in 1975 to 26 percent in 2010.
d) So far anyway, the new business tax — the CAT or commercial activity tax — is raising far less in revenue than the taxes it replaced.
Gov. Strickland and Rep. Kasich will keep resisting laying out what they plan to do. But they shouldn’t be allowed to get by with that. You deserve to know — before you vote — where they want to take the state.
The uncertainty Ohio faces is not whether it has problems, but what it’s going to do about them and whether it will learn from the ugliness that other places are sinking to.
Permalink | Comments (26) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Kasich history lessons not exactly gospel
John Kasich, visiting Dayton on Thursday, July 1, referred to George W. Bush’s presidency as the time when the Republicans “lost their minds.”
Never mind that it was the time when Rob Portman, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate this year, was in the thick of everything. The Almanac of American Politics described him as “one of the most important legislators in the House” during the first term. And he held two Cabinet-level jobs in Mr. Bush’s second term.
Mr. Kasich, the Republican candidate for governor, was confronting the fact that President Bush inherited a budget surplus and yet left President Barack Obama with a monster deficit. Mr. Kasich himself wasn’t in office at the time, having left the House of Representatives in 2001.
In his Dayton speech, he didn’t specify which of the Bush deficit-increasing policies he disagreed with. The tax cuts? The candidate still pushes tax cuts. The Iraq war? The Afghanistan war? The addition of prescription drugs to Medicare? Those are the big ones.
Mr. Kasich painted himself as the “chief architect” of the budget surplus at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. He was chairman of the House Budget Committee. He said he is “willing to share credit,” but he really didn’t seem to mean it.
He did, in fact, play a constructive role, being early to put together a plan for balancing the budget. But by most accounts, the hero of the surplus was the booming economy of the 1990s.
Actually, Mr. Kasich wants credit for that, too. He said that after the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, interest rates started to come down because the business community could see they were serious about budget matters.
Well, as President John F. Kennedy said, victory has a thousand fathers (but defeat is an orphan).
Still, some matters of history are beyond reasonable dispute. In 1993, the Democrats passed President Bill Clinton’s economic plan — with tax increases. Every Republican in Congress opposed it. Then-Rep. Kasich said it would have a terrible effect, costing jobs.
“This plan will not work,” he said then. “If it was to work, then I’d have to become a Democrat and believe that more taxes and bigger government is the answer.”
To this day, he insists that the Clinton program did have a bad impact. In fact, though, the near-recessionary economy that fostered President Clinton’s election turned around, and the president breezed to re-election. Then the economy really took off in his second term.
Perhaps the 1993 Clinton initiative doesn’t deserve credit. Clearly, though, the Kasich types — the true-believers in conservative ideology — were profoundly wrong. The disastrous consequences they predicted never happened.
Mr. Kasich presented himself well in Dayton, communicating the enthusiasm that has long been a hallmark. He made a fair enough case that he has a history of relative bipartisanship and a willingness to take up causes not typically associated with Republicans. As a congressman, he went after the Pentagon hard for wasteful spending on supplies, and he fought the B-2 stealth bomber.
But a theme of his presentation was that government “isn’t complicated;” that it’s a simple matter of combatting taxes, restraining spending and avoiding excessive regulation; that this approach “always” works; and that those who doubt that “love government.”
To hear him speak, it’s as if the 2008 financial meltdown that resulted in part from insufficient government regulation never happened. Nor did the Clinton tax-increase story that he experienced himself, and certainly not the New Deal.
All of which is not to say he couldn’t be a useful governor. Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo likened campaigning to poetry and governing to prose. He didn’t mean candidates are poets. One thing he meant is that candidates are not to be taken too literally.
In office, governors aren’t dictators. Political factors can make them — like presidents — into pragmatists despite themselves. And Mr. Kasich does have his share of admirable qualities.
But his eagerness to shoehorn history into his preconceived notions is not one of them.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Government can’t pull back hard now on economy
The national economy slowed irritatingly in June.
