Two weeks ago, City Fresh's Maurice Small met with friends in East Cleveland to discuss City Fresh, urban farming, and how we may convert a typical urban convenient store, Brown's Market, into a pilot City Fresh local foods market. During our discussions, Maurice mentioned that a dedicated urban farmer may earn more than $30,000 per year from sales of food grown on one typical urban lot (say 1/10th an acre). That being the case, and considering our ever-growing need and realigning demand for locally grown food, and the fact food may be grown locally as cost effectively as elsewhere in the world, it occurred to me that the highest and best use for most of the land now cleared, abandoned, blighted and wasted in our urban neighborhoods is for urban farming. So that is a use we are now planning to be core to redevelopment of the Star Neighborhood. Intrigued? Discuss and plan for this reality with Maurice and friends this Tuesday, from 6-7 PM, at that house on Roxbury, in East Cleveland. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

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Ed Hauser's sure to be there, but you should be too if you care about the waterfront.  The scary sentence in the PD notice observes that the Port's "move would free port docks at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River for commercial and residential development".  Depending on what these latter developments turn out to be, we, the public, are likely to be no nearer Lake Erie than we are now with the Port taking up prime space.

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Maurice Small is the most economically and ecologically sensible planner I know.

Joe Stanley, Sudhir Kade and I have been brainstorming with City Fresh's Maurice Small about "I GRO EC" - Independent Green Republic Of East Cleveland. City Fresh already operates a Fresh Stop at Huron Road Hospital - which Maurice reports is doing great - and is active in community farming in East Cleveland. Recently, we've been discussing City Fresh having an involvement converting Brown's Convenient store into a pilot City Fresh Market, which could offer a paradigm-shifting model for bringing local food, farming and their economies into very needy urban neighborhoods, in very innovative and important ways.

The newspaper business, as readers here probably know, isn’t what it used to be.

The economic crisis for newspapers now will be felt strongly in Cleveland.

Top Plain Dealer executives – Publisher Terry Egger and Editor Susan Goldberg -  told worried editorial staff members yesterday that the business climate is so bad that the paper plans to cut 35 pages a week from its news pages and 20 percent of its workforce.

Here’s an item that should be thoroughly described in tomorrow morning’s Plain Dealer.

  Let’s see if the PD gives us ANY   description about what the public cost of this will or could mean given the desire of Mayor Frank Jackson, Marty Sweeney and the Plain Dealer to keep the public fully informed about public business.

James Levin (seated) with the Brew Crew at Carnegie Hall - photo by Sandy Kish

To follow the jobs loss data, cited in item below, here’s a quick update on a couple of our onerous Cuyahoga County regressive taxes and what  they cost us monthly.

For your May payments, citizens & taxpayers, to support the Browns Stadium, used nearly exclusively (what 9 or 10 days a year) by the billionaire Lerner family, we paid $5,544,424 in May alone. Since switching the stadium "sin" taxes for the baseball field to the football field in August, 2005, we’ve paid a whopping $39,249,696. Always nice to help billionaires. The Lerner family pays a measily $250,000 in annual  rent and the city pays its insurance bill of some $125,000.

I’ve always called George Zeller the scariest man in Cuyahoga County.

The reason, George - really a gentle man - has the always troubling numbers on jobs and job losses for this area and the state. He’s been collecting figures on jobs and unemployment for years, now via Cuyahoga County government.

Today's Midtown Brews & Meet The Bloggers Land Bank open conversation will be featured on Mogulus channel grid. Thanks Mogulus! http://www.mogulus.com

Come join us for an afternoon filled with the history of our neighborhood and our city.
Find out--

• who was known as “the King of Celery”
• which one was the model for the Moses Cleaveland statue that stands in public square
• what does that dove on Aunt Sophie’s grave really mean
• how one of them through tragedy made our lives safer today
• how an inventor born in Brooklyn Centre gave us our YMCA and Deaconess Hospital
• and where will the vintage car be located?

The Old Brooklyn Historical Society will share an array of vintage photos. They could use your help with identification of people, places, and things. Friends of Big Creek will show the progression of our neighborhood through the years with a map display. The Metroparks Zoo will be on hand selling ZooDoo for all of you gardeners. A local genealogist will answer questions on how to get started with your “pedigree tree”

Continuous walking tours will be conducted throughout the afternoon until 4:15 p.m. Refreshments and musical entertainment will be a part of the experience. The book “Reflections from Brooklyn Centre” will be on sale.

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Peak Everything: Eight Things We Are Running Out Of And Why

CORRECTION:
Nathanael Hoelzel, Brownfield Programs Manager, Department of Economic Development, City of Cleveland will not be an official speaker for this week's Midtown Brews program. Nate will be attending and participating in Thursday's Midtown Brews Open Conversation.

Save the date for this week's Midtown Brews with Meet The Bloggers...

Essential Footing: Our County-Wide Land Bank Initiative @ Insivia

Guest
Jim Rokakis, Cuyahoga County Treasurer [Go]

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Join us for the launch of the Women’s Enterprise Network (WEN) Interactive TV show...

For those of you who have been with us since our first brainstorming conversation you know that WEN engages, empowers and unites women and girls in Northeast Ohio.

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Here are two interesting articles outlining next generation enterprise opportunities focused on the Millennial market, the trend toward higher levels of mobility, and advertising and communication. Don't think in actual terms of "next generation" because the market is already here!

Single agendas have no place in large scale collaborations that engage multi-state agreements and alignment of resources. The cost is high: time investment (just think of calculating one Governor and that Office's staff time, then multiply by eight states), tried patience, and a splintering of camps generating what Jack Ricchiuto calls, "shadow conversations" deteriorating future interest in the next collaboration opportunity. Worse yet, people act as if we have time. What do citizens have to say about this? Is this efficient and productive? What's your take on this?

Essential Footing: Our County-Wide Land Bank With Meet The Bloggers

Conversation topics:

• The County-Wide Land Bank
• Housing Foreclosures
• Vacant Properties

Guests:

Here's a note I just received from Bob Sopko, Strategic Technology Alliance, Case:

Anybody can dream dreams. They don’t deserve big headlines on the front page of our only daily newspaper.

So will the Plain Dealer please stop acting as the public relations outlet of downtown developer  dreams! I know that we all want to hear “good news” about our economic progress. However, “good news” that never seems to materialize is “bad news.”

That's right--the time is upon us, again.  Mark your calendars for June 26th!

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Now that we have $4 a gallon gasoline upon us maybe we should look at what could have been if only…

If only our Regional Transit System had concentrated on being a system that had as its main aim the transit dependent, not to mention our environmental needs.

Here's a press release on Ed Morrison's recent presentation in Illinois:

..." Sunday, May 18, 2008 10:59 PM CDT
Regional networking key to future economy, ECIDC speaker says

By BILL LAIR, Managing Editor
blair [at] jg-tc [dot] com

The challenge for civic leaders today is figuring out how to forecast the future workplace needs of the country.

Ed Morrison, an economic policy adviser for the Purdue center for Regional Development, said people spend too much energy placing blame on economic problems instead of planning for improvements.

Morrison was the featured speaker at the nine-county East Central Illinois Development Corporation’s Annual Dinner and BESI Awards on Thursday in Effingham.

The BESI awards went to Jim Ryan of Marshall, John Inyart of Charleston and to the Journal Gazette/Times-Courier for their achievements in business ethics and social involvement.

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East Cleveland does not have a historical society like Westlake or a popular annual home tour like Ohio City, but it should. So for now, I am founding the online East Cleveland Historical Society on Realneo. Please feel free to join. There is no membership fee. Membership only requires that you share your knowledge and research.