Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

This is the best news to come out of Cleveland City Hall in a long time.

In a PD op-ed on May 27, 2005 (no longer on line) Frank Jackson said that, as Mayor, he wanted to make it possible for any Cleveland student to get two years of college free.  He’s never repeated that proposal during the campaign or since (see correction below), and I’ve given him some snark about it on occasion.

Well, here’s a big first step toward keeping that campaign promise.

Positive feedback time, everyone.

Correction:   Sorry, I forgot… Jackson also mentioned the “two free years” idea briefly in his campaign Education Plan.  Here what he said, courtesy of the Wayback Machine:

In order to make Cleveland an educational leader, we must also partner with private businesses to offer the first two years at Cuyahoga Community College tuition free to Cleveland high school graduates. We would accomplish this through a private -public partnership that includes scholarships, internships and work programs. In today’s world, an associate degree is comparable to a high school degree when many of us were first entering the workforce.

State enabling legislation that would permit Cuyahoga and other counties to create countywide land banks to take control of large numbers of vacant foreclosed homes has finally been introduced in the Ohio General Assembly.

I just got word that the “land reutilization bill” being pushed by County Treasurer Jim Rokakis and allies was introduced in both the House and Senate this morning.  The Senate version, SB 353, was introduced by Senator Robert Spada (R-24).  Its House companion, HB 602, has Rep. Tom Patton (R-18) as its principal sponsor. Cosponsors include Senators Harris, Mason, Miller, D., Roberts, Smith, and Seitz and Representatives Dolan, McGregor, J., Setzer, and Yuko.

From the new Cleveland Tenants Organization email newsletter:

As you’ve read in the CTO E-News over the past several months, and in the recently released report by Policy Matters Ohio, renters have been one of the casualties of the devastating foreclosure crisis in Greater Cleveland. Bill Moyer’s Journal visited our office this past May and did an extensive investigation into the issue, interviewing our executive director, staff, some renters that have fallen prey to the crisis, as well as Councilman Anthony Brancatelli and Mayor Frank Jackson. The story will broadcast this Friday, July 18th at 10:00pm on WVIZ-PBS. Watch for us!           

The latest edition of the Plain Press, a free community newspaper that covers Cleveland neighborhoods between the river and West 117th, has an absolutely terrific article by Joe Narkin.   It’s a lengthy account of one West 88th Street resident’s painful journey through predator-land — from buying the house he’d been renting with a no-down-payment, exploding-ARM loan based on an appraiser-inflated price;  to getting foreclosed when the ARM and unemployment arrived; to getting scammed again by a “foreclosure rescue” operation; to finally getting real help from ESOP and the Midwest Housing Partnership.

Narkin names names and lays out exactly how  predatory lending (and its consequences) look when you’re the prey.

Must read.

(The Plain Press has all of its articles back through June 2004 archived here.)

Even in its “pre-release” form the County Engineer’s new map site (CEGIS MyCuyahoga) is pretty impressive. Congratulations to Mr. Kelley and the rest of the team that put it together.

Obviously the site will have lots of uses.   Here’s one: Make your own scary foreclosure map.

This one shows a couple of square miles of the Union-Miles and Kinsman neighborhoods of Cleveland. (Click on the picture for a wider view.)   The colored rectangles are properties foreclosed on since the beginning of 2006 — red for 2006 cases, orange for 2007, yellow-green for 2008.

Here’s my neighborhood — same color scheme:

I could go on, but why? Try it for yourself.  It’s educational! It’s scary! It’s fun!

(Is it too much to hope that Senator Voinovich will give this a try?)

If you’re trying to follow the proceedings at the Cleveland City Charter Review Commission:

1) The deadline for submitting any new proposals for the Commission to consider is this Tuesday, July 15 — by email, postal mail or hand delivery to the City Council office.  If you’re walking it in, remember the Council office closes at something like 4:30.

2) The Commission has three more regular meetings scheduled on the next three Thursdays, all starting at 8:30 am in City Hall Room 217. The meetings on the 17th and 24th will be long work sessions, and final votes on all proposed revisions will probably happen on the 24th.  The Commission’s last meeting on the 31st will have to approve the final report to Council.

There will also be at least two Wednesday morning meetings of the Commission’s subcommittee on proposed changes in City Council, on July 16 and 23, starting at 8:30 am. They’ll probably happen in City Council’s conference room (same entrance as the Council members’ offices).

All these meetings are, of course, open to the public.

3) There are updates posted yesterday at my Charter Review website.  New stuff includes:

• A page with links to the actual draft language of all “City Council reform” proposals now on the table.
• A proposal from the Greater Cleveland Partnership to eliminate the Charter’s current requirement for a popular vote before the City can sell or lease landfilled property on the lakefront (e.g. the current Port property, Burke Airport, etc.).  Language here.

4) At Thursday’s meeting I passed around a request for consideration of two proposals as part of any plan to reduce Council ward representatives. The first (“Collaborative Government”) is specific language for my 1988 proposal for Neighborhood Service Districts. The second (“Transparent Government”) would require the Mayor to make all public records of departments and bodies within his jurisdiction available to the public on line by a Charter-specified deadline.  I’ll post more about this soon.

Hey, I’m back. Some unknown server problem just resolved itself after keeping Cleveland Diary offline for the last two days.

Apparently some more people left town while I was gone.

Not even close.  The amendment to take out the lawsuit immunity provisions for AT&T, Verizon, etc. failed 66-32.

Sherrod Brown voted for the amendment and against the bill… George Voinovich against the amendment and for the bill.

As expected, Obama voted for the anti-telco-immunity amendment and the final unamended bill.  McCain didn’t show up.

Roll call here.

For me, this is one of those “Yeah, well, what did you expect?” moments.  Nothing much else to say. (But here’s Greenwald.)

(h/t timothy and zehnra at slashdot)

Coshocton County issues Request for Proposals to construct a wireless network for rural access as well as county operations.

Adding: The “county operations” part is based on the MuniWireless report — I don’t see any county commitment in the RFP to be an “anchor tenant” or pay for any services from a new network.  It doesn’t say they won’t, either. The subject is just not discussed.

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