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Saturday, August 09, 2003
Cleveland Convention Center -- The Deal Starts To Go Down
With the due date of August 21 for getting all issues on the November ballot less than 2 weeks away, a major piece of the issue is falling into place. A draft of the "memorandum of understanding and agreement" between Cleveland and Forest City has been given to Cleveland City Council. The reporter had to be under the gun on the deadline, so I'll cut her some slack as to what is reported (for now), and assume that a more detailed piece will be forthcoming.
Among the items outlined in the 50-page document that have been tentatively agreed upon but not yet finalized:
The city will pay Forest City $30 million - $15 million for the air rights above nearly 13 acres, and $15 million that will go toward compensating Forest City for replacing more than 800 Tower City Center parking spaces and lost income caused by the convention center construction. Council members instructed Forest City to come back Monday with an explanation for why the city can't buy the land, only the air.
You mean they couldn't answer that on the spot? I'm sure anyone who reads that will just be impressed with the shrewd negotiating abilities of the lawyers for Cleveland. To be fair (and dull) I'm sure there is a reasonable, legal answer that I can't recall for not selling the land rights -- only everything above it.
With its own money, Forest City will expand Tower City Center and its food court in time for the convention center's projected opening in 2009.
Forest City will spend up to $100,000 on an environmental study of Scranton Peninsula.
Man, Cleveland is really playing hardball with Forest City. Forest City has to use its own money to add room for Sbarro. Wow.
I'm guessing, by that wording, the city picks up the tab when the environmental study of land that has been used primarily for industrial purposes for about a century exceeds the $100K mark.
But it is still unclear whether the city or an 11-member board overseeing the construction and operation of the center would have final say on approving new Tower City retail tenants.
Okay. Wait. Why is this even and issue? Who cares? Does Cleveland really need to be involved in deciding tenancy in a mall -- even if it has major tax abatements and subsidies? Are they afraid Forest City will lease out space to strip clubs to make it easier for the convention attendees to get a lap dance during breaks? Wait. That would be a hell of a selling point for the CCC.
Also, Forest City has not provided council with information on the costs for utilities, landscaping and site preparation of Scranton Peninsula; a market study for determining the types of housing to be built, and at what price; or a concrete plan for when all of the promised 2,400 housing units will be built.
And I wonder how the City of Cleveland plans to pay for all of that? Forest City is only promising to develop the Scranton Peninsula as a residential housing area. It isn't promising to pay for the infrastructure. If it comes out of the tax levy being pushed, that will further reduce the pot of fool's gold for the county suburbs, tech and arts people they are trying to get to drink the kool-aid with them.
Both sides had agreed that 350 housing units would be sold by the time the center opened. "We have to have a guarantee that on opening day of the center, we will have completed development," Council President Frank Jackson said, adding that whether Forest City can live up to its promises "is what makes or breaks the whole thing."
If the city and Forest City can't agree on Scranton Peninsula's master plan, which may not be completed before 2005, the city can back out of both the convention center and housing deals.
Uh-huh. I wonder if they were able to state this with a straight face.
Meanwhile the City and County are still wrangling over power concerning the new Convention Center board ; City Council meets again on Monday, August 11 to discuss the Forest City deal; Tuesday is a local holiday to celebrate my birthday; Wednesday, August 13 City Council will vote up or way up on the convention center deal; and on Tuesday, August 19, the County Commissioners will vote yes or f** yeah, on approving putting the tax levy on the November ballot.
Friday, August 08, 2003
Underrated
The latest Bill Simmons column, is actually two parts. First he lists his top 12 "underrated" movies of all time. Then he lists 20 other movies that didn't quite make it.
I won't argue much with choices, because it is terribly subjective, and he did include one of my all time favorite underrated movies -- Kicking And Screaming; but (here it comes) no way does Saturday Night Fever get on the list. Never. No rationale. I'll even let Turner & Hooch slide, but not SNF.
You want the movie that should be in place of SNF. Easy.
