Roldo rises again to fight the stadium tax

Last week, Roldo Bartimole, the 80-year-old independent journalist, took a step most writers wouldn’t take – up to the speaker’s podium at a Cuyahoga County Council meeting.

An old debate has returned anew, and Roldo arose, as he did in the ’90s, to rail against the alcohol and cigarette tax that funds Cleveland’s stadiums.

“I think this is beyond reason, and I think any serious person would feel so,” he told the council in his high-pitched rasp. “Why would you want to place on the ballot another heavy tax burden, for who knows what real reasons these three team owners would use the money for?”

The council did not take his advice. This week it voted 11-0 to place a renewal of the “sin tax” on the May 6 ballot. A couple of hours later, I called Roldo and told him about the unanimous vote. He laughed. “Really unbelievable,” he said.

In my 14 years in town, I’ve never seen Roldo speak in public on an issue before. But his journalism has long had an activist bent. He recalls arguing with Mike White and Tim Hagan at press conferences and with Art Modell on the field of old Municipal Stadium. For 24 years, with more doggedness than the Browns chase quarterbacks, Roldo’s nipped at the ankles of Cleveland sports team owners, growling that the public shouldn’t build or own major-league stadiums.

The sin tax is "an unfair tax, a regressive tax, welfare for wealthy people,” he says. “All three owners are either billionaires, or members of families that are billionaires.”

I tried some pro-sin-tax arguments on him. The city and county own FirstEnergy Stadium, Progressive Field and Quicken Loans Arena. So shouldn’t the public pay for their upkeep?

“The point is, they should get themselves out of the business,” Roldo replied.

We’re the landlord. The teams are our tenants. If we break the leases, will the teams leave?

“The teams can leave, then,” Roldo answered. But he added, “I don’t think they’re going to go up and leave. They would take a lot of flak themselves for leaving a city. They’ve already done that with the football team. Would they do it again?

“No, I think Cleveland has an opportunity to start something that will go national: the teams start supporting themselves. They stop becoming welfare clients of a city that can’t even afford to educate their children.”

I read Roldo often, and I think he can spend too much energy fighting battles lost in the ’80s and ’90s. Public stadium funding and tax abatements for new business, the two biggest evils in his worldview, are common across the country now. Cities face tough compromises if they want to compete.

Yet a recent poll shows the stadium sin tax losing by almost 10 points. Greater Clevelanders are weary of the cost of public stadium ownership. Sports teams have gotten richer since the 1990s, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have grown poorer, and everyone knows it.

So Roldo is relevant again. For him, the May 6 vote is a rematch, a sequel 24 years in the making. In his career-defining battle against the stadium and arena project in May 1990, Roldo printed “LET JACOBS PAY” buttons and bumper stickers to tweak then-Indians owner Dick Jacobs.

The Gateway project squeaked through with 52 percent of the countywide vote, but it has haunted local debates about public-private projects ever since. Last week, Roldo gave the county council copies of an infamous 1990 pro-Gateway ad, filled with grandiose, broken promises.

“I want to get the teams off welfare,” Roldo says. “A free stadium and not even pay property taxes? Does the museum come and say, give us $100 million over a long period, it’s hard to keep up?”

What the mayor’s race means

I feel Roldo’s pain. “A Meaningless Election,” the radical curmudgeon complains about tomorrow’s vote for mayor.

His critique of Mayor Frank Jackson is the best since Michael D. Roberts’ in March. Sadly, Roldo and Roberts are more thorough, credible critics of the mayor than his challenger, Ken Lanci, who’s built his campaign on simplistic blunt-force attacks.

Lanci, who blasts Jackson as a complete failure, isn’t much of an alternative. He’s failed to build a political coalition beyond disgruntled public employees and a motley crew of activists. He hasn’t articulated a governing philosophy beyond religious piety and confidence in his own competence. He’s a thin-skinned, angry grudge-holder. He’d make a terrible, insufferable mayor.

But give Lanci credit: at least he’s given us a mayor’s race. Without him, Jackson would be coasting unopposed to reelection tomorrow with no questions asked.

Instead, Lanci has pushed Jackson to defend his record on the biggest issues in town, including schools, safety and the lakefront. He’s given us a choice -- though not the one Roberts and Roldo would want. And he’s asked questions that will resonate throughout the next four years. Here are three.

