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Saturday, July 19, 2003
Interlude 2
No time to fully rest. Great party, but I now have a 1st birthday to attend. Then it will be my turn to spend the evening alone with our daughter as the wife gets out of the house to see a movie with a friend.
Friday, July 18, 2003
Interlude
The Lisa to my Bart Simpson, my little sister, was in Pittsburgh to meet with a client. She actually flew into Cleveland and rented a car because it is far cheaper to fly from Houston to Cleveland than to Pittsburgh. This also allowed her to see us last night, and catch a flight home this afternoon. Well, what she really wanted was a chance to see her niece. Angie seemed quite accepting of her which was a reilief.
My afternoon was spent on the 31st floor of Terminal Tower looking at a study (more later this weekend) .
Time to play with my daughter then abandon the wife and child for plenty of drink, food and expected bizarre conversations.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Cleveland Vs. Cuyahoga -- Concention Center Conflict
The Cuyahoga County Commissioners are going into open attack on Cleveland City Council (permanent link is supposed to be here, but it is empty at this time). The prize: who decides how to spend the tax revenue projected from the planned convention center "holistic" tax.
Cuyahoga County commissioners said yesterday that Cleveland leaders are imperiling plans for a new convention center with unreasonable demands for how to spend a proposed tax increase.
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City and county officials are considering raising the countywide tax on hotel stays and asking voters to approve a 0.25 percentage-point increase in the county sales tax, to 8.25 percent.
Those increases would generate about $63 million a year, according to a county analysis. A convention center would require about $33 million a year, leaving $30 million for inner-ring suburbs, Cleveland neighborhoods and arts and cultural programs.
Commissioners oppose [Clevleland City Council President Frank] Jackson's plan to have council decide how to spend the city's share of the money, rather than a nine-person governing board.
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The county commissioners want a board with nine appointees - four from the city, four from the county and a final member picked by the other eight - to decide which suburban and neighborhood projects should get money. The commissioners said arts and cultural programs are likely to get $4 million to $6 million a year if taxes are increased. The remaining millions would be split equally among city and suburban projects.
So, let me see if I have this straight, because it doesn't look good. Cuyahoga County would be voting to raise the hotel and sales tax -- so everyone in the county has to pay. But after over half is given towards the new CCC; Cleveland City Council would be the one to decide where to allocate the other part of the funds. I have to say, that seems something like taxation without representation. The population in the suburbs in Cuyahoga County has no representation with the city council but would be taxed. Go for it. That's the sort of plan that will only help in the defeat of the new tax proposal.
Interesting to note that the money for arts is now down to $4-6 million. Funny, the original plan spoke of at least $10 million per year. Then it dropped to $8-10 million a few days ago. Now it is even lower.
This power struggle between the city and county is nothing new. It's just interesting that they are only now mixing it up so late in the game. This tax proposal has to be on the ballot by August 21 -- about 5 weeks away. Of course, this will probably be settled in a week, dashing my hopes.
Buried in the story was something else that caught my eye.
The city this week began negotiations with Forest City Enterprises, which owns the land where the center would be built.
This week? This [explitive deleted] week?! Let me remind you what is supposed to be accomplished by August 1.
Dennis Eckart, head of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, and Joe Roman, head of Cleveland Tomorrow, detailed the plan yesterday for Plain Dealer editors and reporters - with several caveats.
By Aug. 1, they said, political leaders and the property owners, Forest City Enterprises, must agree to:
Build houses on the vacant Scranton Peninsula, across the river from Tower City.
Expand The Avenue, Tower City's ailing shopping mall, be fore the convention center is built.
Address what to do with Public Hall, which will be vacated if a new center is built.
Commit to expanding existing hotels in the area.
If those things don't happen, business leaders propose that a convention center be built at the site of the current center, an aging, underground building near Mall C.
"This has to be an ironclad development agreement, not left to the whims of market forces," Eckart said. "We're going to ask the most for our $400 million public investment."
The city is going to get an "ironclad" agreement in 2 weeks? Yeah, right. Hey, if you're interested, I can sell you water from Lake Erie -- guaranteed purity.
Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway. Gateway.
Study Provides a New Excuse
Like we needed a new reason to justify this.
Frequent masturbation, particularly in the 20s, helps prevent prostate cancer later in life, according to new research.
Australian scientists have shown that the more men masturbate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop the disease that kills more than half a million men each year.
This was research that you really pull for.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Office of Homeland Security Pornography?
That didn't take long for mission creep.
In other words, beware of bureaucratic opportunism, masquerading as antiterrorism. Now Tom Ridge is proving me right, with a new plan to pervert Homeland Security from its antiterror mission to an unrelated one: "The initiative, dubbed Operation Predator, will target pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, immigrant smugglers and other criminals."
What can we learn from this? Two things. One is that the Department of Homeland Security apparently thinks the War on Terror isn't important enough to occupy its full energies anymore, and that -- in the interest of bureaucratic survival -- it's branching out into the kind of operations that have generally been associated with, well, ordinary law enforcement, even if the targets, in this case, are foreigners.
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Back when the Department of Homeland Security was first being discussed, we were told that such a department was necessary to ensure cooperation among diverse federal law enforcement agencies. Critics and skeptics feared that it would soon be turned from an antiterror agency into a general purpose federal police force, something that Americans have traditionally rejected. Ridge's mission-creep has made clear that the critics and skeptics were right all along.
Since Ridge has, with this initiative, essentially admitted that Homeland Security is no longer urgent enough to occupy the Department of Homeland Security, let's abolish the Department, and pass the savings on to the taxpayers. Not only will this save money, but it will serve as a salutary warning to future Tom Ridges that overstepping the bounds of a mandate is politically dangerous.
I'm not naive enough to think that this will happen, of course.
Neither am I.
The very name has always been creepy. Now it is looking to expand its activities and control under the rubric of homeland security -- a terrifying concept.
Convention Center Perspective
Here in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center are being held up as a shining rationalization as to why Cleveland needs a new CCC. Of course, some things are conveniently left out:
We keep hearing that the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center simply must have a new hotel to attract the kind of major activity the center needs to "prosper." It's a prudent "investment," we're told. (Never mind that the center will need public subsidies in perpetuity to break even.) Well, if the hotel is such a great "investment," why does the plan call for $34 million in public underwriting? And wouldn't one think that if it is such a wonderful investment that some private concern would be stepping forward to plug the $13 million hole in the financing package? The marketplace is saying there's no market for this project.
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operating revenues will be depressed by discounts given to groups that book hundreds of rooms. Honest to goodness, that's what Steve Leeper, the head of the Sports & Exhibition Authority, told a reporter last week. Translation: A public subsidy is needed to offset another public subsidy.
Of course, here in Cleveland, they are doing it "right" along with the cost of a new CCC, there is money to pay to expand or build a new hotel to accomodate the grandiose plans of a new CCC. (Thanks to Dave Copeland for the tip.)
Monday, July 14, 2003
Obsessive? Me?
Believe it or not, I'm not becoming an obsessed topic blogger. Hard to believe after a long series of posts on nothing but the Big East-ACC-Miami stuff; now followed by continual posting on the Cleveland Convention Center. What is happening, is that I only get small windows to post these days, so I have to post quickly and right now I'd rather try and build on what I have already been posting rather than just lurch off on something else. I'm sure I'll move on when the CCC runs cold again.
A new voice against the Cleveland Convention Center
An op-ed piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that nearly made me fall out of my seat (in a good way), by a James N. Harris a partner at H/L Communications, a public relations and marketing firm in Cleveland. Nothing in the link listed online for the convention center section at this time, but you can find it here for the next two weeks.
So far, most discussion on whether to build a new convention center in Cleveland has focused on site placement, architectural features and funding packages.
But whether building and maintaining a new convention center can help accomplish Greater Cleveland's redevelopment goals - whether it is a civic gain or drain - demands more detailed discussion and analysis if the project's supporters hope to win public approval.
