DaytonDailyNews.com

DAYTON — City leaders have news for publishers of Forbes.com, who placed Dayton among the fastest-dying U.S. communities.

"I'm mad as Hades about this," Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin said on Wednesday, Aug. 6. "We're still breathing."

The Web site used a formula that calculated migrating population, unemployment rate and economic growth to determine its 10 most rapidly dying cities. The report reflected data from the entire Dayton metropolitan statistical area.

Forbes focused on Dayton because of loss of population and of manufacturing and other core jobs.

At the City Commission meeting Wednesday, McLin, along with commissioners Dean Lovelace, Joey Williams and Nan Whaley criticized the report. Here are excerpts from their comments.

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin : "One of the most difficult things to do, is wake up in the morning and read a paper that says that the city you love and that you work so hard in, is classified as dying.

It's not only about manufacturing. That's old news. We know that our manufacturing area has been dying. That doesn't mean our city is dying. We still have manufacturing in this town, but it's advanced manufacturing.

To say four cities in the state of Ohio (are) at the top 10 is despicable, irresponsible, and just plain mean, what they really are saying is that the state of Ohio is dying.

If we survived the 1913 Flood, if we survived the (Great) Depression, we'll survive this too. We have great universities. We have great hospitals, we have great partnerships and most of all, we have great people in this city. Yes, we're not perfect. We have challenges, but we as a community are going to overcome them."

Lovelace: We all know we are not on life support. We know we are going through a rough patch, but it is a patch. I don't want to give that article any more attention.

Williams: I debated whether we should even acknowledge (the article). From my perspective, it was a shallow article. They didn't do their homework. Quite frankly, it was a cheap shot ... The article shouldn't have been about a dying city. It would have been a great article if it had been about a changing city.

Manufacturing was obviously a key for us for so long. When you look around now, we are making a very good transition. It's not an easy transition. We're making a transition into the service sector. We're doing a lot around technology. There's a lot of energy going on in this community about trying to make the change.

So, what my hope is that we will use this article as a catalyst to get even more energy behind the positive changes going on in our community. Hopefully, the folks from Forbes will come back and write an appropriate article about the good things going on in Dayton.

Whaley: It's very interesting the top 10 cities mentioned were cities built on the backs of the middle class. (Steve Forbes is) part of a party that has continued to attack the middle class. So, of course, we've had some troubles because of Steve Forbes. I think it's nice he's written a story that said, look what my policies have done to your city. I don't expect another positive comment from Steve Forbes because Steve Forbes doesn't care about Dayton, doesn't care about the people of Dayton, doesn't care about the middle class ... doesn't care about the Midwest.