Big Bets Transcript

Participants:
Ruth Durack
Director, Kent State University Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative
David Gilbert
President & CEO, Greater Cleveland Sports Commission
Lisa Hong
Vice President, eQuest Inc.
James Levin
Artistic & Executive Director, Cleveland Public Theatre
Eric Von Hendrix
Fund Manager, MWV Pinnacle Capital Fund
Brad Whitehead
Director of Economic Initiatives, The Cleveland Foundation

Moderator:
Joe Frolik
Associate Editor of the Editorial Page, The Plain Dealer

MR. FROLIK: Welcome to our eleventh broadcast in this Quiet Crisis series. When I talked with all of you before the show, one of the themes that sort of emerged in a number of the conversations was that a smart region builds on its strengths, what they are good at. Let me ask each of you, just as sort of an opener here, what are our strengths? What are we good at in this region? What do we have to build on or to capitalize on? Eric, why don't we start with you and go around the table.

MR. VON HENDRIX: Sure. Joe, I think there are a number of things. I think, first off, is, probably will come as somewhat of a surprise is, I think, the extent to which the business community and the philanthropic community has worked well together over the years when there is a crisis. One of the things do you find is that the business, the philanthropic community and even the public community find ways to work together and solve the issue. And as a new comer to this area, that's very, very rare that you see that occur in the ways that you have seen this occur in Cleveland.

As a matter of fact, I think Cleveland and the surrounding area is a very livable city. It's a very family oriented city. We don't sort of highlight that as often as we should, but it is a city in which, you know, from the traffic standpoint, you can get around many areas of the city very easily, the region very easily. I think all of those things are things we should be highlighting and playing a positive aspect to in the city.

MR. FROLIK: Lisa.

MS. HONG: I think we have a very strong philanthropic culture here. We have the foundations which a lot of when you go to some of the new cities, they don't have the infrastructure that we do in terms of civic involvement. Now are we leveraging that civic involvement to its potential is a question. But we have the culture here, which I think is really sort of unusual and a real opportunity for us to be creating some new ideas, new initiatives.

MR. FROLIK: James.

MR. LEVIN: Maybe it's because I'm the token artist, the artist's community is wonderful. And I have lived in Chicago, and San Francisco, and Boston and New York. And I think, per capita, the artist community here is thriving beyond what anyone could imagine given the size of the city.

I think that both, in the performing arts and in the visual arts. We have the two great pillars of art. We have the Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra. Aside from that, we have a terrific grass roots movements across the board in the emerging artists and developed artists and career artists. This is a field that I think really can be developed and built on.

MR. FROLIK: David.

MR. GILBERT: I think the single biggest strength of this community is the people here and the passion the people in this community have for their city. And I really think that's part of the reason that our community has been able to overcome things in the past, and we have the ability to do that again. And certainly, there are industries and other things that we have strengths in. But one thing I think we do have over many other places, most, if not all other places are the people and as Eric said, when the time comes that people not always as we have seen recently, but tend to lay down their swords and words together.

MR. FROLIK: Brad.

MR. WHITEHEAD: Well, I must say that I think we have got an extraordinary abundance of opportunities. From where I sit at the Cleveland Foundation, it feels like it's more opportunity than crisis right now. It's, I think, extraordinary what we have to choose from.

First of all, I think we're the right size. As a 3 million dollars, excuse me, a 3 million population region, that's big enough to be world class but small enough that we can still be neighbors.
We have got an extraordinary legacy of entrepreneurship. You go back less than a hundred years ago, we had more millionaires than New York City and we need to rediscover some of that. So, we've got people that know how to create and we have got a population that can do it. We've got a legacy of internationalization where we have people who come from all parts of the globe. We've got racial diversity, that should be a great strength.

The list goes on and on. You think about the natural resources we have. As Lisa well knows, we live near one of the greatest fresh water bodies on the planet and it's right here at our doorstep. So, I view us as being in a situation of abundance in terms of some of these advantages.

MR. FROLIK: Ruth.

MS. DURACK: I am inevitably, we all talk from the basis of our own experience and concern, but I think one of the greatest strengths is the infrastructure for community engagement and planning which is in place. The city has, I think, at last count, 46 CDCs and community development corporations. They may not all be working as one would hope, but the infrastructure is there for that kind of engagement in grass roots involvement, in planning decisions.

And in addition to that, of course, the physical assets which you mentioned about the lakefront and the river. But I think there's one physical asset that we all tend to pay little attention to, which is the fact that the climate here is almost perfect. Having lived in some places with very difficult extremes. We're somewhere in between Vladivostok and the Deserts of Tucson, which may be significant location here, quite spectacular climatically.

MR. FROLIK: That's enough to say about that. Much of the community's time and attention over the past, over much of this year has been focused on the possibility of whether we would vote this fall on a referendum involving a convention center and a lot of other add-ons and stuff. For a variety of reasons, that's not going to happen.

I want to ask you to through out some ideas, in terms of, are there projects, whether brick and mortar things or initiatives, that you think ought to be on the table for discussion in this community. That could be truly transformational, either from a social or economic or ecological standpoint that would really sort of build on the strengths that we all talked about. Feel free, if anybody wants to jump in and start on that one.

MS. DURACK: Well, I think we've got one of the grandest projects that is, well and truly underway. And maybe, the disappointment is that it's not been talked about more, which is the rebuilding of the schools. This is an extraordinary public work that's happening in Cleveland to the tune of some billion plus dollars of in investment and this is probably the greatest neighborhood opportunity that we have. I think there's sort of some disappointment that that's not turning into a more interesting and engaging conversation about how the schools can become a greater element or center for social change within the neighborhoods, themselves, beyond just being school buildings.

MS. HONG: The schools can also become a wonderful catalyst for demonstrating green building technologies practices. Can we use them as the leverage, a new industry around green building products and services. How many, a billion dollars worth of building is a lot of market push on that end. And if we say as a community we want to demonstrate the greenest and healthiest buildings for our children, we can get a double benefit by saying, okay, what kind of jobs can we create for that particular approach, it's different.

MR. WHITEHEAD: You know, Joe, as I think about that question, I think we need to be keeping in mind at the same time, we need some of these large transformational things to get us going, but we need to be cognizant of the fact, as well that there is going to be no silver bullet to getting our community to the next level. And I know a lot of the conversations that we have at the foundation and others in the community is that we need be working from two directions.

We need some of these big transformational efforts and, boy, there's exciting possibilities in technology, and our international community and around our environment and education and so forth. But at the same time, we need to find some of these large things we can do. We need to unleash a lot of the energy that is in the community more on a bottoms up basis, and to really get the innovative juices of the community going.

And so, we have thought about how do we seed some of the big things, but at the same time, what steps can we take to seed a lot of ideas, and how do we engage the 2.9 million people that call Northeast Ohio home? And what sort of ideas that they have? And so, in one sense, I think one of the big ideas that we like is pursuing the small ideas.

Just last week, we launched something that we call the Civic Innovation Lab, which is an effort to reach out to new voices in the community who might have ideas for economic development and things to get the regional economy going? And saying, come on down. We're here to listen and we'll try to get you connected because we think it's great ideas who are brought forward by passionate people that then get connected with the communities, such as the environment, schools and so forth. That will get us there.

MS. DURACK: Brad, do you think we might be focusing too much on always having a new idea or something new rather than working with the things that are happening and making them more than they are, or sort of really focusing on developing more out of stuff that's going on. I mean, I don't mean to hop on the schools, but there was a great pressure to get that bond issue accepted and the funding from the State, but then it sort of dropped out of conversation and it's not a real focus of thinking differently about how they -- and I suspect as I feel that we tend to be constantly wanting something new to hit the table as the silver bullet.