This is a joke, right? A legitimate discussion in public would mean bringing up those niggling things called facts, and that would surely sink a new CCC. That is why any facts cited by proponents tend to be from studies that the public never sees (second paragraph), even if it pays for them. Facts have nothing to do with this, it's why Forest City describes a new CCC as, "an icon for Cleveland's progress." Not as something that will actually do any good, but a hell of a nice symbol.
Project proponents assert that conventions base booking decisions on whether a city has a state-of-the-art convention center. Amenities or attractions outside the convention hall do not carry nearly as much weight, they say. Since Cleveland has an old, outmoded facility, we are not getting our "fair share" of convention business. We must have a new convention center downtown to be "competitive."
But conventions - especially smaller conventions - may not require a new convention center. Such conventions (also called conferences, trade shows and professional meetings) often take place in a single hotel or in hotel clusters, at existing conference centers, in museums, on college campuses, and so on. For them, outside attractions are as important as the hall housing the convention.
Given this, how many conventions already take place locally in such "lesser" venues? How much revenue do they contribute, especially when we add into the mix larger spaces such as CSU's Convocation Center or the mammoth IX Center?
Might Greater Cleveland's various venues already book a "competitive" amount of conventions? If so, would their economic impact be increased or decreased by building a new downtown facility? Will these current locales, many congenial to smaller conventions, be cannibalized or augmented by it?
Irrelevant!! I can hear the shrieks about this. The proponents would argue that a new CCC would still have these events, and more. That these are insufficient. They don't tell you that with new or recently constructed convention centers in Pittsburgh, Louisville, Milwaukee, and so on, the CC's have to reduce their charges to rent the space, and the hotels won't be charging full price -- losing even more money just to get bookings. The proponents of a new CCC don't want to discuss plans to cannibalize the other venues to declare the new CCC a success.
Which is the better option: to support and expand - perhaps via low-interest loans - venues we already have (maybe even including the old convention center), or spend some $400 million to build a new convention center?
Obviously, we must build something big, shiny and new. It is the only way. It is the way things have always been done in Cleveland. New costly public works projects must be built to "revitalize" downtown -- again. There is no point at looking at things in a different way.
A second issue lies in trying to ascertain a new convention center's direct and indirect return on investment.
Will the return for a new convention center justify its cost? Figuring all the factors, will it break even? If so, when?
Directly: Can a new convention center produce a large enough net return over the next 20 years to justify its own cost and operating expenses?
Indirectly: Will a new downtown convention center produce a large enough, fast enough return to Cleveland's economy to warrant diverting limited resources from other needed civic projects?
Here's where, even I will concede the math can be fuzzy. Still, it isn't as blind and impossible as the proponents would have you believe. They seemingly are able to show clearly that the present CCC is a drag on downtown. The problem comes when you ask them to provide numbers on what a new CCC will provide as opposed to what it will cost. Or even able to answer the speculative issue of whether the money could be put to better use in something less grandiose.
We need hard figures. A $400 million project is not akin to a carton of milk sold a few cents below cost to entice shoppers. Bragging rights about owning a wonderful but under-used facility won't pay the large bills it will generate. A new convention center that can't pay its way isn't a "loss-leader." It just leads in losses.
The sound you are now hearing is muffled laughter from Forest City, the GCVCB, GCGA and Cleveland Tomorrow at the very notion of giving any figures harder than a slushee. You may get an occasional crystal, but it quickly melts away.
A third matter of public concern is whether effective mechanisms will be instituted for controlling costs. Will cost controls be realistic, based on a thorough examination of projected expenses, including reality checks against comparable facilities? Will controls clarify and monitor the private-public contractual relationship and distinguish who will be responsible for what?
How often will approved funding be monitored? What oversight controls guarantee that the project will stay within budget (not just in construction, but also in furnishings, replacement, maintenance and operations)? Will this oversight mechanism have sufficient legal power and authority? Will it be trustworthy and independent, and not composed of convention business partners or other vested interests?
A new convention center may or may not be needed or make better use of our region's resources - and it may or may not result in sufficient financial return. But it had better be closely monitored.
Controlling costs? Effective oversight? Responsibility? Not vested interests?
This is just crazy talk!
