Leadership Transcript

Participants:
David Bergholz
Excutive Director, The George Gund Foundation

Jane Campbell
Mayor, City of Cleveland

Joe Frolik
Plain Dealer reporter (moderator)

Brian Hall
Chairman & CEO, Industrial Inventory Solutions

Mal Mixon
Chairman & CEO, Invacare

Don Plusquellic
Mayor, City of Akron

John Ryan
Executive Secretary, Cleveland AFL-CIO

MR. FROLIK: At the first roundtable discussion we had last summer, several of the participants talked about the need for this area to place bets on its future. They were talking about big projects, big initiatives that would make Northern Ohio more economically competitive, as well as a more attractive place to live. To start today, I would like each of you to suggest maybe one bet maybe large or maybe relatively small, that you think is necessary to move this region forward and maybe transform this region. Let's start with you Mayor Campbell.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Isn't it always great to be the new kid on the block. I think, one, if you are going to say what's a big bet that probably from the physical development standpoint, that would be moving the Shoreway so that we can recapture our lakefront. Because if we slow down that Shoreway so that you can get to the lakefront, you open land for development and you take what is clearly our most fabulous natural resource and once again allow us to use it. It also then allows you to connect to the waterways down the Cuyahoga and all the way into the national park in Canton.

MR. FROLIK: Okay, great. David.

MR. BERGHOLZ: I guess I would have to say one thing; it would have to be the airport. We have to complete that and complete it as quickly as possible and to make sure it's going to serve us well in the future. I think without a major air hub here the economy is going to be very hard to fix.

MR. FROLIK: Mel.

MR. MIXON: I think the issue is clearly economics and the creation of new companies in Cleveland. I don't think we're going to attract new or major corporations to Cleveland. We have to create our own businesses and I happen to be involved in the creation of a cluster group called Bioenterprise formerly Biopark which you covered in The Plain Dealer, we may want to talk about that more later, but we do have tremendous resources and research in the medical field. In Akron, of course, we have composites and plastics and we need to understand these cluster areas of opportunity and create new enterprises from which come the jobs.

MR. FROLIK: Mayor Plusquellic.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: When you put it in terms of bet, my answer would be Cleveland Browns in 2005 football. I think Davis has done a great job and they'll come along faster than some people thought. On a serious note, I guess I would just agree with the last two answers. I think the airport is vitally important. I think part of that answer to the regions airport, solving the airport needs is to look at Akron/Canton as a reliever airport, much the same as Boston's Logan has done and many other airports around the country.

Secondly, we have to concentrate on our strengths. We can't just recreate a brand new economy because somewhere else in the country they started with some other natural asset or resource and developed an economy based on something that really isn't Cleveland/Akron. It's not Northeast Ohio, so I think we have to play to our strengths. We have to develop those assets that we have.

MR. FROLIK: John Ryan.

MR. RYAN: Well, off of what the mayor just said, I think one of the things we need to do is strengthen the NASA and continue to build jobs off of NASA. Those are good family supporting jobs and something we can actually build off of instead of trying to grab some economy from some other part of the country.

MR. FROLIK: Brian.

MR. HALL: Not being a gambling person, I sort of hesitate to say I'd make a bet, but I think what we have do is think very long term. Make sure what we're thinking about is something we can consistently support. And I guess to that point, well all the points are important, I think entrepreneurship and economic development is where I would put my money.

MR. FROLIK: Let's build on that. As the person who started businesses in this area, as you look at the strengths and weaknesses and what would work or doesn't work, talk a little bit about the process of growing a business in Northeast Ohio.

MR. HALL: Well, my experience may or may not be unique, but I would say the number one issue that's facing entrepreneurs is capital. That we need to invest capital in those businesses that are growing in this economy, those businesses that are creating jobs in this economy. And I think, Mal, Mag and Biotech, if that's been identified as a niche, that once that niche is identified we have to put resources toward that niche to create the jobs.

I would like to help both mayors at the table have less of a revenue problem. I think we could do that by creating jobs that provide them with a tax base and in order to do that then we need capitals for those businesses that are trying to grow.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: I think perhaps, Brian, one of the issues is creating a connection between the capital and the entrepreneurs, because, Mal, as you well know, there are a number of people who are interested in making investments in good growing businesses. But how do you connect those folks who have the capital to invest with the people who are doing the entrepreneurial activities.

MR. MIXON: Jane we need to break this down into what I would call different pools of capital for different types of businesses. For example, when Cleveland Tomorrow was formed, we were not known for a lot of venture capital. David Morganthaler had a firm here; a lot of his money was invested on the west coast. We created Primus. There is plenty of capital out there for a given size of business opportunity for the smaller businessperson, particularly Afro-American businesses.

And Brian and I worked a lot with the President's Council dealing with small businesses. There isn't that capital available yet and we're working to create a pool of capital, which has less liquidity, perhaps a longer-term exit strategy, but there's capital here for major business types of opportunities in our community.

MR. BERGHOLZ: Just as question, I guess, the one thing I struggle within looking at this community over the 13 years I have been here is whether or not, as the economy has changed, we have really now, have a full range of mechanisms that can make some of these things happen. Are we looking at some old ways of doing business? Is the Growth Association of Cleveland, tomorrows of the moment, which were organized in a much more industrially profitable time, the kinds of places that can really deliver on some of thing that are needed and I'm not saying they can't, but I would raise it as a question.

I guess one of the things that I have struggled with, particularly in the last few years, is looking say at a city like this one that has enormous strengths and potential, but may inside city government for instance, not have the kind of urban redevelopment authority say that Pittsburgh had. It could hold land. Now say the port authority turns into that kind of mechanism that's countywide. I guess one of the questions I would be asking as we go along, pushing the ball up the hill on economic development: Are there things that we ought to be looking at, institutions in the community that may or may not be able to provide the kinds of linkages that we're talking about, and should we be reexamining all of that as we go along the path of trying to create new enterprise.

MR. FROLIK: Mayor Plusquellic, you working in Akron, obviously took a very large hit in the past decade or even a little before that when the rubber companies changed dramatically and shut down their manufacturing outfits. What are some things that you've maybe learned from what you observed there that maybe is applicable broadly across the region, in terms of either as we transition or as we try to reinvent the economy.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: Well, it takes a lot of people working together. It's not one solution. We definitely need to look at venture capital and trying to assist both in the private and public sector I would argue. New entrepreneurs, we started years ago, an incubator that expanded three times moving into a bigger building each time. We think that's vitally important. I think we have 28 businesses that have grown and gone out on their own, employing people, paying taxes, helping support the economy. I think we were very fortunate in Akron.

I've always prefaced any remarks about our successes with saying we had, what I described as a seed falling off that dying tree. The polymer industry was really an outgrowth. It was a growing industry as the rubber jobs left, people could transfer directly the knowledge, training and experience they had in molds, extruders, other pieces of equipment that were used in the rubber shops. That knowledge was easily transferred into the small mom and pop polymer shops that popped up.

