Role model

Q. What city not far from Cleveland has all of the following:

• A county governed since 1984 by a home rule charter, with an elected County CEO, an Assistant CEO responsible for economic development, and a fifteen-member county legislative branch elected by district?
• An established downtown casino industry?
• A downtown waterfront free of industrial and port uses, with lots of park space, promenade access, hotels, office and residential development?
• A 2.4 million square foot downtown convention center — the nation’s 19th largest — with 700,000 square feet of exhibition space?

… not to mention thousands of recent immigrants, a growing feature film industry buoyed by an early-adopter state tax credit program, and a City Council elected entirely at large?

Where is this urban cutting edge, whose residents already enjoy so many of the reforms and innovations that Cleveland so sadly lacks?

(Hint: It’s not Pittsburgh.)

A. Detroit.

Yes, Detroit.

I said Detroit. Detroit. Detroit.

Feel better now?

Getting real about home rule

Henry Gomez reports that City Council members like Kevin Kelley and Kevin Conwell “fired a warning shot Thursday at [local] state legislators” who voted for the state anti-residency law that the Supreme Court upheld yesterday:

Their message: Start looking out for the best interests of our constituents — or look elsewhere when you need political support in our wards come re-election time.

The tough talk came at a special council caucus, one day after the Ohio Supreme Court upheld a 2006 law that bans Cleveland and other cities from enforcing residency requirements.

“I hope in the future we hold these people accountable,” said Councilman Kevin Kelley.

This is exactly the right way to look at the situation, as I pointed out when another big anti-city, anti-Home Rule measure passed in 2007 over the City of Cleveland’s strenuous opposition — but with the votes of 100% of Cleveland’s state legislators:

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.

What happened? In 2008, all those Cleveland legislators who voted to strip the City of its cable oversight authority, and then ran for re-election, won easy primaries without significant opposition.This includes Barbara Boyd, who represents most of Conwell’s Ward 9; Sandra Miller, whose District includes Kelley’s Ward 16;  and Eugene Miller, just welcomed by the whole Council to fill the Ward 10 seat vacated by Roosevelt Coats.

What did they and their colleagues learn from this experience about the depth of City leaders’ commitment to defend the home rule principle that they had all just trampled? What do you think they learned?

Wells Fargo: “Ghetto loans” to the “mud people”

In the New York Times yesterday:

As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally.

“Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”

Here in Cuyahoga County, Wells Fargo mortgage originations went from 35 mortgages in 1999 to more than 4,564 in 2003.

Their annual foreclosure filings soared above 1,000 in 2005, hit a peak of 1,538 in 2007 and totalled almost 1.300 in 2008.

So far in 2009 Wells Fargo has filed another 479 new foreclosures in Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court — just under 9% of all new foreclosures filed this year.

Cold Lake Erie wind

You may have heard that the long-awaited feasibility study of the county’s proposed offshore windpower project was released last Friday. Maybe you read the PD story Saturday or the editorial yesterday, both of which acknowledge the project’s “eye-popping” cost but then shift quickly back into cheerleading mode:

"If Cleveland wants a big future commensurate with its big industrial past, it needs to start thinking bigger. The multimillion-dollar wind-energy pilot project in Lake Erie outlined last week by local officeholders, foundation officials, professors and developers would be a great start. Its mix of “green” industrial innovation with a broad public-private research partnership should set Cleveland apart and make the city a go-to destination for wind-energy manufacturers and innovators", etc., etc.

But perhaps you’d be interested in what the study, conducted by a German firm named juwi GmbH (through its Cleveland subsidiary JW Great Lakes Wind LLC), actually tells us about the issue of feasibility.

Let me summarize:

• Is it technically possible to build and operate a cluster of utility-scale wind generators a few miles from the Cleveland shore? Yes, of course it is.
• Are there impossible environmental or regulatory hurdles to such a project? No, nothing that can’t be handled.
• How good is the wind resource out there compared to other sites being evaluated for utility wind investments? We’re still not really sure, but the evidence so far says: Not so great for an offshore site. (See pages 4-21 and 4-22.)
• How much would it cost to build and operate the proposed capacity? In the neighborhood of $5 million per rated megawatt to build it and six to eight cents per kilowatt-hour to operate it, which would make the unsubsidized cost of its wholesale power more than twenty cents per kilowatt-hour — two to three times the unsubsidized cost of conventional land-based wind generation.(See page 11-33, especially Figure 11-7.)

Does this add up to “feasible”? The study’s authors (whose company is, after all, named “Great Lakes Wind”) say sure, no problem. After all it’s a pilot project, and besides there’s all that Federal stimulus money — let’s just go out and get some.

So, bottom line: The Great Lakes Wind Energy Center project is a feasible “demonstration project” as long as we can get the Feds to pick up most of the tab, and we remember that it’s really a $75-$90 million science experiment.

[A section of this post "after the jump" could not be recovered.]

