If you are interested in the ruination of a great state........this series might interest you.
I know there are Ohioians on the board............I thought I would post a link to this series
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content...V.html?sid=101
Ohio's cities, as we have historically known them, are dead. Forget the past. Except for Columbus, Ohio's big cities have endured vast population and job losses.
City leaders realize the glory days are not coming back. They are working on strategies to reinvent, transform or do an extreme makeover of thier towns in order to compete in the new global economy.
The Dispatch takes a look at the issues, through the eyes of those living in those cities, at Ohio's urban plight.
On the brink
Can Ohio's big cities be saved?
Sunday, December 2, 2007 3:47 AM
By Mark Niquette, Alan Johnson and Joe Hallett
The pictures are old, faded, black and white.
But the vibrancy of Ohio's once-thriving big cities remains crystal clear. You see it in faces in the crush of people outside W.T. Grant's in downtown Youngstown in 1952, the frenetic shift change at B.F. Goodrich Co. in Akron in the 1940s, a bustling street market in Dayton in 1910.
Most of the stores, factories and people in those photos are long gone, reminders of an era when Ohio's large cities were powerhouses. Their workers helped build America with the steel, cars and tires they made. Their entrepreneurs gave the world powered flight, the automobile self-starter and other inventions.
Today, however, most of Ohio's seven largest cities are teetering.
With the exception of Columbus, they have shed more than one-third of their population and watched as income, home values and other economic indicators dropped below national averages while poverty, job losses, crime and foreclosures skyrocketed.
In the booming 1950s, the state's seven big cities boasted a combined 450,000 manufacturing jobs. Fifty years later, only a third of those jobs remained.
"Our urban core cities are legacy costs of the great industrial age," said state Rep. Larry Wolpert, a Hilliard Republican who led a 2004 study of Ohio's cities.
Some residents who fled the decline and struggling school systems for the suburbs or rapidly growing townships say they don't need Ohio's dying big cities anymore, except for an occasional ball game or museum visit.
But experts warn that Ohio is ignoring the urban plight at its own peril. They say that today's inner-city problems are spreading to the suburbs, as a rotten core eventually makes the whole apple bad.
~much, much more at the link~
Audio on Excessive Government
http://www.dispatch.com/dispatch/con.../katz/gov.html
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content...ies/index.html
Meanwhile, townships have been empowered by the General Assembly, which has granted them more authority to rebuff city annexation attempts, regulate strip clubs and control zoning issues.
"In my opinion, this group has been totally, 100 percent set on destroying central cities in Ohio," Plusquellic charged, referring to legislative Republicans.
State Rep. Kevin DeWine of Fairborn, deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, said the mayors' criticism is unfair in view of the hundreds of millions of dollars lawmakers have allocated for urban projects and schools. High city income taxes and poor schools, not home rule issues, have caused the middle class flight from cities, DeWine said.
"It's the expected response -- blame somebody else for your own problems," DeWine said, referring to the mayors' criticism. "They have only to look in the mirror to find out why their cities are suffering. I'm not going to let somebody blame us for the failing school districts in our urban areas or the high income tax rates that people are trying to get away from."
Findings
Except for Columbus, Ohio's big cities have endured vast population and job losses, but now city leaders realize the glory days aren't coming back.
A key reason the plight of Ohio's major cities can't be ignored: Their problems will continue to spread to the suburbs and beyond.
Cities are adopting unique strategies to reverse years of decline, but they remain hindered by crime and poor-performing school districts.