Demolition Man
Look at the cast: Stallone, Nigel Hawthorne, Rob Schneider (in his first teaming with Stallone), Dennis Leary, Sandra Bullock, Wesley Snipes, Ben Bratt and 2 (2!) "That guy"s -- Bill Cobbs and Glenn Shadix. Plus as an added bonus, it has Jesse Ventura as one of the defrosted road warriors/criminals.
This was before Bullock and Snipes became big box office draws. Hell, it was before Snipes went totally beefy. Bratt still hadn't shown up on "Law & Order."
Snipes' orange hair inspired Dennis Rodman to start changing his hair color.
Yet, when discussing Stallone action movies, this rarely gets mentioned. It wasn't a spectacular hit (Rambo II) and it wasn't a spectacular bomb (Judge Dredd).
It doesn't get a lot of play on cable. Just a completely overlooked and underrated flick. No question about it.
From his list of movies that didn't quite make the list, he lists another favorite -- Singles. He completely captures my feelings.
The definitive early-'90s movie. Makes me happy. I'm not sure why I look back at that era so fondly; those were my prime dating-drinking years, only women weren't promiscuous and wore six layers of clothing, plus everyone was terrified of hardcore drugs and unprotected sex. Not good times. I'm getting bitter all over again. Let's just move on.
And yet I still had fun.
Splitting Interests
I've made no secret of my loyalty and interest in following the University of Pittsburgh Panthers. From time to time, I've obsessed to an even greater level then I have on the Cleveland Convention Center.
So, with the help of my friends and gang of Pitt football season ticket holders, a new blog will be covering my Pitt passions.
Pitt Sports Blather
The goal is for us to have a forum to analyze, debate, and obsess over our Pitt Panthers.
We're still in the "just getting started" phase, so things may be a bit shaky at first.
Cleveland Convention Center -- City vs. County
Looks like the Cuyahoga County Commissioners are still working to get the most influence out of the planned convention center system.
Cuyahoga County commissioners say city and suburban leaders must accept a do-or-die list of conditions before the commissioners will back a convention-center tax package.
The conditions, which would shift the majority of control to the county, could jeopardize a fast-approaching ballot deadline.
Dennis Eckart, president of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, referred to the list as an "ill-timed ransom note."
The county's demands are the latest tug in a war over control of what would be the region's largest public investment in years. Besides deciding control of a new convention center, leaders need to agree on the division of millions of leftover dollars from proposed tax increases.
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Commissioners want the final say on how this money is spent, a request that Mayor Jane Campbell has already called a deal-breaker.
County commissioners also want to appoint the majority of members to an authority that would oversee the center's construction and governance. The authority, they said, should choose the center's location and consider the city's recommended site behind Tower City Center as only preliminary.
The commissioners have given the city until Aug. 15 to agree to their demands. They plan to vote Aug. 19 on whether to send a 0.25 percent sales tax to the November ballot.
Obviously this is just a game of chicken to see who will flinch first. Instead of driving at each other with cars, they are using lawyers.
Cuyahoga County's top lawyer says state law requires that county commissioners - not Cleveland leaders - control spending for a convention center if county sales taxes are used for the project.
Prosecutor Bill Mason wrote in a July 30 opinion that the law gives the county six of 11 appointments to an authority that would oversee construction and operation of the center. Cleveland would get three appointments, and there would be two suburban representatives, he wrote.
Mason offered the opinion at the request of commissioners, who have been locked in a power struggle with city leaders and suburban mayors. All want more say on spending for the center and for related economic development initiatives and the arts.
Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell, who wants at least four appointments to a convention authority, yesterday cited an opinion from her own lawyers that challenges Mason's interpretation.
Her lawyers' opinion says state law grants commissioners the discretion to share more power with the city because the convention project would also rely on taxes charged on hotel and motel rooms.
Okay, the writer must have missed the nuances here. The Mayor's own attorneys are only saying that the County has the discretion to share more of the power. This suggests that the Cuyahoga County Commissioners have the upper-hand since it is their call as to whether they will share that power.
