The Plain Dealer sets its goals for Greater Cleveland in 2009: An editorial agenda

Posted by The editors February 01, 2009 06:28AM

 

 

THESE ARE SCARY TIMES for Greater Cleveland.

Every day seems to bring news of job cuts or shrinking profits. The foreclosure tsunami continues to swamp whole neighborhoods and to drag down home prices across the region. High-profile development deals are on hold. A wide-ranging federal investigation of local government corruption has many residents wondering just who our elected officials think they were elected to serve. There are days when leadership, from any sector of the community, seems to be absent.

 

http://blog.cleveland.com/pdopinion/2009/02/northeast_ohio_in_2009_goals_f.html

 

Nice goals, all of which I 100% agree with...

I like this. I wish the Enquirer would do something like this.

1Begin a serious discussion of unified government in Cuyahoga County that would collapse municipal divisions and overnight create the eighth-largest city in the United States. Talk about an attention-getter! Would it be hard? Sure: The marriage of Louisville and Jefferson County, Ky., took two decades and two ballot-box defeats to arrange. Would it be worth it? Without doubt. Even the discussion would be beneficial.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I think that the region needs to work together, yes. But to collapse all of the little communities into one large municipality? What would this look like, and how would this be beneficial?

It would look like most other cities in the country.

The entire county should become Cleveland immediately.  Republican?  It costs a lot more to run all those little governments, and it makes many people pay double local income taxes.  Democrat?  The current map exists to segregate wealth.  It also makes large scale planning more difficult by giving too much power to NIMBYs. 

Agreed

seconded. a more unified, yet leaner and meaner government is the way to go. the wasteful duplication of services around greater cleveland is incredible. it just gets worse as the years go by.

 

iguess the first question is can this goal realistically be achieved?

If we ever really want to turn things around, it HAS to happen. Schools will 100% be the biggest hang up. 

 

If we can figure a way for schools to still be separated by community while combining other services there is still a chance.  Of course we have to find a way to get people in say a Westlake or a Beachwood, to be amenable to their tax dollars not directly going to their communities, which I'm sure will be an uphill battle.  At some point people have to realize it's not always about "them".  But should be about the greater good.

 

Think of it at just this very basic level.  If all our tax $ are pooled together, every community doesn't have to try an have it's own shopping destination (because every community wants it's own share of retail tax income), which leads to our ridiculous over saturation of retail in NEO.

 

merging cle with cuy sounds all fine and dandy until everyone from westlake decides to move to avon, chagrin to bainbridge, strongsville to columbia (somehow untouched by sprawl)...

 

there has to be tax-sharing that spans counties. 

The problem with city-county merger is that it would only recognize the facts: namely, that the whole of Cuyahoga County is now the inner city.  You only renew the problem on a grander scale.

 

I believe this is the #1 thing that drives consolidations, a realization that people who thought they lived in booming edge burbs now find they are the inner city too.  It's why Indy is finally (albeit slowly) creating a real city-county merger instead of the quasi-consolidation they did in 1970.  It's why Louisville merged.

 

I think the only city that has true cross-county governance is Portland, which was partly driven by that statewide growth control law. Even this "best case" example doesnt inlcude Vancouver, Washington. across the river from Portland.

 

 

It'd be nice if there was some kind of transit (Rapid, commuter rail, new North Coast train station) infrastructure goal, rather than all roadway goals (save the very necessary Inner Belt bridge replacement), esp the stupid-azz, so-called Opportunity Corridor.  But, oh yeah, we're talking about the PD, silly me.