As the East 9th Street property bought from Jacobs bounces back to them, and the muddled dance of trying to lure a Medical Mart as an excuse to build a too-expensive and money-losing Convention Center continues, when is anyone going to ask the Commissioners for some accounting?

The mealy-mouthed Pee Dee actually wrote an editorial about East 9th's old Ameritrust building debacle last Thursday.

Yet the editorial was absent the names “Hagan” and “Dimora.”  How can you ignore the principal actors?  Isn’t anyone to blame for the shoddy planning of the County?

Can we expect even a modicum of competence from our County Government? Hell, the Cuyahoga County Commissioners – at least Timmy Hagan and Jimmy Dimora – even make George Bush look skillful.

County taxpayers face two major issues to be resolved soon.

First, there is the bungling of the purchase for $22 million (with additions, now labeled a cost of $37.4 million with an extra $4 million for asbestos removal expected) of  Jacobs’ old Ameritrust properties at E. 9th-Euclid-Prospect, supposedly for a new county administration building, followed by a bid competition that elicited a single suspicious bid.

Secondly, we have the continued indecision over the medical mart and new convention center.

These two very expensive and difficult decisions provide us with stumbling and bumbling on a large scale by County leaders.

As noted here a couple of weeks ago, Cuyahoga County’s sale of the former Jacobs properties at E. 9th & Euclid to the K&D Group looked, as I put it, “counterfeit.”  The County subsequently rejected the bid making that supposition ring true.

When is someone in a position of authority going to examine whether the sale of the Ameritrust properties was a matter of gross stupidity or vile corruption?

Unfortunately, we can’t expect County Prosecutor Bill Mason to probe Democratic Party leaders but where are the federalistas?

We need a federal probe of the County Commissioners to determine why and how the deal to take Jacobs’ white elephants off his hands was contrived.  The reason:  It has all the stink of a deal.

It’s accounting time.

Are Hagan and Dimora simply as stupid as they seem?  Or can there be more to this combo’s machinations at E. 9th & Euclid, and with the Medical Mart deal?  Hagan’s friendship connection with the medical mart developer, a son of Robert Kennedy, cries out for examination.

And why were the Jacobs properties bought without a plan that ensured the County was capable to finance and build a new administration building at the site?  What caused the change in plans?

Now, we should have faith in the Plain Dealer for non-legal monitoring of such behavior.  However, the Pee Dee, as I have come to call it, appears to be nothing more than a stenography service for all parties involved.  Reporters take whatever Fred Nance – Squire-Sanders managing partner and County negotiator on the medical mart – says and presents that as what’s happening.  There seems to be little effort to go beneath the surface.

It’s time all principals, including Hagan and Dimora, were made to come clean on these issues.

You should be able to expect the Pee Dee to ask the questions about these major debacles and insist upon answers from public officials.  Of course, you can’t when you get editorials that let the culprits off the hook by failing even to name them.

“The best option,” said the PD editorial of the Ameritrust deal “is to get the property back into the hands of a private developer who can make it over as a mix of office, retail and other uses…”

Well, that’s exactly in whose hands it was...  a private developer named Jacobs.

The Commissioners rejected the K& D bid earlier than I expected.  I thought, as mentioned in the previous column, that they would wait until yesterday’s primary was over.  Of course, Hagan had no primary opponent (shame on all of us) and Dimora isn’t on the ballot this year.

Hagan (pictured glad-handing disgraced former governor Bob Taft) especially deserves close observation.  Hagan has enriched Jacobs beyond his already multi-millionaire status by his strong support for Jacobs at Gateway and his insistence and lobbying for total property tax exemption for Cleveland’s baseball stadium and arena.  This help enabled Jacobs to profit by several hundred million dollars on the sale of the Cleveland Indians.

In 1998, Hagan left the Commissioner’s office, supposedly tired of the business, only to return in 2004 to run for the office he said had drained him, defeating Tim McCormack.  McCormack foot dragged on a costly new convention center.  Ironically, Peter Lawson Jones, the third Commissioner who has voted wisely on these issues, may pay the price since he actually has serious Republican opposition this November.

Hagan’s return put him in the position to mess up the deal at E. 9th and support the medical mart for his Kennedy family friend who wants both a medical mart and convention center on the cheap. The Kennedy operation –Merchandise Mart Properties of Chicago – doesn’t want to put up any part of the cost but wants to control the building, the leasing and the managing of the development, according to Nance.

In other words, we have another deal where the public has to dump in big money and the profits will be handled by the money-makers.

And as I wrote a couple of weeks ago...

“The bid from K&D Group from the beginning struck me as a backroom deal made… to help (Hagan and Dimora) save face on a smelly deal that could have significant financial damage to Cuyahoga County and its taxpayers.”

With the rejection of the K&D bid this seems very plausible.

All this incompetence will have its consequences.

As this is written, County taxpayers are voting on a health and welfare levy.  If voters yesterday defeated the levy issue, we can blame Hagan and Dimora.  They arrogantly ignored voters and went ahead to vote a quarter percent sales tax hike to fund the medical mart/convention center.  Hopefully, voters didn’t show anger for the haughty Hagan-Dimora act by voting down the social services levy.

If voters did reject the health and welfare levy, Hagan and Dimora’s comedy act has turned tragic for the neediest people in the County.

Why Did CSU Have to Pay for Debate?
 

Are we all stupid or what?

Cleveland State University, a college of working class and middle class students, had to raise $300,000 to help put on the Democratic debate last week at the Wolstein Center.

Why?

Debate sponsors NBC-TV, its affiliate here WKYC, and its cable network MSNBC are all profit-making entities.  They all enjoy government-anointed, semi-monopolies using the public air waves.  They are being fed by millions and millions of dollars of election advertising.  Yet, CSU had to go take $300,000 out of this community to host the event.  I don’t understand why the profit-makers didn’t pay their own way.

The Cleveland debate drew 7.78 million viewers, an historic best for MSNBC, according to Nielsen Media Research.

So shouldn't NBC pay CSU, rather than the other way around?

MSNBC has been running ads saying that the debate in Cleveland got it great ratings, but CSU had to pay some of the cost of providing the network a stage.