PORT AUTHORITY AWOL - Vote No on Tax Levy increase Issue 108

Submitted by Jeff Buster on Mon, 04/10/2006 - 12:37.

Cleveland cuyahoga county port authority stiff leg derrick obsolete vote no on tax issue levy 108

This is a repost of a 2006 report.  The stiff leg derrick is still in place today.   Large and heavy steel and equipment is still being made overseas - and not in NEO.    Think about it:  the Port is a JOB LOSER because just about nothing is exported!  
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Cleveland’s Port Authority is missing the boat.    This way-obsolete stiff leg derrick is a symbol of how off-message they are... AWOL in responsibly serving the charge their name implies. 
                

The derrick crane is an embarrassment to Cleveland it is so old – definitely pre WWII.  No wonder the Port Authority now specializes in providing financial bond back up for construction of Cleveland Clinic parking garages and Cleveland Heights private school expansion and threatening eminent domain for local well heeled developers and filling parkland with industrial size gravel piles.  The ship loading/unloading equipment which the Port offers is out of the dark ages.  The Port of Cleveland is Sleepy Hollow.

Maybe  it is a good thing to preserve the antique crane because without modern hydraulic intermodal container and dockside heavy lift cranes, it is impossible for Ohio companies to offshore construction of large weldments any bigger than the tanks in this photo.   The tanks are consigned to Linde gasses company in Lima, Ohio.  The tanks could have been made in Ohio, but they were cheaper elsewhere.   So Linde imported them through the Port of Cleveland. 
If the Cleveland Port Authority financed more modern dockage and loading facilities instead of parking garages,   surely more heavy goods would be imported and offloaded in Ohio.   Big welded structures like 70 + ton wind turbine towers could be unloaded and shipped throughout Ohio.  By maintaining this antique crane, the Port Authority is preventing the invasion of Ohio by these big foreign goods and in so doing helping keep the balance of payments to outside the US in check. 

Seriously,  why has the Cleveland Port Authority abrogated its charge?  Who appoints the Authority’s board members.  Why are they meddling in threatening eminent domain for Wolstein rather than bringing their own house into modernity?


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I don't know about port, but I want to know!

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 01:16.

I thought one of the outcomes of all the Whiskey Island war was that the County was going to fund an independent study of the purpose of the port. This is clearly needed. They use a huge amount of land and have great power and certainly have a role in the economy - I'd like to know more about how all this it set up right now, and how it should be set up for the future. So, what happened to the study? Who is the real expert on the port authority?

Port vs. "location, location, location"

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 01:24.

 The most basic law of real estate is "location, location, location", and the Port Authority is ruining one of the best locations in the nation - the Cuyahoga River Valley - and it is now time for the public to regain control. I see very little value in having lots of bulk material dumped on the most valuable real estate in Ohio - the Cleveland Lake Erie waterfront and Flats - and then having speeding dumptrucks fly around some of the most valuable (and expensive) streets in the state, endangering the most dense population, when all that mess could be somewhere else. Why have we allowed this destruction of our most valuable "location, location, location", and what can we do about regaining public access and control?

I LIKE DUMP TRUCKS

Submitted by Jeff Buster on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 15:58.

I'm an old construction buff, so I think we need - and can find - sensible ways to fit those dump trucks and construction materials into the civic mix in a way that improves the environment and working efficiency for the regional construction industry AND the environment and civic ambiance for the public. 
 Moving gravel by lake boat into NEO is by far the most efficient way, and Great Lakes access allows higher quality aggregate to be imported from Canada and other sources where the stone is Precambrian and much harder.  Ohio has little granite or stone with a PSI of 30,000 or above, instead Ohio has sandstone and limestone - much too soft for railroad ballast and really even for roadway use - though limestone is used for asphalt mix.
Along the Hudson South of Albany in New York there are very efficient conveyor belts which move tons and tons of cement several miles from the quarry to the Hudson.   There is no reason dockage along Lake Erie couldn’t be built with similar conveyors to move granular materials inland and away from the shore which the public should enjoy.   Such a conveyor system would eliminate that crazy low gear crawl all the heavily laden dump trucks have to make up from the Cuyahoga and would dramatically reduce the wear and tear on the bridges and roadways now used by the dump trucks.  The conveyor could even be underground and out of view.
This is the sort of “modern” idea that the Port Authority members should be researching – not eminent domain for a developer

Nice to see good ideas for the port to remain valuable

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 20:34.

Sounds like you are the only person around who actually understands what the port does and should do, so perhaps you can write the first phase of the port study - I think the county budgetted $100,000 for that.

Until you work out a deal with the Authority for that, keep the insight on this flowing here