I think that's one of the problems with the steel industry. There isn't that direct transition that's as easy as what it was in Akron. Not to say it was easy, easier, but it was easier than some other communities. So, the thing that I have noticed and maybe it's just my perception from that far away place, Akron, from Cleveland, but our business people were never as motivated as Cleveland's business people have been, to really jump in and provide the leadership. Part of that is because our city never felt as if we were in bad or dire shape, as maybe Cleveland, when you have the financial situation up here. I think a lot of business people realized even if they didn't live or work in Cleveland, they were all affected by it. So you saw this tremendous push by the private sector to provide leadership. The Cleveland Tomorrow that, Mal, that you talked about and just a number of things that I think we have not, we did not see that kind of leadership early on. We did have tremendous leadership from several different individuals, the former university president, Bill Muse and certainly Howard Flood, First National Bank President, provided some, but we just didn't have the numbers that Cleveland had. That's one of the things that I always thought had been very, was very beneficial for Cleveland to get through some difficult times that it had.

So I think you need to have that leadership in the private sector. You have to have people out there understanding what's going on in the economy and really working to try to fit the public sector, how we can make it work. We went through a major overhaul of our building department because we really weren't meeting the needs of people, especially when they wanted to buy an old building like some of the B.F. Goodrich complex that was built in the early 1900s and with the new building code it was just almost impossible to convert. So we were left with many of these old buildings and no one wishing to deal with our building department, so we went through a major overhaul of the building department.

I think it's the kind of things that city government has to do on a regular basis to ask the questions and get some extra help from outside, are we matched up with what we need to be, that really the private sector needs to make this system work.

MR. MIXON: Joe, I'm personally excited about our new mayor, Jane Campbell, and regardless of whether your Republican, Democrat, a business person, laborer, whatever, Jane has the reputation of being a facilitator, bringing people together and bringing people of different opinions together. I think there are plenty of people in the business community that want to give something to the community. They want to get involved and I'm sure that as our mayor asked for their involvement, there will be a lot of involvement.

And I would like to just spend a minute on what I think is one of the most exciting civic projects I've been involved in which is now called BioEnterprise. I'm a representative on that board from the Cleveland Clinic, but we have University Hospitals Group, we have The Clinic Group, we have Case Western Reserve, three wonderful organizations with huge research capabilities and we're all coming together to facilitate the creation of medical science incubators, and to create companies, and to attract businesses, hopefully from all over the world to come to Cleveland to start your business or nurture your business and my expertise is in the medical field.

As I mentioned earlier, there may be other cluster groups. I think services are an area in our community. We have some tremendous real estate capabilities, lawyers, but we need to find these areas and really, you know, work to create these businesses, because for every hundred we create one or two of them will become huge and they'll spawn all types of other suppliers and other companies around. That's the goal it seems to me we ought to have in our community.

MR. BERGHOLZ: How far do you think the community is away from having some clear notion of what might produce, that there really is a set of agreements from all those other institutions?

MR. MIXON: I think that the fundraising, David, we think we have the funding required to drive this project, and Bill Sanford, who has agreed to chair the head of the organization for now while we do a search for a permanent person will be unveiling very soon the economics of BioEnterprise and our views on the opportunities for a foundation such as yours, both state, county and city governments and business community because we think that we need to have everyone participating. And most importantly, we'll need to have those funds without a lot of strings attached so that we don't become a bureaucracy that is mired in administration that can't really get the job done. I think it's a very exciting project, so I'm looking forward to our continued efforts.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Mal, I want to just follow up on one of the things that you raised, in terms of the real interest in the business community and the broader community of getting involved because your absolutely right. Just, you know, I've now been mayor for less than a month. I have been mayor for three weeks and we, during the transition we had two hundred people from business and labor and religious groups, neighborhood groups who sat down in the middle of December, when people are supposed to be home doing their thing, and they sat down and tried to figure out what do we need to do, and for example, we're now, as everyone knows, struggling with the city finances.

We have six full-time loan executives who are there from banking, accounting firms or helping us try to sort out where the cities finances are. So, I think part of the challenge is: How do we ask the right question so that we ask people to participate in something where they can be successful and make a difference, and that's sort of the public/private challenge.

MR. BERGHOLZ: And I don't want to be a contrarian on it, but in one sense, I guess the thing that concerns me is that you look even in the decade and a half that I've lived here, the nature of the business community has changed rather significantly. I'm reminded of my time in Pittsburgh in the '80s when the major corporations really were on their way out of town, and there's some feel that there's been that kind of a change here. This is a business community that steps up. I guess the question I ask: What do we need to be thinking about to get them to step up in the best way.

How do you reach into other ranks of leadership in this business community, so it isn't just still wishing for kind of the old guard, old boy network thing to work its magic when there are fewer and fewer of those folks around who have major corporate commitments.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Dave, take the conversation that Mal just had about BioEnterprise. I mean, there is a piece where the business community, historically hasn't been thought of to include the medical community, although, in fact, some of our largest employers are the medical institutions.

And there is a fairly specific project that people have been willing to step up, move forward. That involves the medical community, the educational community and the business community and there's some pieces there -- I was in Washington with Mayor Plusquellic for the conference of mayor's and sat with some folks who were there from the AFL-CIO, from the housing investment, and here is a group of people who are basically dealing with -- this is like the carpenters pension fund and the various trade people's pension funds who are looking to reinvest those dollars in communities like Cleveland, to build affordable housing.

And you know, of course, their thing is they get their members working. Well, this works. This is a very good model, and so part of what we need to do is we need capture those activities. I mean, this gentleman I was sitting next to at this supper said, we've tried do this in Cleveland three or four times, but we haven't found the reception that we needed, and I said well give me your card.

MR. MIXON: Well just to add on to that David, I think anytime the mayor calls you and asks you to get involved in something as she did with me, the airport transition team or the governor calls you, or the President calls you, I think most people are going to try to accommodate that request. They simply aren't frequently asked, in the past, haven't been. And I think they want to and their intentions are very good, and I think we have one of the most philanthropic cities in the world.

Cleveland's giving per capita is tremendous, people want to give and money is part of it, but giving your time, to me, is more valuable than the money aspect of it. So, I think that we have a lot of talent in the community that can be brought to bear on dealing with many of the government or civic problems that we have.

MR. RYAN: To go back to a point that David raised, how do you make sure that it's not the old boys network. I mean, it's appropriate that we have the first woman mayor to make sure that's not the case. If you take a look at the transition teams, while they were huge, they also were not just a who's who of Cleveland, they looked like Cleveland, they liked like Greater Cleveland and I think that that makes a big difference compared to how sometimes we have been managed in the past versus today.

I think that makes a big difference, because one of our concerns is you can put an economic development, but the question to us is what does it mean to the worker. You know, if we have a beautiful whatever and we all enjoy using it, but at the same time, it's really not economic development, it isn't providing family jobs. That's going to be a concern of ours. But if it looks like Cleveland around the table talking about these issues, we won't have those results.

MR. FROLIK: Let's pick up on that. David, when we talked recently, you told me you think it's almost the how you decide what business to do, is almost as important as what business you actually do. How does this region go about, or should this region go about mapping that next set of initiatives, because everybody has ideas about things we should do, projects that are important. How do we set the priorities and go about doing that?

