“I don’t think Frank Jackson is the best mayor in Cleveland history, but what I’ve always liked about him is that he’s not a slick, huckster-politician who’ll just tell you what you want to hear. And even though he’s not a real exciting or charismatic guy, nearly everything I have personally heard him say has seemed pretty reasonable and sensible. He’s a true public servant - the unflappable kind who keeps plugging along for years without succumbing to cynicism. And as a former public servant myself I’ve just got to say, that’s bloody hard and I respect him for it.”

Along with jewelry and other wearables, shoppers can expect glass, pottery, photography, prints, paintings and more. And this year the popular hand-made chocolates and locally-produced honey will be accompanied by spices, coffee and scratch-made baked goods from Coit Rd Farmers Market.

“This is a wonderful chance to shop outside the box – to support local artists and arts organizations, and also support your community,” says Sarah Gyorki, Executive Director of Arts Collinwood. “These offerings make memorable and unique gifts, and let our customers put something special back into their holidays.”

And shopping on Waterloo gets more rewarding, with the 6th Annual Weekends on Waterloo celebration happening throughout the district. This burgeoning arts community presents a series of family-friendly events from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, including live music and open studios at Arts Collinwood, the rock-n-roll flea market at the Beachland Ballroom, special sales at MUSIC SAVES and Shoparooni, boutiques and shows at Waterloo 7, ReVamped, Vision Gallery, and LowLife – even the gift of make-your-own music at ExitStencil studios! While you’re there, pick up holiday baked goods at Café Marika, or homemade sausages at R&D and Raddell’s. Look for lantern installations, holiday decorations, art, music and much more from a district that’s entirely locally owned and offers a unique range of art and entertainment. For more details on all of the Weekends on Waterloo happenings, visit www.artscollinwood.org

Holiday Sale: Dec. 12: 5-10pm
Dec. 13: 11am-10pm
Dec. 14: 11am-5pm

Arts Collinwood Gallery, 15605 Waterloo Rd, just 1 block north of I-90. Eastbound exit E. 152, westbound exit E. 156.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking, unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in Boulder, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, Boston, DC and more.

Hellooooo…………Cleveland!

a mere 31 votes will put us in the top 5
doubling our current votes will put us ahead of Zincinnatti

Cast your vote for the CLV!!

RALLY for the Chickens and the Bees.

Join your friends and Chicken Little, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Daddies, Goosey Poosey, Gander Pander, the Bee Babe and her friends for as rollicking good time in support of the proposed Cleveland legislation to relax the building code regulations restricting Chickens, Bees and other small critters. (Tom Turkey will not be available due to a death in the family).

Time: 2:00 P.M.
Day: Sunday
Date: December 7th, 2008
Location: Blue Pike Farm, 900 E. 72nd St. Cleveland (Between I-90 and St. Claire)

Bring your petitions, copies of your emails and your positive energy. We’ll collect all the support material and present it to Councilman Joe Cimperman on Monday morning, December 8th before the hearing on the legislation before the Cleveland City Council Committee of the Whole.

Bring the kids to play on Holly Hock Hill. Refreshments for the early birds.

After rewatching The End of Suburbia last night, these arguments (which I’ve emailed to Councilman Polensek) make sense:

Economic security; in these lean times raising your own food, veggies, chickens for eggs or meat, bees for honey etc. help stretch your families food budget. Maybe you could make a $ or $$ by selling some to your neighbors.

Food security; raising your own food helps insulate you and your loved ones from the contaminants in the industrial food chain (see i.e. this one about antibiotics in the U.S. meat supply; A direct relationship exists between food consumption levels and poverty. Families with the financial resources to escape extreme poverty rarely suffer from chronic hunger; while poor families not only suffer the most from chronic hunger, but are also the segment of the population most at risk during food shortages and famines. Or this about food scarcity:

Passage of the ordinance will help support local food initiatives.

Nothing could be safer than growing your own food, or purchasing locally grown foods.

One of the scarier points made in EoS is in our neighborhood, there’s about a 3 day supply of food. What can we do to increase the survivabililty/thrivability of North Collinwood? FYI, if you’d like to get together and watch The End of Suburbia let me know. I’ll put a party together.

Here are the questions we discussed:

- What can one person do to get 5 people to move to North Collinwood in 2009?
- Can we create a waterfront initiative to draw people to this area with grants, the park system and by creating a boardwalk?
- If we created a giving circle (like the Cleveland Colectivo) for the neighborhood, would you participate? What would you fund?
- Would connecting Euclid Creek Park to Neff help improve North Collinwood? How important is it?
- What would you like to see happen with the Commodore Theatre lot?
- Do you think the RTA Healthline will revive the City of Cleveland?

I’d invite you all to comment on these questions here. Hopefully, one of the questions raised will resonate with you, and we’ll re-ignite the dialog we started last month. Also, if you’re interested in the next Beachland T&D session, it’s coming up on 12/17. Drop me a note and I’ll send you the details.

What is Beachland Thinkrs & Drinkrs?
The concept is simple—everyone thinks of a question (anything at all), writes it down (anonymously) on a piece of paper, throws it into a hat, then we’ll pick out one at a time and discuss it until the timer goes off. Then we’ll move to the next question. You can watch a CoolCleveland.com video interview of the originators of Thinkers & Drinkers who established a non-hierarchical group that meets monthly in Youngstown. Their meetings have spread around the country to Washington, D.C. and Columbus.

