Brewed Fresh Daily

Mark Puente, crime reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has won the 20th annual Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting administered by the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Puente’s three-month investigation uncovered decades of corruption by Cuyahoga County Sheriff Gerald McFaul,who resigned and is now the subject of a criminal investigation.

Plain Dealer’s Mark Puente Wins Police Reporting Award

The Environmental Protection Agency on Sunday unveiled a five-year, $475-million plan to revitalize the Great Lakes, including cleaning up polluted water and beaches, restoring wetlands and fighting invasive species such as Asian carp.

Federal and state officials call the effort, dubbed the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Action Plan, “historically unprecedented” in size, funding and coordination between various branches of government.

EPA unveils Great Lakes restoration plan

More from the EPA here.

YikeBike – The world’s first super light electric folding bike.

FutureStory: how people and businesses in towns and cities across the UK are adapting to – and succeeding in – the new global economy. Wherever you live, you can build your own FutureStory and upload and share it here.

FutureStory

A land tax is an efficient tax because it can make the economy more productive and create wealth, because raising the tax rate on land has few undesirable effects, while lowering the rate on improvements has many benefits. A conventional property tax tends to discourage investment in new structures and maintenance of existing structures by reducing the return on such expenditures. A land value tax can be a better method of property tax reform than assessment limits, which have undesirable side effects, including unequal treatment of similarly situated taxpayers and distortion of economic incentives.

Land Value Tax Holds Promise for Cash-Strapped Cities and Towns, Report Says

In Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Cleveland, gardening and urban farming are vital parts of revitalization plans — and Akron isn’t far behind. Grow Pittsburgh promotes local, urban food through farmer education, school gardening and a host of other projects….

The energy behind urban agriculture is also high in Youngstown, a city that has seen its share of economic distress, foreclosures and vacant property. In addition to developing community and for-profit urban farms, local food advocates in Youngstown are working to develop a commercial kitchen in the city, a space that would allow small-scale producers and farmers to process fresh produce into salsa or jam, for example.

Last fall, nationally recognized urban farmer and local foods advocate Will Allen of Milwaukee visited Youngstown to inspire and inform current and prospective urban farmers. Allen is best known for his work with Growing Power Inc., an urban farming organization he developed in 1993 to link Milwaukee teens with growing opportunities.

Growing Power now operates many urban and rural farm projects in Wisconsin and Illinois, with a focus on Milwaukee and Chicago.

In July, Allen was in Cleveland to inspire teachers and youth advocates at the National Gardening Association’s youth gardening conference, sharing stories about his work to bring youth in touch with food and land. Participants from across the state and the country left inspired and invigorated, full of ideas to help youth learn to grow.

Urban farm movement is taking root in Akron

Another day, another Forbes list goes and kicks Cleveland square in the chin. This time we’re the “most miserable city” (unless you’re a single, of course, in which case, don’t worry because you’re living in one of the best cities in America, according to Forbes). Unlike the winter weather list I criticized last week, the problem with Cleveland’s newest “worst” designation has less to do with the micro issue of badly flawed methodologies and more to do with the macro approach that magazines like Forbes take when evaluating and comparing cities.

When Forbes editors sit around a conference table in their Manhattan headquarters (I’m assuming this is how it happens, who knows what actually goes down), they start with a conclusion and work backwards. For instance, they want to determine the worst weather cities, so they ask, “what makes weather bad?” Somebody shouts “snow” another “cold”. Similarly, they might ask, “what makes for a good singles city?” They brainstorm variables like: cheap rent, cheap beer and the number of profiles on Match.com. What they’re failing to ask is: what makes for good weather or what makes for a bad singles city and then factoring those variables into the analysis.

Think of it like this… when people have a tough decision to make in life, many will put together a pros and cons list. The idea behind this exercise is that it forces you to explore the entirety of an issue instead of focusing only on one side and making a bad decision – to ensure that no important variables are omitted.

What Forbes effectively does is create lists that are exclusively pro or exclusively con. Thinking about cities in these terms doesn’t make any sense.

Cleveland ranks as America’s most miserable city because the data conforms to the variables that Forbes thinks makes a city a miserable place. In fact, when you read Forbes’s “happiest cities in the world” list (don’t bother though, none of Forbes’s lists are worth your time), you notice that they analyze an entirely different set of variables. When we compare cities, we need to compare both the good and the bad; otherwise we draw conclusions that merely confirm pre-determined beliefs.

This Cleveland Foundation move is a test for the community. Will it deal with the fallout and move on positively, or fall back into bickering and recrimination? The answer will be a sign of how far Cleveland has come on the regionalism journey.

And it is a journey. Regions don’t get there overnight. Whatever happens here, Cleveland has gone from being a metro that was nowhere on regionalism a decade ago to having many active regional programs underway today. Regardless of how far northeast Ohio may still have to go, it has come a long way already, and that’s a real accomplishment.

Cleveland and the Regionalism Challenge

The first annual Dayton Water Conference is scheduled for May 10-12 at the University of Dayton. The Water Innovations Alliance, a Connecticut-based association promoting water technologies, is coordinating the event.

Dayton Water Conference

Is anyone looking at NEO’s fresh water technology assets? Here’s what happened when Purdue worked with University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. We formed a new water cluster: The Milwaukee 7 Water Council.

Strategic Doing and the Milwaukee 7 Water Cluster from Ed Morrison on Vimeo.