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 > October
October 2010
Editorials: Don’t believe it just because you hear it
2010 ELECTION
As the 2010 campaign comes toward an end, efforts to reach voters reach a peak of intensity. A little roundup of late developments:
• President Barack Obama returns to the state, with the goal primarily of convincing people who voted for him in 2008 — in Democrat-rich Cleveland — that this is an election worth their attention.
Gov. Ted Strickland has made the decision not to run away from the president, as some Democrats have. This has concrete importance.
After supporting Hillary Clinton in 2008, Gov. Strickland has developed a close connection with the president. If he wins this time, the tie will be even tighter. The governor will press the president for one more round of federal aid to the states. His appeal will be that if places like Ohio are forced to have huge layoffs and dramatically cut spending, that will undermine the whole idea of the original federal stimulus. In that round, Gov. Strickland was a leader in getting money directed to the states.
• A news event like a presidential visit, or a statewide candidate coming to town, or a debate, press conference or interview is called “free media” by the politicians. In this last weekend, though, they’ve ramped up the “paid media,” meaning television and radio ads, though mailers sometimes figure in.
On Thursday, the bipartisan Ohio Elections Commission made news in a way that reminds voters to be deeply skeptical of what comes their way, especially at this late stage, when there’s no opportunity to undo the untruths.
A three-member panel of the seven-member commission made rulings against several claims that have been widely heard in the campaign. Taking hits were mainly Republicans (including two candidates, Jon Husted and Josh Mandel, who are recommended by this newspaper). In other cases, Democrats have been gigged.
The panel came down three times against state Sen. Husted, of Kettering, or the state Republican Party acting in his behalf. At issue were his claims that his opponent, Democrat Maryellen O’Shaughnessy, raised her own salary, padded “her own pockets” with furniture purchases and took money from an indicted politician.
The panel found “probable cause” to conclude that each charge is false. And it forwarded the issue to the full commission. The votes were 2-1 on the first two charges (with a Democrat and an independent voting against a Republican) and 3-0 on the third.
This should be embarrassing for Sen. Husted, considering he wants the job of overseeing the state’s elections.
• State treasurer candidate Josh Mandel got appropriately slapped by the panel (2-1) for suggesting that his Democratic opponent, incumbent Kevin Boyce, is a Muslim who “admitted” he announced a certain job opening only at a mosque.
• A panel also unanimously gigged Mr. Boyce for falsely quoting Mr. Mandel as saying the state treasurer has no role in creating and retaining jobs in Ohio.
• In the race for governor, the panel upheld the Strickland camp’s charge that John Kasich got an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association. That is true, but dated, information. Mr. Kasich’s current rating is a “B.”
The Strickland people see gun rights as hot in southeast Ohio, where the governor’s opposition to gun control is seen as working in his favor. They like to refer to his own “consistent ‘A’ record from the NRA — and his current A+.”
A+? Good grief.
• Do you suppose anybody has done a study on how a person’s television viewing preferences affect voting habits?
It would be interesting to see if, for example, Bill Beagle, the Republican candidate for the state Senate against incumbent Fred Strahorn, carries what might be called “the ‘Jeopardy’ vote.” An unsystematic check of the airwaves suggested that Mr. Beagle has been particularly visible during breaks from that program.
Many candidates have concentrated their spots in the pre-prime-time hours.
Of course, the Beagle ad is one of those hyper, over-the-top attacks — piling up charge after charge (about taxes), complete with an unflattering picture of his opponent — that no sophisticated adult would take seriously.
And yet some people might tell you that “Jeopardy” watchers are pretty smart. This definitely calls for a post-election study.
Permalink | Comments (41) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Electronic records can be confidential
Of all the problems with electronic medical records, the sort of breach that happened at Miami Valley Hospital is the easiest to fix.
The hospital recently notified Brennan Eden that four people inappropriately accessed his medical records. The hospital says the four offenders have been disciplined. Meanwhile, Miami Valley has to report the lapse to federal authorities.
Mr. Eden is 19 and was the driver in a spectacular August crash on I-675 that was caught on police video. His survival is both a miracle and a mystery, which presumably explains why some people went prying.
A hospital official whose job is to protect patient privacy — and who can do audit trails to see who’s looking at records, which aren’t possible with all-paper records — brought the case up to hospital managers, noting that some 200 people had tapped into Mr. Eden’s records.
Upon hearing that, Mr. Eden’s mother told the Dayton Daily News that she feared that number suggested there could have been major snooping.
That only four people were found to have disobeyed the rules is a reminder of how many people have a role in a critical patient’s care. The very fact that so many need to know sensitive patient information is one of the reasons that there has to be scrupulous enforcement of patient privacy.
Obviously, when you go to a hospital (or a doctor’s office or pharmacy or nursing home), you don’t expect your medical records to be available to any staff person who wants to take a peek. But you still should want those records to be electronic.
The big picture is that digitizing medical records is almost always best for patient care, but especially in emergencies. The situations where having quick, electronic access to records can be a life-and-death matter are many. Think about, for instance, a patient who is unconscious; if he’s is unsure about the medicine he’s taking or what tests he’s had; if multiple doctors are treating a patient; or when prescriptions can interact and cause harm.
As part of the federal stimulus package, the Obama administration dedicated $19.2 billion to help medical providers go electronic. Some places are moving faster than others.
Locally, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association snagged $3 million-plus of that funding to help doctors and clinics in Montgomery, Preble, Miami, Darke, Shelby, Auglaize, Mercer and Allen counties make their records more accessible.
Still, there are big problems ahead. Medical organizations have different operating systems, meaning that not everybody can talk to other entities yet. Like everything digital, security is a huge issue. Laptops with critical data on them can and have been stolen. Geeks and crooks will find ways to hack into systems. Ethical guidelines about how data can be used for research and to make money are fuzzy.
One expert on medical privacy has said that healthy people care more about privacy, while sick people worry more about doctors having all the information they need to know — notwithstanding the downsides to electronic access.
Professionals can err on the side of taking good care of people while still giving them the protection they deserve. But the growth curve for doing that won’t be quick, and it does require individuals to at least follow fundamental rules about patient rights.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Health Care
TweetKevin Riley: Dayton has advantages in fight for shuttle
A 747 flies low in the sky over Dayton, its engines roaring.
As you look up, you see the space shuttle Atlantis attached to the top of the jumbo jet. The plane and its unusual cargo slowly descend over the city on a path that takes it to the runway next to the Air Force Museum, where thousands of people are waiting.
It lands before the cheering crowd as Dayton celebrates its acquisition of one of the most coveted historical artifacts in American history.
Sound far-fetched? Not to those working to get one of the retiring space shuttles for the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
NASA announced a couple of years ago that the shuttle fleet would be retired and then given to museums for display. The agency says 21 institutions want one. That’s a problem because there are just three flying shuttles. (A fourth, experimental shuttle that never flew in space is already on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.)
So does Dayton have a chance?
Yes, but the competition is stiff.
The Smithsonian has already been promised one of the flying shuttles, which leaves just two.
(The Smithsonian’s experimental shuttle will be given away, a consolation prize of sorts.) Besides the Air Force Museum, a reasonable short list of serious contenders includes:
• Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
• Johnson Space Center in Houston.
• Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
• The Museum of Flight in Seattle.
• Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York.
NASA has been tight-lipped about any favorites, and no decision is expected until the summer of 2011 after the last scheduled shuttle flight.
Not shockingly, the politicians have gotten involved. During the summer, members of Congress from Texas and Florida tried to force NASA to award the shuttles to their states when they slipped criteria for choosing the winners that favored their states into a bill. Ohio’s congressional delegation got that nixed.
But exactly how the decision will be made is anybody’s guess.
Advocates believe the case to bring a shuttle to Dayton is strong, and the effort is helped by the reputation of the Air Force museum.
Among Dayton’s other selling points:
• The centrally located Air Force museum is free and attracts well over a million people per year. Other sites charge for admission and/or parking. For example, New York’s Intrepid Museum charges $22 for adults, according to its web site.
• The Air Force museum has the staff and facilities to handle a complicated project like preparing a space shuttle for display. Its curators are renown for handling historic aeronautical displays. In fact, the museum is deep into planning the construction of a new building where a shuttle could go.
• The government wants the shuttles to be centerpieces of strong education programs. The Air Force museum has plenty of programs, many with a STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — emphasis. For example, the new Air Camp program launched last summer by the University of Dayton, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Sinclair Community College has to be counted as the sort of initiative NASA says it wants to see.
• Ohio’s politicos and some the state’s astronauts are making sure they’re heard at NASA and the White House. Some of them have been sporting a “Land a Shuttle in Ohio” button. It also doesn’t hurt that the decision will be made a year before the president is up for re-election, and he needs to carry Ohio.
What are the big challenges for a community that wants the shuttle? Among them is actually getting it to your museum. The orbiter is huge, and it has to arrive on the back of a 747. Then the shuttle has to get to its museum resting place.
Dayton offers a near-perfect solution with a runway right next to the museum, while other communities would be faced with the prospect of a transporting the shuttle from an airport and moving power lines, closing roads and testing bridges for the load.
One other big factor could help Dayton. The formal request for a shuttle was made by Secretary of the Air Force Michael B. Donley — not by the museum or the Dayton community. The Air Force would house the shuttle at Wright-Patt because that’s where its premier museum is located.
The Air Force wants a shuttle because of its longstanding work with the shuttle program, including providing astronauts and spending billions in support of NASA. And it would be a tribute to the many men and women of the armed forces who contributed to the program for the Air Force to get a shuttle. That’s important when some of the competitors are private museums, perhaps just looking to make a buck.
The Air Force is most interested in Atlantis because that shuttle flew many Air Force-related missions that included putting military satellites into space.
So in the quest to bring a shuttle to Dayton, we have a powerful ally, one that has even offered to fly the shuttle here on the back of one of its own planes.
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TweetGuest column:Every cancer has a color, but research is very pink
This commentary was written by Fairborn resident Stephanie Ely, who is on medical leave from Wright State University, where she has worked for 14 years.
My best friend is a 12-year breast cancer survivor. I was reminded of her during “Monday Night Football” by the pink chin strap on the quarterback. Or maybe it was by the pink shoes on the defensive end. The pink gloves on the wide receiver?
Anyway, I thought of her and what great support she has given me since I was diagnosed eight months ago with pancreatic cancer.
I wear a purple wristband, not unlike the yellow ones made popular by Lance Armstrong and his LiveStrong campaign. Purple is the color designating pancreatic cancer.
You don’t see a lot of pancreatic cancer survivors wearing purple because there aren’t many.
Each year in the United States, more than 43,000 people are diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas.
While the Centers for Disease Control lists cancer as the second-leading cause of death in the United States, pancreatic cancer is, according to the American Cancer Society, the fourth-most lethal of cancers. Who knew?
According to American Cancer Society projections, in 2009 there were 562,340 cancer deaths overall, including 159,390 deaths from lung cancer; 49,920 from cancers of the colon/rectum; 40,610 from female breast cancer; 35,240 deaths from cancer of the pancreas; and 27,360 from prostate cancer.
Where are the pearl colored (lung), brown, blue (colorectal), and light blue (prostate) ribbons?
Susan G. Komen’s foundation, along with the efforts of many, has made impressive strides against breast cancer, leading to better detection and a lowered mortality rate.
However, in its Annual Report to the Nation, the National Cancer Institute reported that in women, while incidence rates have decreased for breast cancer, they have increased for lung, thyroid, pancreatic, bladder and kidney cancers, as well as for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma and leukemia.
So, who is looking out for those of us not in the pink? Do we need our own marketing firm? Celebrity backer? Water bottles, T-shirts, and bumper stickers announcing our cause?
Not really. But a call to our U.S. senators and representatives can help. A vote in support of the FY11 Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations bill would mean continued funding of medical research with an emphasis on getting treatment options into the hands of those of us who need them most.
This month, 600 volunteers from 50 states representing the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy affiliate organization of the American Cancer Society, visited lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to encourage their support of this appropriations bill.
It is the federal government that is the major source of cancer research funding — not retail sales of cause-related items, or phone solicitations for contributions, or 5K run pledges.
This funding — currently $5 billion — is funneled through the National Cancer Institute. And Congress controls the institute’s funding.
Last year, Congress allocated nearly $600 million for breast cancer research. Pancreatic cancer received $89.7 million. Only kidney (green ribbon) and bladder (yellow ribbon) cancers received less than that.
If you read a newspaper or watch television, you’ve heard these statistics: the American Cancer Society predicts that one out of two American men, and one out of three American women, will get cancer.
When you, or your mother, brother or best friend gets that dreaded announcement from a doctor, you’ll join the millions of us who rely on tomorrow’s cutting-edge research.
These days I’m holding my breath for the breakthrough that will make the difference for pancreatic cancer survivors. And I’m turning purple.
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TweetEditorial: Voters should know who’s paying for ads
2010 ELECTION
As the election approaches, Ohio gets more attention — again. And yet voters elsewhere in the country have been bombarded with even more campaign messages than people here. This is partly because there are no hot congressional races nearby, and partly because no billionaires are trying to buy a job.
In little Connecticut, Republican pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon
has spent $40 million for a U.S. Senate seat. (Her Democratic opponent is on track to spend $5.5 million.) In California, Republican Meg Whitman has spent $163 million for governor. (Her opponent has raised $36.9 million.) In Florida, Republican Rick Scott is in for more than $60 million for governor, vastly more than the Democrat. And still more will be spent in the homestretch.
As for Congress, look at one district in northeast Ohio, the 16th, which includes Canton. It goes Republican by 8 or 10 percentage points in a close presidential election. But it elected Democrat John Boccieri in 2008. He voted for the Obama health care package after opposing an earlier version. Both parties have seen him as vulnerable since Day 1. Money is pouring in from outside the district, not in the form of contributions to the candidates, but in the form of ads purchased by outside groups. The Democrats as a party have spent just over $1 million on behalf of Rep. Boccieri, and the Republicans $900,000 for Jim Renacci.
National labor unions have put in $1.5 million for the Democrat. On the Republican side, there’s been almost $200,000 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, $500,000 from the national small-business lobby, $638,000 from an anti-abortion group called the Susan B. Anthony List and $642,000 from the 60 Plus Association, a conservative organization that focuses on seniors.
Overall, about $7 million had been spent by this week. Not long ago, that would have funded an entire statewide campaign for governor or senator.
Spending by outside groups has been the special feature of this campaign year. The U.S. Supreme Court just unleashed corporations to pretty much spend as they please, so long as they don’t give big sums directly to candidates.
An effort was made in Congress to at least require the corporations to disclose their contributions, but that effort was rushed, and it failed. So vast sums are coming to Republicans from untold sources, substantially through the efforts of former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove.
One result is that many Ohioans have received multiple mailings trashing Democratic senatorial candidate Lee Fisher for his alleged positions on taxes. Those checking out the return address see a reference to Americans for Tax Reform in Washington or Crossroads Grassroots, also in Washington.
Crossroads is associated with Mr. Rove. Republican candidates have benefited most by this kind of spending. On overall spending, however, Democrats were holding their own nationally, at least until the last week. Their own party organizations have more money than their Republican counterparts; and party organizations are still the biggest players.
One result of all the national money is to limit the importance of the candidates’ own campaigns and of the candidates’ pre-campaign standing at home. In some congressional races, ads from the outside are credited with creating a serious contest where otherwise there was none.
That isn’t all bad. But when the money comes entirely from outside a district — as opposed to partially, as is usually the case for candidates — and it’s used to fund ads loaded with garbage, that sure isn’t all good.
Moreover, the developments are making a mockery of existing campaign finance laws. Candidates for Congress can only accept contributions up to a certain size. Yet contributions of unlimited size are funding ads in support of specific candidates.
After the election, Congress needs to take a hard look at the whole campaign-finance scene. It must pass disclosure requirements, at least.
For the past decade and more, support for disclosure has been the conservative position on campaign spending: Let’s not infringe on the rights of people to participate in elections, so long as everybody knows who’s giving to whom.
Somehow that ethic disappeared during campaign 2010.
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: U.S. House seats at stake in race for governor
2010 ELECTION
This column and this page (and blog) have devoted a lot of attention to a subject with the offputting name of “redistricting,” which is about how legislative districts are drawn, which has a huge effect on who wins and often a big effect on how the politicians behave.
That attention has been concentrated on the state legislature. But this particular piece is about congressional districts. Big things are in store in that realm, and little attention has been paid to the fact that much depends on the outcome of this election.
Congressional districts are drawn — after every Census — in much the way a bill is passed: the legislature approves a map, and the governor signs or rejects. Unlike the system for designing state legislative districts, this allows for the possibility that both parties will play a role.
However, if John Kasich wins for governor and the Ohio House of Representatives goes Republican, as is widely expected, the Republicans will have complete control of the process. (The Senate is locked in GOP hands.)
The task at hand will be drawing a map with two fewer districts. Ohio continues to lose population relative to the rest of the country.
For the Dayton area, the issue this creates may be simply this:
Will the 3rd District — based in Montgomery County and now held by Republican Mike Turner — be put hopelessly out of reach for Democrats?
The district is already good for Republicans. It gave John McCain 51 percent of the vote in 2008. But it’s not hopeless for Democrats if there’s an open seat and they have a good candidate. Other, similar districts have Democratic reps occasionally.
The 3rd will be growing in size, adding perhaps 70,000-plus people. Most of the areas adjacent to the district are Republican. However, if the new map were designed to take in parts of Clark County, and if the district lost some of the suburban and rural areas it has now, it might be kept competitive.
But, of course, the Republicans would have no reason to do that if they don’t have to compromise.
Statewide the stakes are bigger.
The Democrats now hold 10 seats to the Republicans’ eight. That’s a fluke. Democrats have had two great elections in a row. After 2010, the Republican total could be 12 or higher. That would be in keeping with the plans of the Republicans who drew the map a decade ago.
They weren’t able to get every possible advantage for themselves, because Republican Gov. Bob Taft, who was nearing the end of his first term, wanted to make sure they didn’t eliminate the district of then-Rep. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who was saying that he’d run for governor if he was redistricted out of office.
The Republicans ended up with some districts that weren’t as safe as they might have hoped. Then population shifts helped the Democrats. Franklin County started going Democratic, having been a Republican stronghold. And Hamilton County trended Democratic, as Republican voters left for outlying counties. Then came the national Democratic waves.
What happens now? Michael Sargeant, a Democrat who watches these things for a national organization, told Politico, an online Washington news outlet, that, “If Republicans are in control, they could reduce to three or four the number of Democratic seats in Ohio, by packing Democrats into urban areas.” He’s talking about the Republicans reducing the number of seats Democrats can win by giving the Democrats huge margins in a few districts.