Chickens, meet roost

The PD says my Councilman, Brian Cummins, is very upset about the ward redistricting plan that’s being circulated to Council members by Triad Research. Brian explains why in more detail at RealNEO, where the comments include calls for a neighborhood campaign to defend Brian, the Brooklyn Centre neighborhood, and/or Ward 15 from the redistricter’s axe.

From Henry Gomez’s PD article:

Council consultants favor a plan that would combine a tiny piece of the West Side ward that Brian Cummins now lives in and represents with a much larger portion of the ward now led by Joe Santiago. That would set up a potential showdown between the two in this year’s elections.

Councilman Joe Santiago could find himself in a race this year against colleague Brian Cummins.

Ward lines are being redrawn to eliminate two of 21 council seats, meaning wards like Cummins’ and Santiago’s will be sliced, diced and merged with others. Cleveland voters approved the population-based downsizing last November by passing a city charter amendment.

The plan that consultants shared with Cummins this week would strip the Ward 15 councilman of most of his political base. The charter does not require him to live in the ward he represents, but Cummins’ only other logical option would be to run against another neighboring incumbent.

“They’re only leaving me with a quarter of my ward, the area where I live,” Cummins said Friday afternoon, a day after being shown a map of what his new ward would look like. “Three-quarters of the ward is now in Ward 14.”

Strangely, Henry doesn’t mention that back in July, during the Charter Review process, Brian was Council’s most outspoken advocate of fewer ward Councilmen and bigger wards. My Councilman came to the Commission and asked us to recommend the elimination of at least six of the city’s 21 wards… instead of tying the number of wards to a number of residents, as Council President Sweeney had proposed. Brian got lots of ink from Henry for his effort, and even a PD editorial in his honor.

When we were at the Charter Review table, I asked Brian to explain how he thought a bigger ward would improve his ability to serve our neighborhood. I didn’t really get an answer. But what I really wanted to ask — and should have asked — was why he was so hot to get Ward 15 and his job eliminated, because that was the obvious inevitable consequence of his proposal.

Well, what we got — courtesy of City Council, the Plain Dealer and 60% of Cleveland voters — is a reduction to nineteen wards. (I’m not saying “courtesy of the Charter Review Commission”, because we didn’t recommend making it happen this year. And it probably should be seventeen, but since there’s no real data to base either figure on, who the hell knows?) So the absolutely predictable deal is now going down: Lose one ward on each side of town, ward lines pushed toward the west and south, Council Members scrambling for some rationale to keep “their” voters and stay in their current homes, activists and neighborhood groups starting to jump up and down for vague and contradictory reasons.

And my Councilman is shocked — shocked — that he might lose three-quarters of “his” ward and have to run against the Councilman whose existing (”Hispanic”) ward ends six blocks to the north of my Councilman’s house.

Be careful what you wish for. You’ll probably get it.

P.S. I guess I should say one obvious thing for the record:

Council President Sweeney, Councilman Kelley and Council in general are doing neither themselves nor the city a favor by keeping the Triad proposal, and the CSU population estimates behind it, under wraps. Council is required to act on new ward lines by April 1. That’s three and a half weeks from today.

Whatever work product Triad and its consulting partners have submitted to City Council needs to be put on public display and made available to the media right now. 

By “right now”, I mean no later than 9 am this Monday morning.

I don’t think it should be necessary — in a democracy where the government’s business is the public’s business — to explain why.

Update 3/8:In a comment at RealNEO, Councilman Cummins points out that he ended up voting “No” on the final legislation to put the ward reduction charter amendment on the November ballot, and that his proposals to the Charter Commission included more than just reducing the city’s wards — e.g. he advocated adding at-large Council members. Fair enough.

US Bancorp CEO: TARP was meant to fund bank takeovers all along

From coverage in Wednesday’s Twin Cities Pioneer-Press of a speech by U.S. Bancorp Chief Executive Richard Davis:

Davis went on to say in his talk that while government officials marketed the program as a way to entice banks to lend again, TARP actually was designed to give solid banks like U.S. Bancorp some extra cash to buy weaker banks in the system. U.S. Bancorp did just that late last year when it acquired the assets of two failed banks in California, Downey Savings and Loan and PFF Bank & Trust.

“We were told to take it so that we could help Darwin synthesize the weaker banks and acquire those and put them under different leadership,” he said. “We are not even allowed to mention that. … We were supposed to say the TARP money was used for lending.”

Presumably “Darwin” is Davis’ nickname for Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

US Bancorp, the Minneapolis-based parent of US Bank, announced a “capital infusion” of nearly $7 billion from the TARP in November.

In the same story Davis is quoted as boasting that US Bancorp is “a strong player in a weak industry” because “We didn’t get into the stupid stuff two years ago that would have impaired us from doing the normal stuff today. So there.”

“Stupid stuff” presumably refers to excessive, badly underwritten subprime lending leading to defaults and foreclosures. The article doesn’t say whether Mr. Davis mentioned or explained his bank being listed as the plaintiff in one out of every twelve foreclosure sales in Cuyahoga County in the last five years. (That’s over 2,600 US Bank sheriff’s sales in the county — 1,600 in the city of Cleveland alone.)

(h/t Calculated Risk commenter crispycole)