I don't seriously believe that this won't end up on the ballot. The squabbling is just a source of amusement, especially because it once again, evoked whining from the Cleveland Plain Dealer Editorial Board:
Unable or unwilling to reach a deal that would clear the way for a November election on a new convention center, city and county officials continue to talk past each other, not to each other.
Preferring to exchange terse, demanding letters instead of engaging in meaningful negotiations, they are now within two weeks of missing a deadline for placing on the Nov. 3 ballot a tax increase to fund a new convention center, economic development projects and support for the arts.
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Two days ago, County Commissioners Jimmy Dimora, Peter Lawson Jones and Tim McCormack fired off what Greater Cleveland Growth Association President Dennis Eckart referred to as an "ill-timed ransom note." That missive essentially demanded that Cleveland and suburban leaders accept the commissioners' conditions regarding an economic development package and convention center governance. Yesterday, Campbell and Cleveland City Council President Frank Jackson fired back a letter reiterating their own conditions.
You can almost hear the mewling, to stop the bickering.
Speaking of the ballot and CCC, the City and County are still negotiating on an extended deadline with Forest City. Apparently the City Council is supposed to receive the final deal today. Not that the public would have known. They never officially stated that they extended the deadline.
Why Does California Get to Have all the Fun?
California has Ah-Nuld (I just don't want to type out his last name); Larry Flynt,a porn king who cares; and Arianna Huffington, what is she this week; running for Gov. (C-SPAN has to run live coverage of a debate between the three of them. The nation demands it.) Here in Ohio, we were just going to settle for having the day-time trash TV king run for US Senator. Now, even that is denied us. Jerry Springer isn't running
Intelligence Bias
A good piece in the Opinion Journal from Francis Fukuyama on the global intelligence failure of Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The source of this failure does not lie in the political agenda of this administration. The Bush people are right in saying that their estimates of WMD stockpiles were no different from the conclusions of the Clinton administration. And the latter would say, if asked, that their assessment was drawn from Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspectors who operated in Iraq from 1991-98. The intelligence failure is thus ultimately traceable to Unscom, and deeply embedded in an intelligence process that in the 1990s was biased toward overestimation of threats.
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Why then did Unscom and the U.S. intelligence community believe so firmly that the weapons programs continued big time long after 1991? It was because there was plenty of evidence indicating that the Iraqis were lying, in the form of documents, communications intercepts, defector reports, and other types of suspicious behavior. But this evidence may have been the product of a deeper deceit, and its importance overestimated by everybody.
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Economists have a simple maxim to explain human behavior: People respond to incentives. And if one looks at the incentives facing both the Iraqi scientists, Unscom, and U.S. intelligence, one sees the likely roots of the problem. Iraq was a totalitarian system in which everyone was forced to cater to Saddam's whims. We know that his son Uday, as head of the Iraqi Olympic committee, tortured losing athletes. We also know that during this war, Saddam was being fed false information about the success of his forces by commanders fearful of telling the truth. Iraqi scientists had every incentive to exaggerate the extent of their activities in internal communications with the regime. This appears to have been the case with the hapless Iraqi charged with developing the toxin ricin. He told his U.S. interrogators that he was never able to produce quantities of sufficient purity and toxicity for weapons use, but nonetheless reported to Baghdad that he was managing a large, successful program.
I've read this from others, and it seems very plausible. Of course Professor Fukuyama points to UNSCOM and US intelligence desire not to be caught off-guard by Iraq again as helping to skew beliefs in WMD.
Both Unscom and U.S. intelligence were unpleasantly surprised by the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs uncovered in 1991. Thereafter, both had strong incentives not to be made fools of again. Unscom developed estimates of the extent of covert Iraqi research and stockpiles not accounted for, but whose existence could not be verified. The Clinton administration used the Unscom tallies as a baseline, and supplemented them with worst-case estimates based on intelligence it gathered. The Bush administration simply continued this process. Overestimation was passed down the line until it was taken as gospel by everyone (myself included) and used to justify the U.S. decision to go to war.