MR. WHITEHEAD: That's a fair point. I think though, it's incumbent upon us right now. I am not happy, and I don't think anybody is happy with what's going on in the national economy right now and what is going on regionally. So, I think it's incumbent upon us to be pushing against every single thing that is happening, at least having the explicit conversation of is it working, what do we need to change or what do we need be adding to it? So many of the things that we're doing, you're right, it may be double down, stay the course. But that needs to be an explicit conversation and my guess is, and most of the areas in which we're working, we're going to say, look, we need to inject at least new energy if not a new model.

MR. GILBERT: I think to the point of the schools and some of the other things we talked about around the table, we also look, where do we already have stakes in the ground that we can build on? And there are several things that come to mind. Even with the convention center discussion. One of the reasons it was so relevant is because we spent a lot of money, time and energy over the past 15 years developing Cleveland as a regional tourist attraction or regional visitor attraction. With the Rock-N-Roll Hall of Fame, Science Center, the waterfront line and all the sports complexes. So if that's one pieces that's missing, it's one piece that is missing in a larger picture and not developing the whole picture.

A lot of talk of BioTech and technology industry, cities would give their right arms to have the Cleveland Clinic and UH and the innovation that happens there. So instead of having to recreate that, I think it's important, first, we look at where do we have strengths? And there are a lot of them, but it's a case of not spreading the peanut butter too thin, if you will, or you don't taste it. We have to take what resources we have and put in there where we can get the biggest return on the investment.

MR. VON HENDRIX: I think, Ruth, to go down her point a little further. This whole ability with the construction of the school board has a chance to combine both of what David and Brad are saying. You look at having almost 1 billion dollars to build new schools. There hasn't been a discussion that has been about bricks and mortar. We need to build the schools, fix the schools. Instead of looking at it and saying, how can we build schools differently, creatively, add things, maybe there's a medical component to the school systems.

You look at what happened in New York City, where the Gates Foundation gave $51 million to the school system there to create new, unique, innovative schools. There was one focused on theater, there could be one on green building, there could be one on entrepreneurship. From a whole design perspective, from a magnet school perspective, I don't think there's been a lot of time spent saying, how do we design these schools in such a way that, you know, propels Cleveland over the next 20, 30 years because we're teaching the students that are going to eventually become adults and, hopefully, who will be leaders dealing with these issues 20 years down the road. We need to figure out a way to, you know, with this ability, to build the schools, to put in innovative approaches that we're talking about.

MR. FROLIK: James.

MR. LEVIN: One of the great strengths, back to your first question, is Cleveland's neighborhoods and the variety and uniqueness of each of these neighborhoods. I am thinking about your point about selling Cleveland as a convention center. I think it would be great if we were able to sell Cleveland to the 3 million people that are already here. And I'm amazed, frequently amazed at how many people don't come to 65th and Detroit, to my theater. But it's also interesting as to how many people from the West Park area have never been to Little Italy or never been to Shaker Square. And if we could do a little better job of promoting Cleveland's resources and uniqueness of its neighborhoods to Clevelanders, I think it would be a great accomplishment.

MR. WHITEHEAD: It may be one of the themes coming up, is how do we explore more of the inner section that are going on. I welcome reflections from anyone else here, but it strikes me that there's three or four conversations that are going on around town right now. I think there's one conversation which is around through the building blocks and the fundamentals of an economy, which technologies what do with work force and so forth. There's another set of conversations. How do we make this a truly distinctive and vibrant place that is able to attract and retain our young people? There's a third conversation, that is, how do we make this a fair place? How are we connecting with our neighborhoods? How do we make diversity a real source of strength? And then there's a fourth conversation and that's, how should we even make decisions? Whose voices should be heard? And how do we make in an inclusive process and so forth?

And I think what's most fascinating to me, and it's already bubbled up here in the first 3 minutes of our discussion, is we immediately are landing on the intersection of schools and green building, or arts and tourism and so forth. And perhaps, Joe, where the magic is going to come is where we find those intersections and really exploit them to create a magic that can't be replicated anywhere. Because anybody can build, and any city can build a monument or some sort of large physical asset, but what won't be able to be replicated is if we find these intersections and create something that is uniquely Cleveland and Northeast Ohio.

MR. FROLIK: One of the things, you know, it's come up in a number of conversations recently is this whole idea of how you create a sense of place, and I think that goes to what you are talking about there. I mean, do you think that we have a sense of place here, and if so, what is it, or what should it be?

MR. LEVIN: We shouldn't start with the lake. The lake is just a dominant presence geographically in our city and it seems that we almost ghettoize it. You can only get to it through very specific ways. One on Gordon Park on the east side, a little postage stamp of Voinovich Park, Downtown and Edgewater. And it seems it's not easy to get to. And you have, I didn't want to get into this, necessarily, right now, but to me, in anticipation of this meeting, I went to Burke Lakefront today, actually, and I was amazed at the absolute lack of traffic there. There were a couple people inside the airport, somebody was doing a crossword puzzle, somebody was on the their cell phone. They have a great museum, by the way, of women aviators. So, if you haven't seen that, you should check that out, it's a real gem.

But anyway, the fact, you have this vast space that's dedicated to a few corporate airplanes and occasional celebrity that bops into town, where we have another local airport that can serve this need. Basically, that eats up that huge acreage, is outrageous, really. That could be such a presence of the city and it could be something that really brings the people in. If we were able to build a residential area on the south end of Burke Lakefront and we had this great green space for a park, or beach, and eateries, and entertainment and culture.

MS. DURACK: Maybe taking over Burke Lakefront Airport right now is, sort of, premature right now, in where the city is not ready for it. But, I think, though, that there's ways that we can make use of pieces on the waterfront like the port operation and the airport operation. If we thought about how people could go down there and sort of understand them and enjoy them. I mean, I know people who love to sit and watch planes. And if there was great place to go and sort of watch the -- .

MR. LEVIN: Hopkins.

MS. DURACK: That's true, but the airport is a bit of a land holding strategy until we actually need the property. Right now, I'm not sure that we particularly need it. But I get frustrated by this constant debate about getting rid of the port so that we can have public access. Why can't you have public access with a port? The little city of Perth, Western Australia, for example, just completed a port master plan, and it's all about public access so that you can go down there and watch sheep coming off the boats and eat your fish and chips while you see steel arriving or leaving or going to Japan or whatever it is.

It's about public education of what the port does for the economy of the city, and it's fascinating stuff. I remember when I was a kid, sort of sitting down there on the dock on Sundays, watching the ships come and go. And it was the most exciting part of an extraordinary waterfront.

MR. LEVIN: I certainly don't suggest cutting out the port activity, but I don't think we need a huge cement factory on the mouth of the river. I don't think we need the vast acreage of salt mines that are half used at this time. Nor like, 25, how many acres is Burke Lakefront, somebody must know here, hundreds of acres for the few millionaires that are dropping in from TRW or they're not even dropping in anymore, they go to Chicago.

MR. GILBERT: I think, when you get back to what you are asking, about a sense of place, and I do agree, I think, I'm a big proponent of the lakefront development and Downtown. But we are that gritty blue collar type of city. We are a city of immense ethnic diversity. It's the kind of diversity where you still have pockets, you still have pockets of people who speak their native languages and go to their native churches. It's great. It's not homogenous like a lot of the new cities that you find.