1. What if Jackson’s school reforms fail? Lanci has pierced the air of optimism around Jackson’s 2012 school reforms and levy victory. He’s focused on the cold facts: the Cleveland schools still score a big zero on the state report cards.

Lanci dismisses Jackson’s reform agenda of tougher standards for teachers, new specialty schools and plans to dismantle the staff at failing schools. If elected, Lanci would probably let the teachers off the hook.

His alternative is a $40 million expansion of his favorite charity, the mentoring program Project Love. Lanci can seem naïve and self-regarding when he plugs it, and Jackson has dismissed his approach as condescending to mothers and kids. Still, Lanci may be on to something.

The Cleveland schools’ woes have been nearly intractable for decades. Yet Jackson’s reforms need to produce results fast, in time for the levy renewal in three years. A couple more report card Fs, and Jackson’s legacy will be in danger.

If that happens, a massive mentoring program for at-risk inner-city kids may be the only big reform idea left to try. It might look a lot like the renowned Harlem Children’s Zone — or a lot like Project Love.

2. How will the police department change? Lanci is carrying water for the police union on the year’s biggest City Hall debate, the response to last November’s 60-car police chase and fatal shooting. He blames police chief Mike McGrath and safety director Martin Flask for the uncontrolled chase and says he’d fire them if elected.

Under pressure from Lanci, Jackson has said a lot this fall about the chase’s aftermath. He’s gone way beyond his usual line about how he’ll support the police who stayed “inside the box” and followed orders.

Jackson has made it clear he sees the chase as mass insubordination. The mayor views McGrath as reasserting control and discipline.

“Without this police chief there would be no semblance of fairness and justice in the whole thing,” Jackson told Crain’s Cleveland Business. “He stood up against a culture that said there was nothing wrong [with the chase and shootings].”

Neither candidate talks about holding both the police leadership and the rank-and-file accountable. But Lanci’s stance keeps the pressure on Jackson to answer this question: Is disciplining the officers and supervisors for violating policy and procedure enough? Or, if McGrath and Flask are going to stay, how will they improve police training, equipment and communication so that the next chase is handled better?

3. What about the lakefront? Eight years of Jackson, and no construction cranes on the lakefront. Lanci scoffs at the mayor’s plan to develop a new neighborhood along North Coast Harbor. It won’t happen, he says, just like all the past lakefront plans haven’t happened.

Lanci would scuttle Jackson’s lakefront efforts if elected. So if you want the lakefront developed, Jackson’s your candidate, even if he’s disappointed you so far.

The mayor has developers pitching plans for the land around Browns Stadium. An office park project near the East 9th Street pier is a step from final approval. Jackson should take Lanci’s scoff as a dare and get it done.

(Jackson art by Jason Byers, from Asterisk Gallery's 2008 CLE- show. Lanci art by Kristen Miller.)

32 Years of Roldo’s Point of View now online

You can’t tell Cleveland’s story of the last five decades without a word from Roldo Bartimole.

He’s the city’s original alternative journalist, icon-smasher, press critic and radical muckraker. Whether you think the white-haired, reedy-voiced reporter is Cleveland’s conscience or the town crank, he’s a necessary corrective to 45 years of boosterism and power-elite conventional wisdom.

“I don’t have a lot of heroes. Roldo Bartimole is one,” Esquire writer and Cleveland native Scott Raab tweeted last month, when his hero turned 80.

Now, Roldo's life's work has been liberated from library shelves. The Cleveland Memory website has recently scanned and posted the entire 32-year print run of Roldo's Cleveland politics newsletter, Point of View.

The generation of Clevelanders who know Roldo through his Cool Cleveland columns can read him as he takes on his great nemeses of the '70s, ’80s and ’90s: George Forbes and George Voinovich, The Plain Dealer and Alex Machaskee, Forest City and Dick Jacobs, sports team owners and their sweetheart deals.

My quick dig in Cleveland Memory's Roldo archive turned up gems:

• “Buying Peace the Private Way,” June 26, 1968 – Roldo breaks the news that businessmen paid black militants $40,000 in summer 1967 to help prevent a repeat of the Hough riots.

• “Resign Now,” April 26, 1980 – One of Roldo’s many screeds against George Forbes.

• “Sohio Forbes/Shoves,” April 4, 1981 – The story behind the legendary photo (above) of Forbes physically throwing Roldo out of a meeting of city councilmen at the Bond Court Hotel.

