is a long standing joke

ask someone about the effort to get them to use palm pilots to upload data and accurate reports....

The media has been praising Frank Jackson like he is Jesus... and I have to wonder why.

Let me see... Cleveland isn't firing anyone at city hall. Is that a good thing?

So Jackson didn't spend much leading Cleveland... did he spend anything right?

The coverage of this story so far is looking for the bad guy - the PD LOVES these big developers so it couldn't be their fault... and they love Frankie so it couldn't be his fault. Let me guess... the problem is just a few fat, dumb, drunk city employees who are masters at deceiving their bosses and scamming the region's biggest developers... yea right.

PD reporters - stop breaking bread with the crooks in town, and start breaking heads... you are all going to be fired by your bosses soon enough, may as well go down with s fight and self-respect... the community will carry you forward after the carpetbaggers leave (we shall not carry them forward, you may be ASSURRED... not that they actually live here anyways!).

Disrupt IT

A group calling themselves SBS short for Stop Building Shit has a great blog on construction and design "issues" in Cleveland. They covered the Stonebridge problems in 2007. Check out Something Missing?

Yes at the time I saw this I wondered, how did that pass inspection. Uh... now we know.

And you may recall that if the westbank of the Cuyahoga continues to slide eastward into the river, Stonebridge residents may be blasted with millions of gallons of sewage. Freetimes covered it:

Up A Creek

On the west side of the river, looming over the barge, is an overgrown embankment. Atop this hill is Riverbed Street. Or, rather, that's where Riverbed Street once was. The city closed Riverbed in November 2005, when the pavement started cracking and buckling from geological stress. Today, access to the street is blocked off by Stonebridge Waterfront apartments.

Beyond the barriers, just around the first bend, Riverbed Street is slowly tumbling into the Cuyahoga a piece at a time. A section of road at the edge of the drop-off is already MIA; it looks like a giant came along and took a bite out of it. The ground here is in motion.

The PD covered it:

Irishtown Bend collapse could halt Cuyahoga shipping according to Army Corps

In 2007, the sewer district said that a crumbling, 60-year-old brick sewer under Riverbed Street could be crushed by movement in the earth, and could then spew from 1 million to 20 million gallons of waste per day directly into the river.

Schulenberg said that by next summer, the Army Corps will come up with several potential solutions to stabilize the Irishtown slope and bulkhead the river.

"We want to provide a complete solution," he said.

On Dec. 22, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson listed the repair of the Riverbed Street hillside among his top four items in a letter requesting aid for infrastructure from President-elect Barack Obama under a potential economic stimulus program. The letter specified that $50 million would be needed.

And yes, K&D was the supposed savior of the Breuer Tower. Still pending I would guess. In case you don't recall, the Commissioners when asked by their project manager (remember this property was to be razed so the county could have new offices) was told not to publish the sale of the building outside Cleveland, so a notice was posted in the PD, Crain's and that's it. K&D knew from the start that they would be the sole bidder. I tried to find a notice on the county website that the property was up for bid, but the website is so convoluted that it required verbal direction from Adrian Maldonado, then director of the county's office of diversity and procurement - now this one?) to eventually find it. The entire process was convoluted.

I wonder if, like the current banking BS, our entire government might not come crashing down and blast more than Stonebridge with a ration of shit.

Imagine that this story about City View shopping squalor is a microcosm of our global ecomomy meltdown - crap built on crap - a view of Cleveland:

Since then, City View's fortunes have taken a dramatic dive. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency filed a complaint against the property's owners in July, after EPA inspectors found explosive levels of methane in sewer basins under the parking lots and elsewhere on the property. The inspectors also found polluted water leaking into storm sewers. City View Center LLC and the EPA settled the case in December, and the property owners pledged to install gas extraction systems, capture the polluted water and pay fines.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart pulled out of the center, citing concerns about the safety of its employees and customers. PetSmart followed. Other tenants, including Jo-Ann Stores Inc. and Circuit City, also have closed during the past year. In December, the property's owners told their lender that City View was not bringing in enough money to cover its expenses, and that City View Center LLC planned to close the shopping center.