MR. BERGHOLZ: I mean, my feeling is basically has got kind of a three legged stool. In any successful community like this one, you clearly have a coherent business community that has kind of a point of view and is willing to take a leadership role. We have strong local and other forms of government, then you have this whole set of the intermediary organizations, I mean, whether the foundation is philanthropic are part of that or not, but you have the Cleveland Tomorrows and the Growth Associations and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and Cleveland Initiatives for Education. All these organizations try to broker relationships between the public and private sector. They're clearly one voice in that.

I think the thing we have struggled with here and was interesting to read the articles in the PD about Chattanooga and this whole, which goes back 15 years. I can remember going there in the mid '80s as part of a public school project where we would just begin work on the aquarium and some of these other things that they have begun to change the basic nature of that town and there was a much broader kind of a community process. It wasn't one that just ran rough shot over the leadership.

I mean, the people had to make hard decisions and make choices, but to set out a vision that is broad enough to capture a larger amount of public interest. I mean, I think Cleveland is a very unique place because a big part of the leadership does not live inside the city. So, when people talk about Cleveland, here, particularly in the business community, I'm always reading it Greater Cleveland. I mean, it is a place where people come in from the outside to help lead and they've done that nobly and effectively. Now, the question is, how do you organize a city that has a lot of stresses and strains that has pulled behind. I mean, Gateway is a classic example of the split between the inside and the outside, and people who are being taxed for one purpose that they may or may not agree with that heavily and others who want the other purpose secured.

We've got to find ways to bridge that. And I'm not making a big argument for regional this or regional that, because I think those forums are hard to find. We have invented some things over time that have worked well, like Neighborhood Progress Inc., which both on one hand produced more housing than it produced in the city before, and on the other hand limited the number of clients, because a lot of them weren't very effective. So, hard decisions on one side, production on the other. I woke up one morning, and thought, you know, the one institution that has changed most radically in my stay in the city is the school system.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: That's right.

MR. BERGHOLZ: It has been totally regoverned and I'm not sure we have to look at other places where we're going to talk about, quote unquote, a regovernance in order to make them more effective in a very changed world. I mean, a decade ago this was a place in a different kind of trouble than this place is now and we've got to think about how we're going to reform.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: You know David, I think part of it is, you look at what kind of mobilization happens when people believe that this is a place in trouble, and that, I think we're now at a point where people believe that this is a community in trouble. That if we don't take some positive steps together, we're going to be in a world of hurt. Similarly, in the mid '80s, early '80s, we believed we were a community in trouble, and at that point, you know, Voinovich had just come in. He was mayor, and he did the, you know, sort of reengineering city government kind of piece. They did layoffs, they did cuts, they did all those kind of things. They also did the development of the citywide plan, which was a huge inclusive process that was, you know, a year and a half long that reached out to people, both in the city and outside the city.

But, really in the city it reached out neighborhood by neighborhood. I mean, there were church basement meetings three nights a week with people talking about what's important, what are your hopes, what are your dreams and they ended up with a for what you, whatever you would call it, a color coded map. Here we wanted retail, here we want housing, here we want industrial and that has been, I mean, if you go back and look at that plan, you can see that where Church Square is now, across the street from the Clinic was coded as retail, that where Beacon Place is was coded as housing, and what the city did was, they went at the private sector.

Basically, the private sector paid for city personnel and private personnel to go side by side out into the neighborhoods, gather a consensus, then went through city counsel and so it was official. They then adopted a zoning code to back it up. And so, there was, part of the problem, I think, in the last maybe five or six years is that there have been a number of different sort of, let's make a plan initiatives, none of which have been willing to invest the time and money and trouble in going to the church basements, listening to the people, going through city counsel and all of the liberative hearing processes that there are, and then coming up with a zoning code, because a zoning code, boring as it is, is the way that you enforce that. And so, we now really haven't updated our citywide plan for now, almost 20 years and it's time to do that again. But, we have to do it with all that same, you know, sort of willingness to invest the time, invest the money and to listen to what people said.

Because at that time, when people said they wanted retail next to the Cleveland Clinic, people thought they were out of their mind. I remember, you know, this is -- the big thing was maybe they could get Zayre, you know, Zayre would be the anchor store and Zayre pulled out. I mean this was a -- and so, but people listened and in fact, low and behold what are there, Mel, 20,000 people work at the Cleveland Clinic.

MR. MIXON: There is a big number. I don't know the exact number, the largest employer in the city though.

MR. HALL: I lived through that. I lived just around the corner from that. I remember the plan in process that went on, but I also remember there was a great deal that was donned development of institutional planning that said we were going to acquire this land and work with city government to get this in shape. I think the thing to David's question about leadership, I think, not only has the community changed in the makeup of the business community, but also in the makeup of the leaders. And, some of that we can see as a benefit. You mentioned our mayor, who is our first female mayor.

I think we have a group of business leaders who are more open minded than the past. We all grew up and through the civil rights era and we have some idea that in order for us to be successful, there has to be inclusion amongst everyone, and we're talking about workers, we're talking about diverse ethnic groups, and I think the one thing Cleveland, Greater Cleveland when I say Cleveland can do is to find a way to energize the industry in the city next to those developments that you just talked about. We have got retail, we have got housing, but we aren't creating the jobs in the city.

I'm one of those businesses and several others, and we talked before this about my challenge being in the city, and I just feel capital is one answer to it, but also coalescing about where are the opportunities. Minority businesses are growing across the country at a faster rate than other businesses. While we can say Biotech is maybe our future, we have a present, and we have a present in those minority businesses. If we continue to energize them to employ people in the areas where that retail is being built. If we don't do that, as the subsidy and things run out that cause those things to be built, we'll be back at this again in the next five or ten years, wondering what happens the first time that people go to sell the houses that were being built in the City of Cleveland.

Is there going to be a market for the house once the tax abatement runs out. So we have to have people with jobs making money, willing to live in the city because they work in the city and then that creates the impetus to keep that going.

MR. MIXON: Brian, you are preaching to the choir because you and I have spoken about this a lot, but I happen to believe that major cities need to learn how to create Afro-American capitalists, not just jobs. Brian is president of the presidents counsel, which represents 18 or 19 now, I believe, African American owned businesses and hopefully, I'm excited about this program, and hopefully, we can create wealth and create more companies like those that will of course, create the jobs. And, I think we have got a small program going, but I think it's an exciting one. I think Brian has done a lot to bring the major corporate leaders in the community into this program.

MR. HALL: Your point, David, about leadership, I think one of the things that we've tried to do is not have an intermediary in between us. Why not have business people talk with other business people? Why do we need a third part to negotiation and broker the relationship? The fact that I can call Mal Mixon and I couldn't call Mal Mixon four years ago, I probably could have and didn't know it. But, because we started working on something together that we both feel passionate about, we developed our other relationship and it wasn't because the mayor came to us and said you guys should work on this problem. My point about leadership is, I think we have more leaders that are willing to get involved to take the call, to say, okay, let's do it. We don't need to have an organization do this work for us.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Well, I think Brian, the other piece that you raise, which is very important, when you talk about no intermediaries is that part of our development of business and leadership is making sure that you can call Mal and say, you know, listen this is what I'm producing, this is the service I'm offering and I would like you to be able to buy it, and that we have got to make sure that we create an environment where our emerging businesses, the minority businesses, the female owned businesses, the businesses that are started by immigrants who come to this country.