• “On to the 90s: White, Westbrook break old guard,” Nov. 25, 1989 – Roldo captures the moment when new political characters stepped up to replace Forbes and Voinovich: Mike White, Jay Westbrook, Jim Rokakis, Pat O’Malley, Mike Polensek, Jeff Johnson.

• “Saying Goodbye,” December 2000 – In Point of View’s last issue, Roldo looks back on 32 years of combat against Cleveland’s political and economic powers. 

I’ve blogged about Roldo before – here’s a post about how downtown looks through his eyes, and one about his emergence as a critic of Mayor Frank Jackson. I’ve just posted two articles about him from Cleveland Magazine’s archives:

• “Knight Errant,” May 1972 – In which Roldo describes his journalistic vows of poverty and comes close to calling himself a socialist and anarchist.
       (shortlink: j.mp/Roldo-KnightErrant)

• “Last of the Great Muckrakers,” September 2000 – Michael D. Roberts’ profile of Roldo, which explores his single-minded devotion to his work and reveals the origin of his unusual first name (“the hero of… a cheap Italian novel”).
       (shortlink: j.mp/Roldo-Muckraker)

(photo by Timothy Culek, Cleveland Press, from clevelandmemory.org)

Roldo: Will Plain Dealer endorse Romney?

Veteran alternative journalist Roldo Bartimole is out with a prediction: He thinks the Plain Dealer will endorse Mitt Romney for president -- and maybe set off another controversy like the paper’s embarrassing 2004 non-endorsement.

He doesn’t explain his prediction, but his spider sense is tingling. I think he may be on to something.

The PD boldly will endorse Sen. Sherrod Brown for the U. S. Senate. A Democrat over Republican. Josh Mandel, Brown’s opponent, has been shooting himself in the foot. The Pee Dee has been taking note of these self-inflicted wounds. ...

Having shown itself as willing to nominate a Democrat, I figure the editorial board (which is a misnomer for “the boss” Terry Egger) will nominate Mitt the Romney for President. Making Republicans (and Kevin O’Brien) happy. …

I read the Plain Dealer’s editorials, just like Roldo does, and I think he’s catching on to a trend. But first, a little background, from Roldo’s column:

You may remember the debacle in 2004 after the board chose John Kerry as its Presidential endorsee. Oh, wait. Publisher Alex Machaskee then ordered it changed to the other guy – George Bush. After some internal wrangling, the PD choose the silliest way out. The paper punted. It didn’t endorse anyone. It made a fool of the paper nationally.

After Terrance Egger succeeded Machaskee in 2006, he was often asked about the 2004 non-endorsement. Though Egger is a Republican who nudged a liberal editorial board toward the center as St. Louis Post-Dispatch publisher, he reassured Clevelanders he wouldn’t pull a Machaskee.

“We will endorse,” Egger told a City Club audience in August 2006. “Whose decision that will be will be the editorial board’s. And I mean that.”

He was implying that, as publisher, he wouldn’t use his authority to overrule the rest of the board. (See my Jan. 2007 story "The New Dealer" for more on this.)

Sure enough, when the paper endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, the editorial carried an unusual tagline that named all the members of the usually anonymous editorial board who voted on the endorsement.

The PD’s endorsements have swung back to the right since then. The paper recommended John Kasich for governor in 2010 and endorsed last year’s Issue 2, also known as Senate Bill 5, which would’ve severely restricted the power of public-employee unions. Both editorials sounded strained, written by committee, like unsuccessful efforts to reconcile deep internal divisions.

The Kasich endorsement called on the governor to cut out his “Red Bull style” and his habits as a “Fox News provocateur.” And the pro-SB5 editorial was probably the paper’s worst-argued in years. Naively, it called for Kasich to go back to the bargaining table if voters approved SB5 to negotiate away its most divisive provisions. But the law would’ve given Kasich total victory over the unions, leaving them with no leverage and the governor with no reason to bargain. It was as if the Plain Dealer had no idea how power works.

Roldo implies Egger controls the endorsements. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s safe to say that Egger is one of the board’s more conservative members. He’s likely to have played a major role in the Kasich and SB5 decisions.

Follow the trend from the last two years, and it’s easy to imagine the PD dismissing Obama as a disappointment and endorsing Romney, while trying to appease the dissenters with a rose-colored call for him to embrace his Massachusetts-moderate past once elected.