According to the Bank of New York's claim, City View Center LLC did not make required monthly payments in November, December, January and February. On Jan. 28, the property owners said they would not pay pending real estate taxes. The Bank of New York subsequently provided $1.3 million to pay the taxes.

Then ask yourself if it is still a "good idea" to allow this sort of thing (dressed up as a Medical Mart) to be installed in downtown Cleveland. Place your bets folks because we don't need to legalize or privatize gambling in Ohio - we're already well into a statewide casino schema.

Imagine the Cuyahoga caving in from both banks - bulkheads not restored on Irishtown Bend, Forest City shoehorning their project onto the eastbank and straightening the river to do so... what happens if the river just caves in at that point?

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
The only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

T. S. Eliot - The Dry Salvages

This shows (one of several locations) the 4 foot high subsidence directly over the main west side sewer collector at Irishtown Bend.   The entire hillside up towards W25th Street is visibly unstable along this stretch of roadway.   And the area has historically been unstable, that's why there are no buildings on it.    The NorthEastOhioRegionalSewerDistrict ( NEORSD) has installed a dozen or so slope inclinometers (a drilled well with a slope indicator in it) to monitor the subsidence.    

In my opinion, (I have a little geology training) this entire area could slip into the Cuyahoga River at any time.  And if that happened,  much of the sewerage from the southerly portion of the West side of Cleveland would dump untreated into the River and into Lake Erie where, three miles offshore, the Cleveland water intake crib sits. 

We would be fine, however, because the Water treatment plants could just add more chlorine!  So,  this approaching problem can wait - it makes more sense to spend a billion and build the MEDCON now!

Now Jeff, how could you suggest such a rational thing as spending money to address this issue?

Here in Clevehoga the modus operandi is keep you nose to the grindstone, blinders on, say nothing, just obey...

 just pretend it's not there.....gAd....

For those few of you who still read the PD, always keep your eye out for little lines inserted in just about any article that attempt to associate just about anything screwed up in the Region to "FBI Investigation of Corruption in Cuyahoga County"... like with coverage of the corrupt City of Cleveland building inspectors who work for Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson... headline: "K&D Group manager charged with bribing inspectors; case has tie to county corruption probe". How is the "County" the story here?

The story is "K&D Corruption Runs Wide And Deep: Corruption Investigation of Mayor Jackson's City Hall Continues!", and that story is published all day every day on REALNEO, all over town.

And in today's "Editorial", by the "Editors"... "Bratenahl's citizens deserve explanation for how things went so wrong: Plain Dealer editorial"... about the corrupt Police Chief and Mayor of Bratenahl, the issue becomes Peter Lawson Jones' problem... with the "subliminal" little seduction-line "If the mayor didn't know, that's only a slightly smaller problem -- one reminiscent of County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones' response to news that a former county recorder wasted $1 million a year: "We all had a sense something was wrong."

The Mayor and chief of Bratenahl are corrupt because that is how the powerful people of Bratenahl want it... sort of like having personal get out of jail free cards... (ask the Chief about all that... see how many rich people have gotten DUIs in Bratenahl... he may be looking to bargain).

The inspectors at City Hall are corrupt because that is how Frank Jackson and his funders want it.

AS FOR THE PD - WE GET IT... YOU'VE TEFLON COATED JACKSON AND ARE TARRING AND FEATHERING JONES.

Elisabeth Sullivan - GOOD JOB - NICE TO HAVE YOU IN TOWN - Real nice. So that is what selling out looks like.

Go back to DC.

We get your point, you are pandering to the business establishment, Ronn Richards and the Cleveland Foundation, Brad Whitehead and the FFOEF, and are endorsing all their candidates for everything and destroying everyone that doesn't fit that model... you are out to get the County government and especially Peter Lawson Jones, making you biased and entirely irrelevant to this community, and part of the "Quite Crisis".

Get your act together... this type of bad news is not what anyone in the community really wants.

Disrupt IT