I mean, that's another whole growth area where you have people who have moved here, who may have a technological background and came here because they had hopes and dreams about their economic future, where we have to create an environment where the emerging businesses have direct access to the successful businesses like Mal. I mean, there was a time when Mal was an emerging, ran an emerging business.

MR. MIXON: Absolutely.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: You know, that's now long time ago, but, you know, the thing that he's real helpful for this kind of thing because he remembers when he was the entrepreneur starting up. And that's a piece that we have to foster the climate of entrepreneurship in Cleveland, because entrepreneurship also means that not every single idea you try is going to be successful. And we have to encourage people to try and move and learn from their mistakes and be ready to take the next step. That's a challenge.

MR. HALL: I think we have the opportunity in this region. It could be a challenge because we're behind some other areas where minority businesses are flourishing, but if this is a growth area, we have an opportunity with a city that is 55 percent African American to really make this a niche, just like we made Biotech, and I think that is one of the areas I'm interested in and I hope that the city gets behind as well.

MR. MIXON: Jane, to me it's a little bit like a flight of B29s going through different antiaircraft fire. At the end there's only a few that get through, but we as a government, and as a city, and as a people need to remove the obstacles so that more of them can get through. And we may not have time at this panel today, but we do have in our state, Joe I sent you a book this week that indicates that in terms of 30 criteria for small business.

Ohio is ranked 46th out of 50 in terms of the obstacles to success. And I have been successful in this city despite whatever obstacles there are and I never worry about them too much. We do need to keep removing the obstacles, and that makes it easier and more likely that we'll have more and more successes.

MR. BERGHOLZ: You know, I think on the other piece of this, which is kind of about the civic vision side of it, I'm struck by what's happening in Akron, Mayor, that there is now a planning process that's gone on and ongoing around the schools, which I think is really an interesting piece, not only in the city, but in Summit County, but also the whole downtown piece that relates to the University and other institutions there.

And I think, for me, that's a lesson in some ways; we may have to get back to in this planning process. We have a lot of things out there to worry about. Convention Center and the highway relocation and the need for 25,000 people to live downtown before you have a decent retail piece and then all this stuff on Euclid Avenue. We've got some terribly successful examples, which I think are the kinds of things that are being built in your city. Playhouse Square is a remarkable enterprise. That's one kind of intermediary. We don't need them everywhere, but certainly, we have built some things that have been just amazingly successful under very trying circumstances.

And so are there other, my question keeps being: Are there other places where we need to think about either undoing things that aren't doing things well because they sop up resource and we have scarce resource to spend. Are there any new enterprises we ought to think about building to accomplish over that 10 or 20 year period that you're talking about, that would be the equivalence of the next set of Playhouse Square or MPIs.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Reengineering some of the things that we have. And if you look at when Playhouse Square got started, one of the things that helped Playhouse Square get started is that county government at that point took ownership of those buildings because the theaters were in them. The buildings were, with the exception of the theaters not prime property and put government offices in there. Sort of overflow offices and so the health department, I mean to this day, the health department is in Playhouse Square. Why, just because we put it there in order to stabilize, it was before I was a county commissioner, I can't take any credit for it, but the then commissioners, to stabilize those buildings.

Now, if we're looking at stabilizing midtown, I mean, perhaps there are some opportunities that are similar where we ought to be able to stabilize property. You were talking about Pittsburgh earlier, I know that is your dear love, but Tom Murphy, who is the mayor, was at the mayors conference and I had an occasion to sit with him on a bus. I said, okay, tell me, all of a sudden you're the hero, right. Ten years ago you were coming to Cleveland saying what do we do and how do we do it, and we want to try everything, and so, your on the top now, what did you do? And he talked about early in his administration, setting aside some money specifically for development and he said, you know, it was tough times we were cutting the budget and I just took a piece of money and said we're going to use this for development no matter what.

MR. BERGHOLZ: My only point, Mayor, is that they had a place to stick the money that had great experience at using it for development purposes. So they had this urban development authority mechanism, which is something we don't truly have here. And that's been, when LTV went out of business in Pittsburgh, it was the urban redevelopment authority that bought and held the land for the 20 years it took to turn it into an industrial park and a research center. All I'm arguing is that, I think there are lots of things we can do and that's a piece of it. But, do we have, have we already looked hard at what we need to have in place, in terms of structure, new or reengineered or put out of business in order to do those things.

MR. FROLIK: In terms of citizen input, Mayor Plusquellic, talk a little about your Imagine Akron project. Briefly, how did that work and did things come forth at those meetings from the average citizens that you never really thought about in City Hall or in the discussions with the other people who would normally, one might have identified as the leadership of the community.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: Probably, the disconnect between City Hall and information that we thought we were getting out to people from the average citizens point of view just felt that they weren't getting enough information. And I have this sense that part of the problem is people are bombarded with information. We have 110 TV stations, and God knows how many other things that people pick up from talk show hosts spewing out, whatever it is they talk about, to any number of ways that people hear things or read things. But, it doesn't always sink in and, I think myself, that is more of a problem.

There are too many opportunities maybe, and so people miss the one that is important. But we found that people had a major complaint about that, and we're trying to do several things to improve communication. That's one that I don't think we thought was anywhere near the high level of importance that citizen put on it.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: What are you going to do to make sure that there's communication that matters to people and that they listen to.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: We're talking about more of the use of the Internet; we're talking about more direct communication with people. We produced a calendar this year that we produced in the past, but it was basically an idea that I had years ago, just wasn't enough information on it, but it was to tell people when their recycling bags were supposed to go out. We have an ever other week pick up of recycling and it was one of the calls I used to get all the time, is it this week or is it next week, I forget and is the garbage going to be delayed this week because of the holiday or is it on schedule.

We started saying, companies used to put out calendars years ago. I remember my mother hanging it up, you know, and you'd write your doctors appointments on it. Companies had cutbacks, we had an opportunity to get some state funding for some kind of a communication mechanism and I came up with this calendar idea. It wasn't very fancy. It did the job, but this year we added to it, and we put all the community events, the park opening and closing. We have concerts in the summer. So we put a lot more information kind of spruced it up a little bit with some beautiful pictures. So, I guess we just, at each turn we've tried to figure out how can we provide more information. We are under, I also put an internal group together and asked them, challenged them, internal group meaning city employees, at a mid-level and mid-management level, to say to them, here's a report and those items that are important to people, that they've identified, where we need to do something at City Hall. I want you to address those needs. So they’re talking about new ways.

We're probably going to put some other direct communications together with people and combine some annual report information and some other reports that the parks department and others put out in brochures. I see them in my office all the time, so I assume that, gee, those are available, but, obviously, the average person doesn't come to City Hall. So we're going to try to figure out a way to get those in the hands of people.