Editorial page endorsements aren’t as influential as they were in newspapers’ golden age, especially in presidential elections. A thousand voices are deluging Ohioans with screams and roars and tweets about Romney and Obama. Voters can make up their minds about a president without the Big Voice of the Big City Paper weighing in.

Still, Clevelanders’ reaction to the 2004 cop-out suggests they'll still care what the Plain Dealer says. Major endorsements let readers know where an editorial page stands, what its values are. And as Roldo says, the paper’s in an interesting position: it has a centrist editorial page in a Democratic metro area, so a Romney endorsement could anger a lot of readers.

So, yes, Clevelanders will pay attention to the paper’s presidential decision. Even if it says more about the editorial page than it does about Obama or Romney.

Update, 7/23: A Plain Dealer editorial yesterday called on Romney to release more tax returns.  "He is basing his candidacy largely on his success in the private sector and first-hand knowledge of job creation," it says. "Voters expect and deserve a look behind the curtain."  Hmm, is that a hint of skepticism?

Roldo vs. Naymik on Mayor Jackson

Reading Roldo Bartimole's column has gotten really fun lately. The veteran alternative journalist is back in Cool Cleveland after a sporadic semi-retirement. He's chasing Mayor Frank Jackson with the same fiery tenacity that once inspired George Forbes to physically throw him out of a meeting.

"Is it time for Mayor Frank Jackson to go?" he asked on March 14. Cleveland is suffering from a spiritual depression, Roldo raged. Jackson, he wrote, has botched the LED lighting and trash-to-gas plant deals, hiked trash fees, thumbed his nose at Cleveland teachers, and cut a sweetheart deal with the Browns (this is Roldo talking, so you knew that'd be in there).

Roldo even called out the city's ambitious politicians to run for mayor in 2013:

C’mon Jeff Johnson. C’mon Joe Cimperman. Zach Reed. Nina Turner. You too Brian Cummins. Chris Ronayne. You all know you want it. C’mon Matt Zone. You too Tony Brancantelli. Ray Pianka. Don’t any of you sell yourselves short.

And, by the way folks, Dennis now is available. Whoa!

Since then, Roldo has accused Jackson of being Mike White Lite, cozying up to the Greater Cleveland Partnership, getting too tough on teachers, but not getting tough enough on firefighters. City Hall sources are complaining to him about the sorry state of Cleveland's fire, water and building departments.

It's exciting reading, some of Roldo's best work in a while. And it fits a vibe I'm getting from the local press corps, that with Jimmy Dimora in prison, it's time to swing more of our attention from the county administration building back to City Hall.

But while Roldo provokes Jackson fans, Mark Naymik is probing Jackson's character. The Plain Dealer columnist's March 22 piece is full of insights into the mayor's values and priorities. Some of them even read like responses to Roldo's anger:

Jackson's been a reluctant partner to the business community on many development issues over the years. His partnership with it today is one of convenience. He and the business community both want change within the schools ...

Jackson doesn't need the parties, the business community, unions or any other special-interest group to win re-election. ... His street credibility remains enormous ... Don't believe me? Name someone who is seriously considering running against him.

The mayor "lives by a code," Naymik notes. "It boils down to staying true to your word." This is an important insight, one I noticed when I profiled Jackson just as he took over as mayor. It not only means he'll stick to his promise to improve the schools. It also means he judges people by deeds, not words.

The mayor is judging the teacher's union not by their declarations that they want reform, but their go-slow approach in contract negotiations toward issues such as merit pay. He doesn't trust state Republicans either, but he knows they can give him more leverage to change the schools.

Roldo and Naymik agree on one question: Why isn't Jackson getting as tough with City Hall's most troubled departments as he's getting with the schools? It's a great question to judge the mayor by in the next year or two. And it's a sharper way to talk about him than the usual clichéd thinking about mayors.

Quick Fixer: my profile of Peter Raskind, interim schools CEO

Peter Raskind will only be CEO of the Cleveland schools until summer, but he wants to solve two years of budget troubles in the next three months.

Last night, Raskind proposed closing seven schools and laying off 650 teachers, part of his plan to manage the shrinking district. Facing a $47 million deficit, he wants to cut $74 million. He knows that a worse deficit is projected for 2012, and he wants to deal with it before he leaves.