Job growth in the private sector was only 83,000, not enough to keep up with population growth. Overall job “growth” was actually negative, because the government no longer needed 200,000 people it had hired for temporary Census jobs.
The official “unemployment rate” dropped from 9.7 to 9.5 percent, but only because some people dropped out of the job market. Car sales slowed. Consumer confidence dropped. The stock market struggles. Unemployment claims rose.
On the upside,
the growth in private-sector jobs was double the rate in the month before and was the third-biggest in two-and-a-half years. And the difference between the first half of 2010 and 2009 was enormous: a half million jobs gained as opposed to 3.5 million lost.
Most economists weren’t seeing the dreaded “double-dip” recession, but just a too-slow recovery.
Truth is, though, if the numbers continue to look this lame, the current period will seem a lot like a recession. An often forgotten fact: the economy grew in many years during the 1930s. But that failed to make up for the huge losses in the early years. So we still think of the entire decade as the Great Depression.
In May, an editorial in this space said, “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.”
That judgment may have been premature. While a new stimulus now might also be premature, too, a debate looks like a good idea.
Minds might have to be opened gradually. We’ve heard so much lately about the evils of big government and big debt. With congressional and media Republicans in lockstep in absolute certitude that these are the evils of the moment, congressional Democrats are scared.
But in a time when state governments are facing budget cutbacks, when other governments in the world are retrenching on spending, and when millions of Americans are still on the economic edge, a retrenchment in Washington could have sharp downsides.
At the least, Washington needs to extend unemployment insurance again, rather than pretend the hard times are over. It was good to see U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, vote for extension. But the issue remains poisonously partisan in Washington.
Washington also needs to consider other forms of stimulus through the tax code. The tax credit for home-buyers clearly stimulated housing sales, as the cash-for-clunkers program helped with cars.
In the late 1930s, the nation saw a recession. Some economists attribute this to a governmental pullback from the recovery spending of the New Deal.
Other economists disagree. Despite all the numbers economists use, their field remains an inexact science at best.
But the 1930s and similar experiences need a close look now.
The stimulative efforts that have been undertaken so far have not enlarged the nation’s long-term debt hugely, because they have not created ongoing programs. (The new health care plan has done that, of course, with controversy over whether it also pays for itself.)
But the recession itself has made the deficit outlook much worse; a few more years of recession would do major harm.
In 2009, the nation managed to avoid dropping into a depression, quite possibly because of government action. It can’t now drop into a recession because of inaction.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National government
TweetEditorial: Greene County got caught ignoring law
When the legislature changes the law, the fallout can be complicated. But that’s no excuse for public officials to just ignore a new law.
To be sure, the move to put formerly independent law libraries under the control of counties has been a headache. It’s in that context that Greene County officials fumbled badly, prompting a rebuke from Ohio Auditor Mary Taylor.
Law libraries, quirky but useful resources that legal communities rely on, are changing.
For decades, the libraries have been open to those with business before the courts to assist with researching and preparing their cases. Today they also offer access to computer databases and serve as hosts for videoconference depositions.
But during the past five years, concerns about the future of law libraries led to intense lobbying in Columbus. Ultimately, lawmakers decided to revamp them — to protect them from state budget cuts and to assure better financial controls.
Boards consisting primarily of lawyers and judges have long independently run the libraries. Funding came from fines, court costs and, in some cases, private contributions. But critics worried about the trustees handling public money even though they were not accountable to either county or court officials.
Greene County’s library board employed a small staff consisting of a librarian and two assistants.
Legal groups first raised alarms about the libraries in 2005, when a provision added to the state budget began phasing out state financial support for them. After much debate, the legislature created new rules that restored funding but put counties in charge of paying library employees.
In addition, independent boards had to be disbanded in favor of new boards appointed primarily by county and court officials.
For a time in 2009, both governing boards were active in the transition. That’s where Greene County botched the money side of the equation.
The county, saddled with three new salaries, looked enviously at the library’s bank account. Since the library paid those salaries in the past and it had money in the bank, county officials reasoned that it could keep paying the employees for one more year.