One of the ways is to put an insert into the newspaper. Although we know that there's been a cutback in readership of newspapers, it's still one additional mechanism we think may be an important way to communicate. So that's just an example of one issue that we didn't see high on our radar screen. We figured, gee, we have newspaper reporters and radio reporters, we got a new TV station. Although, that was one that was identified as a high priority, as well. We knew of that one, but this communication issue, it was an excellent way to allow people through the Internet, through a call-in show, through going to the meetings themselves or printing forms that they could send in to identify what their top priorities were, and some of it was not really surprising. Their top issue was education and that didn't shock anybody. But it really was a wonderful way to get the community engaged.

The only frustrating thing for me, and it's probably been in this -- as the older I get and look at democracy and what it means -- it's more and more frustrating that we have such a small percentage of people who participate. And I mean very small. 25 years ago, almost 30 years ago now, the community undertook a system to try to get community input called the Goals for Greater Akron, and it was really in reaction to the loss of many of those rubber jobs and what's going to happen to our community. And we had many more people participating then. I think maybe because they were scared themselves of what was going to happen, so they felt motivated. But when you have things going sort of okay, you have less motivation for people to get out and be involved and yet it's important for us to get that feedback.

And we tried in every way possible. It's much better than not doing anything. It's probably the one frustrating thing during my career that you can almost pay people. You can give them free cookies and whatever else they want, just come to a meeting and let us know what is on your mind.

MR. BERGHOLZ: We have a project that we have been interested in and funded for a number of years along with the Cleveland Foundation and some others, this community partnership for arts and culture, which is a small program to kind of build a regional base around arts programming in this multi-county area that it serves.

The thing that strikes me about it were two aspects of it. One, an incredible amount of research trying to determine what is real or imagined about community concerns about the arts and we learned a lot of interesting stuff, most of which those of us who have been sitting around this stuff for years did not know, and the other was this incredible involvement of a broad base of the community that usually isn't at the table, so county commissioners from all the counties, other public figures, people from labor. John serves on this group with me.

And so I think it doesn't represent any kind of solution to a big problem yet, but it is a model, I think, for us looking at other issues in the community. I think your -- you know, you get at this thing very simply. You know, here's a basic communication problem. I mean, in my neighborhood, if I got all my friends and neighbors together, they would talk about garbage pickup as being the primary concern of their municipal lives. And so what do you do from that to enlarge that kind of participation.

And we have got a bunch of planning processes going on here and a number of them aren't all that participatory, so do we want to work on that, do we want to use something like this little effort at the moment to kind of set a model for the way in which we discuss these issues in the future.

And that's what I think I was trying to get at earlier is that we can't just keep at it kind of behind closed doors, you know with a small cadre of leadership and have a conversation that is going to engage people especially in places that are struggling. I mean, I'm an optimistic person and so I believe that the sense of optimism you get in a city when thing are going well or interestingly is something you want to encourage.

I can remember being in Pittsburgh when it was named the most livable city in the country. I don't think most of us thought that was true, but we did respond to it with that sense of optimism and you've got to kind of build for those moments again.

MR. RYAN: The other thing, David, that we found about the arts work is also not only is it fun, but it does two other things. One is it creates good jobs. We talked about Playhouse Square before. One of the other small --.

MR. BERGHOLZ: Huge economic generator.

MR. RYAN: One of the other small non-profits, the Media Development Corporation, is taking the good jobs created through Playhouse Square and is bringing in films in Cleveland, receiving a small amount of money from some foundations, small amount of -- relatively small amount of money from the City and from the County, some money from the State, but it's creating good jobs and building upon what Cleveland already did well which is Playhouse Square.

The other piece in the arts is we found a lot more connection with helping with education than what many of us thought was there for sure, you know, some good research, and you take a look at some of the cuts that have been made in the Cleveland Public Schools years ago, decades ago. It was around music, it was around arts. We're not only denying students a fun time as some students receive in the suburbs or maybe in Akron but also, you know, we're denying them some of their education and something that will help them to pass proficiency testing, help them to be able to do better in math and science.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: Dave, I've got to go back to something you said. You have to reach out and give people an opportunity. It has to be a diverse group in the community. You have to make every effort to do whatever you can, but real success, real progress comes when people are committed to providing leadership in spite of sometimes the lack of interest. I have described --.

MR. BERGHOLZ: Well put.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: -- to council members -- I don't quote Richard Nixon very often. I don't know that he coined the phrase or he just used it often enough, but the silent majority is a wonderful term to describe what goes on out there in our society. When things are going okay, they're not motivated to get out and speak. When things are going okay, in most businesses as well as I would say in most regions and most governments, you have to challenge yourself to keep pushing to do things different to change, to improve, to make things happen because there's an old cliché, if you are not moving forward, you're really not standing still, you're falling behind.

And it's the same, I think, in a community and some very controversial, tough issues that Cleveland faced with Gateway and other development projects, same thing with our downtown stadium. If I listened to the ten percent of the people who screamed no literally on anything that I would propose and say, well, wait a minute, I want to get you in a meeting and I want to build consensus and get your agreement, I would still be sitting there looking at old rubber buildings wondering where in the heck --.

MR. BERGHOLZ: Consider yourself lucky it's only ten percent.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: I don't disagree. I'm trying to be on my best behavior here today.

But it is the mark of a leader to be able to understand and know, have a vision, ask people to participate, ask people to assist and to help but sort of understand that there's a time that you have got to make that tough decision, and I think that's the mark, and I have a lot of confidence. I've watched Jane, Mayor Campbell, over the years and I know she understands that that's what you have to do to be a good leader. That's what you are going to be eventually judged on is whether or not you know when to use that judgment and take a position that's not the most popular but is the right thing to do.

And I think, and I believe this with everything in me, and I had an early lesson I won't bore you about. I had an 83-year-old woman; we had to take her house. She cried and cried. I agonized. We couldn't do this project in my little ward for the business community if we didn't take her house and she cried. Luckily for me, maybe luckily for her, too, she lived long enough that when the project was complete, she called me back to tell me she apologized for making me feel bad. She had a much more beautiful house and she was so proud of her community that it just galvanized me to say if an 83 year old woman who, by the way, lived in that house her entire life. She was born in the house. She lived upstairs with her husband then moved back down when their parents died. If she could get it and understand that doing the right thing for the whole community is what is expected of their leaders, just about anybody in our society should get it.

So I just, I guess, warn about too much of this, okay, we have to have a consensus. I have seen mayors try to do that for five years and miss opportunities right and left because they couldn't get consensus on some things. Sometimes they just have to do what is right.

MR. RYAN: I do think that the mayor and others need to listen to as broad of a --.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: Sure.

MR. RYAN: One of the strengths that Jane has had, Mayor Campbell has had throughout her career in public life that we have to at least be there to listen. You take a look at Gateway, for example, not saying it was a good project or bad project, you take a look at it. Maybe other people needed to be around that table. If you take a look at the vote on Gateway, you know, the City of Cleveland turned it down big and the suburbs passed it.