Having the Democrats limited to three or four districts would be quite a development for a state that, as a whole, swings back and forth between the parties. But the pressure on a Republican governor and legislature to create that kind of map would be intense if you have 12 or more Republican members of Congress vying to stay alive in a state with 16 districts.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Kasich makes unfair charge against DeWine
2010 ELECTION
The race for Ohio attorney general is of special interest to a lot of people in the Dayton region, especially Greene County, because Mike DeWine is the Republican candidate. The large DeWine family has deep roots in Greene County, and a vast network of friends and connections. Before he was a U.S. senator, lieutenant governor and member of Congress, Mike DeWine was a state legislator and, before that, the county prosecutor.
As is true of a lot of successful politicians, he has local friends and admirers across the political spectrum, even in the liberal bastion of Yellow Springs.
Unfortunately — or not, depending on how you look at it — his opponent is an exceptionally accomplished and able incumbent.
Democrat Richard Cordray has received national attention for his successful protection of Ohio interests against bad actors on Wall Street. And he has done so without getting a reputation as a headline-obsessed hot dog like, say, a couple of recent New York attorneys general. He has managed to combine prudence and aggressiveness.
So, if this race is one that a lot of people in the Dayton community pause over, that’s understandable.
Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich did not strengthen the case for Mr. De-Wine when he mentioned him at a campaign event Tuesday, Oct. 26, in Washington Twp. On the contrary, he demeaned him with the worst kind of praise.
“We’re going to need his help,” the candidate for governor said. “Because, if you think they are fighting to stop my election now, just wait until we start putting the policies in that reflect our philosophy of government…. They will fight, and Mike DeWine will stand up and fight for us.”
To identify the attorney general as a member of the governor’s team is to make an embarrassing charge against him.
Mr. DeWine spoke at the same rally and didn’t take offense, of course.
Nevertheless, the whole idea of electing the attorney general is that he or she is supposed to be independent of the governor. Mr. Kasich is not running for president; he doesn’t get his own AG.
And Mr. DeWine is not running for lieutenant governor. As attorney general, he would have his own operation and would be officially accountable only to voters.
Certainly politics figures into the behavior of elected officials, even AGs. Mr. DeWine, for example, wants Ohio to join efforts to overturn the new federal health care program; Mr. Cordray does not. That split is partisan and is common across the country.
Still, a certain amount of independence from the party team is expected in the making of legal, constitutional and other decisions. Campaigning as if the AG is some sort of aide to the governor demeans the office. There are other ways for the two candidates to campaign together.
Worth remembering here is that the attorney general is the state’s lawyer, if not the governor’s. If a state policy enacted by the legislature and governor is challenged in court, the attorney general’s job is to defend it, like it or not. Mr. Cordray has had to defend policies he didn’t necessarily like.
Still, the job is an important one with lots of room for individual judgment. If Mike DeWine wins this election, it might be because a lot of people think that he has a kind of principled independence that John Kasich apparently thinks he does not have.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Worst illegal drivers can’t get off the hook
Moraine Mayor Bob Rosencrans was killed in a tragic accident by a driver who shouldn’t have been on the road.
The Dayton Daily News checked into the driving record of Mark A. Myles Jr., 21, and found that he has had 17 traffic violations since 2003, including repeated citations for driving without a license. The dilemma for police who see this situation again and again is how to keep the offenders from getting behind the wheel of a car.
Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl says he noticed an epidemic of unlicensed drivers in Dayton upon arriving in town. Since 2008 when Chief Biehl took his job, more than half of the city’s traffic violations annually have been written for driving without a license.
The number of offenders driving without a license in the entire Dayton area is on the rise, up 24 percent in the past five years. Not surprisingly, those drivers are often involved in accidents.
A Dayton Daily News investigation found that, so far this year, half of Dayton’s 10 fatal accidents involved an unlicensed driver. Nationally, about 20 percent of fatal crashes involve a driver who isn’t licensed.
Maybe this is an unusual year; but certainly the trend — and the difference with what’s happening nationwide — is worth responding to.
Not all people who drive without a license are in that spot because they have bad driving habits. A license can be suspended for all sorts of reasons — including a host of non-driving offenses like failing to pay child support. All told, there are 46 reasons a license can be taken away.
Another explanation is that just the cost of a simple speeding ticket can be too high for some people, eventually leading to the offender losing his license for not paying. Then there’s the added cost of a license reinstatement fee. Some people are so awash in fines that they give up on ever driving legally.
Chief Biehl says officers cite drivers for not having a license anytime they are discovered, even if the subject was pulled over for a different offense. It’s fairly common for officers to ignore a minor offense and instead cite a driver for not having a license; that charge typically has greater penalties. Too often, however, it isn’t a deterrent to people who think laws are for someone else.
The Dayton city prosecutor’s office four years ago launched a license intervention program. Two employees of the prosecutor’s office review court records and identify offenders who could get their licenses back within 120 days. If the offenders agree to follow a plan to get legal, the fine for their latest citation is dropped.
The program has worked with 5,500 offenders since August 2006 and cleared more than 3,000 license suspensions.
Unfortunately, that program doesn’t address the hard-core offenders, the ones who lost their licenses for repeated traffic violations like speeding, ignoring stoplights or driving while intoxicated.
Prosecutors have seen drivers with as many as 30 citations for driving without a license. While they may ask for those offenders to get jail time, judges tend to balk at filling the jail with non-violent offenders.
Chief Biehl says seizing unlawful drivers’ cars can slow repeat offenders. But towing a car is time consuming and takes officers off patrol. Plus, determined violators put their cars under family members’ names, borrow vehicles or steal cars to get around.
Even if the legislature were to increase the penalties for, say, causing an accident while driving under suspension, the worst offenders probably won’t be frightened into driving legally and responsibly. But they could be more severely punished if they hurt someone.
Repeated driving offenses aren’t the result of bad luck. They are a sign that drivers don’t think the law applies to them. But if there’s effectively no penalty for ignoring the rules unless and until you kill somebody, that invites drivers to do as they please.
At some threshold — before 17 offenses — locking up an offender and seizing his car could be well worth the cost and time it takes.
NOTE: The original version of this editorial incorrectly stated that the license intervention program was run by the county prosecutor’s office. It is a program of the city prosecutor.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Are map-drawing reformers finally having impact?
Democracy works in mysterious and fascinating ways.
So here we have the 2010 election, which will determine, among other things, who controls the drawing of Ohio’s legislative districts for the next decade. One political party or the other will have complete control of the process, at least as it relates to seats in the Ohio House and Senate (that is, not Congress).
The last half decade has seen multiple efforts — or, one might say, one constant effort — to change the rules so that one party does not control everything. You might think that would be an easy reform to achieve. The surface appeal is pretty obvious, isn’t it?
But the reformers — representing both parties, and meeting opposition in both parties — have seen only failure. They’ve been thwarted both by voters and by the legislature in a saga too long to retell here.
The legislators clearly see the public as indifferent to redistricting reform. And yet here we are: Both candidates for secretary of state — and some for other relevant offices — are so publicly committed to reform that the possibility looms that the next redistricting round will take place somewhat as if reform had been actually been enacted.
That would have seemed inconceivable in days past.
Under current rules, the lines are drawn by a five-person commission whose majority goes to whichever party holds two of the following three posts after an election in a year ending in zero: governor, auditor and secretary of state. In the past, all members of the commission have always been expected to vote for the map that gives their party the most advantages (consistent with the minimal requirements of law).
That expectation is basic. Redistricting is the most partisan of all government functions. If you have the party label, you vote the party position on this one. Period.
But in this election Democratic secretary of state candidate Maryellen O’Shaughnessy says, “I will balance the state legislative districts by conducting an open, competitive process.” Taken seriously, that’s a simple rejection of the traditional role.
Her reference to a “competitive process” is an embrace of the biggest proposal of certain reformers. It would be make Ohio a national leader in reform.
It entails an open contest to see who can design the map that (1) has the most districts that might be won by either party, (2) has nearly equal numbers of Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning districts, (3) recognizes natural boundaries, such as county lines, and (4) doesn’t have weird, squiggly lines (but, rather, keeps districts compact).
O’Shaughnessy says her “competitive process” would weigh precisely those factors.
Meanwhile, Gov. Ted Strickland and Democratic auditor candidate David Pepper have also embraced reform. (Republican candidates for governor and auditor — John Kasich and David Yost — have not.)
O’Shaughnessy’s opponent, Kettering’s Jon Husted, has been the leading legislative reformer (though not an advocate for the competition). As to his role on the commission, he won’t go as far as her. He does suggest requiring that any map be embraced by at least one member of each party on the commission; that would be big. But he says everybody would have to agree up front.
He also says he’d use his position on the commission to work out a long-term solution, not just a onetime fix.
A cynic might say that O’Shaughnessy, 60, only made her promise out of desperation. In a Republican year, she was up against a better-funded, better-known candidate. So she threw a Hail-Mary pass.
But one might be cynical about Husted’s relative caution, too. At 43, he is presumed to have his eyes set on higher office; he doesn’t want to be seen inside his party as disloyal.
Speaking of cynicism, it’s still a little hard to believe that the party that controls the commission would give up its power to feather its nest. Redistricting is an enormously complex subject when you get down to the actual work. One can imagine the pursuit of wiggle room taking place.
Nevertheless, the next redistricting process — which begins when the 2010 Census figures are in — may be different. Because of the ferment of the previous five years, because the reformers put an idea out there, and because of what the candidates have said, people will certainly be watching in a different way.
This is a story about a resilient good idea, one that has life beyond its apparent death.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: GM bankruptcy may be speeding clean-up
Fourteen states (and an Indian tribe) have reached agreement with the company liquidating old General Motors sites on how to spend $800 million in federal cleanup money. The old Moraine assembly site will get $25.8 million, the most in Ohio. Michigan, Ohio and New York are the states benefiting most.
The announcement of an agreement was no surprise.
The Obama administration promised the money last spring, after states, including Ohio, had said that some bailout money should be set aside to get old sites operational again. The money will go not only for environmental cleanup, but to the communities and states to do what else is necessary to make the sites marketable.
Since the administration’s decision, the task at hand has been working out an agreement among the states, which seem satisfied.
Surprise or not, the announcement is a necessary step toward putting the Moraine site back to work. Any company looking to buy that land wants to know that any necessary cleanup will happen — at the expense of others. After all, the future occupants didn’t cause the problem.
As with other aspects of the GM bankruptcy, things have been moving fast. The bankruptcy itself flew through the courts. The new GM was up and running fast, and started thriving. The government came up with the environmental money quickly. Now the decision on how to distribute the money has been made rapidly, with no need to resort to courtroom proceedings.
Next, it’s important to get the environmental work actually done fast, or as quickly as possible. The mere spending of the money could provide a nice boost for communities around the state and the country that are in particular need of a boost. And, of course, the faster that permanent new jobs arrive, the better.
Worth remembering now is that the Moraine site didn’t fold because of the decision to go into bankruptcy. GM had closed Moraine before the bottom fell out of car sales in 2009. So the fact that Moraine is included in money that comes out of bankruptcy proceedings is perhaps not to be taken for granted.
Moraine wants to move ahead fast. Moraine City Manager Dave Hicks says Moraine is more advanced toward reuse than most GM sites.
Some people will continue to resent the fact that GM got any bailout money. But whatever one thinks about the bailout, the case is overwhelming for government action when a bankrupt company leaves a polluted industrial site behind.
Competition for federal money to clean up old industrial sites is intense. “Brownfields” — abandoned industrial sites — are common around Ohio and the country. The federal “Superfund” for dealing with the worst cases has been considered by environmentalists to be underfunded (and exceedingly bureaucratic) for decades.
Today, having been connected to GM may be an advantage, because of the bailout. But money is not the complete solution. Cleanups can be done incompletely, leaving issues behind. There can be bureaucratic snafus.
Local and other officials need to be vigilant in making sure the money is spent right.
The environmental issue is far from the only hurdle to overcome in getting the Moraine site humming again. But it’s an important one.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Education, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Fast-talking buyers asking to be watched
Is Dayton becoming the new Florida? Or at least a Florida?
In recent weeks, the Dayton area has learned that:
• A self-proclaimed Hindu “guru” named Dr. Commander Selvam (also known as Annamalai Annamalai) has purchased the old KeyBank building downtown. He also bought a former flea market on Olive Road.
All this comes after his temple in Georgia went bankrupt and was foreclosed upon when attendance plummeted. The IRS is seeking $600,000 from him in unpaid taxes. He has filed at least 20 defamation lawsuits against former devotees and media outlets that raised questions about his religious practices.
• A man who once achieved 15 minutes of fame for not coming up with the $100 million he offered for a seat on Russian space mission wants to bring — this is true — a Chinese cultural center to Wayne Avenue and Wyoming Street in Dayton, complete with a replica of an eighth century village. The goal is to create a tourist attraction.
The same fellow, Peter Rodney Llewellyn, has purchased two homes in the Wright-Dunbar neighborhood, alarming some locals by turning one over very quickly for a nice profit, to a Chinese buyer. Talk about an absentee landlord.
Mr. Llewellyn’s history is, let’s say, colorful. He’s been arrested in Pittsburgh for alleged bilking and sued in Yellow Springs by a business partner. He left Australia after being hit with a default judgment for a $400,000 debt. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Taking these two events in combination, the question arises: Don’t wheeler-dealers with these kinds of records usually turn up mainly in Florida? Or Southern California?
Spend any time in those places in past years, and you’d hear about all manner of neighbors for whom things got dicey somewhere else, and who arrived in a new world with big plans. You couldn’t be there very long without being hit up by somebody with an offer you were told you couldn’t possibly pass up.
Earlier this year, when a young mother from the Dayton area disappeared with a man who was not her husband, they turned up Florida. They were playing by the old rules: When in trouble and looking for a fresh start, go to Florida.
But the southern and western extremities of the country are apparently no longer universally seen as booming, unregulated territory, easy pickings for people with big ideas.
And yet now, in this economy, there are certainly more such people at loose ends than ever before.
Enter Dayton — and other Daytons. When people with real money jump into markets where things are going for fire-sale prices — the Key building went for $525,000 cash — they can buy what they want. But that doesn’t mean neighbors and public officials shouldn’t be wary.
When the Chinese village project was put before Dayton’s officials, they found it “lacked a sufficient business plan” and “simply wasn’t viable.” But the people pitching their big idea got their hearing. In this economy, a developer who has even a germ of an idea is going to get a hearing. Local governments don’t want to pass up any opportunity that comes close to adding up.
In sizing up the comers, however, it’s worth recalling an old Chinese proverb: “A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”
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TweetEditorial: Property tax court ruling is only fair
When Ohio first decided in 1852 that schoolhouses shouldn’t have to pay property taxes, lawmakers couldn’t have imagined that some day public schools might be run by for-profit companies.
But today charter schools, which are public schools run by entities separate from school districts, often have close business relationships with for-profit enterprises.
While charter schools themselves are non-profit, many contract with a for-profit company to actually operate the schools. (Dayton has several examples, including three well-regarded charter schools run by National Heritage Academies, a Michigan-based for-profit company.)
Or a charter school may lease its school building from a for-profit company. In some cases, the management company that runs the school and the real-estate company that owns the building are effectively partners or share some of the same principals.
It was this kind of arrangement that led the Ohio Supreme Court to recently hand down a decision that rattled the state’s charter school community. In the case of a Cincinnati charter school, the court said the privately owned, for-profit company that leases a commercial building to the school is not exempt from paying property taxes just because a public school operates there.
The pro-charter Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools denounced the decision, saying it could put Ohio charter schools in “serious peril.” But that looks like an overreaction.
The ruling probably won’t have as wide an impact on charter schools as initially feared. The majority of non-profit charters aren’t leasing from a for-profit entity.
Ron Adler, of the Miamisburg-based, pro-charter group called the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education, said he is trying to determine if any Dayton-area charter schools are affected and, so far, he hasn’t found one that is. (National Heritage Academies, for example, has always paid property taxes.)
In fact, the court’s ruling makes sense. State law is clear that profit-making ventures are expected to pay property taxes. Simply making profits from a tenant that happens to be a school shouldn’t change that. If the school owns the building, then that’s another story.
Mr. Adler, however, worries that the Cincinnati school and any others in a similar predicament might be expected by their landlords to pay the taxes, which could mean significant new costs for the school. It’s possible that a good performing school could even be forced to shut down; many charters operate on tenuously tight budgets.
Even as charter advocates are still trying to count up the schools that might be hurt by the ruling, Mr. Adler and others are looking for legislators who might be willing to help write a law to ease the pain. Affected schools, for example, could be given a short amnesty period that would allow them to adapt.
Once the scope of the problem is nailed down, a temporary tax break is worth considering. But it’s not unfair or ridiculous to expect for-profit businesses to pay property taxes.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Human Services Levy is good government
2010 Election
Maybe you’ve seen one of the 10,000 yard signs that are sprouting, asking people to vote for Montgomery County’s Human Services Levy and saying, “It’s critical.”
The slogan isn’t hyperbole. Human services have been reduced across the state because Ohio’s budget has been slammed.
And guess what? More cuts are coming because balancing Ohio’s next two-year budget will be an exercise in miracle-working. (One-time money — short of selling state assets — and the federal stimulus are gone.)
If the Human Services Levy fails, the money Montgomery County has available to spend on human services would take yet another hit.
This particular levy raises $58.3 million annually. It’s one prong of a two-part funding package that supports services for the mentally retarded, abused and neglected children, the mentally ill, the needy elderly and others who struggle to fend for themselves.
Because it’s a so-called “replacement” levy, it would bring in $4.5 million more than is currently being collected. That would cost owners of a $100,000 home about $15 more per year.
This “combined” levy approach is Montgomery County’s alternative to asking voters to pass separate levies to support agencies dedicated to each of these populations. A committee of elected officials and citizens makes recommendations about how to divvy up the combined levy proceeds.
Under this arrangement, no agency gets to ask for taxes just for its own benefit; none gets everything it wants when the pie is split. Taxpayers benefit because evaluating a host of needs forces agencies to prioritize and to make difficult choices.
Historically, Human Services Levy requests have passed by big margins. The last time a levy was on the ballot, it passed with 58 percent of the vote. But in the current economic environment, it’d be a mistake to take anybody’s support for granted. People have to be reminded of what’s at stake.
The best explanation for voters’ past buy-in is that almost everybody has family or friends who have benefited from the levy, or knows somebody who is paid to do good work using levy funds. You don’t have to look far to find someone who has a mentally retarded pre-schooler or adult child, or someone who knows someone who has gotten help from a mental health agency or benefited from special services for seniors.