To me, when I think a sense of place, that's what I think is the personality of it. I will add though, I do believe that Downtown is an enormous part of a sense of place. Because, when people think of Cleveland from the outside, they do think of, you still need a central core that has a personality. And so, I think a combination of the right image of your downtown area, which includes access to the water and other things, but I also think we can't take away what's been our past and what has defined us so far.

MR. FROLIK: David, were you involved with Northcoast Harbor in the early days, in the early '90s and stuff. You have had some ideas in terms of what you can maybe do to make that a place more people would want to come and use, and how do you make it more the, I hate to use the term attraction, a destination where people say, let's go down to the lakefront because there's something that might be, there might be something to do there.

MR. GILBERT: It's very true. We did, we being the community, did a nice job of building an area where you can have access. As you said, it's a postage stamp size now, but it's a footprint there and you have two big attractions down there, the Rock Hall and Science Center. But the fact is, you're very cutoff by railroad tracks, by a freeway. The one thing you don't have, if you look at real significant waterfronts that attract people in the country, places like Baltimore, places like, Navy Pier, the one thing that they have is constant activity. And right now, people go to, they don't go to the lakefront, they go to the Rock Hall or Science Center and then they get in their car and leave to go whereever they're going. If they are in a car, chances are they're not going to drive somewhere else Downtown and go to eat, they're going to go back where they came from. You put in the big investment down there, in the big museums and the big boxes, it doesn't take a lot. If you look at those other place, it doesn't take a lot to add the things that make it a real destination.

The idea that Cleveland Tomorrow had of the carousel, which ties back to Euclid Beach and the heritage, ongoing arts entertainment and street level entertainment and kiosks down there with food. There are things that can be done programmatically, for not a tremendous amount of money, that can really make a difference. We should have people driving in from Pittsburgh to spend a day at our lakefront, not going to the Rock Hall for 3 or 4 hours and going because there's nothing else for them to do.

MR. WHITEHEAD: Dave, I think this gets back to the idea, you do these transformational plays, where you alter the lakefront, or you build a Euclid Corridor or you build up a University Circle and then you do all this filling in and innovation and excitement around it.
I had a chance, Saturday, was wandering around University Circle, and, of course, was staggered by the new botanical garden and it was a lovely day in front of the art museum and that physical infrastructure was stunning. But what was really exciting was the percussion group that was in from Oberlin. And there was artists who had set up an easels outside the lagoon and it just had a wonderful feel to it. It felt like I was really someplace and I remember reflecting with my children, saying, you know, this is a great tourist town, we should come here on vacation.
But it was not just those buildings, but it was all the activity, the art and so forth. And I hope we don't ever loose sight of that.

MS. HONG: What I worry a little bit about is Disneyfying our waterfront. I hate to see it become just attractions because, if you think about the cities you want to go visit, there are a lot of places, I think they're the smaller subtle things where it's serendipitous that you might happen to stumble upon something that is not planned out. And I think we need to allow for that kind of creativity or.

MS. DURACK: Does the skateboard park start to do that?

MS. HONG: The other part of, in terms of our place infrastructure, that we haven't mentioned, is the Metroparks area. The county has a wonderful green space plan that they're looking to connect to all of the parks that are disconnected now, right into the neighborhoods and that's not a huge expense either. But what can that do for each neighborhood and can it help catalyze further development. I think that can be very transformational, not only connecting the neighborhoods but you start really connecting all of the green space around and that is very unique to this place.

MR. FROLIK: How does the green space, how does that, talk a little bit about, how you think that connects to economic development and to growing the area.

MS. HONG: Well, for example, I think it was by the Mill Creek Project, there was the park restoration and I believe it really catalyzed a lot of housing development, residential development. It catalyzes a lot more neighborhood pride and just getting out into the community walking the park, et cetera.

MS. DURACK: It's about building the quality of life, which makes it an attractive place to locate. If you look at -- this may be one of the only advantages of being in a shrinking situation, the shrinking city phenomenon, I think it's important to try and find opportunities that might provide. If you look at a map of Cleveland's vacant land, it's sort of scattering of black spots, particularly on the east side. But there's a huge amount of vacant property, right now, in Cleveland. It's just not contiguous nor where you particularly want it to be.

But now is the possibility of perhaps, affecting some dramatic land swaps, exchanges of ownership to put that vacancy where you want it and restructure the whole green space network and definition of neighborhoods in Cleveland that might allow the reopening of streams that have been culverted, sort of a remaking of the natural drainage patterns that have been destroyed over time. It's a matter of shifting around the vacancy to put it where you want it to be. But I think, the sort of wonderful opportunity of being in a shrinking mode is this is --.

MR. WHITEHEAD: Ruth, I couldn't agree more with that. That may be one of the silver linings of what has been a tough situation is that we do have the time to think about what we want success to look like as success comes. And I sometimes worry we'll fall into the mindset that, look, we have got to do anything we can, and at any price. We'll do anything as opposed to saying, just as you have said, this is the chance to picture what greatness will be and what a new future is and to think that through.

MS. DURACK: There's an awful lot going on that contributes to that, or will allow it to happen. For example, the Mayor has set this immensely aggressive housing building program of 1500 units a year, which is a wonderful goal, but it's so aggressive that it's sort of, there's a great hurry to build them wherever you can find a piece of land, sort of get them going, as opposed to planning that in a really deliberate way, to create a critical mass in locations that is not just to change the face of the neighborhoods, rather than scatter individual tax credit houses around.

MR. FROLIK: Eric, you working with Shore Bank, you worked with some of the lowest income neighborhoods in the city. How might that relate? What's the opportunity there, perhaps for some kind of public investment as well as, then, to encourage private investment to do the kind of things Ruth is talking about.

MR. VON HENDRIX: I think Ruth makes very good points. I think that there has been this mad dash to just build housing and to take every vacant piece of land and turn it into something housing relate without having a coordinated plan. I think there needs to be more of that going on. There's, you know, talk about, you know, we need more supermarkets in inner cities. I agree. In my prior life, you know, I contributed to a fund that did just that.

But you also have to look at the changing demographics and economics and see if that makes sense. I think quality of life is important. I think, when people have choice of where they are going to go to live and they come to a new city, they are going to look at these things. You know, how is the school, where are there parks to take my children to or just to walk the dog, and I think there has to be a plan thought about that. Or even an improvement of the existing parks that we have in the city. We have some great parks in the city and around the city, and there's got to be a lot more thought process and focus on how do we keep those parks improved because that is an issue when you are trying attract people to a city. It's not just about where the jobs are, it's also about the quality of life. And I think, that's one of the things, I would say, we haven't seen here, is, I would say a coordinated plan within the communities to figure out what makes sense and this particular neighborhood versus another neighborhood.

MS. DURACK: Which is actually one of the inside out characteristics of the new economy; right? The jobs go where the people are rather than people moving to where the jobs are. So, our goal should be to create a location that attracts people.

MR. GILBERT: Ruth and I talk about quality of life and there are companies here that, while we have seen some leave, there are companies who haven't left because it's a good quality of life for their employees and that is what's keeping them here. A company like an IMG, biggest sports manufacturing company in the world, almost none of their business is in Cleveland, it's in New York, London and all over the world but they stay here because it's good for their people and it's a good place for their top people to stay and live, and we that's one of the things that, again, we're that stake in the ground. There's so many things, whether it's arts, parks, so many things that we have that other communities envy. And it, to me, it certainly does tie into economic development.

