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August 23, 2007

TAKE FROM POOR, GIVE TO THE RICH

Cleveland Leader
By Roldo Bartimole

Like "porn," you know panhandling when you see it.

Hypocrisy remains the only growth sector in Cleveland.

Can you imagine the downtown gang now is pressing for a ban on panhandling!

When panhandling for handouts for themselves, they seem very adept and eager. They certainly won’t legislate against panhandling for government handouts for their businesses.

So, the poor and near poor can’t beg downtown. It’s untidy. The rich – developers and real estate interests – please line-up over there. We’ll feed you with millions of dollars of goodies in a moment.
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The building owners are applying for historic tax credits from the state. Among them are familiar locations. Terminal Tower of Forest City Enterprises, back in line and the Higbee building, also owned by Forest City.

You can click here to read the entire column or just hold your nose as you read this list of Forest City panhandling classics from the Cleveland's Rob-n-Dole Hall of Fame.

Tower City has been a welfare case from the beginning. One story goes that Ruth Miller, Sam’s first wife and a Ratner, wanted Tower City to be a gem offered to the city. So she stocked it will upscale shopping that wasn’t going to endure. Tower City, as the terminus of RTA’s rapid, delivers tens of thousands of people to the retail outlet. Upscale people don’t typically take public transportation. Gucci’s has left the building. The food court does okay at lunch.

However, Sam and the Ratners buy politicians with political contributions and trinkets. Here’s an off the head list of gifts to them by public agencies:

  • RTA [Regional Transit Authority] spent tens of millions to spruce up its station at Tower City. (Oddly, Forest City was its construction manager, then sued RTA for $25 million more and got a $10 million settlement, and significant rent guarantees. That’s gratitude for you.)

  • RTA built the money-losing Waterfront Line for some $69 million using Tower City as its connection, delivering tens of thousands to and from ballgames and the Rock and Roll Museum.

  • RTA also built at about $13-million or so a walkway to Gateway through Tower City, again routing hundreds of thousands of people via the Ratner retail properties.

  • The Federal government built its new $175-million courthouse on Ratner land behind Tower City (also conveniently connected by an inside walkway) with the help of then Congressman Lou Stokes. When Stokes retired, he took a seat as a paid Forest City board member.

[Note: The tallest courthouse in America opened in 2005 on Forest City's MetroTech campus in Brooklyn — the City of NY is MetroTech's biggest tenant.]

  • Tower City and the Terminal Tower which rises above the shopping area has received property tax value reduction in the hundreds of millions of dollar on the properties thus depriving Cleveland school children in particular of revenue. Further, taxes from a number of its parcels go, not the normal governmental bodies (mostly Cleveland schools) but to finance bonds for the $93-million Rock and Roll Museum and Hall of Fame.

  • These property tax reductions came after Mayor George Voinovich and Council President George Forbes gave Forest City some $80 million in UDAG money for various developments at Tower City.

  • The Ratner-owned Ritz Carlton, also attached to Tower City, received a 20-year, 100 percent tax abatement in addition to a UDAG no-interest (as in zero) loan, which isn’t payable until 2016.

  • The politicians tried to give the Ratners a no-bid right to a casino but that was rejected by voters.

  • The downtown gang has pushed a revamping of Public Square, at Tower City’s doorstep at a cost of some $40 million. The downtown promoters want a “hipper” Public Square, which really means get rid of panhandlers and the homeless.

  • RTA is spending some $200 million in a beautification project along Euclid Ave. from Tower City to University Circle, using desperately scarce transit money to subsidize retail (after Tower City helped destroy retail along Euclid with it’s the Avenue, within Tower City.)

All that is not enough for the avaricious Tower City needs.

Now they want a medical mart at the old Higbee’s (do not believe the PD propaganda about numerous sites being considered for the medical mart) to further bolster the Forest City failure.

Even that’s not enough. They want a half-billion dollar convention center on Forest City land, attached to Tower City.

Posted by lumi at August 23, 2007 9:09 AM