Raskind, the last CEO of National City, says he learned lessons during the Cleveland bank’s decline that motivate him to bold action now. “It’s better to get out ahead of issues and confront them than hope they go away,” he told me recently. “Being proactive beats being defensive, even when it's painful.”

My profile of Raskind, “Quick Fixer,” appears in the April issue of Cleveland Magazine and is online now. The April issue is available in bookstores this week and will be on other newsstands by early April.

Most Clevelanders know Raskind as the CEO who took charge of National City just as its aggressive push to grow from hometown commercial bank to a leading national mortgage lender began to bear rotting fruit. Now Raskind has a chance to be known in Cleveland for something other than bank failure. He's taken on an unlikely second career as an interim CEO for troubled government agencies.

Last year, he stabilized the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and killed its grandiose $600 million relocation plan with a single, swift stroke. Now, after former schools CEO Eugene Sanders’ abrupt departure for Maui, Mayor Frank Jackson has asked Raskind to step in, tackle the deficit and advance the unfinished "transformation plan" to reform the schools.

The peculiar job of an interim CEO gives Raskind unusual freedom to act, without a career-minded leader’s caution. Sanders, faced with a similar deficit last year, closed 13 schools and balanced the budget, but didn’t push hard enough to prevent this year’s sequel.

Still, Raskind’s decisions are sure to provoke controversy. School closings change a neighborhood, and Raskind and the school board will likely hear from upset parents at community forums (pdf) next Tuesday and Wednesday. (Is Raskind “on the right track, or is there another way?” asks Dan Moulthrop on the Civic Commons web site.)

Raskind is also thinking about selling the district’s headquarters, the 1931 board of education building on East Sixth Street. Roldo Bartimole — blogging again after a long break — is upset, pointing out that selling the building would mess with Daniel Burnham’s 1903 Group Plan for the Malls and that public outcry nixed a plan to sell the building in the 1980s. It’s one example of the critical moment the school district faces and Raskind’s brief but key role in its future.

You can read my Raskind profile by clicking here. If you’d like to link to it, you can use this shortcut: tinyurl.com/CM-Raskind.

Roldo: Run Dimora and Russo out

Roldo Bartimole says it's time for citizens to get "off their asses" and swarm the county building every week until Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo resign. From his blog post:

It’s time for citizens to take the action themselves. A protest should begin at the Cuyahoga County Administration Building at the corner of Ontario and Lakeside every Thursday, the day Commissioners meet. Hopefully, such a demonstration would get larger and larger each week until Dimora and Russo find it uncomfortable enough that they get the hell out.

It'd be great political theater. Could it happen?

I see two problems. Weekly Thursday morning protests require a special kind of protester, the unemployed kind. How many of the 234,346 people who voted to throw out the county government in November are angry enough to show up every week and have the free time?

Also, Roldo can't mobilize them on his own. So he calls on local bloggers to get the word out. This brings up the question: Could the blogosphere round up a better turnout than the county Republican party? Last July, Rob Frost & Co. tried to pack a meeting with protesters who wanted Dimora to quit. I was there, and if memory serves, they only made a small dent in the crowd in the commissioners' tiny meeting room.

Roldo studies Frank Jackson, "caretaker Mayor"

Reporters have a hard time getting their minds and pens around Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson. They expect mayors to lead through stirring words, to exude charisma, to embody the city in an exciting way. Then their expectations run up against Jackson, and fail. He is the opposite of all that.

Roldo Bartimole is the latest to take on Jackson, the low-key enigma. For his new piece, "Mayor Jackson: A Mayor for the Times?", he interviews Jackson about his late friend Lonnie Burten, a city councilman in the 1980s. Roldo's piece revives vivid memories of Burten, then judges Jackson as a politician and mayor. He perceptively notes Jackson's lack of ambition, so unusual in an elected official. He notices Jackson's wariness, his "streak of stubbornness," his loyalty to his neighborhood. (I've seen these traits in Jackson too, when I wrote about him in a 2006 profile, "The Populist.")

"He projects a steady hand at the helm, even if that’s the mark of a caretaker Mayor," Roldo writes. I would have expected Roldo to be satisfied with that. He and Jackson have a lot in common. They're both longtime students of how the city runs. Both have populist streaks in their politics. Roldo's journalism is built on facts, not flash, just as Jackson says his leadership is built on tasks, not words.

