Brewed Fresh Daily

Mayor Dave Bing said Wednesday he “absolutely” intends to relocate residents from desolate neighborhoods and is bracing for inevitable legal challenges when he unveils his downsizing plan.

In his strongest statements about shrinking the city since taking office, Bing told WJR-760 AM the city is using internal and external data to decide “winners and losers.” The city plans to save some neighborhoods and encourage residents to move from others, he said.

“If we don’t do it, you know this whole city is going to go down. I’m hopeful people will understand that,” Bing said. “If we can incentivize some of those folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation.”

Detroit Mayor Bing emphasizes need to shrink city

To engage its citizens even more, the City launched Manor Labs, an interactive website that invites residents to suggest and vote on proposals for improving services. What separates Manor Labs from other crowd sourcing efforts is the City’s creative way of incentivizing participation. Each time a resident participates online – either by suggesting a new idea or commenting and voting on the ideas of others – they receive a point, called an “innobuck.” Innobucks can be redeemed for prizes, or re-invested towards making some of the ideas on the site a reality. Once an idea reaches a certain threshold, city officials evaluate the proposal, and decided whether or not to put it into action. So far, five ideas have been adopted from the site.

How Smaller Cities and Towns Can Begin to Benefit from New Media

When University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland recently spun off a medical company, it looked south to Akron’s growing biomedical corridor for the launch.

Fluence Therapeutics Inc. recently opened in the downtown Akron Global Business Accelerator on South Main Street.

University Hospitals startup company opens in Akron

My law school classmate Richard Cohen runs the Southern Poverty Law Center. At our reunion last June, Richard gave a compelling talk about how hate radio and television — he singled out Fox News, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs — distorts our civic debate. (For example, see Fear and Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News).

This week, the Center published a disturbing report on the growth of hate groups. You can read more about it here.

You can download the report here.

This “rage on the right” is not an abstraction. We are confronting the growth of hate in Indiana, where Purdue has been vilified for offering English as a second language courses to Mexican immigrants. A group of us are working in one rural county to establish a safe “civic space” where these issues can be explored without touching off the rage.

Mark Potok from the Center provides an overview:

From the Ideas Project

Will Web-based collaboration enable us to improve on the achievements of a competition-based system?

The citizen’s group has issued an analysis that raises serious questions about the financial consequences of the Med Mart. The report underscores what we’ve been saying in the BFD for some time: The Commissioners committed the citizens of this county to a major project without a business plan.

(Try going to JumpStart or a bank to get start-up financing for a business without a business plan. Your meeting will be short.)

The report highlights the slipshod process the Commissioners designed for making this major decision. (Which raises another interesting idea. Naming rights. Why don’t the citizens of Cuyahoga County simply award naming rights to the three Commissioners. Call it the Hagan Dimora Jones Med Mart. With a big bronze plaque, of course.)

Some excerpts from the report:

Except for public relations platitudes and optimistic, informal estimates provided by the Commissioners and their private sector partner, MMPI, the county has not revealed its long-term plan to generate adequate revenue from the Med Mart/ Convention Center project to finance the required $40 million annual debt service and $6 million in operational subsidies.

No professional documentation of realistic visitor projections based on industry standards or historic industry data has been provided.

Even if the MM/CC facility is relatively successful in attracting shows, meetings and visitors, it is not clear that the Medical Mart facility can generate sufficient revenue from operations and visitor income to cover $40 million or more in annual debt service and operational costs.

[T]here is no known plan or professional study explaining how the Med Mart will spark the development of ANY new jobs or business in the local health care sector, apart from undocumented public relations claims.

Citizens group raises concerns about medical mart funding, Cuyahoga County finances


Cleveland Med Mart Analysis 2-25-2010