Tragically, all it takes to rise above the baseline here is to ask basic, obvious, common-sense questions… and to refuse to accept nonsense for answers.

My further questions: Which county officials are under criminal investigation for their part in the MMPI deal? If none, why? In particular, is it not illegal for Hagan to steer hundreds of millions of dollars to his close personal friend Chris Kennedy? If not, why not?

Here’s a refresher course on how this worked for the Rock Hall. Eleven years ago, I wrote about an epic battle between the Rock Hall and a young Cleveland photographer, Chuck Gentile, who took a great photo of the building and was trying to sell it, until the Rock Hall tried to stop him on the curious grounds that it controlled all the rights to any images taken of its building, even though it had been built with considerable public resources. Here’s the key portion of that article:

“Thus, the entire downtown establishment and its political support group rallied around the cause. Jones Day agreed to provide $2 million of pro bono legal services, lending the expertise of its attorneys in corporate, real estate, intellectual property and bond work. The state of Ohio and its governor, the former mayor of Cleveland, stepped in with $9 million in loan guarantees. And Cleveland-based McDonald & Co. chipped in by selling more than $50 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds, guaranteed by state and county governments. And when the funding still came up short, Mayor Michael White and Cuyahoga County Commissioner Tim Hagan paved the way for the County Port Authority, the only public bonding authority that hadn’t exhausted its funding cap, to help.

And yet, eager to dispel the general notion that such funding means it is a public building-and thus available to be photographed by whomever wishes to-the Rock Hall’s defenders have engaged in some legal hair-splitting that would do Bill Clinton proud.

By this reasoning, the Rock Hall isn’t a public building because the fi-nancial assistance was derived not from general tax revenues but rather through private investment secured through publicly issued bonds. Regan Fay concedes that this has been a difficult distinction to sell.

“That’s something we’ve been able to educate the judges on, but not the public,” he says with an air of resignation.

The entire article can be found here:

http://www.sbnonline.com/Local/Article/4023/82/0/Poster_boy_for_the_revolution.aspx

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/02/_the_publicprivate_partnership.html

Excerpt:

The public-private partnership for the convention center and medical mart proposed for downtown Cleveland is structured like this: the public sector would pay for it, and the private sector would own and operate it, with little public oversight.

Ducate, the president of the pro-industry Center for Exhibition Industry Research in Dallas…

“It’s kind of a puzzling thing,” Ducate said Wednesday. “There certainly are convention centers that are publicly financed and owned and are privately managed. But I’m not aware of any publicly financed centers that have been transferred from public ownership to private ownership and operations.”

Look under the question: “Why does MMPI get to own taxpayer-financed facilities?”

For what they’re worth, here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations of the extra interest cost. Simplifying assumptions are: 1) the principal amount is $400 million; 2) bonds have a maturity of twenty years; 3) taxable bonds pay an interest rate that’s 1% higher than tax-free bonds; 4) there is no compounding of interest. On this basis, taxable bonds imply a higher interest cost to taxpayers of $400,000,000 x 20 x 0.01 = $80,000,000 (i.e., $80 million). If one changes the assumptions the amount of higher costs will change, but that amount will almost certainly be substantial.

That’s my sense. If we follow the line of argument that John Polk puts forth, the GCP does not have an analysis, and they don’t care.

But it’s important to ask the questions in order to estimate the operating deficits that this project will generate.