LincolnKennedy

The first thing the City has to do is get out of offering a defined-benefit pension, immediately. They are ticking time-bombs. I don't know a ton about finance, nor do I know much about pension rules, but I get the feeling that these folks aren't thinking of particularly creative ways to raise revenue. They ruled out pension obligation bonds, but why not sell enought p.o. bonds to cover the deficit, and then use they money raised to buy an assortment of foreign and corporate bonds that pay higher premiums than the bonds you've issued? Obviously they'd be somewhat risky but they can't be riskier than not funding the the pension fund. Combine that with increased payments into the funds, rolling all City owned parking garages + parking meters into a contract that you can farm out for bid for 20 some odd years or so so that you can have another guaranteed revenue source, and create a parking lot tax so that all private lots wouldn't end up pricing out the publicly owned lots. Or hell, figure out what would happen if we file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. But above all, don't do things that are going to subsidize parking.

^Really? Anyone else notice this story in the Enquirer: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100224/NEWS0108/2250331 It was conspicuous for lacking a single quote from Mallory regarding a looming fiscal crisis for the City. And I fear the worst thing about that article is the potential impact on the Streetcar. They are suggesting that the City sell about a half a billion dollars in property to fund the pension obligations that had so long been underfunded (a practice begun during the late 90's under then Mayor Qualls, if I'm not mistaken). The article suggests that the City will try to sell "land, buildings, parking garages..." in order to raise the money. I can't imagine a worse time to try and sell land or buildings. That leaves parking garages as the only valuable rent producing asset the City has, and the only thing close to commanding the $500 million price tag they need to reach. So while at a time when the City should be consolidating with the intention of limiting parking along the Streetcar routes in order to both increase the amount of people using the Streetcar as well as the amount charged for the scarcer parking spots, Qualls and Company want to sell key assets to avoid making tough decisions.

Well, there's no inflation right now and there's a lot of unemployment. The fed is keeping exchange rates low with the intention of encouraging lending and investment. It seems to me that if you have money that can't buy many foreign goods at the moment you'd do better to keep it in your bank account or buy bonds or something (savings isn't just holding hard cash, if I'm reading you correctly) and wait out the depreciation. The problem that Spain is suffering from right now is that they don't control their currency, so they can't depreciate it now that unemployment has skyrocketed and prices remain at their pre-unemployment levels. Don't disagree with you, but I doubt many but the seniormost positions left St. Louis for Leuven, and I doubt that that purchase will effect AB's presence in the St. Louis community. A similar thing happened when P&G bought Gillette. Almost all of those jobs remained up in Boston. Income results from productive activity. The primary activity of the past five to ten years was not productive. If it takes some devaluation to jar us into productive pursuits, the U.S. will be better served by it.

^Coming at them with individual stories about declining Ohio air hubs and small businesspersons excited about the opportunity 3C is a good start. Hope for the future is a good draw.

Gramarye: I'm not sure if you are an economist or an amateur like me. I enjoy the act of thinking these scenarios through. So, my responses: That's precisely my point- the U.S. needs to import less and export more. Anything that helps to give people a reason to invest in creating goods of value for export and the personal savings rate is a positive thing for the U.S. Look at how much was wasted in terms of opportunity cost as result of the housing bubble. Americans spend too much of their money on certain sectors and not enough saving. There seems to be two ways of viewing changes in the exchange rate: Changes either balance out across the economy and their is no net effect, or changes can cause new patterns of investment that have real effects, either good or bad. My view is the latter, that our economy is currently out of balance, and more domestic manufacture and exports would be better and rebalance the economy from, as you say, "import[ing] much more than we export." Don't really disagree, except that it seems to me that decreasing the average person's purchasing power would potentially increase the savings rate, which is something I think would be good. I don't think you're arguing that the weak dollar wouldn't increase exports, because of all the phenomena you described above, so that's once again a factor that I view as a benefit, along with the decrease in personal consumption. That's what happened when InBev bought Anheuser-Busch when the Euro was riding high against the dollar. I'm not sure why anyone should care about this. The only way that InBev closes plants in the U.S. is if beer consumption falls in the North American market, which is something the bosses in St. Louis would do as well. It's not like the auto industry. This strikes me as a political question rather than something related to the relative value of currencies floating against one another. The creditworthiness of the U.S. Treasury is directly related to the amount and regularity of the tax receipts it can command, which is in turn directly related to the productivity of American workers. We should be trying to get Americans to invest in business that pay good wages, not houses to trade back and forth.