What happens if the levy fails?
Montgomery County could try again next year to pass it. But cuts still would have to be imposed in 2011. Because there’d be no guarantee that the request would be approved the next time, the county would be forced to start scaling back programs immediately in case the levy totally dried up.
(Property taxes are collected a year behind. What you pay in 2011 is actually for 2010. What that means is that if this levy isn’t approved this year or next, no money can be collected for a “gap” year. Under that scenario, human services spending would have to be cut by more than 40 percent. That would be unthinkable.)
Montgomery County has a history of taking care of the vulnerable among us. Making that commitment is the right thing to do, but it also makes for a better place to live and work. In these tough economic times, the levy is needed as much as it ever has been.
Permalink | Comments (26) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Elections, Ellen Belcher, Health Care, Montgomery County, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Social Services
TweetEllen Belcher: Worried candidates right to be worried
2010 Election
Some things to be watching and thinking about heading in to the last week before the election:
— A lot of candidates are worried. The polls are tight in a bunch of races, and the early-voting option is so new that nobody knows how it’s really going to affect things. Though nationally there’s much talk about a Republican sweep, both sides in Ohio are proceeding on the assumption that the governor’s race is not locked up.
Ditto for the two races that involve local people: the state attorney general contest that pits Democrat Richard Cordray against Republican Mike DeWine; and the secretary of state contest involving Republican Jon Husted and Democrat Maryellen O’Shaughnessy.
— There is at least one squirrelly possibility that could occur. Say Republicans win big, but lose the state auditor’s race (where there’s no incumbent and both candidates are named “David”), as well as the secretary of state’s race (where there’s no incumbent and neither candidate has ever run statewide).
Under that scenario, Democrats would control the legislative redistricting process after the next census.
That would be an odd outcome in a seemingly otherwise Republican year. But it could happen; the races are so low-profile, anything can happen.
— Turnout is a big deal not just for the candidates, but for backers of levies. Supporters of school levies and the Montgomery County Human Services levy, for example, have dozens of supporters working at phone banks to identify likely supporters and to make sure that their people get a mail-in ballot or get to the polls.
That get-out-the-vote effort probably benefits Democrats more than Republicans. Because there are dozens of levies on the ballot across the state, those votes could end up being pivotal in close races.
— One possible explanation for Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland’s narrowing the gap — which one poll in September said was 17 points — between him and Republican John Kasich is that Strickland is taking a page out of former Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste’s playbook.
In the face of a sour economy, Celeste and a Democratic legislature raised the state income tax, and angry Republicans dubbed it a “90 percent tax increase.”
The criticism was technically true, but it also made the hike sound astounding. In 1983, Republicans put a measure to repeal the increase on the ballot; it failed 55-45.
Celeste was successful because he made sure that anyone who depended on state government for any amount of money understood that if the repeal succeeded, the subsequent budget cuts would be huge. Among those who opposed the repeal were businesses, which were worried they’d be hit with higher corporate taxes.
By running so hard this year against the state income tax, Kasich has some Republicans — at school districts and libraries, in local governments, at universities and hospitals — nervous.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote this week that the influential Ohio Hospital Association told its members this about Kasich, “He is unaware of hospitals’ true economic value, saying health care providers do not create wealth.” The association and the Kasich campaign say the reference is being misunderstood or taken out of context.
At the same time, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce has endorsed Kasich, motivated enough to take a side in a way it’s heretofore never done.
— It’s not shocking that the governor’s race is setting a new record for campaign spending. But it is amazing that DeWine would loan his attorney general campaign $1.9 million. If he wins, he’ll have an office from which to raise money to pay himself back. If he loses, it’s hard to sell tickets to retire-my-debt fundraisers.
— Whoever wins the governor’s race will immediately be hit with balancing a budget that’s possibly as much as $8 billion out of whack. There will be a limited number of places the governor and legislature can go to find money for the state’s operations, as well as the schools, local governments and local social service agencies it funds.
The next group that’s in charge can’t not look at peeling back contributions for public employee pensions. Republican governors and legislatures, Democratic governors and legislatures have refused to go there in the past.
But the tab is not sustainable. Altogether, state and local governments, school districts and universities are paying $4.1 billion annually into five pension programs. That cost — amounting to between 10 percent and 26.5 percent of each employee’s salary — is set by state law.
The good news is that there’s a pretty big pot that can be tapped to cut spending. The bad news is that it isn’t going to be pretty.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Long campaign undermines Kasich pitch
2010 ELECTION
One good thing about long campaigns: They sometimes allow ideas to get out into the public realm and get examined — and then to either stand or fall.
In the race for governor of Ohio, this process is a problem for John Kasich. The more his points are repeated and examined, the weaker they look.
Let’s divide them into his criticisms of Gov. Ted Strickland and his own proposals.
Former Congressman Kasich criticizes Gov. Strickland for raising taxes, which simply isn’t true. The governor has mainly stood by and let net taxes fall (in accord with changes enacted before he was in office). He has also delayed the last phase of a scheduled tax cut and has added his own tax cut for senior homeowners.
It’s one thing for a candidate to throw out an inflated charge now and then, and then back off — or at least stop saying it — if the claim is discredited. It’s another to just keeping pounding away at it. That sends two messages: (1) You don’t think you have any strong points that are true. And (2) you don’t care much about truth.
Mr. Kasich also criticizes the governor for believing in “big government.” He runs ads saying that adding to the bureaucracy is not the way. But, of course, the state government has been shrinking on the Strickland watch, with several thousand jobs being eliminated. In fact, there are fewer state employees today that there were in 1983, the low-water mark in recent decades.
The other big charge that Mr. Kasich makes is that Ohio has lost 400,000 jobs on Gov. Strickland’s watch. It’s true. But similar numbers have been seen around the country, under all kinds of governors. To the degree that Ohio has had special problems, it’s been because of the decline of the auto and manufacturing sectors. And everybody knows it, certainly Mr. Kasich does.
As for what he wants to do as governor, the big idea associated with him is gradually eliminating the state income tax. Around Dayton, conservative Republican candidates for the legislature are granting that this is not the time to be talking about that. They acknowledge the severity of problems facing the state budget, especially if the federal government doesn’t step into help and the economy doesn’t improve. They know that the issue at hand for them is how to avoid tax increases, not how to cut them.
The income tax issue undermines Mr. Kasich’s position in critiquing the governor. The best case against Gov. Strickland is that he has failed to find a systematic approach to the state’s budget problems; he has relied on federal help and one-time fixes. But that critique can hardly be made by supporters of a candidate whose only concrete proposal on the budget is to eliminate the income tax, which provides at least 40 percent of the state general revenue.
Also on the negative side, Gov. Strickland has failed to devise a plan to pay for his long-term education program. But there’s something very Kasich about his course: dreaming big; not “tripping over ant hills on the way to the pyramids,” as Mr. Kasich has been known to say.
But a dream to upgrade Ohio’s schools does, at worst, little or no harm; it raises the bar. It is not to be compared with a dream about decimating the state’s revenues.
Both candidates have been hugely vague about how they’d address the state’s most immediate problem, its budget. But one has a record to be judged, warts and all — cutting spending, avoiding tax increases, softening on gambling, successfully lobbying the federal government for help, and failing to develop a long-term plan. The other is ignoring that record, critiquing an imaginary one and proposing a course that is fantasy.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Why is GOP spending in Strahorn race?
2010 ELECTION
Sometimes the most fun political races to cogitate about are the low-profile, local ones. Frequently, there are no reliable polls to guide the discussion. And a good general rule is that political experts without polls are political novices.
So here we have the 5th Ohio Senate District. It comprises Dayton, Jefferson and Harrison townships and some other close suburbs, and it sneaks up to take in all of Miami County, via Huber Heights; it also has part of Darke County.
It’s made up of two overwhelmingly Democratic House districts and one Republican one. It’s always been held by Democrats. The Republicans who drew it after the 1990 Census consciously made it Democratic because that was the way to create a solidly Republican district in Montgomery County. They did the latter by connecting the south suburbs with most of the north suburbs (outside Huber).
But in making the 5th Democratic, the Republicans didn’t entirely give up on it. They combined large numbers of black Democrats and white Democrats. Some of the latter were thought of as culturally conservative and not reliably Democratic.
The Republicans could see chances. Whites might be pulled to a Republican, as when Mike Turner eventually ran for mayor (in a race in which party label wasn’t on the ballot). Or, if the Democrats put up a white candidate, the Republicans might put up a popular black moderate to win on a coalition of Republicans and blacks.
The Republicans have made repeated highly-funded efforts to win. They easily outspent the Democrats.
This is kind of strange because they haven’t needed the 5th to gain 2-1 control of the Senate, which they’ve had forever, it now seems.
They just had money to burn, so they went for the 5th, too.
But they never had any luck. It’s been held by Democrats Rhine McLin and Tom Roberts.
Well, if there was ever a year for the Republicans, this would seem to be it. A good Republican year is expected. And the incumbent Democrat, Fred Strahorn, has never been elected to the job. Republican money has materialized again. Candidate William Beagle, a former Tipp City council member, had ads on television several weeks before Strahorn got there. Beagle has help from his state party and has filed papers acknowledging a half-million-dollar campaign on his side already.
The Republicans are apparently hoping that money and the nature of the year will be enough. Beagle is making no concession to the district’s Democratic voting habits. He’s running as a regular Republican, identifying himself with stauncher conservatives than, say, George Voinovich or Mike DeWine.
Certainly he has no record of involvement with an urban community, no pre-election profile. So he’s far from the ideal candidate. But Strahorn has never been seen as a political powerhouse.
The ads on both sides are — surprise — kind of dumb. Beagle went after Strahorn on the Obama health care plan, of all things. Then there’s regular stuff from both sides about who’s raising taxes and who isn’t. Strahorn has something up about Beagle supporting no-bid contracts for Canadian firms.
It’s hard to be believe anybody will be moved by any of this, but it’s what the professionals talk about when they speculate about who might win. And, yes, just getting the candidates’ names known is important.
What’s most striking is that the Republicans are spending any money.
One can understand the stakes for the Democrats; they don’t want to be shut out completely, to give up one of their last purchases on Senate life, a central-city district.
But what are the Republicans doing?
After winning the presidency, wealthy scion John F. Kennedy said that his father hadn’t spent as much money as people thought. The old man wanted to make sure he didn’t waste it. I’ll be darned if I’m going to pay for any landslide, his son said he said.
But the Republicans apparently aren’t satisfied with perpetual landslide control of the Senate.
Aren’t they afraid that they’re showing themselves to be irresponsible handlers of money?
And if they lose one more time in a district they consciously designed for the other party, will they be back spending more money yet again?
And will people who donate money to parties and politicians continue to do so, even when they see it being spent like this?
The answer to the last two questions is easy: Yep.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: ‘Strong mayor’ isn’t what Dayton needs
The people who say Daytonians blame the mayor when things aren’t going well are absolutely right.
Just ask Rhine McLin, who was defeated last year by Gary Leitzell, an independent who had no name recognition, no money and was challenging an incumbent Democrat in a Democratic city.
Regardless of which explanation you buy for her loss — and there are many — there is no question that voters hold their mayor more accountable than the other four city commissioners even though the title confers little formal power.
Sensing a disconnect between what people think about a mayor’s power and what Dayton’s charter allows, some people want to change the charter to allow for a “strong mayor” form of government.
Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus and Cincinnati have “strong” mayors, though the range of their power is different from city to city.
Other people argue that if the mayor had real power, more and better candidates might run for the office and that voters should be able to hold one person especially accountable.
Greg Gantt, the Montgomery County Republican Party chairman, has said that, after the November election, the GOP may consider the idea.
“Certainly it’s an item on our list of things to think about,” he said this week.
City Commissioner Nan Whaley has been shopping the idea among her fellow Democrats.
The co-chair of a group that advises Mayor Leitzell personally backs a “strong mayor” arrangement (though he says the topic hasn’t come up at the mayor’s leadership council).
Of all the things that Dayton needs to be focused on, a charter change is far down the list. A “strong mayor” won’t change the daunting financial challenges Dayton has stemming from a persistently declining tax base, a shrinking population and an unrelenting demand for services.
In spite of what the charter says, Dayton has had “strong mayors.”
Mike Turner, a Republican, and Paul Leonard, a Democrat, used their bully pulpits to be regional leaders, and City Hall staff knew that the center of power was in their corner offices.
When the commission had to decide something, Mayors Leonard and Turner had to negotiate for at least two votes and create public support for their ideas, but they found a way.
Democratic Mayors Clay Dixon and McLin, on the other hand, were in different leagues when it came to having special influence or a wider public presence.
Through all of these administrations, however, there was a professional city manager behind the mayor and commission. The managers made sure that the politicians didn’t overextend the city financially or grossly violate best practices or do something too stupid.
Also, because five people had a say in the big decisions, there was a manageable check-and-balance system.
Dayton, which was one of the first cities in the nation to have a city-manager form of government, has been exceedingly lucky to have had excellent professional administrators. Even when its politicians were ordinary or poor, there was a steady hand around to make sure things didn’t run amok.
Even if Dayton had an elected chief executive, he or she would still need a strong administrator to help run things. The difference would be that one person — rather than five — would pick that professional, who then would probably be bounced when a new mayor came in.
Not exactly a great plan for stability.
Some people might indeed be more interested in running for mayor if the job had more power (and paid more than $45,000). But that’s a theory, not a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, what isn’t a theory is that exceptional people have been able to work within the system Dayton has.
Changing the charter is not a simple proposition. To negotiate the wording, gather the signatures to put it on the ballot and then to pass it would just be a diversion of a lot of energy and attention. And it would create a public expectation that the move would change the fundamentals behind Dayton’s problems.
Hardly. The next day the city would have the same old problems. Best to keep attention focused on them.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher
Tweet‘Superman’ re-energizes school debate
Davis Guggenheim is trying to do for education what he did for climate change — use a documentary film to propel discussion of a misunderstood issue that deserves more attention.
The new movie from the director of “An Inconvenient Truth” is designed as a challenging jolt to Americans who have only a vague sense of America’s education crisis. “Waiting for Superman” is a skillfully crafted and compelling story that tracks five kids searching for a good public school; it shows the barriers confronting them.
Along the way, Mr. Guggenheim offers an eye-opening tutorial on the depth of the problems of public education, identifying some of the reasons for them. He proposes solutions in line with a particularly in-vogue brand of school reform. It focuses on charter schools and on making it easier to fire bad teachers.
Educating children is a deeply complex process, one that doesn’t lend itself to simple fixes when things go wrong. Critics have pounced on Mr. Guggenheim for cherry picking certain reform ideas. They say he’s making a good story while other equally worthy approaches ended up on the cutting room floor.
Fair enough. The movie makes an argument for change that might not fit everybody’s vision for improving schools. But if the film sparks a renewed and passionate debate about school reform, then it has served an important purpose.
Anyone with a connection to public education — from kids and parents to teachers, principals and administrators, to taxpayers who support local schools with their hard-earned dollars — should see the movie. (Paramount Pictures has tentatively scheduled a Nov. 5 opening of “Waiting for Superman” in Dayton. It opened last week at selected AMC theaters in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.)
“Waiting for Superman” is especially relevant to Dayton, one of the nation’s earliest and most vibrant hotbeds of the charter school movement. In this city, a decade of hard work toward reform has yielded positive, if still unsatisfying, change. Ten years after charter schools began to blossom and the reform-minded “Kids First” team took control of Dayton’s school board, there are interesting and beneficial school choices and innovations. But the city schools still rank among the very worst in Ohio.
That experience is a microcosm of the national story. Since the first charter school law passed in Minnesota in 1989, the country has seen some of the biggest changes in education policy in a century: school choice, standards-based curriculum and expanded testing and accountability, to name a few.
But overall test scores haven’t moved much and the desperate state of urban school districts is largely unchanged.
“Waiting for Superman” seeks to re-energize a national debate. The would be as useful here as anyplace.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Did going hard to the left mean forfeiting Congress?
2010 ELECTION
Looks like a perfect storm for the Republicans. Big-name, non-partisan predictors in Washington see a Republican takeover of the House and maybe the Senate. They say almost 100 Democratic House seats are in play, an unheard of number.
Four Ohio Democrats make any list of the endangered representatives, including Steve Driehaus. He holds the Cincinnati-based district that had been held by Republican Steve Chabot for many years before 2008. Chabot is re-challenging.
House Republican leader John Boehner, the prospective speaker of the House, is now shying away from media interviews, for fear of messing things up. That is, he’s sitting on his lead. That tells you how things are going.
True, the last couple of weeks have seen certain signs of life for the Democrats. Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland seemed to be making gains on Republican candidate John Kasich. Polls asking which party people generally favor have fluctuated.
And over the weekend, an estimated 35,000 people came out to see President Barack Obama in Columbus. It was called his largest crowd since the inauguration. But, of course, this time he brought Michelle, which he typically doesn’t. So there might have been more than the usual amount of star gazing.
About the Democrats’ distress, they and others are asking, What did Obama do wrong?
Did he try to accomplish too much too fast, setting himself up for the charge of “big government”? Was he too lax in responding to that charge for too long, hoping that a reviving economy and a show of successful leadership would rob it of its impact?
Or did he cave in too much, go too slowly, act too conservatively, thus sapping the energy of his liberal base? After all he gave up on the “public option,” doubled-down on Afghanistan, stalled on gays in the military, failed to close Guantanamo.
This is the easiest question to answer: He’s been the most liberal, highest-impact Democratic president in half a century. To expect more would have been absurd.
Health care is historic. When he came into office, the country faced a depression and the collapse of the auto industry. No longer. The stimulus (with nearly $100 billion for green projects), accomplished goals the Democrats have long dreamed of.
If some liberals don’t get it, that necessitates a column about them, not him.
And yet, maybe they matter, not so much as voters, but as cheerleaders. Republican cheerleaders have been noisy. The liberals have sat watching, moodily. Moody cheerleaders is a contradiction in terms.
The national debate has proceeded largely without them.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote last week that the pending election outcome is “a national revolt against the Democratic governance of the last two years, … a highly pointed, perfectly rational anger at the ideological overreach and incompetence of the governing Democrats.”
True, the Democrats have certainly overreached their mandate from 2008. The American electorate has long been stuck in the middle ideologically. Any activist president pays a price for trying to pull it away.
Ronald Reagan lost House seats in 1982. Bill Clinton crashed in 1994. George W. Bush hit a wall — lost his congressional majorities — after he interpreted his re-election as a call to change Social Security.