MR. LEVIN: I do sense an urgency that maybe you don't feel. Maybe it's because of my own myopic view of the world. As an artist living in Cleveland, I'm very aware of the talent drain and certainly Cleveland is drawing some artists, I suppose, hypothetically at least. But every week, every month there's more people, both in the marketing and administrative end, and the performing end, and directing and designing end that just believe that the options here, in terms of making a livelihood as an artist, are not there.

And one of the great infrastructural things that we can do, in the bigger picture of course, is an arts council, which can be one of the barnacles on the convention center. But this is something that Cleveland does not have that every other mid-size city, much smaller ones than Cleveland. Dayton, Toledo, Erie, Pennsylvania has an arts council and we don't. And we need some way to kind of stabilize the existing, smaller and grass roots arts community. The mid-size organizations and really the larger ones could probably benefit as well. I think this is something that really needs to be addressed.

MR. VON HENDRIX: Brad brought up the Civic Innovation Lab that the Cleveland Foundation recently launched, and I sat in on the committee that was putting that together, Brad should talk a little bit more about that. I think that program is trying to do some of the things which you just mentioned. If we're missing something, like an arts council, we need a champion to really find a way to bring that about.

MR. LEVIN: Tom Shorgl has been a champion for four years and has gotten quite a bit of publicity and coverage.

MR. VON HENDRIX: We may need to come at it a different way. It may be that, all too often we look at it in one direction, there's many roads that lead to the center of a city. And so, if one is not working, we need to come up with a creative way, different way to do it. I think the innovation lab provides an opportunity for, lack of a better word, ordinary people, to come together and say, I have a good idea how to make this city better. It may be just a small little thing, but it makes the city better, and, I think, Brad also mentioned, there's no silver bullets here.

You know, it's not one big thing that is going to transform the city, it's a series of coordinated little things that bring the city to an even greater state than it is. I think we all to often are only focusing on one thing. It's got to be a convention center, or Gateway or this. I think it has to be all of those things, but I think it's a series of other little things also, that has to do that, such as urban design, such as theater. We need to find ways that have champions to be heard to make that work in a coordinated fashion. I think the real issue is coordination.

MR. FROLIK: How would an arts council work? What would be, in your mind, what would be the role of that and why would that be, why is that so needed by the various, because some people also say, we have got a billion dollars plus arts community, it's already quite vigorous and large. What would a council, in your mind, how would that be different? What would it do differently?

MR. LEVIN: A council would be able to generate, and I'm assuming that the council would have somewhere from four to ten million dollars, compared to other cities of our size, to spend. And these funds could be spent on cultural tourism, spent on creating an arts festival that the city so badly needs.

Look at the River Arts Festival of Pittsburgh, and we have a much greater arts community than Pittsburgh and we don't really show it. I think it would really benefit the tourist industry as well as the arts community. An arts council could generate and coordinate programs between individual artists and the schools that you are talking about. The cultural arts, the schools are so bereaved, right now, of cultural arts programming, it's pitiful in the public schools. I'm aware of this because I live in Cleveland and explored those possibilities.

There's so many artists right now, if they were to be funded with a residency in a school for a semester or for a year, could share their wealth of knowledge and skills with kids that would become arts appreciators, or artist or craftsmen themselves. An arts council would also fund, give operating support, which is virtually impossible to get. An arts council could oversee the creation of special projects that otherwise wouldn't be able to get funding because they're too innovative, because of the scale. An arts council could coordinate activity between ecological and green initiatives in theatre. There's a whole laundry list of things that could be done and should be done by an arts council in this town. And no offense to the sports community, but the arts generates twice the amount of economic activity than sports does.

MR. WHITEHEAD: The intersection is going to come when we get the arts pulled into Dave's 2004 children's games and it's not sports versus arts at all.

MR. GILBERT: We're not about Cavs, Indians, Browns, it's national events. But what's interesting, in a lot of things we talked about is how do you maximize the impact of what one organization is doing. And maybe this is a small example, but when Brad mentioned this, we have an international event, the International Children's Games coming next summer, the largest international multi-sport youth games in the world. It will be first time ever in the U.S. It's a U.S. Or International Olympic Committee event, and this will be definitely the biggest international gathering in the City's history.

But the sports are next to nothing in terms of what's being built out of it. It's maximizing the impact of this huge international gathering and we're tying in the arts community. We're actually hosting a big Downtown International Cultural Festival as part of it and tying in the business community, and companies are doing international business and trying to connect business to business opportunities around the world. I think more of that needs to take place where, when something is happening, the mind-set is taken that, how can we use it. Maybe there aren't opportunities with a lot of things, but many times there are. How can we use it to forward other community agendas without adding a lot of additional cost or work? It's bringing -- a lot of times what people need is a deadline, it's something exciting to rally around and people are thrilled to get on board.

We have a group now, a whole technology group Brad and I were talking about that is creating a technology conference around the children's games. They are not connected with us, but they are doing all the work and they want to bring in companies from around the country to showcase the latest innovation for kids, and to me, that is the beauty of maximizing the impact, and it doesn't minimize the arts. It doesn't minimize sports, but it is about all those intersections.

MS. HONG: How do we systemically help create those intersections rather than stumbling upon them? It seems like there needs to be some sort of clearing house about what is really going on in this area, what are the major issues so we can have a place to go to see where are the overlaps and to shorten the lead time for people to plug into different activities. There's -- can we have a community portal, some sort of community knowledge management piece.

MR. FROLIK: One term that I think you used when I talked to you and maybe David and one or two other people, that we have silos in this community and the silos, unlike a Venn diagram, often don't seem to overlap with one another. Can anyone expand a little on that concept and what do you do? How do we build the Venn diagram?

MR. WHITEHEAD: I will say that when we think about something like land use planning and we were talking before about the pre-meditated and thoughtful use of the land and I think we all feel urgency, but you can see how you want to have this clear plan on where you are going.

I think for a lot of the other aspects of economic development, if we think we're going to come up with the plan that will stand for time and is not adaptive to changing circumstances, that's probably a false dream. So I don't think anybody is saying what we need to do is take a time out and come up with, quote, unquote, the plan for northeast Ohio. There's just too much uncertainty about where things are going.

Technologies are going too fast. We have too many opportunities to think that there's any magical entity, person, portal or whatever that can sit down and plan this all out. In fact, building on Eric's point, in other words, if the arts council didn't work one way, it may meet another way. I think what we need is a little bit of I don't know if it's controlled chaos or what, but it is banging around ideas among the different groups and seeing if we can find a way to get consensus around some good and sometimes big ideas in which there is sufficient mass in the community that collectively says, this is a good idea and it represents a diverse group of interests and we get momentum and launch it as it's ready to go as opposed to thinking of some sort of static process where we'll be able to solve it once and for all.

MR. VON HENDRIX: That's absolutely true. Economic development is always changing. You can't put together a plan for the next ten years to design economic development. Life will pass you by. Economic development will pass you by to do that. I think one of the things that is a little bit frustrating in the City, there's always a need to sit down and plan and figure everything out. Sometimes you've just got to try an idea, just do it, and if it doesn't work, you learn from it and you move on from there.
We spend so much time talking about, well, will it work, will it work, will it work. You see many of the inventors over time just did it. They said, let's see what happens, and inventions have been made out of mistakes, and I think instead of trying to come up with a master plan or making sure it's vented through all the processing, let's just come up with an idea that's fairly well thought out and then go try it and see what happens. And if it doesn't work, see what you learn from that and move on from there.