But even Roldo wants Cleveland's mayor to be the bully pulpit figure that Jackson is not.

"It may not be long, I believe, when Cleveland will want someone who gives them something to look forward to, some spark and flair," he writes. "Someone who will promise more than a balanced budget."

Just when I think Roldo's building up to predicting a dramatic mayor's race this fall, or maybe a kind word for charismatic challenger Bill Patmon, he goes the other way.

"I don’t think it’s this election. I don’t think we can wait too much longer. Cleveland needs a big lift."

Sounds like Roldo's predicting the reelection of the caretaker mayor this year and a swing back to charisma in 2013.

Downtown through Roldo's eyes

In this week's Cool Cleveland, Roldo Bartimole looks at downtown Cleveland as almost no one else can.

He walks and rides along Euclid Avenue, saddened to see the empty storefronts and the meager number of people on the street. Then he taps his 40 years of reporter's knowledge to see the scene in another way. He looks up at buildings restored with the help of public subsidies and tax abatements, recalls how many millions each one cost the taxpayers, and asks whether all that money has done any good.

Bartimole is Cleveland's original alternative journalist. His newsletter Point of View, which he published from 1968 to 2000 (now partially archived on clevelandmemory.org), critiqued Cleveland's media and power elite long before alternative weeklies debuted here.

Most of his writing is very newsy, full of numbers and references to controversies of decades past. This one, though, is vivid like a good magazine piece, weaving observation and fact, past and present.

It's also a very clear statement of Roldo's ideology, which is still very influential in our alternative press and blogosphere. He's not just a left-liberal -- his take on Cleveland is a sort of frugal populism. Simply put, he is always against tax abatement and public subsidy of local development.

He writes:

I had lunch with Norm Krumholz, picking him up at CSU’s Urban Studies office. I mentioned the dismal state of downtown. “It’s your fault,” he said, not really meaning it. I knew he meant I had opposed every project in the downtown area. “What are you talking about? Everything I opposed was done. How could it be my fault?”

He looks at downtown and sees more than $660 million in taxpayer money spent.

All for what? A depressed and depressing downtown. The price hasn’t matched the expectations. ...

What is the answer? Private development done naturally to meet needs. You can’t force people to be where they don’t want to be, to do what they don’t want to do.

Plenty of people would argue with him. A lot have. A few weeks ago, Roldo took on some of his online critics in this column.

I tend to think tax abatement is sometimes necessary because Cleveland is not competing with other communities on a level playing field. It's hard to attract development downtown when there's no undeveloped land and property tax rates are lower elsewhere.

But even if you don't agree with Roldo's ideology, his work plays a role in town: he knows the hidden costs of all of Cleveland's big projects, and his questions help us evaluate if the next one is worth it.

Med Mart free-for-all

Usually January's a good time for a Clevelander to take a vacation. But this year I'll be missing a week of Med Mart fun!

Everyone who's in local politics, or who follows it, has an opinion about the county choosing the Mall site for the Medical Mart and convention center. Roldo takes the occasion to tell Forest City to get out of town. Jill Miller Zimon gets mad about Tim Hagan's bad habit of telling citizens they don't need to express an opinion or ask for information because they've got an elected representative -- him!

Mayor Frank Jackson has an opinion too. He called all 21 city councilpeople into his office to tell them. Here's a letter he's put out about it. He's definitely questioning the premise that the Mall site is cheaper, and whether MMPI can really save $100+ million by building on the old convention center foundation. But note that he also says, "With this critical decision made...."

Here's the Greater Cleveland Partnership's reaction to the total rejection of its recommendation of Tower City as the site: "The MMPI numbers ... require intense scrutiny. ... MMPI and the county should ... work closely with Forest City to re-examine whether there are potential savings at the Riverfront site. ... The community ... can't afford going down a road that leads to a no-build scenario." Strong wording for a chamber of commerce press release. I wonder what they're saying behind the scenes?

Lots of people are pointing out the many questions still unanswered. Here are mine.

-Last year people were saying a new convention center on the Mall would have to expand beyond the current site. Will it still expand? In which direction, north or west? North would be the best answer -- toward the Rock Hall, to connect conventioneers with our biggest tourist attraction. West would mean knocking down the county administration building, so all the arguments about the Ameritrust Tower and the cost of moving the county government would start up again.