And I think we have to be honest when we come up with a project that no one project is going to be the new LTV of the future. No one project is going to solve all the City's problems. And the other thing is we have to be honest about, you know, what we sell. I think that there were some ads on Gateway that anyone would admit were well overstated. I think it was 27,000 good jobs, and I think we have to be very careful when we look in the future on those to make sure that doesn't occur.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: It's really strange. My first comment when I was asked about Gateway was if I was mayor of Cleveland, I would be doing the same thing. I think Gateway was a tremendously successful project for what it was intended to do which was to start to change the image and provide the opportunity for people to go downtown for a good reason and to keep the sports teams that I think are -- you can measure, you can argue all you want, but they are important. You know, the conversation about Pittsburgh went back to the football game yesterday.

I mean, I think Gateway from Summit County -- I'll probably get negative calls into my office after this show airs because I seem to be speaking in favor of Gateway who moved the Cavaliers and that was a tough issue, but, I mean, I think from the outside, certainly, whether or not the jobs that were produced, whether it was 19,000 or 27,000, certainly that was a very successful project for Cleveland to sort of get the image turned around, and I would say a lot of positive things came from that. And last time I checked, that mayor was reelected several times after that, so it must have been worth something to someone in Cleveland.

MR. HALL: I would agree with you, too. I think we can all look at Gateway now and if we had to do it over, we would say, yes, this is the right thing to do. I think the way to do this in the future without necessarily saying we have to have total consensus is to make sure there's value for everyone that is going to benefit and those people that turned it down turned it down because they couldn't see the value. They can't afford to go to the stadium and they're not getting jobs there.

So if we look at whether it's a convention center or moving the shoreway, we certainly better consider the impact on the communities that are going to pay the sacrifice and I think that is the right sale, and if you do that, then you can include people.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: In some ways, using the Gateway example, it's got an interesting spin to it because, I mean, today you can hardly meet anybody who doesn't tell you they voted for Gateway which is real interesting considering the vote which passed by a hair.

But one of the things that did happen with Gateway is that there were on-site monitors to make sure that the promise of minority participation in construction jobs was real, the promise of minority participation in contracting opportunities was real and there was real monitoring there and that's -- I mean, part of the challenge I think, Brian, as we look at development of minority business, is that we have to make sure that it's real and it's not just, you know, somebody puts your name on a sheet, turns it in and they get their EEO check-off but at the end of the day, okay, you get a little money. That doesn't help the community.

We want the minority businesses to be, as Mal calls them, African-American capitalists. We want you to be out there making money, hiring people, making jobs, and so that doesn't work unless we really monitor whether that kind of participation is real. And to a certain extent, out of the Gateway experience, because there was such monitoring, there were a lot more African-Americans who --.

MR. HALL: I would agree.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Had strength in the construction industry that they didn't have because then they could say look what we built. There were African Americans who became part of the unions in the, you know, carpenters and pipefitters and some of these unions that historically have been white men, all of a sudden, you know, they had to have woman, African Americans and low and behold, they found out that they could do the jobs.

Once people could see somebody standing next to them who could do the job, it made a big difference. And so that's a piece of what the promise is.

MR. HALL: I think that's a good point. As we do other projects, that's a good thing to refer to, to say, let's look back at some of those companies and where they are today, who got their start there, who got a leg up there that they wouldn't have otherwise.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: And you look, Brian, at the difference because when we built the football stadium, there wasn't on-site monitoring, so there were a lot more problems about whether, in fact, the minority participation was real, particularly on the employment side. I think the contracting side was perhaps monitored better, but the employment side was just one set of conversations after another about whether that was real.

MR. BERGHOLZ: I guess the one pitch I'd make coming back to my scene of the moment is that this is an incredible transition we're going through, change in leadership at the County, change in leadership at the City, change in leadership at Case Western Reserve, change in leadership at Cleveland State.

MR. HALL: And many businesses.

MR. BERGHOLZ: Many businesses and businesses going out of business, moving away, new businesses coming in. It almost seems to me that we fail to take advantage of these periods where we really might want to take that brief moment of transition and look out and say what do we need to take the next step upward as we move forward with all these new folks, and there's some really stunning people coming in, the Mayor being one and clearly the new presidents at these two important institutions.

And I guess the challenge to me is it was kind of like in those days of Reagan coming on the scene where the human services community went into a total tailspin because of all the cuts that were being made in the so-called safety net organizations. Very few of them took advantage of the moment to say, okay, things are going to be different. Let's either regroup or let's figure out that we really don't need to be in this business and let's get out of it.

I think in my 35 years of being in the nonprofit sector, mostly on the side of raising money rather than giving it away, unfortunately, that some of the finest moments were times when a group of folks came together and essentially as part of an organizational structure came to the conclusion that death with dignity was better than providing a service that may or may not be fully utilized or was competitive or was not really in sync with what was going on.

I think it would be great, especially looking at a foundation world where you have either flat assets or declining assets to go out into the community. This is a moment to look hard at what we ought to be doing to use scarce resource for the best possible purpose. I mean, the amount of money that goes out the door to all kinds of organizations, some of which clearly are doing stunningly wonderful jobs and some of which you scratch your head.

MR. FROLIK: As leaders, how do you sort of break that inertia and encourage people to think that change, where some things can obviously be scary at times. We have an LTV wiping out 3,200 jobs, if there's -- if they're unable to reopen that plant, Ford downsizing. How do you make the case or how do you encourage people that this is -- there's opportunity here in what looks to be a very scary situation rather than hunkering down that maybe need to go forward and do something different.

You're an entrepreneur there, Mal. How do --.

MR. MIXON: Well, Joe, I think the conversation on a number of subjects illustrates the need to have leadership and volunteerism at every level of our community. We wouldn't have the world's greatest orchestra if the Musical Arts Association didn't work on this relentlessly including your leader Alex Machaskee, which is one of the most important projects I believe in his non-business activities and we have the Cleveland Institute of Music which supplies a third of the musicians to that wonderful orchestra which is one of the great conservatories right here.

You talked about restoring the theater, but the project is one thing, but the ongoing continuation of the fact that we now have more live theater east of the Mississippi except for New York, so they obviously did a very good job. We built three new stadiums. We have all three of the professional teams now housed in new parks or new stadiums, and, you know, my expertise and my experience has been mainly in the business community, but, David, as you said earlier, I was born an optimist and I am an optimist. My limitations are my time, not that -- I still think there are tremendous opportunities.

And something we haven't talked about, I think there are tremendous opportunities to revitalize old companies. I purchased, a group, we purchased Royal Appliance 15, 17 years ago, revitalized it. I probably bought and sold 10 or 15 companies. We made them grow and did things and hired more people. And Cleveland has a lot of these sleepy old companies around that it's possible to put a group together and buy it and wake it up and do some things.

And it's not all about just creating companies. Creating companies is very, very difficult. I was involved in the startup of Steris Corporation which is now the 14th largest company in northeast Ohio by market cap, Invacare is 15th largest. I'm involved with a company called Neurocontrol. We spent $30 million so far trying to get this little company going with Primus and Morganthaler and Invacare. I think we'll do it, but it's tough. Starting companies is very tough. I think we have to be careful not to think we're going to snap our fingers here and suddenly we're going to have this magnificent economy appear in downtown Cleveland. We have to get the wind at our back and we have to get the people in a very positive moving the city forward.