County Auditor Luwanna Delaney, however, told county authorities their financing plan wouldn’t fly, pointing to directives from the state that she said were unmistakable. The library board could not just choose to spend its public dollars to pay salaries that state law required Greene County to pay.
Ms. Taylor’s office recently said Ms. Delaney was right and ordered Greene County to pay back $66,010 the library board had “contributed” to help defray salary costs.
The money has since been returned and the matter is resolved. It’s tempting to say “no harm, no foul.” But county officials tried to pull a fast one. Public dollars can only be spent as state law requires.
That was the driving reason behind lawmakers’ desire to give counties control over the libraries in the first place.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Immigration best left to the feds
Here’s one measure of just how sharply divided this country is on immigration issues:
Not long before Arizona passed a law obliging police officers to check the immigration status of people they have stopped, the city of Dayton made a rule that police officers may not inquire into the immigration status of those they pull over or pick up.
Police Chief Richard Biehl worries that if Daytonians fear that they’ll have to prove they’re legal, that’ll deter illegal and legal minorities from cooperating with or turning to the police for help.
(Many legal immigrants often find themselves without the right paperwork; the immigration bureaucracy is notorious for its snafus.)
The Arizona law — which also requires immigrants to carry immigration papers and makes being in this country illegally a violation of state, not just federal, law — has become a national controversy.
Polls show most Ohioans who have an opinion on the subject favoring such a law here. (But a quarter of respondents have no opinion.)
Yet intense outrage in some quarters outside Arizona caused the state to modify the new law.
One change says police may only investigate immigration status in connection with a “lawful stop, detention, or arrest.”
As a nation of immigrants celebrates the independence won by the offspring of immigrants from Great Britain, it continues to attract immigrants from around the world. When that stops, the experiment that began so long ago will be foundering.
But, just as immigration is the American way, so is attendant controversy and, in truth, discrimination against new populations arriving in big numbers.
Today the issue is particularly complicated by the failure of the government to control its Mexican border, to keep immigration orderly and legal.
The Arizona issue has roiled politics as far from that state as Columbus. Mayor Michael Coleman has banned sending city workers to Arizona.
And Columbus is considering a resolution calling on Washington to pass an immigration law that gains control of the border but allows long-term, law-abiding residents to stay legally.
Meanwhile, Fairfield, in Butler County, is telling the state to follow Arizona’s lead. Even before the Arizona law, Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones was pushing for a crackdown in Ohio. He has talked about a state referendum, which couldn’t be on the ballot until next year. He has the support of state Rep. Courtney Combs, R-Hamilton.
Some of these ideas are misguided. The best move at the state and local level is still to demand action from Washington, not to pretend there’s a state or local solution.
Only the feds can control the border. Only Washington can work out a system that applies equitably across the country and prevents the issue from pitting the states against each other.
Speaking of that, the Coleman policy is awful. States and cities should not be penalizing each other over policy differences. Let the federal courts decide if Arizona’s law is legitimate.
To do otherwise is to undercut the whole idea of the “United” States. Slippery slope, and terribly dangerous.
Among the traditions to be celebrated this weekend is that of having one policy toward the outside world — on behalf of all states.
President Barack Obama, having sent troops to the border, has called on Congress for a comprehensive approach to immigration. Most observers seem to think his heart isn’t really in it, at least in the short term.
He and others in Washington need to be pushed.
Let Ohio politicians focus on issues that are truly in their domain, even though those issues — like getting the state budget under control — don’t offer easy ways to grandstand, the way going after illegal aliens does.
At the same time, Washington needs to get the message that one of the results of its failures is the spread of really bad ideas.
Permalink | Comments (52) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National government, Ohio government
TweetKevin Riley: State pension system must change
Ohio has a math problem.
The numbers just aren’t adding up — on several fronts. The state’s next two-year budget will have a gaping hole. Of course, there’s disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about how big it will be, but both sides know that whether the shortfall is $6 billion or $8 billion, cutting a $50 billion budget by either amount will be wrenching.