The media's focus on whether President Bush or his advisors were lying is thus totally misplaced. Most in the administration honestly believed there were significant stocks of weapons and active programs that would be found, even if they let slip a false assertion about yellowcake in Niger. Why else would Centcom have been so concerned to protect U.S. forces against possible chemical/biological attack?
I still believe that the US was right to get rid of Hussein, regardless of the WMD. What we have been learning of Hussein's atrocities since, should be enough for anyone. I also have no real problem with it being a shot across the bow of the Arab/Islamofascists leaders that the US will act against perceived threats.
Go Yankees
How great is this. The Yankees get stronger and a potential playoff foe is weakened. The Yankees traded Amando Benitez and cash (to cover some of the salary difference) to the Seattle Mariners for Jeff Nelson. I'm very excited about the possiblilty of having both Arthur Rhodes and Benitez being in the same pen to have to face the Yankees. Go Mariners.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
My Head Hurts
This evening, blogger/blogspot finally started working for me again. But then I discovered that my posts still weren't showing up on my blog. After quite a while of trying to reach anyone with blogger (no responses), I started wondering if my comments had really screwed up the template despite appearing to work. Well, I checked my template, and found it completely blanked. Apparently during the problems, my template got erased.
Luckily, I made a copy of the template in Notepad, before adding comments. Cut and pasted it back in; re-added the comments; and voila! All of the posts are back.
I'm going to bed.
Finally
I'm back. Actually, I never left, just BlogSpot and/or Blogger went down and wouldn't let me publish for the last few days. Of course, I'm about to head out and get some dinner, so I'll post more later.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Someday I'll Post again
If BlogSpot/Blogger ever lets me. Hell, I'm even getting "500 Error" messages when I try to check Blogger control for the status.
Testing, testing...
another wasted post.
Fingers Crossed
Well Blogger Control is "investigating." Maybe the problem is solved.
Is this thing on?
This down time is driving me nuts
Why West Virginia will always be a punchline
Unbelievable.
A Powerball winner who has donated more than $3 million of his record winnings to churches was drinking at a strip club when $545,000 was stolen from his sport-utility vehicle, police said yesterday.
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Someone broke the driver's side window and took a briefcase containing $245,000 in cash and three $100,000 cashier's checks belonging to Whittaker, who hit Powerball's richest jackpot on Christmas Day, police said.
There are many things in this story that just cause a "Huh?" reaction. Here's a big one: All of the cash, the checks, the briefcase, a CD player and CDs taken from the SUV were all recovered. They were found in a nearby trash can. What the hell? Even the cash?
Authorities believe the thief has close ties to the Pink Pony strip club in Cross Lanes, but no arrests have been made.
Whittaker first arrived at the Pink Pony on Monday evening. He left shortly after midnight, returning at 2:30 a.m. and leaving his vehicle's motor running, Tucker said.
Whittaker discovered the broken window about 5 a.m. and tried to go back inside to call police, but club employees initially refused to let him in.
Whittaker called deputies at 5:20 a.m. and also called his private investigator, who found the stolen money behind the trash bin less than an hour later, police said.
"There's no confusion on the fact that he didn't have all his faculties," Kanawha County Chief Deputy Phil Morris said.
He left the motor running for 2.5 hours? I'm thinking that whoever broke into the car just wanted to turn off the engine.
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
@#$% BlogSpot
Still can't get the damn posts published
Some Downtime?
Just one of those days for BlogSpot. I haven't been able to get posts out all day.
More Fun in Cuyahoga County
This time from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where the last three years worth of financial records seem to have disappeared.
Three years of financial records, crucial for audits, have disappeared from a locked steel cage in the basement of Cuyahoga County's elections board.
The missing records include handwritten ledgers and receipts for money that the agency received in 2000, 2001 and 2002.