It doesn't matter why. That's just the way it is especially with the people who are leaning against the 3C. My point was that you seem to be arguing that the average voter is more discerning to arguments that favor Kasich rather than Strickland, and you point to the idea that Kasich can make the case that he will be a better choice to oversee a tight budget and that's why bashing 3C is smart politics. My suggestion is that average voter doesn't make these distinction, that people who think "3C=waste of money" and nothing deeper than that are already voting for Kasich. What's the advantage then of alienating a hard-core group of dedicated issue voters simply to score political points in a state election that the national GOP can make for you? Granted that that's where Kasich's core support lies, but I would argue (without any supporting data obviously) that the consistent support of SE Ohio values voters was what helped to consistently tilt Ohio Statewide races to the GOP in the 90s. The increasing importance of the Democratic HamCo vote (and perhaps FrankCo too, I don't know much about that) combined with a native of SE leading the Dem ticket has changed things.

^I fail to understand why a subtle argument about who is more competent to oversee a tight budget will find more resonance with the public than arguments about education. Either people pay attention to the details of policy or they don't. You've got to present more detail about why someone is inherently going to prefer Kasich, a former Congressman who comes from who knows where, to Strickland, a former congressman that you've actually heard of because he is Governor and comes from SE Ohio, simply on the basis of the claim that Kasich will make that he is a better manager. True independents make up an extraordinarily minor part of the electorate. There are a bunch of people who say they are independent but vote like partisans. Anyway, relating to 3C, like I said, the people who care about 3C as their primary issue are much more likely to swing toward an individual candidate who supports it (or against one who opposes it) than someone who is against additional spending and dislikes 3C because of that. Like I said, Kasich's position strikes me as more a factor of aligning against the national Democratic brand rather than a particularly insightful way to carve out a piece of the Democrats base. As I said, most voters don't care about 3C because it doesn't exist. They don't care and aren't interested because they can't see it and use it. But how do you get people pissed off enough to vote for you against something that is purely theoretical? Why alienate the core supporters when the anti-tax and anti-spending crowd has no other candidate to support? Kasich's position is lazy rhetoric based on lazy thinking that the electorate is too lazy to pay attention and he won't suffer for it. You don't get somewhere running a campaign based on laziness.

Is this what he's going to run on? While I'm admittedly a partisan of Strickland, I'm not quite sure what the Republican message is supposed to be. Vote for me and we'll eliminate the state income tax? Anyone who thinks that taxes don't pay for useful things is already voting for Kasich, and anyone who spends two seconds thinking about it can't take Kasich seriously. How do you run against a train that no one knows anything about? It might poll low support, but that's only because the average voter has little to know understanding about government process, and don't think things that they don't use are useful. As soon as it gets built, people are going to ask why the train doesn't go faster or come to their city. The people who like 3C rail really like it. The people who don't just consider it another gov't program they don't like. There are far more rail fanboys than there are anti-rail hacks. I don't really see the value to Kasich in opposing it. I suspect he's coming out against it out of a knee-jerk reaction to siding with the Congressional Republican leadership (maybe out of fear of the tea-party types, but I doubt it). Or he's just not that smart. I don't see how Kasich beats Strickland in SE Ohio. Coming out against projects that benefit the 3C's + D sounds like a way to net zero votes, particularly when stories about decreased air travel service are easy for the Strickland camp to toss back at you if they want to engage on the subject (I'm thinking of ads where airport workers and business people say how much decreased air travel has hurt their business and how much they want the train). Strickland has positioned himself well on public education at a time when people are shifting to public schools and education is one of the few major functions of state government. What's Kasich got, vouchers? Is it 1997? The fact that the most of us learned about Ohio politics during the 90's suggests that this state is default Republican, but I think that was much more a function of the culture wars of that period than anything else. I don't see Kasich (who doesn't have great name rec compared to Strickland anyway) giving anybody a reason to vote for him. In Massachussetts, Brown gave people a reason to vote for him vis-a-vis his competitor (by campaigning hard). How do you beat someone who is more well-known than you are if you don't offer a new vision?

I've always found it amusing and somewhat said when I here average people who aren't importers say how concerned they are about the strength of the U.S. dollar. The worst thing about the Greek crisis from an American perspective (in my opinion) is that it could raise the value of the dollar vis-a-vis the euro. We need more manufacturing, because that is producing real value, and a weak dollar would really help that. Plus, it would give the Red Chinese fits. I agree, I think the U.S. auto industry is posed for a comeback (and that actually includes manufacturers like Toyota and Honda that have lots of factories in the U.S.) so long as Detroit focuses on putting out a quality product and not simply marketing.

It would be nice if we could use federal any federal transpo money for any area project, so we could stop the widening of I-75 and devote the funds to this.

Did the Republicans do anything to improve Ohio when they had a lock on state government from 1994-2006? Any game changing projects?

^For a relatively short time. Didn't property requirements for voting end pretty much everywhere in the U.S. except the upper house of the South Carolina legislature by the 1840s at the latest?

