The Medical Mart being pitched to us is an old idea, an old failed idea. Ask Baltimore.

Cleveland has been excited about the unique development of a Medical Mart here for some time. The movers and shakers have been pushing for the concept and Cuyahoga County Commissioners Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora have voted us a sales tax to fund it.

The medical mart has been the magic elixir that downtown boosters have been peddling to taxpayers as a potion to revive a sagging city.

It’s nothing of the sort.

How realistic is it?

Here’s a 1991 story from a Baltimore newspaper:

“Just about every major industry is served by a trade mart – from furniture and apparel to computers to gifts.

“But the developers of a $600 million medical mart for Baltimore say there is nothing like a 2.5 million-square-foot complex they are planning for the medical and health-care industry – and that’s why they believe it will be a success.”

It’s now 2008, slipping to 2009, and there is no Medical Mart in Baltimore.

Oh, the same certainty of Cleveland’s corporate community has that this would be an obvious gain for Baltimore was floated there in 1991.

“They (developers of the scheme) say the proximity of the John Hopkins Medical institutions and the University of Maryland Medical System (substitute Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals), the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration (we don’t have these) makes the city a highly desirable location for a medical mart.”

Gee, did they have the same public relations firm? It sounds like the same bill of sales as here.

“If we don’t do this,” said one promoter, “somebody relatively soon, in a major city, will do it. A Philadelphia will do it, or an Atlanta will do it, or a Chicago will do it. It’s too big an industry for it not to be done at some point.”

By 1993, a follow-up article began:

“It would seem incongruous that the developer of a medical trade mart that has been unable to get off the ground for three years is seeking more land for expansion.”
The story notes that “nothing of the kind currently exists in the world.”

By 1997 it was forgotten dream in Baltimore. Nothing ever happened to the wonderful $600-million idea born in 1991.

“They could never make the project work,” said Heywood Sanders, Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Political Science at Trinity University at San Antonio.

Sanders studies the convention center business and he is working on a book on the business.

The truth is that the Greater Cleveland Partnership and its Downtown Corporate Gang (Sam and the Ratners) have been using this hokey idea of a medical mart to obtain funding for a new convention center.

It’s been the pump primer for people like Hagan to pass a tax for an unnecessary new convention center to be constructed on Sam and the Ratners’ land behind Tower City.

These creeps never give up and never stop wanting “More.”

It is time that the quarter-percent tax is suspended by Commissioners Hagan, Dimora and Peter Lawson Jones. The $40 million or so already collected could be used for a reasonable purpose – like helping non-rich people in need.