Even in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson, the very definition of an activist president, suffered a major comeuppance in his first mid-term after his landslide election.
Obama pulled away from the political center particularly hard. And yet it’s worth asking how much different the political situation would be today if he had proceeded moderately, given that he was facing the country’s worst economy collapse in 80 years.
Certainly political debate would sound different today. But would the election come out any differently?
If Obama had taken that course, the right comparison now might be with George H.W. Bush, who did little in the face of a recession. All the other presidents mentioned above got re-elected. Bush I did not.
The storm facing the Democrats could still turn out to be imperfect. But if it does cost them their majorities, at least they can take comfort in the fact that, whatever the reason may be, it most certainly is not that they didn’t do anything when they had the chance.
Permalink | Comments (48) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Abortion stats are good news on lots of levels
During decades of American debate about abortion and abortion rights, some voices have made this complaint: both sides devote too much energy to political warfare and too little to providing alternatives to abortion and preventing unwanted pregnancies.
But statistics now suggest that people are finding alternatives. According to the Ohio Department of Health, abortions have declined in number for 10 years in a row, reaching their lowest point since 1976, when records first started being kept.
All told, the statewide number in 2009 — 28,721 — was down an amazing 40 percent since peaks in the early 1980s. In other words, four in every 10 that might have happened then aren’t happening now.
Anybody who watches political debates has heard politicians saying they want abortions to be “safe, legal and rare.” Those candidates get derided by some for trying to appeal to everybody; critics say the issue is simply whether abortion should be legal.
But progress is being made toward the safe, legal and rare vision.
When the latest statistics came out last week, the two sides lived up to their reputations: they offered conflicting explanations. But the two sides did agree on one thing: that they are pleased.
An organization called NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio did not say that the lower numbers result from bad laws that deny women access to abortion. It said schools are doing a better job teaching sex education and that women and girls have easier and more access to post-sex birth control pills.
Meanwhile, Ohio Right-to-Life cited new laws it says deter abortions: a law requiring that an expectant woman or girl be shown an ultrasound of the fetus, and another that she be told she can’t be forced to have an abortion.
It’s natural for political warriors to attribute all progress to changes they have pushed. Their interpretation justifies their existence and their constant push for financial support.
But the new statistics are a threat to the centrality of abortion in American political debate. That is long overdue. Abortion has been the biggest issue in determining support or opposition for U.S. Supreme Court justices. It has been a litmus test for both the left and the right. That is simply a preposterous circumstance.
Any Democratic politician who opposes abortion rights, and any Republican who supports them, needs only that issue to establish a reputation for political independence or infidelity — another absurd circumstance.
The issue has also been crucial in determining basic political affiliations. Young people who sign on to a party have often cited abortion as a top reason. (At least this was true before the Barack Obama phenomenon came along, first energizing some people, then polarizing.)
But the American majority has long stood someplace between the extremes. They’ve thought abortion should be basically legal, but regulated; or basically banned, with exceptions.
Most other democracies have been able to work out abortion policies that keep the issue from lingering for decades at the center of political debate. In the United States, that effort has been complicated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Roe v. Wade. It laid out the basic rules rigidly.
Now we know, though, that the rules don’t dictate how many abortions there will be — certainly not rigidly.
If the numbers keep coming down, and if both sides can continue to find ways to take credit and to welcome the decline, the issue will still not disappear from American politics. But it will fade.
The abortion situation will be widely seen as more or less under control. Liberals and conservatives will be able to find things they like about the status quo. The loudest voices will resonate less, and the body politic will be able to move on to other obsessions, perhaps — one never knows — some more important to the nation’s future.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Health Care, Ohio government
TweetEditorial: Xenia ballot shows way not to run a city
Is there a community with an issue on the ballot that could lose more than Xenia on Nov. 2?
A request to increase the income tax rate from 1.75 percent to 2.25 percent is desperately needed for the city to maintain basic services at acceptable levels. It’s had a deep drop in tax revenue caused by the national recession and the resulting unemployment.
At the same time city council is trying to pass the tax, it has been forced to fight off a challenge to its authority to manage the city. An organization led by the firefighters’ union thinks it should get to call important shots about the size of the fire department and who gets hired and fired.
That’s not the way cities are supposed to work.
In Xenia, petitioners who want to amend the charter are required to get signatures totalling 10 percent of the number of people who voted in the most recent general election. In this case, that was 750 names. That’s a pretty low threshold in a city with close to 25,000 residents.
Citizen participation is a good thing, but, just the same, a small self-interested group shouldn’t be able to dictate public policy that could hold the city hostage.
A charter amendment pushed by the firefighter-led group, known as Get Alarmed Citizens of Xenia, would allow the fire and police departments to seal themselves off in guaranteed jobs while their peers in other departments could be laid off.
In a defensive move, the council placed its own charter amendment on the ballot, asking for the flexibility it would need to keep the city running if the firefighter-backed amendment passes. Neither charter amendment is needed. Xenia voters would be smartest to vote yes on the income tax and no on both charter amendments. They should also appreciate just how dangerous this election could be for them. There is considerable urgency that the income tax pass and the charter amendments fail.
In a worst-case scenario — if the income tax fails and the charter amendment backed by Get Alarmed Citizens of Xenia passes — the city will be in real trouble. City council will have a very difficult time managing its budget.
The amendment creates what amounts to a protected class of workers that can never be touched, not even if Xenia’s finances get worse or population declines. The amendment stipulates that the police force may never fall below 45 full-time jobs nor the fire department below 43 full-time jobs, unless the charter is changed again by another citywide vote.
Right now, Xenia is down 12 positions in police and fire because of cuts that followed the defeat of a similar 0.5-percent income tax in May. Officials have promised to restore those jobs if the income tax passes this time. But city leaders say they just can’t assure voters they will restore those jobs unless they know the income tax has passed, bringing in new revenue.
If the police and fire jobs get carved in stone and the income tax fails, the city estimates it would have to lay off as many as 29 people in other departments.
All that drama and chaos can be avoided if the income tax passes and the charter amendments fail. That outcome also would chasten the public safety unions and show them they can’t threaten the city with charter amendments to get special treatment.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Dayton could be place to rekindle Bosnia peace hopes
Fifteen years after the Dayton peace talks ended the Bosnian war, the president of the Serb portion of Bosnia talks of secession. Not good.
That threat symbolizes and reflects years of failure at reconciliation.
The Dayton peace accords necessarily gave seats of power to each of the country’s warring groups — Serbs, Croats and Muslims. The hope was that over time, democracy and international pressure would push all Bosnians to come together as a nation.
But the part of the country that’s known as the Serb Republic has become an outpost for politicians who don’t need the support of anybody but Serbs. Those politicians play to Serbs who want to be part of the neighboring country of Serbia rather than Bosnia.
That’s only one of Bosnia’s many problems. The country is horribly stagnant economically. People are restless. A return to violence is possible.
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the region last week, the idea was to salvage the hopes of “Dayton,” the peace agreement that was one of the great accomplishments of her husband’s presidency. The Clinton trip has sometimes been referred to in the national media as “Dayton II.”
Because of what happened here in 1995 — with bitter foes essentially being locked down at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base until they came to terms on how to stop the war — Dayton will long be associated with that historically volatile region and with the notion that leaders really can sometimes stop other leaders from fighting.
Recognizing the need in Bosnia and an opportunity for Dayton, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, has proposed a real Dayton II: he wants the top leaders from Bosnia and surrounding states to reconvene in Dayton. He formally suggested the idea in a letter to Secretary Clinton.
The letter is of praise for the former president’s effort. It lacks criticism of anybody on the American side. It calls for constitutional reforms (including creation of a strong central government, as opposed to dispersing power along regional/religious lines), for efforts to create a society in which political parties that don’t only represent religious blocs can flourish, and for efforts to minimize radical Muslim forces. (Traditionally Muslims in Bosnia have not been extremists; the last thing the world needs is another place for radicals to freely stir up hatred and train terrorists.)
Would anybody come to Dayton? Rep. Turner says leaders he talks to in the region respond enthusiastically to the idea.
Serbia’s President Boris Tadic has been a breath of fresh air to the West. Uninterested in nursing old wounds, focused on getting Serbia into the European Union, he has, for example, embraced bringing leading Serb war criminals to justice. That’s a big symbol.
He has not recognized Kosovo, whose independence from Serbia has been recognized by Washington. But if Dayton II takes up Kosovo, he might see the possibility of winning concessions that would make that possible.
He’d have another motivation for coming to Dayton (besides staying on the good side of the West): he is presumed to worry that if the Serb Republic joins Serbia, that leaves Bosnia as an essentially Muslim state (with a Croat minority). That’s something a lot of Serbs don’t want.
Presumably Serb Republic President Milorad Dodic would be a tougher sell on Dayton II. But he needs to worry about relations with Serbia, if he’s going to be isolated from the rest of Bosnia. So perhaps Serbia could lean on him.
Meanwhile, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats would be more cooperative, as might the leaders of Croatia and other countries.
Other efforts to get the Bosnians to work out a successor constitution to the Dayton Accords have come to nothing. But there has been no full-court press by the Americans. People in the area know that if the Americans play the “Dayton card,” they are serious about getting something done, not wanting such a high-profile failure.
During the war itself, many efforts at peace failed, until Richard Holbrooke came along with his full-court American press. The idea of trying that again has a lot of appeal.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Peace Accords and Other Peace Initiatives, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National government
TweetEditorial: College savings plan puts Ohio among leaders
Reeling from the economy’s collapse, people have been saving more since the start of the national recession in 2008. Americans overall may have less money, but they’re putting more in their savings accounts.
The August personal savings rate (the fraction of the average person’s income that is not spent) was 5.8 percent. Three years ago, the rate was 2.7 percent.
There are a lot of reasons: Banks have gotten stricter with their lending standards, so borrowing is harder. Watching the real-estate bubble burst has chastened some people who were spending more than they should have been. (Meanwhile, some economists actually think folks are saving too much, that more spending would perk up the recovery.)
But getting everyone in the habit of saving instead of spending is good for the country in the long run. In Ohio, one good way people are saving is by socking away cash for their kids to go college. CollegeAdvantage, the state-run college savings and investment program, reports the number of new college savers is up 35 percent this year — by almost 25,000 new accounts.
The state — which benefits from having more college graduates — is doing the right thing in making the option available and marketing it. Those account-opening parents are smart, too.
Still, a huge percentage of Ohio families who have college dreams for their kids are missing out on a great chance to make college cheaper. Ohio’s college savings program, called a 529 plan by the IRS, is easy to use and it’s getting better.
CollegeAdvantage works like a 401(k) in that earnings in the account accumulate and compound tax-free. Up to $2,000 in contributions can be deducted from your state and federal taxable income annually.
Money saved in a 529 plan is not held against families when they apply for financial aid. The program is amazingly flexible when it comes to using the money. It can be spent at any college and may be used for certain expenses such as books. If a child doesn’t attend college, the money can be transferred to another family member.
Beyond these benefits, CollegeAdvantage has just signed with the well-regarded investment group BlackRock to provide investment advisers and new investing options. BlackRock replaces Putnam, closing a dark chapter for the program. Putnam had a long-term contract with the state in 2004, when it was accused of manipulating the timing of trades for some of its large investors. It paid a $144 million settlement.
R. Michael Prescott, who heads CollegeAdvantage, says his hardest job is convincing people with children to just get started with the program. An account can be opened for $25. Mr. Prescott advises that people follow that with a regular contribution in any amount they can afford. In the future, when times are better, it’s easy to raise contribution levels, which can be set up through automatic payments.
Every dollar saved in advance reduces daunting bills later, and the savings is growing. CollegeAdvantage is such a good deal it attracts investors from other states. Parents here would do well to check it out.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetKevin Riley: Let’s keep an eye on Wright-Patt jobs
It’s no secret that the Dayton region is placing a big bet on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base when it comes to our future.
Wright-Patt has been a good news story for the region, a place that’s prospering, building and hiring at a time when the state and region have been taking an economic beating.
And while the base has a bright future — it actually grew when the military downsized, thanks to its important place in the Air Force — it can’t be taken for granted.
We recently got a reminder of how others covet the work that’s done at Wright-Patt when Alabama’s congressional delegation made a blatant attempt to pilfer jobs from the base’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center, where more than 3,000 people work.
Alabama legislators, presumably led by Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, wrote a letter asking the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to move jobs from Wright-Patterson to the Missile and Space Intelligence Center near Huntsville, Ala.
Wright-Patt’s NASIC does highly classified national defense work, keeping track of ballistic missiles and other long-range threats hostile countries are developing. The Alabamans argue that the Huntsville operation, which monitors short-range missiles, ought to be the place that does both.
Plenty of experts disagree. The technology behind ballistic missiles and short-range missiles is as different as bullets and knives. Plus, the NASIC folks at Wright-Patt have a reputation for doing excellent work.
But the Dayton region faces a persistent challenge from Alabama. The folks in Huntsville have tried this before, and there’s every reason to believe they’ll keep trying. Huntsville’s economic plan, according to its chamber of commerce, is tied to growing its defense and aerospace industries.
(By the way, Dayton has competition with Huntsville on another front, too. Alabama’s U.S. Space & Rocket Center wants one of the soon-to-be retired space shuttles, as does the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson.)
In fact, Huntsville’s economic development plan sounds a lot like Dayton’s. It calls for advocating on the state and federal level for defense-related jobs and building on the success of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, which is bringing thousands of jobs to the Huntsville area.
Here’s the environment we’re competing in:
• Defense budgets will shrink for the foreseeable future. That means no military installation’s work is secure.
• The Air Force has a reputation of doing a poor job of advocating for itself when compared to the Army and Navy.
• Important work at Wright-Patt — particularly involving NASIC — is classified.
(The latter fact means information is available to only certain members of Congress, and decisions can be hidden in secret budgets. If Ohio’s U.S. senators and local members of Congress aren’t on top of things, they may find out after the deed has been done that Wright-Patterson was stripped of something important.)
In the wake of Alabama’s play for jobs, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency has said the NASIC jobs will stay put. But that commitment can change.
The DIA has its own interests to look out for: It wants to consolidate work under it. NASIC reports to the Air Force, while Huntsville’s MSIC reports to the Defense Intelligence Agency.) Wright-Patterson and Dayton have a strong case:
• Among the many investments recently made at the base is a $50 million building for NASIC.
• The Advanced Technical Intelligence Center for Human Capital Development was founded in Beavercreek about four years ago with the support of area colleges. It trains people for the intelligence community and related industries.
In recent conversations, U.S. Reps. Mike Turner and John Boehner insisted they are focused on beating back efforts to move NASIC workers. Turner is the ranking member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, which, he says, gives him the opportunity to demand information and protect Wright-Patterson.
Boehner was more blunt.
“I’ve been involved in this NASIC fight,” he said. “Keeping the bastards in Alabama away from it has been high on my list.”
Coming from the guy who may be the next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, that was good to hear.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment |
TweetEditorial: Libraries feel pinch, but they can still save
Dayton Metro Library is right to assume that it will be a long time before it sees new money from Columbus. In fact, the financial hits that libraries across the state have been taking could just keep coming.
The challenge is learning to live with less and still making the situation palatable. To that end, the 21-branch library system in Montgomery County is talking about merging several small, older neighborhood libraries and building one bigger facility. The new space would be more spacious and better equipped, especially with computers.
Branches in East Dayton, or West Dayton or North Dayton are the likely places to consolidate. This does not mean branches in all three sections of the city would be closed.
Rather, the questions on the table are: if only one new facility is affordable any time soon, where is it needed most and where would the most money be saved through consolidation?
This discussion could get testy.
People love libraries and they especially love their neighborhood libraries. Requiring patrons to walk or drive further is a take-away, even if those people agree that the nearest library is too small, doesn’t have enough computers or was built in the day when people went to the library to read quietly.
(A lot of children and students go to the library to research and work on group projects, which is the order of the day at school; that form of study is inevitably noisier.)
Even with a cost-saving consolidation, that’s not to say that there won’t be other closures down the road. The state is facing a monster deficit for the next two years. Mostly because of state budget cuts, the library system has $1 million less in annual revenue than it did in 2008. Dayton Metro Library’s budget this year is $42.3 million, with nearly $11.5 million of that going into a building and repair fund.
Libraries currently are guaranteed an almost 2 percent slice of whatever the state general fund budget is. That irks some policy makers who wonder why libraries get a special commitment when, say, schools, for instance, aren’t given that sort of promise.
Meanwhile, state funding could start coming with more strings. A report came out this summer (“Building a Better Ohio: Creating Collaboration in Governance) that points out that Ohio has 251 library systems. (There are four in Montgomery County.) In the timid tone that dominates the research, it suggests that libraries should study consolidating.
If money is going to remain short, wouldn’t it be better to eliminate overhead and administration than for libraries across the state to be closed?
The report says that Ohio’s libraries “have the highest number of patrons, visitors and circulation per capita in the nation.” The only explanation for that kind of ranking is that the state has something special and that people recognize the resource.
Dayton Metro Library’s dilemma is straightforward: It’s confronting whether it can afford as many libraries as it has had and where to place them, given how population clusters have changed.
The state, on the other hand, is facing whether it will insist that duplicative administration needs to be reduced before facilities and collections are scaled back.
Libraries are surely changing because of how knowledge is being digitized and consumed, but they’re far from irrelevant or unnecessary. What their leaders have to concede, however, is that so long as there are administrative economies of scale that they aren’t realizing, they’re compromising the role the institutions can play in society and communities.
If patrons really are the priority, state lawmakers, library trustees and administrators will grant that libraries absolutely can cut costs in places users will never miss.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Delphi salaried retirees right to claim foul
People who have retired from General Motors and Delphi come in a lot of different categories as to how they are being treated in the wake of GM’s bankruptcy and rebirth: Did they retire on schedule, or were they squeezed out; did they work at the end for GM or Delphi; were they members of a union or not, and, if so, which union?
One group stands out as having been treated peculiarly: the non-unionized — or salaried — people who worked for Delphi at the end (and for GM through most of their careers). They include, for example, engineers, secretaries, middle managers and human resources people.
When GM was trying to get out of bankruptcy, Delphi’s pension obligations were taken over by a government entity called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
The PBGC, which steps in when a company can’t pay its pension obligations, doesn’t pay retirees any incentives or consolations that they might have been promised by their former employer at the point of retirement. If, for example, your company offers the equivalent of a Social Security benefit until you turn 62, PBGC won’t pay that.
Also, PBGC won’t pay benefits above a certain amount: about $4,500 a month for a single person retiring at 65 (less for younger people).