MS. DURACK: With plenty of room for opportunism, things that are unexpected that offer opportunities that couldn't possibly plan for.

And, Lisa, your idea about the portal, correct me, Brad, if I'm wrong, but I think the foundations play that role pretty effectively right now, sort of the applications and ideas that they hear kind of put them in a position to be able to put things together that seem to make sense or, you know, downplaying things that may be repetitive of what someone else is doing.

Is that what you see, that as a value?

MR. WHITEHEAD: I think we're one of the voices in the community and when we're at our best is when we're really listening hard to what the whole community is saying. And perhaps one of the advantages we do have in the foundation world is we get to see and hear a lot of different ideas, so I guess in one sense, there is that role, but we are just one of the voices here. We have our public sector leaders. We have artistic leaders and so forth, and that's why I think maybe we can help convene sometimes around this, but what we can't be is in a position of saying we will be the decision makers in terms of community priorities.

So I guess we're at our best when we are helping convene and listening hard and bringing in the full voices of the community around some of this stuff.

MS. DURACK: I think that convening function might be at the core of it, and what's really what we're talking about is a lot of sort of different people coming at problems from different points of view, whether it's sports or the arts or whatever, and providing a forum or occasion for those people to talk to each other and start developing coordinated approaches might be one of the most powerful things that we can --.

MR. LEVIN: I'm sorry. Brad, you were talking about the intersections before, and based on what Dave was saying with this incredible festival that is coming when is it?

MR. GILBERT: Next summer, end of July.

MR. LEVIN: So if there were an arts council, for example, an arts council would maybe issue a communication to all the arts community letting them know that this is going to be happening, where it's going to happen, what time it's going to happen and then we could begin thinking and planning how to include that in our programming and maybe we could create some outdoor events in Voinovich Park or Public Square in collaboration with each other, perhaps, and maybe we can make arrangements to have some things that are in our own neighborhoods and develop a relationship with the trollies and other transport to get the people from the festival to our neighborhoods and then back again. Maybe you can participate in promoting that.

But it's really just, you know, informing people about this and giving us the time to cultivate the ideas where we can work in coherence with that.

MR. GILBERT: I think it's also incumbent upon individual leaders to make sure that they are looking outside their own blinders. It's important for people to concentrate on what they are working on but to be well read, to be well connected, to spend some time knowing what else is going on to spur ideas, because I think it helps every initiative to be able to think how it might be able to connect with other initiatives and make one plus one equal three because you have the right synergy between two things going on.

MS. HONG: I do think we can improve the information flow infrastructure in this town to make, though, this happen on a regular basis, not just your conversation.

MR. LEVIN: We can meet your law.

MR. FROLIK: Lisa, I think one of the things you did for the Cleveland Foundation a couple years ago was to look at successful regions and some of the things that they did. Can you talk about what some of your findings? Were there other ideas there or things that we should emulate or just flat out steal.

MS. HONG: Yeah. We don't really have to re-invent the wheel, but one of the things that really came up very strongly in a lot of the areas that I think are adaptive and agile was a sense of collaboration and an infrastructure for collaboration and even training, training leaders on how to collaborate, because we think, oh, let's just collaborate, but how do we do that. There's certain rules of that game that are different than the one we play now or that we played in the past.

The other -- what was the second one? Collaboration and -- I lost that one.

MR. FROLIK: How do you get better --.

MS. HONG: Visioning. The community visioning process is asking what the community wants. There's a lot of energy out there around people who, you know, they go to their jobs, they have great skills, they're making this place their home and how can they get involved. And I think they're willing to contribute, but is there a way for us, as a community, to ask each other, what is it we really want to drive towards together and then what are we each willing to contribute and take responsibility for, because we are here.

It's not up to, necessarily, the Mayor to create our vision for us. She's created the environment for collaboration or the initiative, so maybe it's incumbent upon us to take initiative to say this is our vision. But it's a process that a lot of the communities have done to create their community vision, and it's not a plan that sets things in stone. It's something to shoot for, then each person in each group can have their part in reaching their vision.

So it's very energizing and catalyzing, but we don't have -- I don't know what folks would say this region is really about and we would all sort of agree on.

MR. FROLIK: How would you do that sort of thing, because I do think one of the problems with the convention center and the other things that were associated with it was a sense of people trying to figure out why they should have buy into this, whether it was really relevant to them or not to them, some people -- like if you could look at almost the four piles that we were talking about at the end or the four pockets of the idea. How should a community decide what it wants to do, where the vision comes from?

MS. DURACK: This is sort of immediately into our work. I think there's a definite challenge to designers to think more creatively about how to engage people actively in the decision-making process. There's information, and we all do that pretty much as a matter of course now when you have and hold public meetings and tell people what is being planned and ask for their comments. But that is not active engagement in the decision making, and a lot of the reason that active engagement doesn't occur I think is because designers are not very skilled at being able to outline the consequences of different decisions and really give people an opportunity to make choices before those decisions have been made.

And we need to not just show drawings of different alternatives and say which one do you like but explain the impacts of those alternatives and what the costs and benefits are of each of them in a much more comprehensive way that really gives people an opportunity to weigh in in an informed way, not just I like the colors on this one and that one is not drawn so well, which tends to be the problem.

In the convention center debate, for example, the public meetings that I went to, the attitude of the lay audience was very colored by who had spent most on the rendering and who prepared the prettiest picture, and, obviously, the most compelling with very little substance beneath those renderings that really helped the audience to understand the impact of the different sides.

Sorry, Brad.

MR. WHITEHEAD: I do think to the point Lisa was making about the need for visioning, we have such a marvelous legacy of public/private partnership in getting things done over the past two, three, four and arguably ten decades that there is some reluctance in the community to take a, quote, unquote, time-out to do the visioning because nobody wants to stop some of the good things that are going on, and as you look around the U.S., and Lisa can speak to this more knowledgably than I can, a lot of the visioning exercises in other regions, it really is starting from a white sheet of paper, the blank flip chart, and that's not where we are.

There are many aspects of our regional strategies that are in focus today and they ought to be going. We shouldn't be revisiting whether or not to do something with the lakefront or the Cuyahoga River, so it's not a very useful visioning exercise to ask that question. And I think that's caused us to back away from the exercise with the fear that we're going to put good things on hold or slow down things underway. And I think the approach and the process that we need to find is a visioning exercise that allows us to find those things that are in focus to keep going on while we explore what some of the other areas are.

And I don't think it's either useful or probably helpful for us to get into a big convention center discussion, I think, here in this session, but I think the discussion we need to have around vision is what are the buckets or arenas of activities that are a priority. Is it arts? Is it sustainability? Is it environmental sustainability or the intersection between those? And before we can come up with that sense of vision, that's where this exploration period needs to go on in a lot of the communities.

And you're right, it's not just showing three renderings of here's region today, here's region tomorrow, but to bump together and see what those are, and that make take awhile to get sorted out.

MS. DURACK: It's also more complicated than asking the question is it arts, is it the environment. It's all those things, and we have to bring it down to a practical sort of immediate sort of how do you prioritize the spending of some amount of money or whatever so that people are focusing on sort of real choices rather than the kind of motherhood and apple pie conversation of do we care about the arts, do we care about the environment.

Like you said, I think those kinds of principles or philosophies seem to be already in place. Now let's get on with the sort of more immediate concerns about establishing an arts council. Should that be done at the expense of, say, something that Lisa might be working on in the environmental council. Let's sort of look at the costs and benefits of those different things and start making decisions based on real analysis of priorities and outcomes.