And I hope that, Jane, as long as you're mayor, when you leave, you can say we started here and now we're far down the road towards economic generation.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: This is a little off the subject, but it is a discussion about the region and I wanted to correct Mal. There's actually four new stadiums if you consider Canal Park which is a long, long way. Were you talking about the Akron Symphony Orchestra?

MR. MIXON: Well, I forgot about that other city down there. I have told Jane on three occasions, what David said, I told her she's mayor of northeast Ohio, not Cleveland, and now that I've met you, I may have to revise that. But we do have a regional interest here, all of us at the table. It's not just Akron. It's not just Cleveland, and we are talking about the whole region.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: The only difference that I would just point out and just to follow up. Obviously I was joking, but I think it is important to what I'm going to call the central cities. I'm not going to get into this motherhood fatherhood thing. I couldn't figure that out.

But the central cities in this region are vitally important to be healthy and vital and when Cleveland made a comeback, I know that it helped us, even though many of our residents, whether they're in Akron or surrounding areas, don't always appreciate the fact that we're linked to Cleveland. We are linked to Cleveland, as I describe it, whether we like it or not and Cleveland being successful, and I'm talking about the City of Cleveland, I'm talking about the City being healthy, you know good things being said about it, waking up and looking in the paper that some magazine is saying Cleveland is one of the better places in the country to live, that's good for Akron.

I would suggest in the same way it's good for our region to have Akron healthy. I've tried to go out of my way to explain that, that those suburbs, whether it's Shaker Heights or Stow, they can't really be successful if the central city isn't successful. And there are many reports around. The Conference of Mayors partnered with the University of Wisconsin to do regional economy studies in those areas, regions of the country where the central city was strong, the whole region was stronger and where the central city was really suffering, you had the whole region suffering. So it's vitally important that we look regionally but we still make sure that we focus at some times on keeping the central cities strong.

MR. BERGHOLZ: I think one of the most difficult problems any major of a city that's facing some difficulty has is this business of justifying the investment in the core of the city for the future of the entire city and for the region so, you know, the whole neighborhood downtown split that occurred over and over again and you just have to kind of keep fighting your way through it.

I think we know if we could get more people living in good housing in downtown Cleveland, you can change the nature of this city profoundly.

MR. RYAN: But it's not just where the capital is spent. You take a look and go back to Gateway. Sure, many good jobs were created and the construction jobs were fantastic jobs both of Clevelanders and suburbanites and probably some folks from Akron building that. But you have to take a look at the people who are currently working there. Many of them work in Cleveland and live in Cleveland and one of the things I think we have to take a look at is in the City of Cleveland, the biggest issue from my standpoint is both education and poverty and they are tied directly together.

And so you have a Gateway stadium that the people, many people in Cleveland cannot afford to go there. Now today they can't afford to watch it on TV unless they have cable. You have to take a look and say, what can you do to make sure you lift these people out of poverty. You probably have enough people in the past decade or 15 years from the Cleveland Public Schools who have not graduated and have not gotten a GED to fill that stadium, and so one of the things the Mayor has to really take a look at doing is saying how do we get these folks to get the education because there's a big difference between someone that has a high school diploma or GED and someone who can't get that or hasn't received it and hasn't earned that.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: Which is why the investment that we're making in the Cleveland Public Schools today is so important. And, you know, while we have -- I mean and to Mike White's credit, he took all the political flack to take the schools, take the schools on and put them under mayoral control. It may not have been done with the most finesse, but it was the right thing to do.

MR. BERGHOLZ: As co-chair of that committee, I say it was very finessed.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: We are making progress. It's going to take a long time but we're making progress. I mean, three years ago we had 25 percent of our kids graduate. We now have 33 and a half percent of our kids graduate. Now, that's one of those things if you say only a third of the kids graduate, oh, my goodness, what are we going to do, but it's better than a fourth and we're moving in the right direction. Now, we have an opportunity because the community is beginning to believe.

And that's really, that's really what issue 14 was about. The community was ready to say, okay, we believe that we could have better schools in Cleveland, that we could have schools that could really educate kids for tomorrow. So we have to work on that with as much passion and as much fervence as we do on anything else because that is our future. But we really have to be fighting this challenge on many fronts, working with the schools, working with the economic development and it is also working with the physical development.

Nobody wanted to talk about the lake front, but I still think that's a piece of it, because as we are going through this transformation where on the one hand we're dealing with the traditional manufacturing companies who have to be re-energized because they got bought or whatever to incorporate the technology of the future so they can be strong and they can move forward as we take advantage of the bio opportunities and the technology opportunities. We then recognize that in many instances, you now have business leaders whose business could be anywhere and they're going to make decisions about locating their business based in part on their quality of life, and that quality of life is directly related to educational availability for education for their kids and the amenities, the arts, the lake front.

And so we can't sort of do just one thing. We have to be doing all of these things at the same time and recognize that's why you need so many people in leadership because you have to be able to say okay, Brian, would you please serve as the poster child for a successful minority entrepreneur.

MR. HALL: Cleveland public school student.

MR. MIXON: I think the business community has agreed with you that education has been the number one issue, and I think the recession, combination of the recession, combination of other business problems. We have lost LTV; essentially we have had BP move out of the community, Harris Intertype, Diamond Shamrock. I think economics, though, are becoming a very, very important issue. Economics in the sense of creating companies, creating jobs and not relying on this old economic base.

But it's like the chicken and the egg. I know in my company, we get high school graduates from Lorain County and we still have to teach basic math classes because they don't learn it in the schools. And we have the employed and the employable and the unemployable and the unemployed, so we need to continue to make sure that we have -- but we have a lot of talent in this region. There's a lot of skill, different skill bases. We still have a pretty high skill area.

MR. BERGHOLZ: I think it's interesting to think about this piece on the lake front because I think in a way that's the challenge, that you have got to move simultaneously on this nuts and bolts kind of activity around economic development, but if you're not building a city that people want to live in, feel passionately about, if there's ever a moment where you need that broader base of participation because all we keep talking about is access to the lake. The City has been cut off to the lake for all of these years.

I mean, we have got a $20 million investment in the Great Lakes Science Center, the biggest investment we have ever made in a Cleveland institution, so we care kind of passionately about the future of the lake front and I think we're off to a good start. We have stopped in place in a way and now is the time to really pick that up. I think this highway moment of redirecting all of that is a moment that if we don't find a way to seize it --.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: It's the vehicle to get there.

MR. MIXON: David, do you think if we have a convention center, more hotel rooms, and better airport, that we could ever be a destination city? We talked about coming here to see things --.

MR. BERGHOLZ: I think to a significant degree, that's the case. I think the feeling at the moment when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Science Center came on the scene was a very heady moment in the history of the town and there was this sense that you were going to be this international destination and so forth. It isn't that people don't come here, but this is not New York, it's not San Francisco, it's not Chicago, and so I think you have to be realistic about what it is you're trying to achieve.

Much can be achieved on that front and we have not presented a coherent vision to the community about how you would do that with all of these things. We have had dueling banjo kind of proposals and I don't think that gets you where you want to go, whether it's a convention center issue or whatever.

