Badin vs. Fredericktown
Miamisburg graduation 2012
Valley View vs. Greenville
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > August > 21
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Vet Metro Parks’ new chief publicly
Five Rivers MetroParks is at a fork in the stream.
Its executive director, Charlie Shoemaker, has announced he’s retiring in February, 2011. After 33 years with the agency, nine years as the top executive, he wants to fish more and work less.
The announcement comes in the wake of the park system renewing its levy last fall with 71 percent of the vote. Especially in these times, that outcome was an impressive endorsement of the work of a system that insiders sometimes affectionately called Three Rivers and Two Creeks.
(Mr. Shoemaker’s predecessor, Marvin Olinsky, was once visiting Pittsburgh and liked its “Three Rivers” brand. He came home and dubbed Montgomery County’s park system Five Rivers, a formal recognition of the Great Miami, the Stillwater, the Mad River and Wolf and Twin creeks. A little hyperbole is not so awful.)
If the levy vote had gone the other way, Metro Parks would have been in a bad way. The organization operates 25 parks and oversees 15,000 acres on a $20 million budget. Almost $18 million comes from local tax dollars.
Given that the levy runs for 10 years, Mr. Shoemaker is picking a good moment to step aside.
People who’ve watched MetroParks over the years still speak glowingly of Mr. Shoemaker’s former boss, crediting him with having the vision that the park system is a regional amenity that has to be more than picnic tables and clean green spaces. Without that thinking, RiverScape, a lovely urban park that is a spectacular addition to downtown, for example, might never have happened.
Mr. Shoemaker has made sure that RiverScape has continued to blossom on his watch, including overseeing the addition of its striking new pavilion.
And he has continued to create new venues — Second Street Market, for example — and new programming designed to help people make outdoor recreation part of their lifestyle.
Going forward, Five Rivers has big questions to confront.
What is its next big thing? What is its role in supporting a budding local outdoor recreation industry that is critical to growing interest in bikeways, blueways and parks? How can it continue to be a force for encouraging business development along the Great Miami downtown and elsewhere along it?
How can it promote partnerships, for example, with the University of Dayton, which wants to have a side door to its campus on the river? What is its relationship with other county park districts going to be in a time when money isn’t growing on trees?
Mr. Shoemaker’s successor has to have thoughts on all these issues and more. And the park district’s three commissioners need to make sure that the public hears the applicants’ pitches. Specifically, the commissioners need to create a committee of stakeholders to help vet candidates. And there need to be opportunities for the public to put questions to the finalists.
The City of Dayton has had a lot of success with just such a process. It has followed this format when it has picked its police chief and airport director. Some applicants won’t like the drill, but the parks belong to the community, and many people care about this selection.
Montgomery County doesn’t have mountains, a seashore or canyons, and that puts a special burden and responsibility on Five Rivers. The burden is that the district has to be creative in making green spaces, trails and fishing spots extra special. The responsibility is that nature and its wonders, whether they’re one-of-a-kind or more common, deserve to be protected and leveraged.
To keep a good thing going, MetroParks deserves a special leader. He or she will be taking over an organization that can help set the community apart, while also making it a more fun, vibrant place to live.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, Sports and Recreation
TweetEditorial: Election loss is different than a layoff
A federal effort to give people thrown out of work by the recession a break on health insurance was a good idea. But some people who definitely shouldn’t be are benefiting.
It’s hard to imagine that Congress was thinking that elected officials who were tossed from their posts by unhappy voters should get a subsidy for what’s popularly known as COBRA health care payments. Those losses at the polls certainly weren’t on a par with the crisis created when companies were shutting their doors and workers were being laid off en masse.
Federal law requires most employers to offer continuing coverage under their health plans for laid-off employees under COBRA. The goal is to keep ex-workers who can’t find affordable insurance in the open market insured until they find a new job. The catch, though, is that they have to pay the full cost of the premium, which is pricey. When the workers were employed, their employer typically paid a part of the cost.
This means that losing a job can come with a double-whammy — loss of income and extraordinary new costs for health insurance.
“Almost nobody can afford COBRA without a premium reduction,” said Lucious Plant, a workforce development administrator at Montgomery County’s Job Center.
As the recession threw droves of Americans out of work, Congress moved to try to blunt the blow by subsidizing their COBRA premiums. An ex-worker could pay just 35 percent of the cost of COBRA, with the feds kicking in the rest.
Subsequently, the Internal Revenue Service decided that even deposed politicians qualify for the help as long as they were booted from office while the subsidy was in effect between Sept. 1, 2008 and May 31, 2010.
Among those who took advantage of the program was Dayton’s ex-Mayor Rhine McLin, who has since taken a job as a consultant with Gov. Ted Strickland’s re-election campaign. The mayor’s job is part-time and pays about $45,000 a year, although Ms. McLin argues she treated the position as full-time, typically working more than 40 hours a week.
Ms. McLin might fairly argue that her electoral defeat felt like a layoff, but it is different than being downsized.
Paying the subsidy for politicians who have decidedly less responsibility than a big-city mayor makes even less sense. Dr. Gregory McDonald, for example, had a full-time job as a Springboro dentist while also serving as a Clearcreek Twp. trustee, a job that required him to attend a couple meetings a month.
Dr. McDonald, who does not offer health insurance to employees in his dental practice, obtained coverage through the township while he was a trustee. (That perk is why there’s hardly ever a shortage of people willing to run for the position of trustee.)
When he was defeated, like Ms. McLin, he sought federal stimulus help to reduce the cost of COBRA.
The IRS’ rationale is that even elected officials who worked just a few hours a month are theoretically “on call” to perform duties any time.
This piece of the program is embarrassing, but it shouldn’t define Washington’s effort. Nobody has tracked how many former elected officials obtained subsidies, but it’s hard to believe the number is more than a tiny fraction of those who have been helped by the program.
Ohio was among the states hit hardest by job losses in the recession. The U.S. Treasury reports 89,000 Ohioans received subsidies in 2009 and part of 2010. That ranks 7th-highest among all states. Nationally, 2.1 million people participated.
Congress was trying to respond to a special and a spectacular economic crisis. The people who implemented the plan were the ones who compromised it.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Miami Valley Politics, Scott Elliott
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