Proof that candidates paid filing fees is gone. So is proof that top elections board officials reimbursed the county for personal calls made on county cell phones.
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Board officials said they discovered that the records were gone on June 5, the day after The Plain Dealer asked to review bills for cell phones used by acting Director Lynnie Powell, former Director Thomas Jelepis and other employees.
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Board officials did not tell the Plain Dealer that the records were missing until the paper asked on Thursday to review reimbursement receipts for any personal calls made by Powell and Jelepis.
The two officials rang up a total of $12,000 in cell phone charges between August 2000 and December 2001, before the board took away their phones.
The missing records were in three boxes, each nearly the size of a file drawer, and stored with old ballots at the board's downtown offices. Two board administrators said they had seen the records in the cage before June 5, according to a board memo.
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Only three people had keys to the cage that housed the records, but board officials said that employees use them like a bathroom key, handing them out to anyone who asks.
No one noticed anyone walking out with three big boxes of receipts?
The Ohio Secretary of State is going to be investigating. Normally this would fall to the director, but since, in this case, the acting director is one of the main figures in abuse of county resources, they feel that might be a bit of a conflict.
Thinking About It?
Now that Penn State has just learned that on of its professors of the last 4 years had been convicted of killing 3 fishermen in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1965 -- though he was parloled in 1979 -- the school has decided that maybe a background check on its faculty might be a good idea. You know, the same sort of thing that they run on all of their regular employees.
This apparently has gotten the attention the American Association of University Professors
Those advocating the checks cite safety issues and liability. Others not keen on the idea say they are worried about potential abuses.
Though it has taken no official position, the American Association of University Professors says it is monitoring the Penn State case and the national debate.
An attorney for the group based in Washington, D.C., wondered yesterday whether schools imposing checks will make proper distinctions between types of offenses.
"Should a youthful drug use offense bar somebody from getting a faculty appointment? What about a ticket for reckless driving?" asked staff counsel Donna Euben. "What about someone who has filed for bankruptcy? Should that preclude somebody from teaching American literature?"
So, a technician at Penn State needs to get a full background check, but it may not be "fair" to subject a person who is going to be teaching and communicating directly with students to the same. Doesn't sound like too much in the way of academic elitism.
NNNNOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
This should never happen.
About 800,000 gallons of Jim Beam bourbon burned yesterday after lightning struck a warehouse, sending flames soaring into the sky and dumping streams of burning liquor into a nearby creek.
Living in Cleveland, I have to ask. Did the river burn?
Monday, August 04, 2003
Boy I hope this works
I'm giving comments a try. I guess we'll see how badly I screwed up my template this time.
Cleveland Convention Center -- Bad Reporting or Bad Editing?
Maybe it's the lack of competition. Perhaps it's the difference in priorities. If I was truly paranoid, I'd attribute it to some out and out effort to whitewash any controversial news out of the CCC debate. Whatever the reason, it's just another example as to why the Cleveland Plain Dealer is such a mediocre newspaper. That meeting where Mayor Campbell gave the cost estimate also contained some other information, the PD didn't bother to mention. This article in Crain's Cleveland Business (subs. req'd), though explains a good deal more.
If Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell has her way, the Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland won't be responsible for promoting the opening of a new downtown convention center and will be stripped of the bulk of its financial support.
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At present, the Convention & Visitors Bureau, a nonprofit organization, receives the proceeds of a 3% county bed tax to market Northeast Ohio to meeting and convention planners, businesses and leisure travelers. Of its $8.5 million budget in 2001, the latest year for which data is available, $7.3 million, or 86%, came from the bed tax. The rest of the budget comes mainly from dues paid by hoteliers, restaurateurs and other tourism businesses.
Mayor Campbell wants the bed-tax money redirected to what for now is called the Convention Facilities Authority, which would be created to build and manage the new convention center. Public officials would appoint all but one of the board members of the authority, which also would decide how to market the region as a meeting and tourist destination.
As for the current Convention & Visitors Bureau, Mayor Campbell told Cleveland City Council at a hearing last Wednesday, July 30, "They may elect to continue as a nonprofit with their private money.
