Ed Morrison · The costs of inefficiency, bloat and corruption

May 10th, 2009

cuyahogacounty

The PD has started down a productive path in measuring the costs of bloated government in Cuyahoga County.

While one of the largest counties in the country, Cuyahoga County also suffers from one of most inefficient government infrastructures in the country. This heavy overhead — while making life fat and happy for local pols — destroys economic development like weed killer on a lawn.

The graph above — compiled by the erstwhile Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University — plots all of the counties in the country.

The red line shows that as counties get larger, their productivity (measured as public employees per capita) generally improves…except in Cuyahoga County. (The reason the line is not very steep is that government is a service business where costs are driven by headcounts.)

I shared this report with the Greater Cleveland Partnership when we produced it in 2004. But nothing happened.

No surprise there.

In my view, the business leadership in Cleveland has struck a devil’s bargain to keep out of the way of local patronage, as long as local pols support the real estate interests that run the GCP. These real estate developers have a narrow agenda: they want free access to the County treasury (Gateway, Browns stadium, Tower City, Ameritrust, Juvenile Justice complex, etc.) and political support for casino gambling. That’s a bit crude, but it’s pretty close to what I saw while I was at REI. It’s also no surprise that Forest City pushed hard — and successfully — to eliminate REI.

You can download the REI report here.

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3 Responses to “The costs of inefficiency, bloat and corruption”

  1. John Polk Says:
    May 10th, 2009 at 8:13 pm

    A key element of the highly-touted “public-private partnership” which has had perverse unintended consequences was indeed that implicit bargain with area elected officials, from DC down to Cleveland City Hall. Essentially, the GCP’s predecessor organization assured elected officials that, if they would be supportive of efforts to bring home the pork, the business community would give them a pass on just about anything else.

    (This was something which rendered back-in-the-day COSE so controversial. By being aggressive lobbyists on behalf of small business interests, and attempting to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions on business issues related to taxation, regulation, etc, we bruised the feelings of some elected officials, and of some corporate leaders who felt that if we made Lou Stokes mad [for example], he’d quit bringing home highway funds.

    As time has gone on, and as elected officials have become the primary financiers of local “economic development,” the dynamic has become still more dysfunctional. After all, how does one hold elected officials official for being wrong on taxation, regulation, or on corruption or government inefficiency, if they’re the same bunch of yahoos who have to vote “yes” for the public outrage du jour to benefit the corporate looter class?…

    This is yet another shameful attribute of the current regime: both by tolerating political corruption (both illegal and not technically illegal) as part of the cost of doing business and protecting elected officials from any semblance of accountability, our corporate institutional leaders have contributed mightily to the current banana republic-style of government operation, and abandoned an important role for the Chamber as an advocate for business reforms which could remove many obstacles to economic development.

    How can one take a tough stand on County government reform with one hand, and expect help in scamming the public with the other, without making folks…uncomfortable?…And after all, which is more important: efficient, cost-effective government (which would merely benefit the taxpayers and promote a healthier development climate), or the next big “public-private partnership” project which might benefit a few entrenched private interests?…

  2. Rick Bohan Says:
    May 11th, 2009 at 7:19 pm

    Maybe it’s stray pixel my computer screen but I think I see a dot at about the same distance out the X axis (population)as Cuyahoga but way up above it on the Y axis (public employees). See it?

    You gotta wonder which county THAT is!

  3. lmcshane Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 2:32 am

    Thanks Ed–that the PD is finally picking up this story is good news. There has to be some real political house-cleaning in this town.