If you ran the county, what would you buy for $400 million?

The Commissioners want to raise at least $400 million (by spending upwards of $700 million in sales taxes on bond payments over the next thirty years) to buy a new public Convention Center.

The $400 million is not an actual investment which the Commissioners expect to earn back, e.g. through rental revenue. It’s a straight-up expenditure. The “return” it’s supposed to produce is private-sector jobs and taxes, in hotels, restaurants, the Medical Mart, etc.

So: If you were going to raise and spend $400 million in public money to spur private economic activity in Cuyahoga County, would you buy a Convention Center?

Here are a few alternatives to consider:

• One Convention Center @ $400 million, or

• 400 megawatts of utility-scale wind generators (with no debt to pay off, so the power would be very cheap)
• Full-ride tuition at Cleveland State for more than ten thousand county residents
• 8,000 street miles of optical fiber at an average cost of $50,000 per mile (1,300 miles would cover the entire city of Cleveland)
• Major weatherization and furnace replacement for 60,000 to 80,000 homes. (While you’re at it, you could probably throw in lead paint abatement.)

That’s just off the top of my head. What’s your $400 million idea?

Make a wish.

SB 117 and the city: Moving on

The end of local cable franchising is not quite law in Ohio, not yet. The Ohio Senate must accept the House’s changes to SB 117, or a conference committee must reconcile the two versions, and the Governor must sign the final product. But this will all happen in a matter of days. The argument is over, the deal has gone down. Time to move on.

I think there are two take-aways for Cleveland community leaders and citizens who actually give a crap about what will happen to the city’s ability to govern itself and survive through the next couple of decades.

Take-away one: Nobody in the Columbus power structure — including the people we send there to represent us in the General Assembly, and the people we’ve supported for statewide office with our votes — gives a rat’s tookus for that quaint old concept known as municipal home rule. Nobody. It just doesn’t matter to them, when weighed in the political scales against anything desired by an industry, a moderate-sized labor organization, or fifteen random guys on suburban barstools.

The reason is simple and self-evident: Voting to take away another piece of Ohio communities’ self-governing power has no political cost, even when it’s your own community. Oh, the mayor might make a speech, and city council might pass a resolution, and the local paper might even write an editorial calling on you (not by name) to preserve municipal prerogatives. You might be forced to explain to a few voters how deeply you believe in home rule and how agonizing it is to balance that deep belief with the other concerns you’re called upon to address. But in the end, you can safely cast your political lot with the check-writers — the police and fire unions, the gas drillers. the gun lobby, the phone company, the cable company, the phone company’s union — against your own community, knowing that nobody will remember at election time.

If Frank Jackson and Cleveland City Council members really want to preserve a shred of home rule for this city, some Democratic Representative from Cleveland must lose his or her primary election in 2008 for voting against it. Otherwise, stop whining.

Take-away two: “Our” cable company, headquartered in Connecticut, and “our” phone company, headquartered in Texas, have decided they’ll no longer accept a cooperative, accountable relationship with us to operate their networks over our municipal rights of way. The General Assembly has eliminated the necessity for them to do so. So Cleveland now loses its free institutional network and other bandwidth services, its right to ensure citywide deployment of fiber, its ability to negotiate support for community technology training (i.e. getting the networks to help pay for community programs that train new customers for them), etc.

If there was ever a good reason for Cleveland to hesitate to build our own community-owned, multi-user network infrastructure, that reason is now history.

This “City of Choice” needs affordable real broadband in every neighborhood, we need it in the next couple of years, and we need to stop pretending that “the private sector” is going to provide it.

The city’s real private sector — thousands of small and mid-size companies trying to make a buck in a global marketplace — needs robust connectivity like it needs paved streets. It’s time for this community to start paving our own Information Streets so that the whole community can use them, not just one or two mammoth Triple Play vendors who are never going to consider our future to be their problem.

The Mayor’s wireless initiative is a good first step, but it’s just a first step. I recommend Bob Frankston’s current commentary at MuniWireless for a good place to start a more strategic consideration of Cleveland’s new situation.

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Above all, people who care about Cleveland must learn the lesson that these people — AT&T, Time Warner, Ohio politicians of both parties — are not our friends. Not that they’re our enemies, either. But it’s time to stop mistaking smiles, handshakes, writing the occasional charity check or showing up at the occasional fundraiser for friendship. They’ve just demonstrated exactly how much they care about this community. Let’s learn our lesson and move on.