Meanwhile, the state’s unemployment compensation fund is broke. To keep it going, Ohio is on track to have borrowed $3 billion from the federal government by the end of the year.
Finally, the state’s retirement plans are financially out-of-whack.
The problems with the retirement systems are complicated, and they go way beyond the retire-rehire phenomenon that almost everyone has heard about.
Politicians from both parties have been reluctant to push for the inevitable rule changes that are needed — raising the minimum retirement age, for example — which will put them in the cross-hairs of public-employee unions, government workers and tens of thousands of public-employee retirees.
That’s why the Dayton Daily News and Ohio’s other major newspapers have been working together on stories about the pension plans.
The effort among the newspapers has been unusual in that we’ve reported the stories as a group and published them on the same day. So on Sunday front pages in January, and again in June, newspaper readers in Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, Toledo, Cincinnati, Youngstown and Canton learned these things:
• Ohio’s public-pension systems cost local governments more than $4 billion per year, and several of the major pension funds are in trouble and need shoring up.
• While many workers in the private sector find themselves working for companies that no longer offer pensions, public employees enjoy generous benefits. Many can retire at relatively early ages, as soon as their early 50s.
• Police officers, firefighters and teachers may have to work longer before they can retire, and they also may have to pay even higher premiums for their health insurance.
• After some public employees retire, they “double-dip” by going back to work and drawing both their pension and a salary — sometimes without cleaning out their desk and changing jobs.
• The public school pension system rules actually encourage double-dipping, especially by superintendents and administrators. One-fourth of public school superintendents have retired but continue to work in public schools.
The eight newspapers shared information and resources to bring you the big picture of the pension problems the state faces. And each newspaper highlighted local stories that showed the impact close to home.
For example, here at the Dayton Daily News, we wrote about Kettering, where the school board is considering whether to rehire its superintendent after he retires.
Deciding how to make the pension plans sustainable tests the political will of our lawmakers in Columbus. In the end, you, I and the rest of Ohio’s taxpayers are on the hook for the pension benefits that lawmakers have promised and enhanced over the years.
While there is no question the system needs reform, there are powerful forces at work to prevent change.
Each pension fund has strong constituencies. Lawmakers themselves (and their relatives and friends) stand to lose if they’ve made public service their career.
No one on Capital Square will be excited about changes to a system that so many are counting on. If only out of political self-preservation, lawmakers will be tempted to put off hard decisions for as long as they can.
That’s why Ohio’s major newspapers have been on this issue, and why we’ll stay on it. We’ve committed to giving readers throughout the state ongoing coverage.
Ohio has taken its lumps in this recession and is trying to change its economy for the 21st century. The pension system has the potential to be a huge and long-term financial impediment. It’s time to fix it.
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TweetEditorial: Cityfolk Festival too good to lose
There are people who think it wouldn’t be summer without the Cityfolk Festival in downtown Dayton. Of course, the sun would still come up, but there would be a shadow.
The free — yes, free — three-day festival runs today, July 2, through Sunday. Begun in 1996, the event is quite possibly one of the best gatherings in Dayton.
The music and the crowds don’t get any better. Nowhere can you find so much free — there’s that word again — quality, eclectic, diverse entertainment in such close proximity. And if you stumble upon such a thing, the organizers probably modeled it after Cityfolk’s gig.
From blues to folk to jazz to organ (yes, organ this year), this festival is for serious and casual music lovers, as well as anyone who just likes to dance and people watch.
But pay attention: This could be the last year for the event.
That would be such a loss, such a step back from something that’s been built over more than a decade.
Begun in 1996 when the National Council for the Traditional Arts tapped Dayton to host its National Folk Festival, the Cityfolk Festival has gone mostly as organizers had planned. The National Folk Festival came here for three years. Then the locals created their own event, having introduced crowds to what a folk festival could be. In all but one year since, the show has gone on.
