ROLDO: PD gives Jackson a Transplant or Two
To read the local newspaper lately you have to believe that Mayor Frank Jackson has had a brain and personality transplant. Without the help of the Cleveland Clinic.
He’s hot, they say. He’s spot on, they say. He’s managing, they say. He’s jumping with ideas, they say.
That would be something to be thankful for – if it were anywhere near true.
What I see is that Mayor Jackson has taken the town’s elite leadership’s agenda as his own. He’s carrying the water. That’s all.
Oh, how they love that. And their cheerleader is, of course, the Plain Dealer.
Jackson in recent weeks has accepted as priorities the renovation of Public Square, a multi-million dollar task and the commercialization of the lakefront.
Somehow the mayor’s to do list just happens coincide with that of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. And, of course, Plain Dealer columnist Steve Litt. Litt has made a career of demanding we do something with Public Square. At a cost of many millions of dollars and a total disruption of public transit.
The lakefront – already ruined many times over by our great private leadership – now must be the recipient of tens of more millions, no likely hundreds of millions of dollars, in “investments.” The aim – not to make it comfortable, pleasurable, and affordable recreation area to the public, particularly the citizens of Cleveland (after all it is their property, not the Cleveland Browns) but to make it exploitable to commercial interests – to hotels, offices, and, of course, restaurants and retail shops, all of which there are already too much in adjacent downtown.
Talk about wanting your cake eating it, too. And, without doubt, having taxpayers pay for the better part of it. As the city continues to empty out, the business/media cheerleaders continue to call for more glitz for people who live mostly elsewhere.
As Jackson glitzes us, will someone tell me what’s happening in the city’s schools, the building department, the fire and police, and especially the water department. Nothing good, to be sure.
Oh, yeah, we do have news on the fire department – all the way to the west coast.
I’m talking about the audit that showed firefighters being paid for not working. Frank says he can’t commit to having them prosecuted for their theft of pay from the city. Why not? Is the mayor squeamish or what?
Jackson says don’t blame outgoing Fire Chief Paul Stubbs for the scandal. Blame his subordinates. (And who might they be? Will Jackson name them?) But that avoids the obvious: What does Stubbs have to do but manage his Fire Department subordinates? It’s just his job.
The Plain Dealer – the main proclaimer here – tells us that Jackson is coming up with fantastic ideas for us.
When the obvious truth is that Jackson is simply a water boy, carrying what the Greater Cleveland Partnership and its various attached corporate agents tell him to tell us what we need that we don’t need.
Meantime, Cleveland is draining out. But the band plays on.
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.
He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]