The PD story only mentioned that this authority would "oversee the construction and operation of a new convention center, as well as the money for development projects." There was no mention that the GCVCB would become a hollow shell. Surely, in light of the stories of wild spending by the GCVCB in May (and the PD was so willing to take some credit in this), this should at least have merited a follow-up story.
Deb Janik, chief of staff for Mayor Campbell, said as the mayor sees it, the Convention Facilities Authority should be responsible for preparing the budget to promote the region as a meeting and tourism destination because of the public money involved, and that the CVB "or an entity of its type" created by the authority could handle the actual marketing.
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County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, who is handling convention center negotiations for the county, knew of the mayor's statements to City Council but said no decision has yet been reached about the fate of the CVB.
"That's what she (the mayor) said, but we aren't saying that," Mr. Jones said late last week. "I know she would like it to come out that way."
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A state law that permits the county to create a convention authority was created this summer specifically for Cuyahoga County, so the lawyers must figure out legislative intent rather than rely on a well-developed body of legal precedents as they work on defining the authority's responsibilities.
Dennis Roche, interim director of the CVB, said it was his understanding that the bureau will survive in some form.
The mayor of Cleveland wants to gut a quasi-private organization that gets 86% of its money from the county, and this doesn't get mentioned in the only daily? Of course, they still haven't bothered to mention that the president of the GCVCB was fired a couple weeks ago.
Nonetheless, Vern Fuller, president of Marathon Associates, which manages the Radisson Hotel at Gateway Cleveland, said he would not want to see convention marketing handled by a quasi-public building commission.
"My belief is we need a private operator and (that operator) needs to be modeled on what we have," Mr. Fuller said. Hotel operators are key partners in attracting conventions and are private financial supporters of the Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Mr. Fuller alluded to criticism earlier this year of the CVB's spending habits when he said a public convention authority would feel constrained about doing the kind of wining and dining that it often takes to convince convention planners to bring their groups to town.
The convention bureau's president, David Nolan, was placed on leave last May after media reports criticized the CVB for lavishly spending public tax money on entertainment. Mr. Fuller suggested that a privately run convention and visitors bureau would act as a "firewall" that could spend private money on entertainment.
"So when someone comes to peek under our skirts, we don't have to show them," he said.
There is something disturbingly honest in this, that makes you nod your head in agreement; and then want to take a shower. Of course the hotel chains definitely don't want the present system to change since it allows them a great deal of influence as to how the GCVCB spends money and what it promotes and where.
The Plain Dealer is the only game in town. There are two sub-par alt-weeklies; and a weekly business paper. If the PD doesn't report it, most people won't know that it is happening in Cleveland.
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Cleveland Convention Center, Costs and Reality
In light of Mayor Campbell's fascinating cost analysis for a new CCC, even my favorite whipping boy -- the Cleveland Plain Dealer Editorial Board was having a hard time swallowing the figures.
The long-debated convention center project now has some numbers attached. But how hard those numbers are is questionable.
The $422 million overall price tag Mayor Jane Campbell announced Wednesday is the product of dozens of estimates, all of which deserve careful scrutiny.
Campbell has tapped a seven-member team of experts to check the city's figures and report back next month. But if she wants an objective review, she should be asking experts who pledge to remain disinterested in the project. As it is, five of the seven firms involved in the review are local, and it would be no surprise if all bid for a piece of the convention center's construction.
You know there is trouble for the CCC when even the PDEB is saying, "Uh, Jane, look, we want to back this, but, um, do you think you could present figures with, oh ... I don't know, a little basis in reality."
Meanwhile the Cleveland Free Times has a round-up of convention center problems from around the country, indicating that there is already such a glut of new/renovated convention centers that any hopes Cleveland would have for a windfall is strictly speaking, a lie. (And I realize, the piece was simply a reprint from the print weekly, but if there ever was an article crying out for links by the Free Times, this was it.)
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