Why “Beachland”?
Because all of us in Collinwood know a neighbor who lives in Bratenahl or Euclid and vice versa. Let’s get together and brainstorm solutions that expand our community.

Does it work?
That depends. We don’t call it Thinkrs & Drinkrs for nothing. These are social events. They’re great for networking and getting to know your neighbors better. They’re small acts, one of the four conversations outlined in Instructions from the Cook. While we hope big things will come from these, we understand that first there needs to be conversations that inspire dreams, initiate small acts, engage gifts, and create invitations.

Good thing it’s not just a bunch of happy talk:

The opportunities before us now are substantial. In a time when municipalities and states across the country are facing large budget deficits, laying off employees and cutting services, Cleveland has a balanced 2008 budget and is proposing a balanced budget for 2009 without layoffs or service cuts. When cities like Detroit are scrambling to hold onto their traditional economic bases of auto manufacturing, Cleveland is working to attract investment in new economies, like advanced manufacturing and renewable energy, which is why I’m in Germany this week on a trade mission. While cities like Chicago are seeing increases in violent crime, Cleveland’s violent crime has declined by 14% over the last two years.

Please add your thoughts in the comment section. Joel Libava AKA the Franchise King has posted his thoughts on the NEOBiz Blog.

It underscores how far Cuyahoga County public employment is out of whack.

One of the best ways to compare public employment levels is to evaluate the number of public employees per 100,000 population. When you do that, you can see that Cuyahoga County has higher than the national average in public employment in most categories.

You can view a spreadsheet here.

Where is Cuyahoga County heavy in public employment overhead?

Hospitals: (Most places don’t have a public hospital like Metro Health)

Public Health

Public Welfare

Transit

Water and Sewer

Judicial and legal

Firefighters

Housing and Community Development

Elementary and Secondary School Administration

It’s not chump change

Here’s how you can use these number to get a ball park of the additional costs from a relatively inefficient public sector. Let’s take the Judicial and Legal employment in Cuyahoga County. Compared to a national average the county (all units of government) employs 148 employees per 100,000 population more than the national average. That’s equal to a head count of 1,919 above the national average. (Cuyahoga County’s population is 1.3 million.)

If we assume that the average wage is $50,000 and the payroll burden is 35%, the additional overhead in the judicial and legal function of government is costing county taxpayers about $130 million a year. The water and sewer inefficiencies impose a bloat tax of about $80 million a year. That’s about the same bloat tax we pay for inefficiencies in our fire department. (This includes only head counts and not the costs of duplicate, expensive equipment.) A top heavy school system costs about $36 million a year. Inefficiencies in regional transit cost us about three times that: $110 million a year.

Inefficiencies in housing and community development cost us $50 million a year. (These inefficiencies may be offset by the benefits every neighborhood having a community development corporation, but these corporations can also act as fiefdoms or “door keepers” closing down innovation.)

The lost benefits of scale

We should expect Cuyahoga County to realize some savings from scale. The county is one of the largest in the country. But that’s not happening.

(You can see the slightly downward sloping line on page 14 of the REI report listed below. There’s not much of a scale advantage — government is a service business, after all — but there are some. Cuyahoga County falls way above the line. Our “leaders” are self-dealing and leaving a lot of productivity penalties for the rest of us to pay.)

More on the cost of government

Here’s the web site developed by The Fund for Our Economic Future’s consulting team (data through 2002).

You can read through their report here.

You can read through the report we prepared a few years ago at the Center for Regional Economic Issues here.

Finally, there was a recent report on reorganizing Cuyahoga County government, but that report does not really address the underlying cost of government in the county. Their web site is here. You can view their report here.

The conclusion: We are paying too much for the government we are getting

The iron triangle: Map the Mess

In my view, this situation reflects the insular politics of Cuyahoga County. There’s an “iron triangle” that has allowed this situation to get out of control. The business community, led by the Greater Cleveland Partnership, turns a blind eye to political excess (and the corruption potential of patronage out of control) in exchange for public sector support of leading real estate developments, such as the the Forest City’s relentless steering of the convention center/Med Mart. These connections have led to a lot of speculation about the connections.

But don’t forget Browns stadium, the goofy Cleveland casino “learn and earn” initiative, the Juvenile Justice Center land deal with Forest City, the Jacobs deal on the Ameritrust Tower. The list goes on. Roldo and otehrs have chronicled the abuses.

It’s a convenient quid pro quo and a sad consequence of a business leadership controlled by commercial real estate interests. (The shift away from manufacturing leadership started in the 1970’s with the collapse of the steel industry.)

The Plain Dealer, meanwhile, has largely turned a blind eye to the abuses, bowing to pressure and too close connections to the business community under the previous publisher. (Weak-kneed editorial decisions have not helped the PD’s reputation.)

That might all change now that the PD editors get a brief whiff of a Pulitzer for their coverage of the county corruption scandals.

Bloat taxes power the corruption in the county. The best antidote is transparency and an aggressive corp of professional journalists focusing on big issues.

Meanwhile, we’re steadily putting together the connections over at Map the Mess. We welcome your contributions.