But the average monthly benefit the Delphi salaried people were expecting was about $3,250, according to the retirees’ organization. (A substantial portion of that resulted from a worker’s own contributions.)
The Delphi retirees, including some who had been retired for years before the GM bankruptcy, have taken monthly cuts on the order of $1,000 from what they were expecting. Most cuts were in the 20-percent to 40-percent range.
As part of the bankruptcy process, GM (by then largely owned by the federal government) promised to “top off” the pensions of union members, giving them the difference between their PBGC check and what they were originally promised by GM or Delphi.
GM said it was obligated by labor contracts to do that, but some people are skeptical, pointing out that all manner of other contracts were obviated by the bankruptcy.
(At the time, there was also a controversy about a double standard between retirees from different unions, but it was largely worked out, at least as to pension benefits, though not health care.)
Meanwhile, salaried people who were still in the GM plan, as opposed to Delphi’s, also got their full pensions.
As for the Delphi salaried workers, the PBGC ruled that the Delphi pension plan was only 50-percent funded and, therefore, Delphi retirees would get the lower PBGC benefits.
On its face, the arrangement looks unfair.
Some might point out that PBGC is treating the salaried retirees the same way it treats others workers whose companies have gone belly up, and that what’s unusual here is that the union people are being topped off.
But here’s the problem with that analysis: This whole arrangement was worked out by government. It involves government money. And the one group that got shafted was the one without the power and connection of unions and without ties to the new GM.
The salaried Delphi people say that independent audits found that the Delphi retirement plan was not nearly as underfunded as the PBGC says.
The Delphi retirees have sued and have done well in preliminary court rounds. In addition, there are investigations by the Government Accountability Office (pushed by House Republican leader John Boehner) and by the inspector general of the government bailout program. Congress has held hearings.
The Delphi retirees have bipartisan support, especially in Ohio and Michigan, where many live. But some on the political right are portraying the situation as a simple case of the Obama administration caring only about organized labor. That suspicion is legitimate.
Many of the salaried Delphi people had to retire prematurely. They lost their life insurance and health coverage (though they did end up with pricey insurance under the PBGC). Then they saw their pensions reduced from what they were promised.
They rose up when they saw everybody else — in what they thought was the same boat — doing decidedly better.
The Delphi people are entirely right to speak up for themselves. And government/GM officials have questions to answer.
The PBGC has to have policies that will keep it solvent. But that’s not the only issue. Another is whether government officials were willing to see GM spend government money on one group, but not another.
And whether, having allowed that during a chaotic period, they are willing to correct the situation.
Permalink | Comments (19) | Post your comment | Categories: Auto industry, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb
TweetEditorial: Strickland plan for education sets higher bar
2010 Election
John Kasich has spent a lot of time beating up Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland for his education policies. The criticism is particularly unfair considering that Mr. Kasich, a Republican, has told voters little about how he’d change Ohio’s education landscape.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kasich is not backing away from his contention that Ohio, over time, should eliminate its income tax, which provides at least 40 percent of the state budget.
In Ohio, the governor is pivotal in determining how much money colleges, and especially K-12 schools, get.
In four years, Gov. Strickland has done quite a lot to advance education. In fact, improving things — at the elementary, secondary and college levels — is fundamental to his approach to making Ohio more competitive.
For starters, he took a substantive run at solving Ohio’s intractable K-12 school funding woes. Last year he managed to push through a funding plan he calls an “evidence-based model.”
It’s utopian in the assumption that schools should get all the money they need to pay for personnel and programs that research — “the evidence” — suggests will help children succeed. But the approach has focused debate on what is needed if Ohio wants to have exemplary schools.
Though the change would be slow, the governor’s plan is to shift more of the cost of schools to the state and off of local property taxpayers.
He wants to phase in that change over 10 years, which has led to the charge that he’s insisting that those who come after him should raise taxes to pay for things like a longer school year and new personnel that he isn’t personally willing to fund.
In his defense, the governor was counting (too optimistically) on revenue growing over time.
Then came the recession, which has totally crushed that hope.
Gov. Strickland should get credit for at least raising the bar and creating new expectations, some of which are going to be hard to back down from even if they will be difficult to pay for.
Mr. Kaisch says the governor’s plan will be “gone” if he’s elected, but what he’ll replace it with is a mystery.
When it comes to colleges, Gov. Strickland has accomplished even more. He appointed Eric Fingerhut as chancellor of Ohio’s colleges and empowered him to dramatically reshape Ohio’s portfolio of colleges.
Mr. Fingerhut has changed public subsidies to reward those that do the best job of helping their students earn degrees. He has won rave reviews for new tracking systems that measure what’s really happening on campuses, and for insisting that colleges collaborate on research and program offerings.
He has stepped up the connections between universities, community colleges and high schools, allowing students to move easily from one setting to the next.
At the same time, Gov. Strickland made a tremendous commitment to slowing the rising costs of college by insisting on a two-year tuition freeze.
Perhaps most lasting of all his education policies has been the way he has pushed to connect university research with economic development.
Building on the Third Frontier program begun under Republican Gov. Bob Taft, Gov. Strickland has required universities to specialize and concentrate in well-defined areas of research.
The governor has been unabashed in his support of education. The danger that Mr. Kasich might dismantle those efforts is something voters should be worried about.
Permalink | Comments (27) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Higher Ed, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetMartin Gottlieb: DeWine ad on health care, Obama, Cordray a beaut
2010 ELECTION
One of the best/worst political ads of this campaign season is Mike DeWine’s about health care.
The 30-second spot (available at DeWine’s website, in fact at the top of his homepage at this writing) starts with a nice picture of President Barack Obama with his hand on the shoulder of Richard Cordray, the Ohio attorney general whom DeWine is trying to unseat.
Apparently the Republicans have decided that tying Democrats to the president is good politics.
To DeWine’s credit, it’s not an unflattering picture. It’s quite striking, which is probably good politics: sticks in the mind.
The voiceover: “He might be Barack Obama’s favorite state attorney general: incumbent Richard Cordray. Cordray refuses to fight Obama’s health care plan, even though it will cost Ohio jobs, hurt small business and slash Medicare benefits. Ohio’s lost almost 400,000 jobs, and Corday’s job- killing policies are making it worse. Mike DeWine will fight the Obama health care plan.”
Then the candidate appears, earnestly declaring: “It is costing Ohio jobs, and we have to fight it.”
Then a screen flashes that says, “Mike DeWine for attorney general” with a voiceover saying “a model of integrity” as the screen attributes that judgment to the Columbus Dispatch.”
It’s all more effective on screen than here.
The last point is a particular beaut: this doesn’t come from just any politician in the heat of a campaign, but from a certified model of integrity.
The Dispatch offered that praise of DeWine in an editorial bidding him farewell when he left the U.S. Senate in 2007, having been defeated.
More precisely, the paper called him “a model of integrity, pragmatism and moderation.” But DeWine leaves out the two slurs at the end, having enough problems with the conservative Republican base already.
Every point made about the Obama plan is highly disputable, of course. The notion that it is costing jobs, having hardly been implemented, is especially lame.
As for the notion that Cordray’s “job killing policies” are making Ohio’s job-loss statistics worse, that’s just bizarre.
All Cordray has done about health care is decide not to challenge the plan’s constitutionality. Meanwhile, though, other states have, and the issue is pending. Cordray’s decision has had absolutely no impact.
And if he had made the opposite decision, that, too, would have had absolutely no impact.
Is DeWine referring to something other than the health care issue? Well, in another ad, he implies that Cordray has been destroying jobs through lawsuits against small businesses. Asked for the specifics, though, the DeWine campaign had none.
And some people might conceivably argue that legal cases Cordray has waged against Wall Street firms are costing jobs; but DeWine has declined to criticize those suits when asked.
DeWine’s campaign brings to mind his unsuccessful 1992 run against John Glenn for the U.S. Senate. That time, he was actually tougher. Words like “slur,” “mud” and “dirty” kept showing up in headlines about the race.
He went entirely negative and personal. That struck a lot of people as odd, given that the opposition was an American hero.
DeWine ran an ad showing Glenn in an astronaut uniform as an Energizer bunny who keeps “owing and owing and owing.” The reference was to the fact that Glenn had not paid off his debts from his 1984 presidential race, despite being a millionaire.
Glenn was prohibited by law from paying the debt with his own money. And raising money to pay for a past campaign by a politician who was no longer a possible president proved difficult, especially because there were legal limits on the size of contributions.
But DeWine said, “Senator, in the 19th century, we used to put debtors in prison. Today, we apparently keep them in the U.S. Senate.” He said the Glenn of 1992 had “the wrong stuff.”
Prison? John Glenn?
Lots of people have said lots of nice things about Mike DeWine, about his compassion — demonstrated through his commitment to Haiti — about his willingness to work across party lines in good causes once elected.
But campaigns bring out the worst in politicians. That’s what he’s a model of.
Permalink | Comments (21) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Courts can’t let lenders fake papers
It’s hard to fathom, but the housing crisis just got worse.
First came the predatory loans, and then the foreclosure crush because of those loans and the bursting of the housing bubble. Home values and real-estate prices have sunk, leaving millions of people with property valued at less than what they owe. Houses are sitting on the market for seemingly forever.
Now four major lenders are saying they want to temporarily halt foreclosures, and some lenders are balking at making loans for homes that have been foreclosed on. The companies that have stopped foreclosing are sending signals that they’ve been processing paperwork without verifying the very information that would entitle them to foreclose.
Further compounding things, title insurance companies are losing faith in public records because mortgages aren’t always being recorded at local government offices. If title companies won’t write policies on foreclosed properties, banks will stop making loans for them because they’re not going to put their money at risk if they’re not sure that a borrower really has clear title.
This is a national disaster.
Before it’s over, Congress will have to get involved because the problem is so big and because the economy can’t afford an even more paralyzed real estate market.
But this is very much a state and local problem, too.
Attorney General Richard Cordray and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner both are using their offices to put the fear of God in mortgage companies. Attorney General Cordray is filing suit against one company that allegedly filed paperwork saying it had the right to foreclose when, critics say, it didn’t own the relevant loans or can’t prove that it did.
Secretary of State Brunner is calling on the Cleveland U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate cases of suspected fraud related to mortgage documents.
Ohio lawmakers probably won’t be sitting on the sidelines long. They could require that before foreclosures are processed, more “i’s are dotted to make sure that borrowers aren’t getting shafted. (Foreclosure hoops vary widely from county to county.)
Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Brown (who is running for election, as is Attorney General Cordray) says he wants more lenient deadlines for foreclosures, which he said would encourage mediation between buyers and banks.
Local common pleas courts also have a huge role. If mortgage companies can’t get past the judges with their paperwork, foreclosures can’t go forward. With this latest controversy suggesting that banks have been presenting fraudulent or sketchy documents, local judges are on notice that they may have been acting on bogus information.
They have to do more to ensure that homeowners aren’t being victimized by firms that apparently believed they could mislead courts and nothing bad would ever happen.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, GMAC Mortgage and PNC Financial Services Group all are regrouping on their foreclosure policies. They have to be concerned that they’re going to be hit with class-action lawsuits from borrowers who lost their homes even though the banks can’t show they really had the right to throw the borrowers out. The companies could be facing millions in litigation costs.
This stunning and shocking problem can’t be allowed to get worse. Any future foreclosures need to be done by the book. It’s judges who are in a position to require that.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Predatory lending
TweetGuest column: Communism, capitalism not so different at the top
This commentary was written by Dennis M. Doyle, of Dayton, a professor in the University of Dayton’s Religious Studies Department.
The father-in-law of a friend of mine grew up in an eastern-bloc country under communist rule. This man, Constantin, detests “the communists.”
I enjoy speaking with him very much, but I am careful about what I say around him on matters of politics and economics. He has on occasion corrected what he takes to be my lack of full appreciation when it comes to both how bad the communists were and how good the Americans have been.
So it was with trepidation that I shared with him an idea about capitalism that I have been thinking about of late. I had gotten the idea after a different friend of mine, Mike, had been telling me about his personal move from a “high pyramid” firm to a “low pyramid” firm.
In a “high-pyramid” firm, there is a large difference in status and salary between entry-level jobs and middle-level jobs and the highest-level jobs. There is much pressure and competition and a high rate of employee turnover. Promotions usually come soon or not at all.
The production of significant results is expected and then rewarded swiftly and handsomely. The winners rise quickly and the non-winners fall just as quickly to the wayside.
The “low pyramid” firm for which Mike now works had him begin his time with a few weeks of meetings in which he got to know a range of people from all job levels. He doesn’t make quite as much money now, but neither is he under quite so much pressure.
As he looks toward his future, he realizes that opportunities for promotion are spaced out over the course of years and that the monetary and status difference from one level to another are not so great.
He still makes a very good living, though, and already, after a short time, he appreciates the general atmosphere of the workplace.
He has become friends with a number of people who are indeed from a wide range of different jobs.
He blushes a bit when he says that he knows that the word “family” is often a cliché when applied to a business, but he really does have a sense of being part of a family at his present job.
So I said a bit nervously to Constantin, a man whose life had been ruined by communists, that I think the idea of “low pyramid” and “high pyramid” can be applied not only to individual businesses, but also more generally to different styles of capitalism.
I was surprised when, instead of lecturing me on the relative merits of everything American, he said, immediately and firmly, “The high-pyramid capitalists are just like the communists. The power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and everybody else has to answer to them.”
I then learned a few more things about what Constantin thinks. Although he fiercely loves America, he doesn’t take his political views from the left-right menu served up on American cable television. He looks to his own bitter experience of growing up under communist rule.
He doesn’t agree with those who say that it’s “American” to extend tax cuts to the very rich while declaring this means that one is just being fair to everyone.
And he thinks that those who call President Barack Obama a “socialist” don’t have the slightest idea of what they are talking about.
The communists are the people who tolerate a huge gap between those at the top and everyone else. The Americans are the ones who developed a large middle class with a deeper sense of equality than that of which the real-life communists ever dreamed.
Permalink | Comments (48) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Guest Columns, National Politics, National government
TweetEditorial: Political ads best seen as entertainment
2010 ELECTION
It tells you something about the nature of this political year when you see a television ad for a certain candidate right after another ad for the same candidate. With, for example, the National Rifle Association running ads in behalf of Republican senatorial candidate Rob Portman, and with Mr. Portman himself airing some (funded in part by some of the same people), it can happen.
Money is flowing freely in amazing amounts. That’s in part because this is the first election after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the decades-old ban on direct corporate spending in political campaigns. Meanwhile, efforts to enact tough disclosure requirements about the sources of money have failed. And such spending is not even capped.
Among the 2010 phenomena:
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending a whopping $75 million (with some charging — and the Chamber denying — that some of it comes from foreign sources).
• New, big-money organizations are being set up outside of political parties and candidate campaigns to run ads.
• Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has given $1 million to elect Republican governors. Actually, this particular contribution would have been legal even under the old rules, but the size used to be unheard of. The contribution was sparked, Mr. Murdoch says, by his friendship with John Kasich, the party’s candidate in Ohio, who used to work for him.
The whole situation is widely expected to be a major new problem for the Democrats. True, labor unions were also unleashed by the Supreme Court, and they’ve been spending on behalf of Democrats. But Democratic contributors don’t seem as motivated as Republicans this year. Even billionaire George Soros has been holding back.
As this month progresses (1) that could change and (2) television viewers could become so inundated with ads that they tune them out, literally or metaphorically.
Meanwhile, as has been often noted, the campaign-spenders have more and more trouble finding audiences, as television channels proliferate, the Internet entertains more people, and people skip over the ads in recorded or uploaded programs.
Some of the ads that Ohio has seen already — which are bunched together at such length that they can seem like a program unto themselves — are striking enough to be embraced as entertainment. In the race for state treasurer, incumbent Kevin Boyce, a Democrat, is making the campaign about his opponent’s ad campaign itself, creating an ongoing soap opera. Josh Mandel had run an ad that a lot of people interpreted as suggesting that Mr. Boyce is a Muslim. Mr. Boyce responds by highlighting his Christianity and quoting a newspaper’s (justified) outrage at the Mandel ad.
Mr. Boyce has good reason to welcome anything that changes the subject from his performance in office.
Then there’s the ad being run against state Sen. Fred Strahorn. It highlights his support of the Barack Obama health care plan. Never mind that a state senator has nothing to do with that. Is Republican candidate Bill Beagle saying that he can’t find anything to object to in Sen. Strahorn’s actual record in office?
A Mike DeWine ad also features the president and health care. Former Sen. DeWine promises to challenge the health care plan in court as attorney general, saying that somebody must stand up for Ohioans.
Never mind that the bill is already being challenged in court by other states, with or without Mike DeWine.
Some candidates seem to think that the government of Ohio doesn’t actually do anything that people are interested in. That’s worth knowing.
This year is a test case for the new rules on corporate spending, as to how much will be spent and the effects.
The best way to get through the month may be to greet the ads as part of a game. Think of them as a kind of new fall show, somewhat in the “reality” mode — so long as the word “reality” is not applied to what the ads are actually saying.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Fisher closer to right on big issues; Portman wants to refight Obama wars
2010 ELECTION
Ohio’s election for the U.S. Senate comes at time when a Republican candidate has great advantages. President Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress have failed to turn the economy around or to tamp down the hyper-partisan atmosphere in Washington — that is, to unite the country.
Moreover, Republicans in politics and the media have made a coherent, anti-government case against the president, whereas he has not come up with a theme other than “change,” which isn’t resonating anymore.
And yet the mess he has failed to clean up was largely left to him by a Republican president. And the Republicans who now want back in office are basically the same people who supported that president’s policies.
In Ohio, both Senate candidates are highly capable, perhaps the best their parties can offer. Democrat Lee Fisher was tapped to be lieutenant governor because Ted Strickland needed somebody who knew the state and Columbus. Mr. Strickland was widely judged to have found the right person.
Republican Rob Portman has bipartisan respect and an admirable way of finding issues on which he can work with Democrats while keeping his conservative base happy. One was reform of Internal Revenue Service practices when he was last in Congress in the 1990s.
But on the big controversies, he is a loyal, staunchly conservative Republican. He can’t be confused with the likes of retiring Sen. George Voinovich, former Sen. Mike DeWine or former Gov. Bob Taft, all of whom have paid a price with the extreme voices in their party for occasionally straying from the party line. Their relative independence has been courageous and right for Ohio and the country.
Mr. Portman, who believes the Obama administration is consciously out to expand government’s size and power, wants to “repeal” the Obama health care plan. He also talks about “replacing” it. But this amounts to repeal. He simply is not on board for the strong measures that result in dramatic progress toward universal coverage.
