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New Mayor Jane Campbell needs to do three things in the next six months or so to maintain with voters her credibility in the office. And, from a voter's point of view, any reasonable justification for keeping it.
Campbell should carry out at least one very visible public-sector project that is not on the Cleveland Tomorrow agenda. Something that has nothing to do with attracting tourists, making executives comfortable downtown, or capitalizing on building fads.
I don't mean a project that is merely "pro-neighborhood" either. Building townhouses in Midtown was nice, but hardly empowering.
A good example of what I mean would be the Living Wage law passed in 2000. The Growth Association hated the legislation, because it finally tied some strings to all the free money handed out by taxpayers in the form of subsidies, abatements, and no-bid contracts. But it was the right thing to do, because it helped normal working people earn a decent living by, well, working. It was one of the best moments of that Council term, and all props to Jobs With Justice for organizing the campaign.
The dollar amount isn't the issue. The issue is, when corporate interest conflicts with the public interest, the Mayor has to show a sign that she understands that corporations don't vote.
As a suggestion, has anyone considered a taxpayer-oriented audit of all the city-subsidized private business operations, to ensure that they are meeting their commitments for new hires of city residents? That'll make our Civic Boosters squirm.
Support charter schools and enforcement of existing laws that regulate them. Support vouchers as they are, or reform the program to address Constitutional concerns and improve its ability to offer choice to people who most need it.
Barbara Byrd-Bennett should probably be kept for at least another year.
Mainly, note that good education is a can't-miss economic endeavor. It should improve our community's job prospects, and even if it doesn't our own children will be better prepared to work and learn elsewhere. That's far better than the alternative of leaving everyone ignorant.
One loyal Cleveland Pages reader likes to remind me that Cleveland's leaders "will never cater to people who might know more than they do." I'm starting to agree. Like Southern governors of old and today's Third World dictators, they'd rather rule over a demoralized and ghettoized population than participate in building anything that might someday produce competition or opposition to themselves. That's crediting an astounding degree of pettiness, I know, but doesn't it go a long way to explain the mess we're in?
Jane Campbell urgently needs to demonstrate that she will not be that kind of Mayor. The tough part is that improving education cannot be done without giving up some power, and the elements that thrived on the old ways are the ones that will take advantage of the power vacuum. So Campbell must move very quickly to open up city decision-making to the natural constituency of voters, before the vultures swoop in.
There was nothing truly special about the shutdown of LTV Steel this winter. The remaining 3,200 jobs most recently lost are just the last of tens of thousands there.
When I was a child, my big sister used to make a huge deal out of who took the last cookie from the cookie jar. I pointed out that all the cookies are equal, and the kid who took the first or twelfth or twenty-fifth cookie is just as responsible for emptying the jar as the last one.
It's not the loss of those last 3,200 jobs that hurts so much. It's the tens of thousands of other, relatively high-paying jobs that have been eliminated or downgraded at LTV and elsewhere in the past three decades.
There is truly not too much that can be done to make this better. The LTV factories will leave behind a huge, polluted landscape, and few options for near-term redevelopment. Retraining the laid-off workers wouldn't be a bad thing, but retraining for what? Manufacturing isn't dead, but it isn't the employer it was in the fifties.
But there's some hope, especially now that the people of Pittsburgh have stumbled badly. Shocked by confusing and possibly inconsistent assessments last year, they incorrectly blamed the city's two-tier real estate tax system and voted to end it. I'm predicting now that over the next ten to twenty years Pittsburgh will drop noticeably on those national surveys of best places to live.
This is a fantastic time for Campbell to offer a revolutionary tax incentive scheme. It's at least revenue-neutral, encourages employment over idleness, and makes the highest use of underdeveloped land.
No "deals." Just a standard plan, equal for everyone, including companies and citizens already here: we will levy little or no taxes on your buildings and equipment, we will lighten or remove the city income tax that makes it expensive even for your workers to have a job here, but we will recover the entire use value of the public resources, including land, that you arrogate to yourself.
You can't go wrong. At worst, the market for unused land in crummy locations would drop to zero--and that would be a good thing, freeing some land up for squatters, community gardens, and three-on-three football that used to be tire dumps and parking lots.
At best, you'd kick out the slum landlords and land speculators (often the same people) in favor of small business who are now deterred by high speculative rents and unreasonable taxes on equipment and inventory. What could be more natural than un-taxing the stuff that you want to have happen, like employment and new engineering? Why not shove more of the tax burden onto the stuff that just takes up space and won't go away?
Naturally, Campbell's civic-booster rah-rah crowd will push her to continue more of the same policies that have (he said sarcastically) done so much for Cleveland. They see nothing wrong with loading the Mayor's office with press deflectors and people who have nothing better to do than overload Council committees with documentary chaff. They think a low wage for workers is cool.
The more obfuscation and complexity they can add to the education system, the better. Touristy sites and hotel construction feed their egos and get them "noticed" in flight magazines.
But I don't want to be noticed. I want open government, a rational tax system, decent education, and maybe an opportunity for my neighbors to get better jobs in this lifetime.
Jane, it's up to you now. Are you trying to get noticed now, or are you working for us? And take a look at that tax idea, it's not a new one.
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