Roldo: Does Cleveland Really Need A New $350 Million Road?

Tell me – of all the serious, debilitating problems of Cleveland – why has a $350 million – less than three mile road – become a major MUST for our community?

For the usual reasons.

The private people in charge of our public agenda want it.

With other roads, streets and bridges crumbling all over the place – with public transportation shriveling and dying – a short road traversing to University Circle and our medical giants has become No. 1 on our list of priority needs.

I don’t think so.

But Mayor Frank Jackson and the subservient City Council 19 appear not to notice. The usual ostrich position is assumed.

It reminds me of the time I arrived in Cleveland – 1965. That’s when the effects of the city’s urban renewal program began to show devastating impact on the city. A weight, by the way, that deserves an urban study that will show what happened to Cleveland, when and why. Don’t expect any university to make such a study. They would have to critically take on the Establishment. It won’t happen. Only private citizens could do it.

The same institutional forces and the people leading the push for this road made the disastrous decisions that help cripple Cleveland with urban renewal plans. Plans that helped certain interests and devastated others, particularly blacks. They felt the impact of urban renewal, or as it was often called then, Negro removal.

Our leaders and the Plain Dealer have given the road the fanciful name of “Opportunity Corridor.”

Let me quote from a study done in the late 1960s, probably available at the library. It was called “The Cleveland Papers” by the Illuminating Company, an apt but tongue in cheek reference to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. It was done by an ad hoc group of Citizens.

Here is how it starts:

“The notion of a local oligarchy may seem quaintly parochial or – worse – paranoid. Yet we contend that Cleveland, one of America’s great industrial cities, is dominated by a coherent, readily identifiable business oligarchy. Its power is not based in hereditary class prerogatives, but in direct control of the region’s industrial and financial corporations. It is a self-conscious oligarchy, capable of strategizing and of exercising collective authority in the pursuit of common interests. Just as its industries dominate the city’s physical aspect, the oligarchy itself dominates every phase of the city’s political and cultural life. And it is this oligarchy which is above all to blame for the city’s destruction.”

Pretty strong stuff.

If you read the entire report – examining particularly the roles of the foundations and the medical empire – you will get an education of how the power today functions in just the same way. The purpose: public decision making to enable a similar oligarchy to control events and decisions.

Anyone who wants to know how Cleveland got as it is should read this booklet. Indeed, make a copy of it. If you are a teacher of civics, history or politics, assign it to your students.

Gov. Ted Strickland, one guesses to bolster Senate candidate Lee Fisher, recently announced some $4 million to help fund some design work on the road. It goes from I-490 at E. 55^th Street to East 105^th street.

Why do we need this road? Do we need more land for industry? Hell no. There’s land wasting away all over the place. Do we need more land for commercial? Hell no. Commercial real estate is devastated. Do we need more land for retail? Hell no. Retail is languishing, dying all over the place.

Is University Circle isolated? Unreachable by transportation? Hell no. Didn’t we just finish a $200 million plus transit system right up Euclid Avenue from downtown to University Circle and the medical empire? Yes we did. Even as RTA dumped routes transit-dependent people really need. Yes, we notice who is important. And who is not.

So why do we need a $350 million, less than three mile road? Because the same leadership that said we had to do urban renewal throughout the city back in the 1950s said so. We know that the Cleveland and Gund foundations gave $100,000 each to push for this road.

They were mistaken then. They are mistaken now.

Tell that to Terry Egger, publisher of the Plain Dealer and co-chair of the committee for the “opportunity” Side Street to University Circle. Tell that to Chris Roynane, head of University Circle Inc., and a candidate for the new Cuyahoga County Council.

Tell that to Joe Roman and the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

We are allowing the same oligarchy of corporate/foundation leadership to send us further into the hole. They have divined that we need a $350 million Side Street. And if you think the price is set, wait until we get the full bill.

Learn something from history. You won’t find it in the Plain Dealer. Check out the Cleveland Papers for a taste of reality. And think for yourself.

He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991.