MR. LEVIN: There's still the perception that, going back to the convention center, that whole process was maintained by a very select few people with Cleveland Tomorrow -- is that what it's called -- or NeoCleveland or whatever it's called now, and I think the rest of the community felt very much shut out of it. I know the arts community, for example, which had been talked about as an add-on to that wasn't ever at that table.

CDCs, which you mentioned before, Ruth, which are, I agree, such a strength in this community were also kept out of that. It seems that we could learn from that decision process and what might be its failure and try to figure out some kind of planning board that does include east and west and suburb and demonstrative economically, arts and environmental people and help economic initiatives. It wouldn't be that hard to put a task force together like that, I think.

MR. FROLIK: After you sort of figure out the broad goals, where does sort of pull the trigger come from? Could that be from political leadership? Is that through a sort of here's an idea, we'll put it before you in November and see what you think about it? How do you decide particularly on whether it's a major issue? Where does that come from? Where does that -- where is the leadership or the decision, ultimate decision making?

MR. WHITEHEAD: I do know that if we get caught up in conversations about whose turf and whose accountability it is, we're lost. And, by the way, that's not a shot at any sector. This can be if one nonprofit stakes out some territory and says, we can do this and forget the other non-profits or one sector says that or if the business community says we have -- the large business community says we don't need the small business community.
Hopefully, turfism is dead, and so my view, I guess, to answer your question, Joe, is, as we see an area -- let's pick an area we haven't touched on here. What could be a bigger area than manufacturing. How are we going to answer the challenge laid at our doorstep by China? 15 percent of our manufacturing jobs gone in the last two years. What ought we to do? My guess is we could poll pretty much any community and they would say, you know, we need a response on manufacturing. The question is, what do we do and how do we pull the trigger.

I think the answer isn't to just say this organization or that political leader or this university needs to write the plan. This is one where we invite the groups to come together and say what is this road map and then there's probably got a piece of it at the end, this is the federal piece, this is the state piece, this is the regional piece, this is the philanthropic piece, this is the private sector piece. We need the universities to do this, and the who does it, I don't know. If we're working well and the best performing organizations in the world can find their way to those answers through --.

MR. LEVIN: Consensus.

MR. WHITEHEAD: -- consensus. That's not to say there's not a champion who may be pulling it together, but that's a Champion who has shown the energy and the passion and has invested with the others as opposed to somebody who naturally inherits the title of being the purveyor of getting to do this. So I don't think there's a title that somebody says, I get to be Miss manufacturing, Mr. Manufacturing. We come together and that champion, we'll find that champion through the course of those conversations and sorting out what to do.

MR. GILBERT: Yet your question, Joe, with who is it, especially with a significant project and in a lot of cases with a small project is the right combination of people throughout all the sectors. To me, with any organization, the greatest ability to get things done is who can bring the right people around the right table at the right time for the right cause, and if you do that, you can accomplish so much, but you have to get -- Brad was talking about from top down and from bottom up. You have to get the buy-in and enthusiasm and excitement from a whole host of people at a cross-section of levels of their ability to contribute.

And I think sometimes in this town we have too many tables and that can be one of the problems, but it is, I think, for any one of these, one of the most skillful things that can be done is finding out who ought to be at the table. But the difficulty is oftentimes people won't sit at the same table with one another, and if we don't get past that at times, things get paralyzed and you are going to get nothing done.

MS. HONG: I think that lends itself well to what Ruth was asking Brad, if the foundation could play a convening role or somebody in town really is charged with that neutral ground that brings not only --.

MR. GILBERT: The Switzerland.

MS. HONG: Right. But the regular suspects, but it's like the creativity and innovation comes when those unusual conversations happen between maybe arts and business or sports and environment. You know, get them all to the table and see what comes out of that. And I think Brad was right that the champions start to bubble up as the plan develops and people start getting excited about it.

MR. FROLIK: One point that Brad brought out early on that I thought was interesting in terms of strengths is that both the, perhaps, internationalism, because we have lots of different ethnic groups, over 100 plus represented in Cleveland, but also diversity and how you make diversity a strength, something that you really build a core that you can build other things on.

Let's start maybe with -- let's do maybe diversity first and stuff. I mean, how do you -- Eric, you are putting together a venture fund that is going to be targeting minority enterprises and stuff. How do you make this a place where -- and that's one of the fastest growing segments in the economy. How do you make this a center for that kind of activity to take place and how do you maybe plug in those other strengths that we have got.

MR. VON HENDRIX: I think the venture fund is one example, and Brad and I have had these conversations. We talk about the shrinking population and the changing demographics and you hear people talking about Cleveland is not an attractive place for individuals to come, and there's been articles about immigrants and the rest of it. But, you know, you have to focus on the fact that Cleveland is still over 50 percent African-American, for example, and you have to make it an attractive place to attract young African-American entrepreneurs to want to come. And if you don't do that, how do you expect anyone else to come or want to come to the City. I think you have to have those mechanisms in place. I think the venture fund is one example.

I think you look at the recent Ohio Classic that by happenstance -- there was no planning. By happenstance, the NFL schedule conflicted with when the Ohio Classic, which is traditionally in Cincinnati or has been in Cincinnati was held, they put it together in less than six months. There wasn't a lot of advertising publicity about it. It drew over 40,000 fans and had a week long of different events. They said almost every hotel in the city was booked up, and, you know, there hasn't been a lot of talk about it. How do you make that permanent? Why aren't we talking more about that that should be a permanent place given what lack of planning produced in a week's time.

You had the schools come together where I believe Barbara Byrd-Bennett purchased on behalf of the City 300 seats so local students could come see the black college experience. You had a lot of people come together at the last minute to produce something that was successful for the City that, in effect, was a diversity program. The problem was, there wasn't enough -- it was only geared towards or it was only perceived as being something that was, you know, would only have been fun for African-Americans when it was a great, great program. It was a really great program.

And again, it was sort of that lack of planning, bringing all the leaders or people together, but you had some champions, as Brad says, and I think what it really comes down to is the champions. I think the whole issue of diversity is the fact we need to find more mechanisms in which to attract diversity type events and issues to the City and celebrate that, not just say, oh, we're going to have this event to satisfy this group and this event to satisfy that group but to say, here's a great event that is because of this type of populus that we have in the city that is beneficial to the city and let's celebrate that and publicize that and attract more individuals to it because that was a great event that produced economically for the city.

MR. GILBERT: And beyond just an event, what was great about that was you had the job fairs, you had music. It was not about the game. It was about everything else.

MR. VON HENDRIX: You're absolutely right. And again, you look at the fact that this was not done with a lot of planning. It was done because there was some champions that came together and said, wow, let's find a way to make this happen and keep it in the state of Ohio. It wasn't about taking it from Cincinnati. It was about saying this is a great event. Let's find a way to keep it, and low and behold, it broke all attendance records for the state and did things about job fairs and talked about educational fairs, about kids going to college and, you know, the fun aspect of college besides just going to learn something but the whole idea of drum lines and the other things that went on in fraternities and sororities.
I mean, it was a phenomenal event, but it was celebrating universities, you know, we focused on black colleges and we need to do more about that. We need to find ways to really highlight that beyond it just being an ethnic event. It's a great event.