But Cityfolk is struggling to find the corporate sponsors that have allowed it to attract strong acts. It takes $350,000 to put on the weekend run, and numerous corporations that cumulatively have put up upwards of half of that amount have pulled out.
One option is to charge admission, but organizers have resisted. They like the come-one-come-all feel they’ve fostered, not to mention that roping off venues would be a logistical hassle and expense. The myriad volunteers who make the festival a success would rather be directing people to the right stage than checking wristbands.
This year especially is going to be special, what with the new pavilion at RiverScape having just opened. People who don’t often get close to the river will be drawn to the bike paths (you can walk them, too) and the river banks.
Those who’ve never checked out the programming at RiverScape might be enticed to find out about what’s happening throughout the summer downtown. (Incidentally, because the park group is funded with tax dollars, Five Rivers MetroParks has told Cityfolk that the festival can’t charge if it wants to be at RiverScape.)
Because of the money drought, Cityfolk is asking for donations. Expect to see volunteers selling lapel pins for $10. Take some extra beer money — and redirect it — if you want to keep the music playing. With as many as 80,000 people expected to come out, some serious cash can be raised.
While you’re there, also take a look around. Downtown isn’t out of the woods. In spite of the fact, however, that it has had more bad times than good lately, it’s holding on.
The newly paved streets, the spectacular new bridges, the bike lanes, the RiverScape pavilion and the landscaping are investments that insure that Dayton proper — the region’s namesake — isn’t closing down in the face of economic blows.
Cityfolk, MetroParks and Dayton have the right idea about sharing this holiday weekend in a way that leverages music, fireworks and a phenomenal urban park. Their partnership is a testament to the good — even in tough times — that can happen if everybody works together.
Treat yourself. Check out the shows, and find a volunteer to take your money. You’re bound to hear something you like.
Permalink | Comments (26) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Dayton's Arts Community, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Boehner’s off day makes Democrats’ day
Lots of news lately about newsy people saying things they maybe shouldn’t:
John Kasich saying he won’t lift a finger to keep LeBron James in Ohio. Mr. Kasich’s press aide saying Gov. Ted Strickland all but ignores cities, “having grown up in a chicken shack.”
Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his aides publicly trashing the president and the Obama administration. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, apologizing to BP for the government pressuring the company to make victims whole.
That last one earned a rebuke from, among others, House Republican leader John Boehner, of West Chester.
Enter now Rep. Boehner himself.
Democrats hope, and seem to think, that he blundered more than once in an interview he gave to a newspaper in Pittsburgh.
Rep. Boehner characterized the pending financial regulation bill as “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” He didn’t mean the financial collapse was like an ant; he meant the policy problems to be fixed were like an ant.
Either way, he has a problem.
President Barack Obama couldn’t get over it.
“That’s right,” the president said, “He (Boehner) compared the financial crisis to an ant. … Well, if the Republican leader is that out of touch with the struggles facing the American people….”
In the same interview, Rep. Boehner said the retirement age for Social Security — at which a person gets full benefits — should be raised to 70 (from 67 for people now 50 and under).
After various Ohio Democrats pounced on him, Rep. Boehner fairly noted that they were silent when Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, recently said that the Social Security age may need to be raised.
Fact is, though, the entire Boehner interview was on the flaccid side. Take, for example, this:
Referring to the Democrats, he said “They’re snuffing out the America that I grew up in. Right now, we’ve got more Americans engaged in their government than at any time in our history. There’s a political rebellion brewing, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since 1776.”
Really? Not in the Great Depression, when a tidal wave of public anger swept in a generation of Democratic dominance? Not in 1861, when the mere election of Abraham Lincoln set half the country off toward secession? Not in 1828, when a populist uprising put “westerner” Andrew Jackson in the presidency, ending the hold of the East Coast aristocracy on the presidency?
Whether the current conservative uprising that Rep. Boehner is talking about tops even the Democratic tidal waves of 2006 and 2008 or the arrival of the Ronald Reagan era in 1980 or other modern political tides remains to be seen. But since 1776?
Off day.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, Montgomery County, Ohio politics
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