Why next, you'll be demanding accountability from the GCVCB, as to where their annual budget goes. Why, you might even hold the "Executive Board" overseeing their expenditures responsible.
Who is this radical, Harris? And who is he working for? I don't know. Maybe he is acting solely as a concerned citizen, and I don't want to seem ungrateful to anyone who manages to raise these points in the only Cleveland daily. I just think, it is a legitimate question as to whether he was hired by a company or person to help oppose the new CCC. The list of clients past and present, doesn't appear recently updated.
Convention Center Coverage
The Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer was a busy one for convention center matters. An article on the arts funding that will likely be tied to the new tax for the CCC; selling conventioneers with the old building; and a column on not putting all the economic eggs in one basket for the CCC.
First, the arts funding. What isn't in dispute: Cleveland and Cuyahoga County has one of the highest levels of private funding for arts in the country. This is necessary, because it is also one of the most chintzy when it comes to municipal support for the arts. (There is a simple economic argument that could be made -- that if there was more municipal/government funding, then the private individuals, foundations, and organizations would give less direct donations. I don't want to have that argument right now, because that is tangential to this matter.)
The arts community, and even the pushers of the new CCC are all pointing to the polls that show wide support for some public funding for the arts.
Cuyahoga County Commissioner Tim McCormack said 58 percent of county residents surveyed in a recent Greater Cleveland Growth Association poll supported tax dollars for the arts. Only 35 percent supported a tax package featuring a new convention center.
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The findings of an earlier poll, commissioned by the Community Partnership for Arts, were similar to those of the Growth Association survey: 63 percent of voting residents polled either strongly favored or tended to favor tax support for the arts.
When asked if they supported the specific figure of $14 million in tax money for the arts, the number dropped but remained a majority, at 56 percent.
Another survey, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Urban Institute as part of its study "Investing in Creativity," found that among Cleveland-area residents aware of local artists, 69 percent favored local public funding for the arts. That topped the national average of 63 percent.
Community Partnership President Tom Schorgl said his organization had recommended that $14 million in county tax dollars be allotted to the arts based on his experience with funding in other cities and on a standard mathematical formula used by arts organizations nationwide.
The proposed package plan only gives about $8-10 million per year for ten years. Remember, this "holistic" tax package is supposed to pay for the new CCC (and hotel), arts funding, tech business growth, and suburb projects. The more you look at this monster the worse it gets. Over half the money generated by the proposed taxes would go to financing the CCC. Roughly $30 million each year would be for "other." Start subtracting money off the top, just to pay for the new bureaucracy:
[Cuyahoga County Commissioner, Jimmy] Dimora said business and political leaders may also establish a governing board to administer the $30 million. He said he hoped to include representatives from the arts and high-tech organizations so they could "get in there and barter for those dollars" on equal footing.
emphasis added.
So you will add competing interests, the need for arts groups to lobby for the funds, and a new municipal agency that will need to be added to the payroll. The private foundations and organizations will have to spend their money lobbying yet another government entity, and the arts community will still see jack. I really hope the arts community sobers up to the reality that they are being offered fool's gold (but I doubt it).
The piece on what the Greater Cleveland Visitors & Convention Bureau is doing to sell the present CCC is a little on the puffery side. There's a lot of quotes about how everything else about Cleveland sells people on holding a convention here, until they see the present CCC. Still, there was actually one passage and quote that should be born in mind.
Christopher Hosford, executive editor of the New York-based Meeting News magazine, said he sympathizes with Cleveland's situation.
The low ceilings and numerous exhibit hall columns in the current center might drive some meetings away, Hosford said. But if the city joins the convention center building boom, it may find itself lacking business because of a stagnant convention market.
"It seems every community in the country - first-tier, second-tier, all the way to 10th-tier - is looking into building new," Hosford said.
"It's like they can't be a respectable community if they don't have a new center."
Meeting News, a magazine for "news and information for the meeting, convention, incentive and trade show professionals." And even they are warning that the market is flat, not growing.