-Is there any money to build that spiffy pedestrian bridge over the Shoreway that people were talking about, to take convention-goers all the way to the Rock Hall and Science Center? Or did that get cut in the cost-cutting?

-When the Partnership and Forest City push back and try to undo the Mall decision, someone needs to ask two questions about the Tower City proposal. The plans the public saw were for a tall, thin convention center on the slope down to the river. The exhibit hall was a few stories up. How much would it cost to build a convention exhibit floor strong enough to host industrial conventions, if the floor is several stories above the ground? And how much would it really cost to build the big weird bridge you'd need to get dozens of trucks to the exhibit floor?

New City Hall blog

Last month Roldo Bartimole pined for the long-gone days when reporters swarmed Cleveland City Hall, digging for news. He lamented that he heard the Plain Dealer was cutting back from two City Hall reporters to only one. Well, at least that one guy's working hard.

Henry Gomez, our daily's watchdog at 601 Lakeside, is now blogging daily from City Hall, passing on politics news with speed and webby verve. I've posted a link to his Inside City Hall blog on my blogroll of local politics sites (over there on the right).

Now anyone who's wondering, what the hell is Cleveland City Council doing lately? Anything? can find out daily. Sadly, Gomez's post today is about how few council members showed up for an major hearing about which big projects Mayor Frank Jackson will ask President Obama to fund. (Want to stimulate the Cleveland economy? Build us an Inner Belt Bridge that won't fall down!)

Nice use of the web by the Plain Dealer here. Sometimes it seems like cleveland.com thinks "blog" just means "page where we post the news we're printing tomorrow." This one's different. The editors are letting an ambitious reporter post newsy and observational stuff that won't make the paper and play with a voice that wouldn't fit the Metro section. It's a newspaper blog that reads like a blog.

Yes, it's sad more of what Gomez is doing can't make the print edition. His report last week about Matt Zone's failed council coup shouldn't have been hidden on page 3B. But newspapers and Cleveland are shrinking. The city has gone from 750,000 people in 1970 (when Roldo was a young reporter) to 444,000 or less today. Also, since Cleveland is poor, City Hall doesn't have much money to spend. So most political attention shifts to the county or Washington, and those of us who want more news about the Zone-Sweeney battle can go online.

Turns out, plenty of readers want a daily fix of City Hall news. In 11 hours, 26 people have commented on Gomez's post! I'm jealous!

My favorite columnist

No disrespect to my favorite Plain Dealer writers. But my favorite local political columnist these days is Mansfield B. Frazier of CoolCleveland.com.

Frazier wrote the best stuff out there about the fight over who should succeed Fannie Lewis on Cleveland City Council. His CoolCleveland piece on how Obama-worship is getting out of hand was so funny, the Plain Dealer picked it up as an op-ed.

His column this week is a very personal, suspenseful, and terrifying story about his son and ex-wife -- and it ends with a sudden but effective turn to the gay-rights battle brewing in Cleveland.

Journalists often lament that our profession has gotten too professional, no longer a haven for interesting characters. Guess they don't know Frazier. This week's column attests to the wild life he's lived. So does his 1995 book, From Behind the Wall -- the author's bio notes he's been "arrested 15 times on felony charges and convicted 5 times."

Sometimes I wish CoolCleveland edited him more, to hone the rough diamond and ask the unanswered question (such as, Do you really think your wife did what she hinted at? If so, how?). On the other hand, his rough edges are part of the fun.

This became obvious when I compared Frazier's original Obama column and the edited version in the Plain Dealer. Most of the edits improved it (including the helpful correction that the plural of "honky" is "honkies"). But PD readers lost his aside about the late Ms. Lewis ("sharing only went so far with Fannie"), his assessment of Obama as "cooler than Frosty the Snowman," and a great digression about a Harlem street hustler nicknamed Seldom Seen, who "knew that in all cultures and societies, too much access deflates value and diminishes cachet."

There's no archive page for all Frazier's columns, like fellow CoolCleveland columnist Roldo Bartimole's blog. But you can go through the CoolCleveland archives and find a link to Frazier's column in each issue. Also, he's got a new gig with TheDailyBeast.com (so far he's written about how alleged pyramid-schemer Bernard Madoff will like prison). Plenty of Mansfield for us to dig into.