MR. WHITEHEAD: I think one thing Eric is pointing to is I think it's clear that being sensitive to the diversity issues is the right thing to do, but where Eric is going with this, at least as I hear it, is it's also potentially a real source of competitive strength for the region. And, Joe, when you formulated the question, under your breath at the end you said, yes, and minority-based purchasing practices is one of the fastest growing segments in the U.S. Economy.
I don't know the growth rates. I think they're double digits. It may be upwards toward 20 percent of the year of minority -directed purchasing programs. Well, what would happen if we became a national center for knowing how to do that well? I think what Eric and the pinnacle fund are doing with the private equity opportunities here is one step. I don't think we know all the pieces and parts yet, but what we're pretty clear on is there's a big opportunity in there and maybe it's going to require experimentation with a lot of different things before we find the handful that will really make a difference.

Clearly education is one venture capital, as you talked about, is another and I'm sure there's three or four here that are clear to us, but, hopefully, what we start recognizing is this isn't just the right thing to do because it's the right thing to do, but this is also a big opportunity.

MR. VON HENDRIX: And it's not a single building. It's not about one thing. It's a series of activities that must occur across the spectrum. But, obviously, for Cleveland, if you don't find a way to engage the minority community, then you are not going to be successful. End of story.

I don't care what you want to focus on. You can't leave that, you know, populous out of the mix. They have to be part of it. You have to find a way, whether it's urban design, whether it's sustainability, arts, all of that has to come together and be a part of it. And it does drive economics, you know, and it does drive quality of life. You know, all of those things come together and we need to focus more on doing that.

I think, again, you're absolutely right. One of the attractive things about Cleveland is it has diverse communities. I'm not sure we do a good job of celebrating those diverse communities and bringing it together like other cities where they have a special day, whether it's a German day or Italian day or African-American day and they do it at a lakefront or a different area so it brings it together and people sort of get to know and sort of say, it's very interesting or, wow, I'd like that type of food, you know, all those things and expose the opportunities, and we don't do enough of that. Or if we do do it, we're not advertising it enough so that people know or are finding creative ways to convince people to partake in that versus saying, that's the Italian day, I don't need to go, I'm not Italian or that's African-American day, I don't need to go. We have to find better ways of bringing that together.

MS. DURACK: And do it outside of Cleveland. We shouldn't market in Cleveland and eastern Europe alone. We should check on the area and whatever population is here. There's a lot of immigrants.

MS. HONG: And I think there's a way to, also, and I think this is -- I have heard that this is starting to happen a little bit more but to leverage the ethnic communities for export potential. I mean, it's all about relationships in terms of getting businesses going, trying to attract new businesses here. We have so many ethnic groups here. Can we really leverage them.

I was involved in starting up a young Asian group called Motivations and they really started because a lot of people saw their friends leaving because they didn't see anything here in Cleveland, so they wanted to create more of an environment to keep young Asians here to make it have our culture impact this area and help contribute to the vitality here, and I think there's a lot of different ways that that could impact.

MR. FROLIK: If you marketed both the ethnic and racial diversity, the many things that are here, I think you might go a long way in changing the image of Cleveland perhaps as an insular type of place and then also people start to think here, maybe we are different than we thought and that opens other possibilities or gets the wheels of, hopefully, invasion spinning.

MR. LEVIN: I was in Milwaukee this summer and they have a very long beautiful lakefront that is developed with park and beach and museum and at the end of it they have one area that they lease out every weekend for a big festival and it's booked far in advance. So one weekend might be an Asian festival then a Latino festival and an African-American festival and a gay/lesbian festival, and I was asking people about it and every one of them is very, very well attended and not by just that constituency.

And it's right square in the middle -- well, it's actually at the end of the park. It's very walkable from downtown. It's very walkable from many residential areas, and I think about in Cleveland, you have the Hispanic festival that just moved south of Marginal. That could easily move to the lakefront, and you have the American Indian Educational Center which has an annual pow-wow at Edgewater which is very well attended.

So we have the building blocks of that already and I think if we are able to focus on it a little bit more, we can make it maybe an every weekend kind of thing. If everybody knew that there was some kind of big festival and it didn't even matter which one it was because this is when I was going to go to the Rock Hall, also. As long as I'm there, we can go check this out. I think it's the multiple destination aspect that can really create a lot of synergy.

MR. FROLIK: Sort of on the stakes from the ground idea that Dave talked about early on, you have got it, you may as well let people know that it's here and how do you use it better.

MR. WHITEHEAD: I think one of the things that we've talked about, not even a big idea, but ideas we can pursue is there's a lot of hand wringing over downtown occupancy rates of some of our commercial buildings. Well, if you think about it, what if we take some of that space, get it together and create an international business center and this becomes the front door to the international community that these companies can come, set up shop here in northeast Ohio -- by the way, we're more proximate to more of North America within a 500 mile radius than any other place in the country, and so we are a natural Gateway to North America, to the rest of the world.

And put a stake in the ground. Can we, by, you name the date, six months from today, one year from today, have an international business center that can be the place where international companies, entrepreneurial or established come and then can we, as ethnic communities in and around northeast Ohio, make sure that people feel welcome coming here to do business so that they know that this isn't an insular community, as you were saying, Joe, and that this is a place where they want to raise their children and feel at home and there is a festival that you can go to and speak your language and things of that sort. That's just an opportunity begging to happen.

MR. GILBERT: One of the things we found with these children's games is we brought together leaders of about 50 different nationalities. They're all getting behind inviting cities from where they come from. They're itching to do things. They just want and love these games because they said there is a reason to reach out. They look for that.

So ideas like this, I think you will have people jumping on it. There are people out there that want to help this community and they are just searching for the right opportunity. And with all the connections we have back to central and eastern Europe and other parts of the world, we have them here. Monte Ahuja, head of the Ohio India Chamber of Commerce, he told me he just had a gentleman in town who is the Bill Gates of India and just had him in town, had dinner with him, you know, just person to person, this is the place you want to create a beachhead in the United States and that's what we need. People are willing to do that, but if we can create that, that's a phenomenal idea.

MR. WHITEHEAD: This is where we get the intersections going with the artistic community, what you're doing with the childrens games, you know, it's the whole thing. You start saying, well, we could do one off or we could find a way to get all the groups, the design group and everyone to come together around this sort of thing and say what would it mean to be a truly international city again, because we were.

MR. FROLIK: Speaking of the city, we have done some talk over the course of the conversations about regionalism and thinking of ourselves as a region and how we work together better as a region. How do you balance the talk about operating as a region with, also, I think almost everywhere you look, no region is very strong if it doesn't have a strong city at the core. How do we get that conversation going and how do we sort of, again, make decisions about sort of what's the bounds of where we make our public investments?

MR. GILBERT: In my mind, I think it's very, very difficult. It's one of those of getting the right people around the table. Unfortunately, oftentimes, the larger the boundaries, the more difficult it can be to get the people to sit at the same table. And, but, you know, I would -- I think it's critically important and, you know, as Brad said, talking about dropping egos and it's not an easy thing to do because at times people's livelihoods are based on it. But I don't think -- if we don't take care of that, it's -- I think it's never truly going to happen in a substantive way.

MR. WHITEHEAD: I think the window is open right now, too. I know that some of our political leaders have been having an unprecedented level of conversations. I know in the philanthropic community, the receptivity for thinking about issues on a regional basis is unlike it's ever been, and, in fact, many of the Foundation community are meeting regularly from Stark County to Lorain County to Lake County and so forth to address and think about these questions and the trade-offs they present.