Mr. Portman, who is significantly ahead in the polls, also wants to end the Obama stimulus plan, and, in fact, to reverse it, to go in the opposite direction on spending. Instead, he would stimulate the economy with a payroll tax holiday. But to end the Obama stimulus — which Mr. Portman admits has had impact — while trying another kind of stimulus would be self-defeating.
He blithely insists that the original stimulus would have had twice the impact if it were half the size and had bigger tax cuts. That’s the Republican line. Such a stimulus would have been only about twice the size of the now-forgotten one of 2008 (wherein taxpayers were sent rebates). That effort had no important impact on a much smaller economic downtown.
Mr. Portman and other Republican leaders are eager to refight the ugly fights of the last two years even if they can’t prevail. Better to move on. Better to not deliver the message to business people, Wall Street and the world that the United States might make U-turns on fundamental policy after every election.
Mr. Portman was rising in the House of Representatives when he was appointed to the Bush cabinet. He could rise to party leadership in the Senate, too. But to do so, he’d have to play to the Republican mood.
That’s not what the swing state of Ohio needs. It needs focus on the nation’s needs.
Mr. Fisher has not generally aligned himself with the party’s vocal liberal wing. When he ran for governor in 1998, he called for a tax cut. Before that, he was associated with the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization set up to keep the party from drifting too far left. (Bill Clinton came out of it.)
This year Mr. Fisher is fuzzing up his old image especially on trade, highlighting free-trade agreements as bad for Ohio. On the other hand, though, he has joined the political right in opposing “cap and trade,” which would cut carbon emissions with a system of rewards and penalties. His position is a concession to being from coal-dependent Ohio.
He supports President Obama on health care and the stimulus. President Obama has proceeded on the premise that if he was going to achieve dramatic legislation, it would be in his first two years. He was right. The next Congress will have more Republicans, and the scarred Democrats will move to the center. Mr. Fisher and his fellow Democrats know they have stretched to the limit whatever mandate the party had after 2008.
Meanwhile, though, all the pressure on Mr. Portman will be to stick to his promise to refight the old fights, especially with Republicans being pushed away from the political center by the Tea Party.
At a time when both parties should be trying to find common ground — and when both parties have much to be humble and chastened about — Mr. Portman is the one with the ideological head of steam. Mr. Fisher is the better choice.
(A letter in support of each candidate is here.)
Permalink | Comments (32) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEllen Belcher: We grilled them, now you get to vote
2010 Election
A reader who is voting early called this week to say he didn’t know anything about the candidates running for the state board of education. Could I help him, he asked.
As it happened, we hadn’t published our recommendation in that race yet. I did some quick searching on the web for the caller, but indeed there isn’t much information out there about the candidates in this low-profile race.
The plea was a reminder of why many newspapers — not just the Dayton Daily News — spend so much time and energy asking candidates about their views and looking into their backgrounds.
Last week the Dayton Daily News editorial board finished up more than three dozen interviews with candidates, and proponents and opponents of tax issues.
Most of those interviews lasted an hour. In some cases, the grillings ran longer. Usually the candidates faced each other.
It’s a fact — not a boast — that the discussions were far more substantive than any candidates’ night or debate can ever be. Unlike at those events, we got to ask unlimited follow-up questions and interrupt when someone wasn’t answering a question or was serving up platitudes.
While not an election season goes by where we don’t get calls from candidates, or people who are for or against levies, asking us to make a recommendation, other people think it’s arrogant for newspapers to make this effort. Critics say that they don’t want to be told what to think.
Of course, we want to be persuasive. Who wants to have an unpersuasive opinion? But we’re a newspaper, not a political party. Nobody gets a free pass from hard questions here.
What we mainly want to do is give people information, to stoke debate. If, come Election Day, the majority of voters agrees with our point of view, great. If they see things differently, that’s OK, too. People can disagree and still find worth in the other side’s argument. Debate forces all of us to think harder.
Another criticism we get is that the newspaper has an agenda and that it favors Democrats. In presidential contests, it’s a fact that the Daily News has always recommended the Democratic candidate, except in 1972 when Richard Nixon was challenged by George McGovern.
Take a look, though, at the lists below. The record is indisputable that we’ve encouraged readers to support Republicans in marquee contests. If we only had recommended Republicans when there was no real contest, or only in unimportant contests, then we’d be guilty of just jerking our knees.
This year, we recommended four Democrats and four Republicans who are running statewide; we did recommend the Democrat in the big races for the U.S. Senate and governor. We picked the three Republicans for the nearby congressional races. For local Statehouse and county races, we went with seven Democrats and six Republicans.
Here’s a caution, though: it’s dangerous to look at aggregate score cards for this sort of thing. You need to look at election contests one at a time.
Legislative districts are created by partisans trying to maximize the number of contests their political party can win. (They admit this; it’s not just an accusation.) If a district (or county) is overwhelmingly Democratic, it’s hard to get a good Republican candidate to run and vice versa. If a candidate’s competence, not just his party, matters to you (and it does to us), there really may be no choice about who is the better candidate.
That reality can skew the numbers, making any organization that’s recommending candidates look more partisan or more balanced than it really might be.
What do we care about when we’re sizing up candidates? The exercise is inherently subjective; it’s not a math problem with a right or wrong answer. That said, what the person wants to do and how he says he’ll vote is significant. So is experience in public and private life.
Familiarity with the work of the office and the controversies the officeholder would face counts. A person’s reputation and record of involvement is important. Political ideology is significant, but more so, say, for the U.S. Senate, than a county commission seat. Temperament is also a factor.
You shouldn’t just blindly take our word on how to vote. Of course, talk to others, read up on the people and issues. But we’re also hoping that we’ve culled some valuable information for you from the individuals who will be making decisions that affect your lives.
DDN recommendations for U.S. Senate
1982 Howard Metzenbaum (D) over Paul Pfeifer (R)
1986 John Glenn (D) over Thomas Kindness (R)
1988 Howard Metzenbaum (D) over George Voinovich (R)
1992 John Glenn (D) over Mike DeWine (R)
1994 Mike DeWine (R) over Joel Hyatt (D)
1998 George Voinovich (R) over Mary Boyle (D)
2000 Mike DeWine (R) over Ted Celeste (D)
2004 George Voinovich (R) over Eric Fingerhut (D)
2006 Mike DeWine (R) over Sherrod Brown (D)
DDN recommendations for governor
1982 Richard Celeste (D) over Clarence “Bud” Brown (R)
1986 Richard Celeste (D) over James Rhodes (R)
1990 George Voinovich (R) over Anthony Celebrezze (D)
1994 George Voinovich (R) over Rob Burch (D)
1998 Robert Taft (R) over Lee Fisher (D)
2002 Robert Taft (R) over Tim Hagan (D)
2006 Ted Strickland (D) over J. Kenneth Blackwell (R)
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Mims is experience and more realistic
Susan Haverkos is stepping down after four years representing Montgomery, Miami, Butler and part of Darke counties on the state board of education. A bid by her husband, Mark Haverkos, to replace her is opposed by Jeff Mims, president of the Dayton Board of Education.
Both men have an earnest interest in education and a strong understanding of the state board’s role. But neither presents a strong vision for what he wants to accomplish.
Still, the best choice is Mr. Mims, because of his experience and resume.
As a young man just back from Vietnam, where he was a squad leader with a special forces unit, he started out as a teacher’s aide in Dayton. During his 35-year career in the city schools, he was an award-winning teacher, a coach, teachers’ union president, administrator and lobbyist. He lived in the district and sent his children to Dayton schools. In retirement, he became school board president.
Mr. Mims, not surprisingly, is most passionate about urban education. He’d have useful perspectives on how state policy actually will play out at the local level. As a former lobbyist in Columbus, Mr. Mims has contacts in the legislature and knows how that body does business.
Some state board members complain about being left out of education policy decisions made by Gov. Ted Strickland and other top lawmakers. The truth is that voters hold the governor more accountable for the state of Ohio’s schools than they do the state board. Most voters don’t know it exists. Meanwhile, the state is sending a lot of money to school districts.
Mr. Mims isn’t pushing any particular agenda. He says his top priority would be to help the state board “unify” and that he has a special interest in school transportation. Those aren’t exactly transformational issues.
Mr. Haverkos, co-owner of a computer data center, believes suburban school districts are getting shortchanged by the state. He says urban schools get too much funding, notwithstanding that their mostly poor students come to school behind and often require special help. He’s rigid in the extreme in his thinking that all districts should be financially equal and that all students require the same kinds of attention.
Mr. Haverkos says his top policy issue is “local control” and suggests wasteful spending could be reined in if the state were more demanding in the way it funds districts. He also believes school consolidation should be on the table as a cost-saver, although he doesn’t offer compelling ideas about the role the state board could play on those issues.
Serving as the voice of parents (his daughter is a recent high school graduate) and reworking funding for school transportation also are among his interests.
Politically, Mr. Mims and Mr. Haverkos are polar opposites. Mr. Mims is strongly connected to the Democratic Party, while Mr. Haverkos, from West Chester, is a suburban Republican. Both, however, believe intelligent design — a religious theory about the origins of the universe that’s offered as an alternative to evolution — should be taught in science class. Thankfully, both say that they wouldn’t push for changes in the science curriculum.
A painful war was fought not long ago on the state board over requiring science classes to teach intelligent design. Sanity prevailed. Even so, it’s surprising and disappointing that Dayton area voters don’t have the option of voting for a candidate who is strongly supportive of teaching only legitimate science.
Overall, it’s Mr. Mims who makes the best case that he will add value to the state board.
Letters of recommendation for the candidates can be found here.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Lehner should keep her job in Columbus
2010 Election
Click here to read letters of recommendation for these candidates.
Republican state Rep. Peggy Lehner says she wishes her opponent would move across the street from where he’s currently living, which would put him in a different legislative district.
She thinks Steve Byington would make a good legislator, but she doesn’t want him to have her job representing Miamisburg, Miami Twp., West Carrollton, Moraine and Oakwood, and parts of Kettering, Dayton, Carlisle and Springboro.
Rep. Lehner has nothing but nice things to say about the Oakwood City Council member, whom she knows from her interaction with a group of officials who represent “first-tier” suburbs. That group gets together to talk about problems that are vexing them, but not the newer, farther-out suburbs that have less poverty and newer homes and infrastructure.
Mr. Byington works as a project designer for a Daytonn architectural firm. He’s been on Oakwood’s council since 2008, which has gotten him connected to other groups like the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission and the National League of Cities.
He says he’s interested in creating better planning standards, a view that’s usually associated with those who believe states should have incentives for regions to stop sprawling. He has not taken a “no new taxes” pledge (neither has Rep. Lehner) and he says he would have supported delaying the last phase of the state income tax cut (which Rep. Lehner supported).
Rep. Lehner, who was on Kettering City Council for nine years and failed in a bid to be on the Montgomery County Commission, is facing her first re-election. She’s been in the minority in the House these last two years, but she has been particularly dedicated to building bridges to Democrats and lowering the level of partisanship in Columbus.
Some people who have politically safe districts decide that situation allows them to be hyper-partisan; others use that latitude to try to get things done and find common ground. In opting for the latter, Rep. Lehner has the more mature, commendable style.
She is against the pending $400 million project to build high-speed rail between Cleveland and Cincinnati, passing through Dayton and Columbus. She calls the service a “19th century choo-choo,” and criticizes the incremental nature of the program. (Her opponent supports the “3C” plan.)
Married to a doctor, Rep. Lehner has disagreed with her party by voting for rules requiring insurance plans to provide certain coverage for autism and diabetes. That she’s willing to disagree with her party takes a certain courage because the assumption is that if state Sen. Jon Husted wins his race for secretary of state, Rep. Lehner could succeed him.
Though she’s not a fan of expanding gambling in the state, she is not against allowing video lottery terminals at a horse racing track in Montgomery County, if Lebanon’s raceway ever opts to move from Warren County. (Mr. Byington agrees.)
Rep. Lehner doesn’t like Gov. Ted Strickland’s education reforms, saying they treat all districts as if they have the same problems and same needs.
Both candidates are capable, but Rep. Lehner has been in Columbus, done her job and deserves the opportunity to continue.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Re-elect Boehner, Austria, Turner
2010 ELECTION
Among the three Democratic challengers to Republican members of Congress in the districts centered in the Dayton area, there’s not a minute’s experience in public office, not a record to be judged.
Nor — in a time when congressional elections have become nationalized, with money pouring into districts whenever there’s hope of victory — is much of an effort being made by Democrats in Washington or Columbus for these local candidates.
This is not to say that none of the challengers is worth attention or that none is a respectable choice for Democratic voters looking for an alternative.
But the Democratic pitch to independent voters who value qualifications is strained.
JOHN BOEHNER VERSUS JUSTIN COUSSOULE
Rep. John Boehner has been routinely and overwhelmingly re-elected in the 8th District since 1990 with little or no opposition. Now he is leader of the House Republicans and could become speaker if the Republicans take control. It would be a remarkable time for his district to turn against him.
The district dips into Huber Heights and east Dayton from the north, and includes all or part of Miami, Mercer, Darke, Preble and Butler counties.
Rep. Boehner does have a worthier opponent than usual. Justin Coussoule is a lawyer and West Point grad who makes a good presentation of a fundamentally Democratic case.
But Congress is a pretty big office for a first-time candidate. All the incumbents discussed here started lower.
Mr. Coussoule has more financial support than Mr. Boehner’s opponents usually have — reportedly reaching into six figures. That’s partly because Rep. Boehner is a national figure. Anti-Boehner money comes in from outside the district.
Having two reasonably visible candidates is a good thing.
The challenger paints the incumbent as out-of-touch with his district, involved with national affairs, unwilling to pursue funding for local projects the way other legislators do (through those controversial “earmarks”) and used to hobnobbing — and golfing — with business lobbyists and others far removed from real people.
There’s a mix of truth and stretch in that indictment.
But does the 8th District really want to punish somebody for rising in political leadership? Other places have done that, but it seems on the mindless side.
John Boehner is not the reason the House Republicans are at war with the Obama administration. It would be the same under any leader.
What can be said of Rep. Boehner specifically is that he has risen to and survived at the top of his party without using any atypically cutthroat methods. And his party seems to be thriving under his leadership. That has to be respected.
STEVE AUSTRIA VERSUS BILL CONNER
At the other end of the power spectrum from Rep. Boehner is Rep. Steve Austria, a freshman of the 7th District, which includes Greene and Clark counties and extends toward Columbus.
His opponent is Bill Conner, making his third run for the office, having also run for the state legislature. Once notable for an irascible manner, he has improved his act dramatically. Educated as an engineer, he has a strong background in the military and in the defense industry. And he has carefully laid out his views (available on his website) on the big issues.
But he’s still a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican district and still a liberal, pushing single-payer health insurance. His biggest issue, though, as before, is campaign spending. He says the political system is corrupted by money from special interests. He specifically notes the money flowing from corporate interests to his opponent. (Rep. Austria says half his money comes from individuals.)
Mr. Conner wants campaign spending to be limited to $100,000. But the U.S. Supreme Court opposed limits even when the court was more moderate. Today the justices are tearing down even lesser regulations.
Mr. Austria likes to note that he was elected president of the Republican freshman class. And he has put together a committee to help local businesses land more contracts from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. This happened after he took some flak for not asking for earmarks, in the way of his predecessor, David Hobson.
He has broken from the Republican line rarely, but did, for example, in voting for SCHIP, which provides health care for uninsured children.
After mistakenly blaming the 1930s Great Depression on Franklin Roosevelt, the president who was elected because of it, Rep. Austria kept a lower profile, focusing on local affairs, coming back to the district regularly, as a freshman should.
MIKE TURNER VERSUS JOE ROBERTS
The challenge to Rep. Mike Turner is not worth pausing over. Joe Roberts, 25, is a political operative who, after winning a peculiarly undistinguished primary, has not been able to generate much in the way of support or a rationale. Much of his young adult life has been spent outside of Dayton. He can’t possibly argue that he’s the more qualified candidate.
Rep. Turner is the top Republican on an armed services subcommittee on strategic forces, from which post he recently fought to keep intelligence jobs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He could become chairman if the Republicans take the House.
He has emerged as a voice for his party in the strategic-forces niche, critiquing Obama administration policy.
Meanwhile, he’s been sharply focused on local interests, such as the murder of Marine Maria Lauterbach and the military’s handling of her case.
He’s also pushing a bill to protect the child-custody rights of military members who are deployed. The bill has passed the House, but is stalled in the Senate.
He has been disappointing on the biggest national issues, especially the bank bailout, which even the more conservative John Boehner recognized was necessary, however unpalatable.
The three House incumbents are conservatives of varying degrees. Many voters disapprove of their voting records. But if the challenging party wants to pull in independent voters, it should put up candidates who are reasonably well known, who stand near the philosophical mainstream of their districts, and who have reasonably comparable qualifications and abilities.
Meanwhile, incumbents who are serving honorably ought not be disposed of too lightly, given the usefulness of their seniority and experience.
In these races, the incumbents are the most reasonable choices.
(Links to letters endorsing each of the six candidates are here under Letters to the Editor.)
Permalink | Comments (62) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Is Boehner serious about changing Congress
2010 ELECTION
Two views on John Boehner, who might be the next speaker of the U.S. House:
From David Broder, the veteran Washington Post columnist, who tends to see the best in politicians:
“It might well behoove people to assume that Boehner should be taken seriously when he acknowledges that the reputation of this Congress is so bad that it cries out for reform….
“Boehner was a serious legislator for five years … as chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce…. His diagnosis of the problems in Congress offers a starting point for a cure. Let’s hope the Democrats respond.”
From New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who tends to see the worst in conservatives:
“It’s beyond astonishing to me that John Boehner has a real chance to be speaker…. I’ve always thought of Boehner as one of the especially sleazy figures in a capital seething with sleaze. I remember writing about the day back in the mid-90s when this slick, chain-smoking, quintessential influence-peddler decided to play Santa Claus by handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to fellow congressional sleazes right on the floor of the House while it was in session….
“The hack who once handed out checks … is now a gilded flunky of the nation’s big-time corporate elite…. Just this past July, Boehner called for a moratorium on new federal regulations, saying it would be a ‘wonderful signal to the private sector that they’re going to have some breathing room’….
“Protect the public? You must be kidding.”
The tobacco story that Herbert tells really happened. And to be sure, Boehner’s ties with big corporate lobbyists are still near the heart of his political identity.
But is that all you need to know about him, as Herbert suggests? Is the rest just an attempt to change the subject, to sell himself to gentle spirits like Broder?
When you talk to Boehner, his desire to reform Congress seems genuine to the point of passionate. But, of course, seeming genuine is his job.