In the coming months to sell the new CCC, there will probably be a lot of analogies to Clevelanders about how it will be similar to Jacobs Field being built and the Cleveland Indians becoming a contending team with the new revenue streams. The problem is it is an inaccurate analogy. The Jake opened at the beginning of the boom of new ballpark building. They were ahead of most teams in similar markets for the amount of money they could generate/spend by comparison to Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cinci, Detroit and Seattle. All of which then built their own new ballparks to get the new revenue streams and the differences in money disappeared along with the Indians' financial/competitive advantage. A new CCC would be more like the Milwaukee and Cinci ballparks. Opened at the end of the cycle, so the best they can do is stay near the middle of the pack. No great leap or advantage. No boom or boon. Simply average.
This brings up the column by Joe Frolik, an associate editor of the PD Editorial Board. I haven't hid my distaste for the PDEB recently, so it may come as a shock to say that I really liked this column. It was intelligent, well thought out, and sets out reasonable/doable things Cleveland can do to improve -- so it will likely be ignored.
First, he points out something, even I tend to forget: even if the tax goes through in November, there won't be a new CCC until at the earliest 2007. His point is, tourism is now a major part of Cleveland's economy -- as it is for just about any sizeable city today. Cleveland has to look beyond the single huge project and figure out how to do more things (and promote them).
That's why it is important for the business, political and civic leadership to develop a more immediate strategy to bring visitors to downtown and thus preserve the hotel and restaurant jobs they support. This must happen even as those leaders and this region grapple with the difficult issues of whether, where and how to build a convention center.
And it is doubly important to have such a plan if the decision is not to build at this time because Cleveland's ability to attract meetings of even regional scale will surely decline without a competitive downtown venue.
You can make a plausible argument that a new convention center is not a critical priority. You cannot plausibly argue that tourism is not an important part of our area's economic mix, not with an estimated 65,000 Cuyahoga County jobs tied directly or indirectly to hospitality.
"I think tourism is essential in cities that want to revitalize," says political scientist Dennis Judd, who studies the visitor industry at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
To keep the hospitality industry strong, especially without a competitive convention hall, requires a renewed effort to market this city as a regional travel destination.
Dennis Roche, the acting head of Cleveland's Convention and Visitors Bureau, acknowledges that his agency needs to "do a better job of communicating what's going on all around town."
He points to last weekend's Cleveland Grand Prix, the current visit of the tall ships to the Huntington Cleveland Harborfest and the upcoming Gravity Games as examples of successful events that could draw lots more visitors, but only if they were promoted energetically beyond Northeast Ohio.
Emphasis added. Were they? I don't know. They were promoted locally, but was there much in the way of marketing to Columbus, Cinci., Detroit, Pittsburgh, etcetera. I hear and see ads for these and other cities in Cleveland, but do they do any marketing for events in other markets?
Frolik still sees an opportunity.
But let's not fret about missed opportunities. Instead, it's time to think about how to amplify our assets for all the region - and for the world, for that matter - to come and see. And what better way to do that than to organize a major arts festival here?
The foundations and the initial draws for such an event would include the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Museum of Art, which already have international reputations. If the orchestra premiered a major new piece of music or the museum opened an important new exhibition, they would draw critics and connoisseurs from around the globe.
But the festival also could showcase local talent in everything from the blues and polka to glassblowing and neighborhood theater. "You could create something truly wonderful," says Kathleen Cerveny, a program officer at the Cleveland Foundation.
Cerveny, who raised the idea of an arts festival more than a year ago during a "Quiet Crisis" roundtable, thinks it would take at least 18 months to organize an inaugural event. Interest in her suggestion seems to be growing. Thomas Mulready, who founded the old Cleveland Performance Art Festival and who now writes the cutting-edge electronic newsletter "Cool Cleveland," plugged the idea in a recent column.
There is a minor weekend art fest at Cain Park (just happened this weekend and I was out of town) but there is no major, month long arts festival in Cleveland. There is nothing bringing everyone downtown like a favorite of mine from Pittsburgh, The Three Rivers Arts Festival, that happens every June.
Cleveland has to move beyond always looking for that one big project to make everything right. In the economy and in attracting people to the region.
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