Common signage and details along a bike path for the Oasis line could work. Also, Rutherford Hayes memorials, and frankly any memorials relating to the Civil War, should be on Central Parkway, in my opinion.

I liked how there was a Luebbers running for Court of Common Pleas in 1938 and there is a Luebbers on the Court of Common Pleas today.

Not true. ODOT/ORDC are working on this. And I heard an interesting statistic today: The original 3C application cost of $564 million had a 30 percent contingency in it. The $400 million awarded represents 71 percent of the $564 million. I was talking about local political leadership, not civil service leadership. I'm clearly just a dilettante when it comes to this subject, but it strikes me that jmeck's points about the I-75 rebuild speak directly to the problem on having to rely on folks who are tasked to implement policy rather than a politician or group of politicians who are actively pursuing the region's interest. The fact that we are presented with a problem (a route to get high-speed rail from Sharonville to Cincinnati Union Terminal) that could very likely be solved by a scheduled change to a project (I-75 widening) that will arguably do nothing to change the underlying cause of that project, while the change could theoretically fix both exemplifies what folks find frustrating about government. The fact that the state can't connect to CUT at this time is actually a positive thing if it would result in a change to the I-75 widening. But unfortunately it probably won't do that. Problem: Too many vehicles on I-75 at certain times of the day. Solution1: Disincentivize least economic vehicles to take the highway at those times. Solution2: Increase size of oft-jammed highway, while at the same time taking taxable land off property rolls forever. Swish!

They definitely need to be working on how to get good, serviceable downtown stations in all three C-cities stat. These cities are the main drivers of the state's economy, cities with strong core's perform better economically than those with hollow cores, and our legacy costs and new relative distance to high-growth countries make it impossible for Ohio to compete against Southern and Western states at greenfield development. The problem is, there's no "they" working on this. No one is tasked to find a way to make up this shortfall. And unfortunately no politician in Cincy is going to pick up the baton on this. While I don't think there will be a major backlash against any politician, there is a big problem with us saying "good enough" instead of working hard to complete the system. The system works like it is supposed to when it is complete.

While it looks boring as hell, and I wouldn't be opposed to them scrapping the majority of it and just building the Riverfront Park and the Moerlein Brew House and going slow from there, I will at least remind everyone that, aside from Riverfront Stadium, that area was almost entirely parking lots and warehouses before.

I could definitely be wrong. It's been years, so I don't remember. Thanks for trying.

It might be closed down by now. I remember it being there around 2004. It was new around then. It was sort of funny that they put it there because I don't remember many people living in that area back then and it hasn't seemed like much of a growth area since, compared to West Midtown and the stuff they've been putting in east of the highway and north of Grant Park. I guess there are more folks downtown since then.

Maybe. The one I was thinking of was near the State Capitol and there were apartments above it.

Yeah man, chill with the censorship. Stop trying to harsh the mellow of a free-form market values discussion of urban public transit expenditure with your socialist police state rhetorical air-brushing. Oh God. I'm extremely drunk.

^I was always under the impression that that buff-colored brick building at 14th & Main, where the OTR Chamber is, was an old Kroger. At least that is what I recall from Architreks.

^There's a big Whole Foods in Union Square that is packed. Also, Kroger's built the most urban friendly Kroger I have ever seen real close to the Georgia State House in Atlanta. Maybe Rando has pics of that somewhere. It can be done. Eurofridges are small, there milk comes in bricks, not gallons, and they go to the market with relative frequency, because it is a bitch to carry a weeks work of groceries home on public transit. Also a lot of other reasons too.

^I don't know if that is necessarily true. Have you seen the fridges in Europe?

Just describing what I considered to be the best possible route to & through the Eastside at the limits of the feasibility area for the Streetcar. I think the best route through the Westside is across W. 8th Street up Warsaw or Elberon to Glenway/Warsaw/Quebec intersection, down Quebec to Queen City, and Queen City across the WH Viaduct to connect to West End/OTR. Unfortunately, topography, population size and ROI for both East and West Sides are not equal, so you'd have to balance it out with direct bus service between Price Hill and a future Uptown version of Government Square, and or promised improvements a la 3CDC in OTR. Two things are clear regarding the Streetcar- 1) it needs to have a certain amount of independence (particularly regarding revenue) so that every routing decision doesn't have to be a massive political clusterfuck, and 2) there has to be an area that is understood as being the high density area that the streetcar is going to service. It can't go to PRidge or Westwood, because that's not what it is supposed to do. Likewise, new investments in the Streetcar Area have to be streetcar focused, not parking lots with new developments around to give you a reason to go park there like most of what I've seen planned for Short Vine.