He grants that the Republicans have offended his sense of how Congress should operate. But he is particularly furious about the Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi era. He says everything comes from the top down, that even rank-and-file Democrats have been frozen out by their own leaders. But, of course, he’s most angry that Republicans have been.
That complaint leads to this question:
If your party won big majorities in both houses and had a newly elected president who had won comfortably, wouldn’t you, too, have decided that governing was the responsibility of your own party? After all, you couldn’t go back to the electorate and complain that the other party was the problem.
Boehner doesn’t say no. He just says that going the one-party, top-down route is counterproductive in the long run.
He’s proposing more democracy. Ideas would percolate up. Let legislators actually legislate.
That most of today’s legislators are not real players in shaping major bills is clear to anyone who listens to their campaigns. They talk about bringing home the bacon, about fighting for local interests. They talk about letters they have written (or sometimes, amazingly, just letters they have signed, that some colleague wrote). They talk about whom they got on the phone or had a meeting with. They talk about narrowly focused paragraphs they have succeeded in adding to, or taken out of, larger legislation.
Some people think it’s just as well. Democracy in Congress can be chaos. I happened to be in Washington in the late 1970s, just after an era of reform had changed the House dramatically. “Mark-up” sessions, in which committees draft legislation, had just been made public, along with the votes of the members. Sunshine ruled. Power had been moved downward from committee chairs to subcommittees, which proliferated. Seniority rules had been loosened. Some people saw the flowering of a new age.
But Congress got nothing done, though Democrats had a president and big majorities in both houses. That was the model the Democrats of 2009 were determined to avoid.
In this election, few people will vote according to how they think Congress should operate. But if Boehner is going to make a personal mark — if he’s going to be something other than the generic leader, if stories are going to be told about him other than the tobacco story — this may be his realm.
And one gets the impression he knows it, that the kind of reform he’s talking about is his own particular baby.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: Kasich pitch on trains not really about speed
2010 ELECTION
In the fight about passenger trains in Ohio, the two sides have not only differing views, but different information.
Some are on e-mail lists that are put out by opponents. These feature articles and studies with the bad news: about Amtrak’s costs to taxpayers, about bad service high ticket prices or low usage on this or that line, about cost overruns, slow speeds, unmet expectations and scandals.
But there are mailing lists on the other side:
about train usage being higher than ever, about how young people are moving to places with good train service, about how economic development follows train service, about how speeds are increasing (and plenty of people ride the slower trains anyway), about the huge government subsidies for auto travel that make the subsidies for trains look tiny.
As usual in today’s politics, people only feel obliged to know the case for their side. The other side is somebody else’s responsibility. With John Kasich, though, one gets the feeling he isn’t on either mailing list.
In a televised debate, the Republican candidate for governor said he was against 3C, the plan for passenger train service from Cleveland to Cincinnati via Dayton, to be built with federal stimulus money. He put his opposition in terms of speed. He derisively referred to 3C as a “39-mile-per-hour high-speed train.” That’s the main case most critics make: too slow to generate ridership.
To those new to politics, that phrasing might raise the possibility that he’ll change his mind now that the officially projected average speed for the line has been raised to 50 mph, with future increases reasonably expected.
Average speeds will be higher in the middle of the route: 61 mph between Columbus and the suburbs of Cleveland. All told, the Cincinnati-Cleveland run will be 90-minutes shorter than originally projected. The average approaches car speeds, figuring traffic delays and stops.
But 3C supporters should not get their hopes raised about Kasich. After the TV debate, but before the news broke about the 50 mph speed, Kasich and Gov. Ted Strickland met with this newspaper’s editorial board. Kasich was asked how he would counter the argument made by 3C supporters that, in order to get to high-speed trains, a region must first have conventional trains to demonstrate the demand.
(Supporters say that all high-speed systems started as conventional systems.)
Some 3C opponents respond that a high-speed system couldn’t be built on the current tracks, that it would be a matter of starting from scratch.
But Kasich didn’t make that point. He said he was just against the whole idea of passenger trains — high-speed or conventional — seeing no need in Ohio.
His position isn’t about conflicting sets of information. He said it was just a “philosophical” difference between him and the governor.
Given government subsidies for other forms of transportation, the philosophical dispute seems to involve special antipathy to trains. Ohio once had 2,800 miles of “interurban” electric rail lines connecting various cities. But the auto age came along, and the lines became unprofitable. Many were eventually torn up.
Passing up the 3C opportunity now seems likely to produce the same kind of amazed regrets that a lot of people feel about that story now.
There’s a last-chance feel to this. How is Ohio ever going to get the public to go along with spending state money for trains after rejecting a gift of the construction money now?
Republican candidates for governor in other states — California, Florida, Wisconsin — are also against accepting stimulus money for trains. But their projects involve more state money or less crucial connections (Milwaukee-Madison).
The 3C connection is one of the best ideas out there, given the population density of line and given that Ohio is behind other states. But those kinds of distinctions aren’t being made. Instead we get “philosophy.”
Permalink | Comments (49) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics, Transportation
TweetEditorial: Mandel plays gutter politics, Boyce worse
2010 Election
The race for state treasurer between Kevin Boyce and Josh Mandel is thoroughly awful. Neither candidate has much experience in banking, and the debate has been ugly and partisan. But the deciding factor is the performance of the incumbent, Mr. Boyce, a 38-year-old former Columbus city councilman.
In less than two years since he was appointed, several of his decisions raise red flags and his explanations often don’t add up. Some examples:
• In his first six months, Mr. Boyce’s office spent more than $32,000 on promotional items with his name on it.
• A significant number of Mr. Boyce’s hires are personal friends or have political connections. He hired the 24-year-old son of two top advisers to Gov. Ted Strickland; the 22-year-old daughter of Toledo’s former mayor and the sister of Cincinnati’s former mayor.
He also hired former Democrat Party staffers and personal friends from high school and his church. Mr. Boyce says qualifications were the only factors in each case and that he didn’t know some of the connections critics have cited.
• One case of close personal connections is particularly cozy. Noure Alo, a personal friend of Deputy Treasurer Amer Ahmad, was hired as a lobbyist by a Boston bank just days before it landed a $1.27 million contract with Mr. Boyce’s office. Mr. Alo’s wife also landed a job as an administrative assistant in the treasurer’s office. Mr. Boyce says the timing of these hires was coincidental.
• Mr. Mandel’s staff counts eight people at the director level of Mr. Boyce’s office or campaign who have departed, and he claims they are fleeing because of “ethical” lapses.
Mr. Mandel has not provided evidence for that charge, but Mr. Boyce recently responded that many of those individuals were fired or asked to leave. When the Cleveland Plain Dealer called several of them and researched their personnel files, there was little evidence that anyone was fired. Most reported they left on good terms, contradicting Mr. Boyce.
• Mr. Boyce claims he has created thousands of jobs as treasurer. But his office was, in many cases, just the agency that passed through the funding for them.
Mr. Mandel, a 32-year-old state legislator from suburban Cleveland, has plenty of complaints to work with. Unfortunately, his campaign raises doubts about his judgment.
In campaign literature, he refers to Mr. Boyce’s friends as “comrades” and relentlessly repeats an allegation that the only place one job was posted was in a “mosque.” The wording of a TV ad seems intentionally designed to leave the impression that Mr. Boyce is a Muslim. (He is Christian and Mr. Mandel is Jewish.
An ex-Marine and Iraq war veteran, Mr. Mandel is shamelessly appealing to stereotypes and fears about Islamic fundamentalism.
Mr. Mandel also has criticized Mr. Boyce for outsourcing work. In some cases, out-of-state firms have been the low bidder and won contracts with Mr. Boyce’s office. When asked if he would reject cost-saving low bids in favor of more expensive contracts with companies closer to home, Mr. Mandel admits he likely would pick the lowest bid, just as Mr. Boyce has.
Mr. Mandel and his campaign have made your vote in this race a tougher choice than it should be. Nonetheless, Ohio needs a change in the treasurer’s office. Mr. Mandel is the only choice for change.
Letters of recommendation for the candidates can be found here.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
TweetEditorial: Keith better for auditor
2010 Election
Click here to read letters of support for these candidates.
It’s never easy to get voters’ attention for low-profile elective offices. Give Harry Bossey credit for trying, but he’s swinging recklessly.
Mr. Bossey is a Republican who wants to unseat Karl Keith, Montgomery County’s Democratic auditor who has been on the job for 10 years. Mr. Bossey hopes to tap property owners’ resentment of property taxes generally and the specific fact that, though housing prices have fallen, homeowners haven’t seen their property taxes quickly drop with the market.
About the appraisal process: By law, the auditor appraises properties every six years and then updates that assessment three years later. The last update was in 2008; the next big, comprehensive appraisal will be in 2011.
This means that the appraisal of your property is based mainly on what was happening in the market in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Mr. Keith is quick to add, though, that because prices were starting to dive even in 2007, the appraisals he set in 2008 were — with the state’s approval — generally discounted the values by 10 percent. But then, in the fall of 2008, the economy and the real estate market really tanked.
Notwithstanding the depressed market, most homeowners haven’t seen cuts in their property valuations or taxes, even though houses around them aren’t selling or are going for bargain prices. But keep this in mind: the fact that the county is always playing catch-up with regard to the market value of property is frustrating when the prices are going down, but when values are increasing, property owners effectively get a tax break.
If homeowners thinks an old appraisal is off the mark, they can appeal the valuation. Montgomery County had in the neighborhood of 6,100 appeals in 2009, about double the largest number it has ever had before.
Mr. Bossey sees the situation as the fault of Mr. Keith. But he’s oversimplifying to a fault. Mr. Keith doesn’t control the timing of the appraisal process, and the number of appeals isn’t an indictment of him either in an especially chaotic market.
Mr. Bossey, a certified accountant who has an import-export business in Miamisburg, really goes overboard in his charges that Mr. Keith is favoring Democratic officeholders and contributors whom he says are paying less in property taxes than some of their neighbors.
When pressed about his allegations, Mr. Bossey insists he isn’t suggesting illegality, just that Mr. Keith isn’t being fair. That’s disingenuous. After an interview in which he flung his charges, Mr. Bossey thought better of them and retracted some. He’s sticking to his complaint, however, that Mr. Keith’s friends know of opportunities for tax breaks that others don’t.
A Democratic activist, Mr. Keith has long been a fixture in county government. He’s knowledgeable about his office and local government. He also is active in the state auditors association, which — to the good — offers professional development.
On the other hand, the group goes to bat for auditors every time somebody dares to question why Ohio’s 88 counties need to elect an auditor who doesn’t really audit. (Besides overseeing property appraisals and property tax assessments, county auditors have bookkeeping and record-keeping responsibilities for the county, and they verify that gas pumps and grocery scales are accurate. They also license dogs.)
Republicans collectively — and Mr. Bossey specifically — are doing a public service by challenging Mr. Keith. County administrative offices — if they’re not watched — can get sleepy or become havens for political hangers-on.
The challenge itself is not where Mr. Bossey is going wrong. Rather, his problem is that he doesn’t inspire confidence with allegations he can’t support.
Mr. Keith should keep his job.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Montgomery County
TweetEditorial: O’Connor, Lanzinger are best choices
2010 Election
Click here to read letters of endorsements for each of these candidates.
In the legal community inside and outside of the state, the Ohio Supreme Court is known for at least two things. Interest groups spend obscene amounts of money to elect members of the seven-member court, and the court has had an especially impressive chief justice.
When Chief Justice Tom Moyer died unexpectedly in April, he was the longest-serving justice in the United States. Mr. Moyer, who was chief for 23 years, was admired for that longevity, but, more important, for his sense of fairness and legal scholarship.
Regardless of who wins the election to succeed Chief Moyer, the court will be in the hands of someone less able.
Gov. Ted Strickland appointed Eric Brown to step in to serve as chief after Mr. Moyer’s death. Mr. Brown was serving on the Franklin County Probate Court and was already the Democrats’ candidate to replace Chief Moyer, who was facing mandatory retirement. But the appointment gave him a new political advantage in his race against Justice Maureen O’Connor, the Republican in the contest.
Things have not gone well since the appointment.
The chief justice is perceived as believing he can make decisions about hiring and firing people and the court’s budget without asking the other justices. They don’t believe that Chief Brown has the authority he thinks he does. Mr. Moyer would be sick.
This is just not the way he operated. He first won his seat because a shamelessly political Democrat (Frank Celebrezze) was running amok. Chief Moyer spent two decades trying to restore integrity and credibility to the court that is the final arbiter of the biggest legal fights in the state.
Mr. Brown is showing the wrong instincts. Though he has judicial experience and his more liberal views deserve consideration on a court that is decidedly conservative, he’s blown his chance.
Justice O’Connor, who was Gov. Bob Taft’s lieutenant governor and a former Summit County prosecutor, doesn’t have Chief Justice Moyer’s patience, deftness or intellect. She is, however, rated “highly recommended” by the Ohio State Bar Association. Chief Brown is rated “recommended,” a grade below. When the bar association looked over the candidates, Justice O’Connor had to have benefited by comparison to Chief Brown.
The big thing that recommends Justice O’Connor is that, since 2003, she’s seen how a Supreme Court should be run.
The other race
There’s a second contest that pits Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger against court of appeals Judge Mary Jane Trapp.
Both women are “highly recommended” by the state bar association, and some people think it’s a shame that the two are running against each other. It is a difficult choice, but Justice Lanzinger, a Republican, gets the highest marks.
She won her seat six years ago, and this will be her last term because of the rule that judges can’t run again once they reach 70. She jokes that Judge Trapp, a Democrat, can have her job in six years.
Justice Lanzinger points out that she is the only justice on the court who has served as a municipal, common pleas and court of appeals judge. Her point is that when the court is deciding whether a judge handled a case properly, she knows what it’s like to have been on the front lines.
Justice Lanzinger is a former elementary school teacher. She is precise, always prepared and infinitely patient. She is a conservative, but she’s not a partisan.
Judge Trapp, 54, was first elected in 2006 to the court of appeals that’s based in Warren. Before that, she was in private practice. She has been president of the state bar association.
It’s hard to label her because she doesn’t have the record of decisions that Justice Lanzinger has (Justice Lanzinger supported caps on damages in civil cases; she said police have to get a warrant before searching people’s cell phones).
Judge Trapp complains the current court is “too results-oriented.” That suggests she believes the law doesn’t support or require some of the more controversial rulings the high court has made. She’s effectively telegraphing that she’d come down on the more liberal side in debate.
Justice O’Connor and Justice Lanzinger are the best picks.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Carl Fisher best pick in Morgan district
2010 ELECTION
Thanks to the implosion of a Republican’s candidacy, Democrats have higher hopes than usual in the northern suburbs of Dayton, where a seat in the Ohio House of Representatives is open. The state party has taken enough notice to send finanical help, which does not always happen. But the party has a very tough job. John McCain won 59 percent of the district’s vote in 2008.
When Joe Ellis got into a physical altercation, Mike Henne won the Republican primary for the seat being vacated by Seth Morgan in the 36th District. Mr. Henne, owner with his brother of an insurance agency in Englewood, had not held local office before, had not run before and had not been much involved before. He said he has long had an interest in politics — was the guy at a party who might want to talk politics — and decided to take a shot.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are putting up a candidate with a pretty high profile in public office, at least in part of the district: Huber Heights. Carl Fisher, a Realtor and restaurant manager, is a long-time member of the school board and a sometime president of it. The board has been through tense times that have won it attention, including levy fights and a teachers’ strike. Meanwhile, Mr. Fisher’s brother is mayor.
Also running is independent Cheryl K. Watson, of Germantown. (From the northern suburbs, the district extends all the way down the western edge of Montgomery County.) Also a first-time candidate, she says she has been a Republican in the past and acknowledges “very conservative leanings.” A substitute teacher who has also worked in other fields as well, she returned to Ohio in 2007 after many years in Indiana.
Ms. Watson does not have strong views on current controversies or much information about debates going on in Ohio. Though she mentions education as a concern, she says “I can’t give you specifics,” as to the merits or demerits of Gov. Ted Strickland’s education plan. She does say, however, that “money isn’t the problem” for schools.
She also doesn’t have a position on Ohio’s most recently passed budget, saying she’s “not familiar” with it. She talks mainly about having an open mind and looking for new approaches.
Mr. Henne has a traditional Republican perspective. His Democratic opponent grants, however, that Mr. Henne might not be quite as conservative as Rep. Morgan.
Mr. Henne says state spending is “out of control.” In listing items to cut, he mentions first the passenger train system proposed for linking Cleveland and Cincinnati via Dayton and Columbus.
He says school districts need to combine services. He wants cuts in the state “bureaucracy,” but acknowledges, unlike some first-time candidates, that simply cutting state personnel won’t do the trick.
Some Democrats hope Mr. Fisher will be seen as a relatively conservative Democrat. In the teachers’ strike, he was the union’s harshest critic on the school board; he was the sole vote against the resulting contract. He worried that the union was jeopardizing public support for levies.
He calls for less partisanship. But he’s not running as a rebel among Democrats. He supports the new federal health care plan, though noting flaws, and seems comfortable with Gov. Ted Strickland. He says that when Mr. Henne won his party’s nomination, Mr. Henne proposed cutting taxes. (In a meeting with the Dayton Daily News editorial board, Mr. Henne said he wants to cut taxes in the long run.) Mr. Fisher says that appeal is just “political,” given the state’s pending $8 billion deficit.
Mr. Fisher is the most experienced, the most informed and the most proven. He has a realistic take on state affairs. He is clearly the best choice.
(A letter in support of each candidate is here.)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Budget fixed, Jefferson levy will help kids
2010 Election
You have to admire what Richard Gates has done as superintendent of Jefferson Twp. schools. Just four days after the then-calculus teacher at Jefferson High School was named to the job in 2008, he learned the district’s finances were in such a mess that the state was displacing the school board and taking control. Two years later, it’s amazing how things have changed.
Jefferson schools are fiscally sound, and leaders are optimistic that academic improvements will soon follow. Voters can confidently say “yes” to the district’s renewal levy and know their tax dollars will be carefully spent on helping kids learn.
Mr. Gates said that in the very first conversation he had with state officials after the takeover, one of them suggested the only way to save the district was to “blow it up.”
But Mr. Gates thought disbanding Jefferson schools and putting students under the control of neighboring districts was the wrong solution for kids. He told the state that he’d do whatever it took to save the district.
“They have done one tremendous job of getting their finances in order,” Mike Watson, chairman of the state committee overseeing Jefferson schools, says today.