And I'll say that just the spirit of collaboration is completely energizing for taking it on, and I think there is a recognition that you can't have a great region without strong core cities because we do have core cities in Canton, Akron and Cleveland. It's not all about Cleveland. We have got important core cities elsewhere, that economic boundaries don't line up with municipal boundaries and it's a whole series of tough questions, as you point out, Joe, but the window is open right now because of the situation we are in.

As Ruth was saying, this is an opportunity for a lot of things to revisit because of where we are economically and to challenge old assumptions, whether it's about land-use planning or definitions of regionalism, and I don't think we'll find many people who aren't willing to come to the table to talk about what could be. And I hope every single sector, you know, NOCHE, the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education, which is the 22 institutions of higher education, are coming together in a way, so it's happening. It may not happen as fast as we all want and we ought to talk about ways to accelerate it.

MR. GILBERT: It may not have to happen on one big catalytic project. We talked about it before. It could be a lot of the little things that have to bubble up first, different little individual sectors that work together on a regional basis that show it can be done before you can have the big, the mega project that there is cooperation on regionally.

MS. DURACK: And I think it's interesting the way that regional cooperation is starting to happen spontaneously. I mean, nobody is requiring this. There's been no great change in roles. For example, if the suburbs can socialize, they realize that competing with each other is absurd, so, hence, starting the organization, and I think that's the way it's going to happen, sort of more and more groups and municipalities or whatever realizing that there's a pairing partnership that transcends.

MR. VON HENDRIX: I think you do see, it is occurring more. I think there needs to be more discussion about it. It needs to continue to say that this is important and it is good for the region. You know, we have to celebrate that. There's another area that needs to be celebrated because we need to understand and focus on the fact that it's not about competing with a city and the inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs of Cleveland or Akron. It's about competing with the other regions, not nationally but internationally and it needs to be more focused on the fact that we are a region and we're going to compete with other regions that aren't even in this country.

MR. LEVIN: But there's certainly some tension now in this convention center process, and I hate to keep harping back on it. No sense milking a dead horse.

I remember they were talking about the arts community having certain demands and the commissioners wanting some things and City Council wanting some things, the Mayor wanting some things, then all of a sudden one day, there was the Suburban Mayor Association showed up in the paper. Where did they come from? Now there hand is in this barrel, too, and, of course, they wanted to know what projects would be available for funding out in the suburbs, and I think you do have a very fundamental value question when you are talking about regionalism.

I mean, is there really a consensus that the inner city thrive culturally or is it okay if there's, you know, a little fiefdom in Solon and a little one in Pepper Pike and this cool thing happening in Westlake. There are certainly advocates that want to subscribe to the little fiefdom theory. I vehemently believe that the core city needs to thrive and should be the source of culture, whether it be Akron or Canton or Cleveland.

MR. VON HENDRIX: It's not either/or either, though. I think what we have to do is figure out what makes Solon attractive versus what makes Akron or Cleveland and then support those initiatives and maybe they don't get supported in, you know, the level or at the periods of times that each individual city needs to be done, but there should be a focus on the region as a whole versus saying we either support Cleveland or we support Akron or we support Solon or whatever the case may be. We have to figure it out. And I don't think sometimes we articulate that as well as we should.

I think Brad is right. There's a lot going on, but most of the time it's not being highlighted because that's not really interesting that the foundations are all meeting together collaboratively throughout the region saying how do we work together with the shrinking dollars we have because of the marketplace to have a great effect on the region. That gets one line in the newspaper versus who is fighting with whom or who called someone a name or whatever the case may be. I think we need to highlight that because I think, again, it is about the region being competitive.

And when a region acts as a region, that's when you see the successes going on. You look at this fund that came about, again, in a nine-month period of time, the ability to raise $21 million, it wasn't about raising it from Cleveland. It was about raising it from the region. And the region came together to say it's important not only because of Cleveland but because of Akron and Canton and the whole entire region, that if we focused on providing much needed capital minority businesses, no matter where those businesses are going to be located, it's going to be good for the region.

We don't celebrate that aspect of it and focus on the fact that there are people out there who get it, who see it and say it is about the region. There are people saying, are you going to invest your money in Cleveland? No, because it's not going to be competitive. It's not going to make economic sense for the investors, so we officially looked at it and said it's better for the region. In fact, we said it's better if we invest throughout the state because it's about how do we increase the effectiveness and perception of Ohio as a state.

MS. DURACK: So perhaps we need some successes that will help change the way people think about it. And we don't want them sit on the doorstep ready to go. Developing a region and a regional attitude, it's like a city. There has to be some sort of core identity that creates a sense of place, and if there's anything that's at the core of northeast Ohio, it's the River Valley, and I think the strides that have been made by Cuyahoga County Planning Commission and the various nonprofit groups that have been working in the Valley are just extraordinary in setting that up to be an evidence of what regional cooperation can achieve.

MS. HONG: And it seems to make ideal sense because natural resources don't respect municipal boundaries. The river runs through it. It runs through the region. If we look at the green spaces, it runs through from Cleveland to Akron to Canton through the Cuyahoga Valley Park, and if we look even at how we're managing the water, storm water, water systems, that's really a regional issue and regional planning is required, so maybe we can practice on the natural resource issues that lend themselves well to regionalism because they don't really respect the boundaries.

MR. FROLIK: On the Cuyahoga River, the towpath plan, what have been the secrets that made that successful, because it really is in a lot of ways a pretty remarkable story of cooperation that is built very quietly almost year after year.

MS. DURACK: I think we haven't seen anything yet. The towpath is one thing, and, yes, it's been a struggle and a great success to get so much of it built. It's almost to the end now. But the real success story is going to come when development starts occurring in response to the amenities that -- of which the towpath trail is just one and that starts to create a location that's enviable and its opportunities and attractions and qualities of life that it offers and so on and we're going to start to see, I'm confident, a great deal of related development that is going to be really exciting.

And that's where the success of the Valley starts, and I think we shouldn't -- you know, there's a danger of kind of sitting back and saying, okay, we got the trail through or now the railroad runs or something, but the real work -- I shouldn't say that. The real impact hasn't even begun to be felt yet.

MR. FROLIK: How would you feel, what is your thought on -- what are the kinds of impacts that you would like to see or would expect to see or should expect to see?

MS. DURACK: Kinds of impacts? Economic development for everybody in the region. That's the core of it. But what it is going to rely on is some really creative thinking on how to overcome the municipal boundaries. I mean, this is a multi-jurisdictional piece of real estate, if you like, where, sure, environmental things have overcome those, transcend those boundaries, but we need to get past the sort of difference in development regulations from one municipality to another so that the whole Valley can start developing as a series of interrelated projects that are building on each other and adding to the success of each other rather than almost, in a sense, being -- competing along the Valley edge.
And that's going to be tough. I mean, there's work underway, of course, and has been for some time. We're adopting a model code that is going to control development throughout the entire Valley, but getting each municipality to be willing to adopt it once it's written is going to be the real challenge.

MS. HONG: And their ideas down there about demonstrating what does sustainable technology look like, what does sustainable development really look like and can that be a new way that we can launch new industries or take approaches to existing industries by making it a triple win, really, for the economy, the environment and social progress. So what does that really look like? It's really the economy of the future, so can we demonstrate that in a large scale way right down in the Valley using the natural resources as the base.

MR. FROLIK: I think that takes us nicely back to where we started because that is talking about building on a straight, something that is here to -- a physical feature, something that we don't have to go out and invent, we don't have to pass a bond issue to create.

And why don't we -- I think it's a good place to, maybe, to stop. Great. Thanks a lot.

There's a lot to think about here, folks. Thank you.

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