Med Mart: Dan Gilbert's weak argument

The Plain Dealer gave Cavs owner Dan Gilbert's argument for putting the Medical Mart at Tower City page-one play again Sunday. This time the lead was Gilbert's comparison of downtown Cleveland to downtown Detroit.

Gilbert argues that Detroit made a terrible mistake when it put three casinos in different places, two of them too far from the city's center. They lost a chance to give downtown Detroit a connected core.

True, but there's no lesson for Cleveland there. "NOTE: Maps are not at the same scale," says the fine print on page A16 under the PD's Detroit and Cleveland maps.

Detroit's downtown is much bigger and sprawled-out than Cleveland's. The Motor City Casino is 1.4 miles from Detroit's convention center, Cobo Hall. But the convention center site on our Mall is a half-mile from the Q, with East Fourth Street halfway between.

Yes, the Tower City site's big advantage is that it's connected to the Rapid, a shopping center, two hotels and the arena. But the mall site is hardly isolated -- it's next to two hotels, a block from Public Square, and the new center would have a big glass window overlooking the Rock Hall and the lakefront.

Developer Jeffrey P. Jacobs took out a full-page ad in yesterday's paper supporting the Mall site. His letter makes an interesting point about connecting downtown. "Successful urban planning... involves the creation of multiple traffic generators," Jacobs writes. "Moving visitor traffic throughout downtown will help sustain a community of businesses."

In other words, grouping things fairly close together is good -- but you do want conventioneers to get outside, into taxicabs, onto the streets.

{Correction, 4/21: In an earlier version of this post, I wrote that Jeff Jacobs' father, Dick Jacobs, owns the Marriott at Key Center, across from the Mall site. Actually, cleveland.com reports tonight that the Jacobs Group relinquished its 50% stake in Key Center this fall. See my new post.}

County chooses downtown mall as Medical Mart, convention center site

This is a surprise! The county commissioners have decided to build the Medical Mart and convention center on the downtown mall, not at Tower City.

MMPI, the developer, says it's figured out a way to build the project on the site of the current convention center for $108 million less than on Forest City's property on the river.

This'll stun everyone who thinks Sam Miller of Forest City controls Cleveland politics. But it's happening for a simple reason: Sam Miller does not control MMPI, and MMPI had an incentive to save money.

This summer, I was worried that the project would go to Tower City simply because Forest City was (naturally) lobbying for its proposal, while the mall site, which was publicly owned, didn't have an advocate. So when the Greater Cleveland Partnership's site committee declared that building the project at Tower City would save $60 million, who was going to argue?

But the county commissioners put a really important clause in their agreement with MMPI: the developer is responsible for all cost overruns. They did that because they knew critics would try to attack the convention center as "another Gateway." Lots of people opposed to big public downtown projects still point to the flaws in the 1991 Gateway deal, which left the public paying for lots of unexpected debt and expenses.

So MMPI threw out the Partnership's recommendation and started over. (See my earlier post about a Plain Dealer story that explained this, but not clearly.) The Chicago-based developer came up with a cheaper way to build the convention center: by using the existing center's foundation.

Yesterday's talks were held in private, a lot of details about the project haven't come out yet, and the county's deal with MMPI is still not finalized. Still, the debate about where to put a convention center has gone on for more than ten years. So this is really big news.

Obama in Cleveland

Barack Obama spoke to tens of thousands of people at Cleveland's downtown Mall this evening, from supporters who waited all afternoon to get close to the stage to football fans who stopped by after the Browns game.

Obama led with the economy. "The last things we can afford is four more years of the same old tired theories," he argued, "when no one in Washington is minding the store, so Wall Street goes crazy, and lobbyists block [needed] regulations." He acknowledged John McCain's break with George W. Bush on the issue of torture, but claimed that where the economy is concerned, "He hasn't been a maverick; he's been a sidekick."

Defending his tax plan, Obama took a shot at McCain's alliance with "Joe the Plumber" on the issue. He said, "99.9 percent of plumbers make less than $250,000 a year," which means their taxes would be cut, not raised, under Obama's proposal. "This is what they [Republicans] do in every election," he claimed. "They use ordinary people and make them afraid, so they can protect the fat cats."

Obama claimed his plan to stimulate the economy by spending federal money on infrastructure -- roads, bridges, rail, fiber optic networks -- would create 2 million jobs. He proposed spending $15 billion a year on renewable energy, which he claimed would lead to 5 million jobs (indirectly, he must mean, since that'd be $12,000 per job over four years).

He sounded like a New Democrat, a centrist in the Bill Clinton mode, when he pitched his program as a third way between old, false choices. "It's not about big government versus small government. That's the old way of thinking. We need a better government, a more honest government, a competent government." On Iraq, "We don't have to choose between retreating from the world and fighting a war without end."

He cracked some jokes at Dick Cheney's expense. "Yesterday, Dick Cheney came out of his undisclosed location. He hit the campaign trail, and said he is delighted to support John McCain." Not only did he use Cheney's endorsement to assert that McCain would continue Bush Administration policies, he got to play off the vice-president's dour public image -- he said it was "interesting to picture Dick Cheney being delighted."

Rain started to fall. Obama ad-libbed. "A little rain never hurt anybody. Sunshine is on the way. We've only got two more days of these clouds."

Update: The PD has a video of highlights from the rally.