Remarkably, the district is poised to emerge from state control with a clean bill of financial health. Mr. Watson says he expects to recommend releasing Jefferson from state supervision at a meeting this month.
Mr. Gates is blunt about the failings of the past. “We deserved it,” he says of the takeover. “There was no accountability and no controls.”
In response, Mr. Gates has taken a hard line. He’s dumped bad contracts, cut spending and eliminated positions that weren’t critical. For example, he now supervises transportation and maintenance himself. The central office now has five positions, down from 15, he says.
Consider another example. Jefferson Twp. has a high percentage of special-needs students who were served by the Montgomery County Educational Service Center at a cost of about $1 million a year. Mr. Gates figured out the district could hire its own special education staff and offer the program itself — with an expected savings of $750,000 annually.
He directed federal stimulus aid to building repairs and upgrades to make room for the kids this fall. That savings is big money to a district with an annual budget that is less than $9 million. Mr. Gates also demanded accountability from teachers. After he beefed up evaluations, about 10 percent of the teaching staff was let go.
He says the key to keeping a teaching job in Jefferson Twp. now will be demonstrating that kids are learning.
Jefferson schools only have about 500 kids in a township with a similarly tiny tax base. It must do a great job educating kids as cheaply as possible to justify its existence. Mr. Gates is saying it can be done.
The district’s 2-mill renewal levy, which does not raise taxes, is critical to helping him continue to save the district.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Martin best pick for Greene House district
2010 ELECTION
Republican Jarrod Martin is a first-term state representative from Beavercreek, representing also Xenia and Fairborn. The main news coming out of his first term was a primary challenge, which he survived with room to spare. He probably benefited from the race, gaining added name recognition.
A former Beavercreek City Council member, the 31-year-old hasn’t exactly emerged as a major force in the Legislature. But he looks to have a chairmanship in the realm of alternative energy sources if his party takes control of the House.
Looking ahead to the most pressing problem the state faces — a looming budget deficit estimated at $4 billion to $8 billion — Rep. Martin says that, although he has never voted for a tax increase, he has difficulty seeing how one can be avoided now.
As his preface suggests, Rep. Martin’s record has been conservative. But he was not among the staunch conservatives who opposed even the The Third Frontier.
Democrats are putting up a candidate who’s a cut above the usual for a party in a district where the deck is overwhelmingly stacked against it. Mike Watters, 62, has led an unusually interesting life. He was an ironworker on the first dormitory at Wright State University, on the Schuster Center and at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He’s been an English teacher in China, while sharing his religious beliefs against the wishes of the government. He’s been a minister in Oklahoma.
But he hasn’t held local office, and his connections are more with the labor union movement than with the district. Greene County’s Democratic Party chairman was looking for a respectable candidate, and he found somebody with the time and the interest.
It’s good that Greene Democrats aren’t giving up, that they aren’t letting Republicans walk to re-election. But the party — state or local — isn’t putting up real money.
Mr. Watters path to nomination has been different in instructive ways from the contest in which Mr. Martin prevailed when he was first elected: four current or former Republican city council members from around the district were among those seeking the nomination.
Mr. Watters does not claim to have studied his opponent’s record. He does criticize him for supporting a Tea Party-type initiative criticizing Washington for overstepping the U.S. Constitution. He also says his opponent’s staunchly conservative, anti-big government posture makes no sense for a district so connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Ultimately, it’s not a strong enough indictment. The district has an investment in Mr. Martin. He’s a constructive player. He still needs to carve out a bigger role, but re-electing him makes sense.
(A letter of endorsement for each candidate is here.)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Strickland right choice in tough times
2010 Election
Click here to read letters of endorsement for Gov. Ted Strickland and former Congressman John Kasich.
Gov. Ted Strickland has presided over the state in the worst possible times. Yet, he has pulled the state through a certified crisis as well as anyone could.
Hard as it is to imagine, other states’ economies and their governments are worse off than Ohio. In some cases, much worse.
That Ohio isn’t in a more desperate position is a credit to both the governor and the Republican legislative leadership that, for two of Mr. Strickland’s four years in office, worked to find some common ground.
John Kasich, the Republican challenger, is running on promises he can’t possibly keep, relying on rhetoric from a generic Republican playbook. He sees little good happening in Ohio, and his prescription for making things better is to cut taxes and loosen regulations on businesses.
If only governing were so simple.
The Strickland record
Ted Strickland got his job by handily defeating J. Kenneth Blackwell, another Republican who argued that high taxes are at the heart of Ohio’s problems. Though Mr. Kasich lamely claims otherwise, taxes have gone down — not up — on Gov. Strickland’s watch. (Mr. Kasich claims a delay in the final installment of five years of personal income tax cuts is a tax increase.)
Mr. Strickland does not get credit for that series of tax cuts (Republican Gov. Bob Taft set them in motion). But he has not tried to undo the significant tax reforms. He’s taken this position even as the changes are failing to bring in the revenue that was predicted.
In truth, he had no choice but to make do with the money he had, because raising taxes when the economy was tanking was politically impossible. But cutting spending for the mentally ill, for example, has not come easy to a Methodist minister and former prison psychologist.
Four years ago, Gov. Strickland said that if he did not find a way to ensure adequate funding for schools, he should be counted a failure. He has not found the answer; witness the myriad school levies that voters are still being asked to pass on the grounds that the state is raising standards and cutting their funding.
Gov. Strickland is right that all-day kindergarten, a longer school year and a more rigorous tenure process are good policies. However, the best that can be said about his plan to pay for the expensive changes he’s mandated is that he’s forcing school districts to make a choice:
They can either ask for more money from voters or confront the fact that they can’t keep funding generous and extensive step increases for their employees, pick up administrators’ share of their pension contributions, offer generous retirement and health-care packages and resist efforts to consolidate.
The governor has been right about big decisions that are important to the future of the state. He has supported building a train system linking Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, using $400 million in federal money. Connecting Ohio’s urban corridors is something a modern state needs to do.
Gov. Strickland is not an ideologue. He’s steady and mature, not given to political or personal impetuousness. He’s also not charismatic or brilliant, but he has made hard choices smartly.
John Kasich’s pitch
Former Congressman John Kasich started out his campaign talking about eliminating Ohio’s income tax. Then he said it should be phased out over 10 years. Now he’s more vague.
He has, however, signed a “no new taxes” pledge. He’s just wrong to think he can manage a deficit that represents potentially a 15-percent shortfall without raising taxes on somebody. Even some Republicans say that would be impossible.
You could say that in a short span Mr. Kasich has grown, that not that long ago he was proposing to eliminate 40 percent of the state’s revenue. If backing off that shtick is progress, it’s not reassuring progress.
In other important areas, Mr. Kasich is proceeding as if he doesn’t know a lot about state government, as if its nuts and bolts are beneath him. Pressed for details about one of his proposals in a meeting with the Dayton Daily News editorial board, he said he doesn’t “trip over ant hills on the way to the pyramids.”
He’s critical of the worker’s compensation system, though he doesn’t say what’s wrong with it except rates are unpredictable.
He doesn’t want utilities to be forced to increase their use of alternative energy if doing so raises costs. But energy policy has to move in this direction, and not to insist on that is to ensure Ohio remains dependent on polluting fossil fuels.
Mr. Kasich, once a presidential aspirant, was during his time in Congress a leading figure in national budget negotiations. He says that experience will serve him well as governor.
But even allowing for the fact that this is a pitched campaign, he’s doing nothing to suggest that he would give Democrats the time of day, especially if the Ohio House and Senate both are controlled by Republicans.
Ted Strickland is not the perfect governor. But history will judge him as having been dealt a miserable hand and having been better than competent. He should be re-elected.
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TweetEditorial: Anderson is better for Greene County
2010 Election
Click here to read letters of endorsement for the candidates.
Greene County voters can either re-elect Republican Alan Anderson as one of their three county commissioners. Or they can take a chance on Democrat Steve Key.
They should re-elect Mr. Anderson.
An attorney who has represented local governments — including Beavercreek Twp., Jamestown, Yellow Springs, Clifton and Spring Valley — he was elected four years ago. Judging from his literature, he wants voters to know that he’s not raised taxes and that he opposes “Obamacare and Obama socialism or any form of socialism.”
Pressed about what he’s trying to reassure voters about, he concedes that concerns about socialism don’t often come up in his role as county commissioner.
Mr. Anderson says his interests as a commissioner have been bringing high-speed Internet service to rural areas of the county; improving the capacity of the county’s water department and getting Clark State University to have a physical presence in the county, which it does now have just off I-675.
Mr. Anderson can be overly parochial, witness his reluctance to vote to put up much money for the Dayton Development Coalition. Given just how hard that group advocates for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, that’s hardly an expenditure to be stingy about.
And there’s something unfair about Greene County kicking in a lot of money when the Base Realignment and Closure Commissions are in full swing, but then pulling back after any threats have been repelled.
Protecting Wright-Patterson, after all, lasts beyond the BRAC rounds.
Mr. Anderson has experience that’s relevant to the job, and he can dig into issues that he cares about.
Mr. Key says his employment is a contract to gather local statistical data for the U.S. Department of Commerce. He’s also worked as an organizer for the Kerry and Obama campaigns in rural counties in Ohio and formerly he was a bank trust officer.
His campaign literature quotes Gary Haines, the former Montgomery County sheriff who died in 2000 and has since been succeeded by two different sheriffs. Mr. Haines, Mr. Key says, called him “Mr. Fix It” with regard to a gun buy-back program.
Mr. Key believes county commission meetings should be televised, and he’s critical that the commission has all Republicans on it. Asked what he takes issue with that the county is doing, he had no major criticisms.
Mr. Anderson’s local government experience goes beyond the four years he’s been on the commission. That background counts for something. To move out an incumbent, Mr. Key has to make a stronger case than just that Greene County is too cozy.
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TweetKevin Riley: Why we need people to choose Dayton
Now that the campaign season is in full swing, we’re being barraged with television commercials reminding us just how bad Ohio’s economy is. The politicians see political opportunity and advantage in pounding away at that message because they want us to blame the other guy for the spot the state is in.
The Dayton Daily News published a poll last weekend offering insights about Ohioans’ attitudes and voters’ thoughts about the most high-profile races. The U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races got most of the attention. But there were other revelations in the poll that all of us should pay attention to — no matter how we plan to vote.
Among Ohioans who are 18-29, about half say they would move to another state if they could leave. If you roll in Ohioans between the ages of 30-45, two of five people under 40 want to leave. (The sample size among those 18-29 is small. So its statistical validity can be questioned, but the finding meshes with other studies.)
These numbers also mirror what we know about the Dayton region, and they are a “dangerous sign,” according to Eric Rademacher, who directed the poll and heads the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Policy Research.
Why should we care?
• People in these groups are highly sought-after employees. Call them knowledge workers, young creatives or anything else, but this age group represents the pool from which companies want to hire.
• The competition to attract post-baby boomers is intense, partly because their numbers are smaller. Ohio’s next generations will have fewer people, and we could have even fewer if many choose to leave.
“These are the people we’re counting on to fuel Ohio’s economic recovery,” Rademacher said. “Ohio can’t afford to lose this part of its workforce.”
A different survey of people specifically in the Dayton area from about two years ago also showed significant percentages of young adults planning to move within three to five years. While not exactly the same type of study as the poll, the similarities are striking.
But here’s the good news: plenty of people in Dayton are working on this.
At the forefront is UpDayton, a group that grew out of an initiative to make Dayton more attractive to young people. UpDayton has focused on connecting people to organizations, activities and events. If young people are invested in the region, they’re more likely to stay. (On Oct. 13, UpDayton is hosting a candidates forum at the Cannery Art and Design Center.)
Scott Murphy, one of UpDayton’s leaders and an engineer who works at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, acknowledges that the region’s faltering economy makes it harder to keep talented and ambitious young people. But he says concern about upward professional opportunity and mobility are not the only things young people care about.
They want good places to live, a vibrant night life, things to do outdoors and fun bars and restaurants. So even if the economy rebounds, we’d better have more than a good job to offer. Murphy pointed to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek survey that had Dayton among the top cities for college graduates as a positive sign.
The Greater Downtown Plan also is an attempt to attract young people. Skeptics view efforts to revitalize downtown as a nostalgic effort to re-create a past that can’t be brought back. But those on the front lines of the downtown revitalization effort say their work is important to the future.
Many young people prefer an urban lifestyle. If Dayton can become that kind of place, complete with affordable housing (something Bloomberg Businessweek cited as key) and plenty of activity, then it will be the kind of place young people want to live. We have to convince them to choose Dayton and Ohio, and we need to understand that they have lots of options.
All those political ads constantly pounding away about how lousy things are in Ohio? They’re not helping.
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TweetMartin Gottlieb: Politics in the ads a fantasy world; or is it?
Every time you see a Lee Fisher ad trashing Rob Portman, don’t you feel worse about Fisher? And vice versa? Who can the politicians think they’re influencing with this stuff?
The experiences of an editorial page writer during an election season get one to thinking about the different ways people get input about politics — and about what kind of input ends up mattering.
As an editorial page writer, you sit in long meetings with the candidates. You hear
about their efforts on various issues, how, in some cases, not all, they’ve learned the details and compromised, how they’ve worked with the other party, but eventually hit a wall. You explore complexities. You search your memory and the computerized libraries of news clippings from general-interest and specialized publications.
You talk with the candidates about their personal backgrounds and learn humanizing stories about them and their parents. You often sense sincerity when they describe what drives them into politics — as to upbringing, values, religion — and into their form of politics. You find a lot of flaws and a lot of strengths.
You sift it all and struggle, in what you write, to get the heart of the matter, the essential choice facing voters, without getting bogged down in details, but still remembering them.
Then you go home and turn on the television, and there’s some aggressively stupid ad with a grainy, unflattering picture of some targeted candidate. The ad features some economic statistic, usually about lost jobs. And there’s some old quote that makes the targeted candidate look bad. (Coming up with such quotes is trivially easy with regard to anybody who’s been around awhile.)
The ad sneers at the obvious incompetence, corruption and/or some other appalling characteristics of the target.
Then, the next morning, for the journalist, it’s back to work, and more meetings.
Eventually one gets the feeling of stepping back and forth through the looking glass, of entering and leaving the Twilight Zone, some dimension that starts with reality, then vamps a little — a lot. The things is, though, after awhile you can’t tell which side of the glass is reality and which is the zone.
Is it more preposterous to contemplate the affairs of the day in terms of sneers, grainy pictures, distortions, and surreal 30-second summaries; or is it more preposterous to pretend that that isn’t what politics is about?
After all, the politicians are certainly not alone in their embrace of the values of the 30-second ad. Look at the Internet. There people communicate the same way about politics, in the same ugly, simplistic terms. Worse, often.
And those people don’t even have one of the excuses of the politicians: that overstatement, oversimplification and overdramatization in ads are necessary because television time is expensive.
All over the broadcast media are hosts who have plenty of time to delve into all sides of an issue with an open mind. But big, loyal audiences go to those who would never consider such a path.
People who are troubled by this can comfort themselves with the observation that those audiences are, however substantial, just a minority, and are not the voters who determine election outcomes, because they always vote the same way.
Trouble is, in the television ads, the politicians address the other voters as if they have the same personality traits, the same susceptibility to hyperpartisan nonsense.
I shouldn’t leave the impression that the candidates in person are completely different from their ads. Put Ted Strickland and John Kasich in the same room for 90 minutes these days, and they’ll certainly remind you of their 30-second acts. Strickland will repeatedly go back to his point about Kasich’s Wall Street background. Kasich will note umpteen times how many jobs Ohio has lost in the Strickland years, as if that one stat says it all.
With or without television ads, campaigns tend to bring out the worst in candidates. It’s ultimate fighting without agreed-upon rules or referees, with both fighters convinced the other is more likely to get really dirty first.
Still the ads play a special role. Whether or not they actually influence votes, and whether or not they lower your opinion of their targets, they certainly leave the discerning voter with the sense that the perpetrators of the ads are godawful people.
Sometimes it isn’t particularly true — depending perhaps on which side of the glass you’re on.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
TweetEditorial: Pepper offers better ideas for auditor
Democrat David Pepper, the 38-year-old Hamilton County commissioner, is a thoughtful candidate with a good plan for the office of state auditor. He should get your vote.
Both Mr. Pepper and his Republican opponent, Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost, want to root out waste and make government more efficient, but Mr. Pepper has more carefully studied other states for ideas that are working and can be applied here.
Mr. Pepper, a lawyer with two degrees from Yale, first ran for city council in the wake of racial riots in Cincinnati in 2001 and was picked by voters from a field that included 26 candidates.
He narrowly lost a run for mayor of Cincinnati in 2005. Then in 2006, he won a hard-fought race against a high-profile Republican for county commission. That was no easy feat, requiring independent and Republican votes. Democrats are hopeful his crossover appeal and hard-fought past political battles translate to the state level.
Mr. Yost, also an attorney, was county auditor in Delaware County from 1999 to 2003 before taking over as the county’s prosecuting attorney. He says he is the only candidate with relevant experience. But Mr. Yost is really a prosecutor by trade. In fact, he started out this year running for Ohio attorney general before a Republican Party deal brokered to protect Mike DeWine from a primary challenge landed him in the state auditor’s race. (He defeated Seth Morgan, R-Huber Heights, in the Republican primary for auditor in May.)
The major policy disagreement between the two men surrounds the use of “performance audits,” special examinations of public agencies that seek to squeeze waste out of their operations while improving service. Usually they are performed only when a public office requests the review or in cases of financial crisis.
Mr. Yost wants performance audits to become routine, scheduling them publicly in advance over five years. He argues that would create incentives for agencies to improve their practices. Mr. Pepper wants to do more performance audits, too, but he would develop criteria based on agency size, risk, strategic value and potential savings to decide where to take a closer look. He says his process is based on best practices from other states, notably Washington, where he says a similar performance audit process saved $478 million.
Mr. Pepper’s idea is more cutting-edge and is a better bet for bigger savings. His other proposals also are patterned after successful programs elsewhere. Ohio, he says, could save money by sharing services across jurisdictions the way states like New York and New Jersey have. He argues the state could study, catalogue and share best practices, as Minnesota does.
Mr. Pepper is fond of saying the auditor could serve as the “quarterback” of the state’s efforts to increase efficiency. It’s an unfortunate metaphor. There can only be one quarterback among the elected statewide officeholders — the governor. Mr. Pepper, who sounds like a man with higher office in mind for the future, will have to keep his ambition in check to be effective as auditor.
In this race, however, he has a grander vision, better ideas, and is more driven. Mr. Pepper is the better choice.
Letters in support of the candidates can be found here.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: 2010 endorsements, Editorials, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
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