MR. HALL: The last question was about how do you coalesce leadership around something. I think one of the things is defining what is the issue. We talk about crisis. Are we in a crisis? If we are in a crisis, how do we define the crisis?

I know the one thing we can point to is our school system and our educational system. Even though we've made significant improvement, 33 percent still puts you in crisis and you don't stop baling water out of the boat because you're getting it out at a faster rate. You still have to get the water out of the boat.

I would suggest defining the crisis. I would also say that as we pick our bets, we didn't say education, but I think education certainly has to be one of those bets. As we do whatever it is the community decides to do, we tie it back to education. We figure out how does moving the Shoreway help education, how does building a convention center help education, because if that's at the center of our crisis, then everything that we invest in has to have some impact that's positive or we're still -- the boat is still going to be sinking.

I think we would be remiss in not including that. I think we all would agree that there is a crisis. That's where it still remains even though we're certainly headed in the right direction.

MR. FROLIK: One last area I wanted to get into briefly, a lot of talk about regionalism. From the standpoint of particularly the two mayors, what are the kinds of things that in terms of cooperation -- what are the kinds of ways in which both the two major cities in the region but when you're working with the surrounding communities, what are some of the concrete ways in which regionalism may work in making this a better place to live a better place to grow a business?

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: I think the first is the beginning that Jane and I have already had which is sitting down and talking. I joked with someone as I walked in. They asked me about it and I realized that I met with her every week she's been mayor. Didn't plan it that way but just, you know, I've talked with her every week since she's been mayor and even before that.

So I think that's the first step, to sit down and talk, because you start to realizing in those discussions that you're both in the same boat and you're both looking at trying to improve and you find ways to work together. And I don't know that there's ever going to be the direct connection that there is with our immediate suburbs, for instance. We have tax sharing agreements, for instance, that I worked out that was based on many years experience with annexation and all the animosity that that created and found a way to work out agreements that now provide moneys back into the central cities to deal with all the problems we deal with and provide additional development in those areas where they would like development to occur.

So those kinds of things, I don't know that either one of us have that in mind for the two cities, but we can work together to coordinate some of the services between our two cities in those areas that lie between the cities and communities. We ought not to really be fighting against each other competing running parallel water lines to try to cut each other's throat. That has never made sense. It was one of the first things I wanted to get up and talk to the former mayor of Cleveland and never had an opportunity.

I think there are things that make sense and I asked Jane before we came on if she was comfortable with me throwing out an idea that I talked to her about. We each have, most cities at least have mutual aid pacts within our own area with our immediate neighbors so that when there's a large fire, we're sort of shifting personnel back and forth. But if you look at the terrible situation that occurred in New York where they really needed specialized equipment and specialized -- specially trained personnel, mostly you find that in big cities.

So I have talked to Jane about doing a mutual aid pact between Cleveland and Akron to provide immediate need, immediate service and deal with all the union problems and contract problems where we're sending somebody up here and how do we deal with Workers' Comp. I have already talked to the president of our firefighters union. He talked to the president of the firefighters union in the state of Ohio. They see it as helping their fellow firefighters, so they're more than willing to help us deal with the issues when you are traveling more than just across the border.

All of those things, I think, are the types of things like that are what you reach when you get past whatever kind of competitive winner take all spirit that has existed in our county, quite frankly, and to be honest with you, I sort of swore to myself I wouldn't bring up the old times and old issues, but I think Cleveland has had a winner take all type of attitude. When it comes to the airport, they want everything, and our whole region was in a position to lose to other regions on international air travel because you couldn't accomplish anything when you said I want it all.

I think freight traffic, air freight traffic is a huge concern that we all ought to be addressing and I don't think it makes sense to have it all shipped going through Pittsburgh or all international flights going to Detroit or Pittsburgh because we can't within the region come together and find a meeting of the minds where we share something that we would all like to have but we know we're going to lose out if we don't find the common ground.

I think there are a number of those areas that we can deal with. I have already talked to Dennis Eckert and tried to schedule a meeting periodically with Jane and the Growth Association with the City of Akron being represented and the Greater Akron Chamber, Dan Collintone, and just sitting down talking about what are some of the other issues that we need to be dealing with. And I think through that, those discussions, that we'll find ways that I couldn't even think of right here today as we continue to talk through the years.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: And if you look at, I mean, this conversation we have been having about mutual aid, it is one that got brought to the forefront by September 11th because all of a sudden, I mean, everybody thinks until September 11th, everybody thought about mutual aid as there's a big fire, you need to be able to cross or there's a hostage situation and you need the SWAT team to go into Berea or something like that. But what we saw was that there we needed a whole different kind of support personnel, and as we began to talk about it, you don't want to try to negotiate those things in the middle of a crisis.

If we had, God forbid, a bioterrorism activity or something, I would want to be able to call and say, mayor, we have a problem, send your folks and he would automatically send the best people from the health department who would be there, who would bring the penicillin or whatever was the proper antibiotic and all the doctors and nurses to administer it and we would have all of that figured out ahead of time because if you're in the middle of a crises and you're trying to figure out, now, let's see, what was Plusquellic's home phone number, this is not going to work.

But the fact of the matter is, it's more than mutual aid that you can do. As we were looking at some of the things before I was even mayor, Mayor Plusquellic came in the county commission spot and said, we have an opportunity to do a hazardous materials recycling facility for small business and we have got this much money over here in Summit County to do it and the Summit County executive talked to me and it was -- they had figured out where to site this.

Now, you can imagine sitting a hazardous materials recycling facility is not one of your easier things to do. They had a place. This was a good thing, and so for a relatively modest investment of money from Cuyahoga County, we could then say to our small business, look, we have a deal for you. We signed up for this hazardous waste recycling facility and the Summit County folks got to build their facility state of the art in a timely fashion, and so now all of the small business folks who have hazardous waste can recycle it in a way that is safe for everybody because we worked together.

So those are the kind of things when you just begin to have a relationship, I mean, a lot of this really is you have got to be able to have a relationship. It's like what you talk about Brian with the conversations with the minority businesses. You have to be able to pick up the phone and call somebody and say, you know, John Ryan, we have a situation here with one of the labor unions, can you give me a read on what's really going on and, you know, he can call back and say, here's what's real, here's what I suggest. You know, Mayor Plusquellic can call and say, you know, we heard this rumor or that rumor.

Now, there are some rules. You know don't you be moving a company from the City of Cleveland. You know, I mean, Paul gets real successful. If I find Don Plusquellic trying to -- don't even go there. And, I mean, those are, you know, there are some rule of engagement. Don't take our businesses out of our community. We want to help those businesses grow and thrive in our community, and I suspect that the mayor has the same feeling about Akron.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: I do, and we have never, in spite of some difficulties and personal differences, whatever you want to call it, we never sent our people up here to go contact Cleveland business. I would suggest and it’s a whole different topic. We probably don't have time for it today. I would suggest the Cleveland Water Department helped move more businesses out of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County than anything we did all together in the last 20 years, and that's another thing that we'll sit down and talk about sometime.

But, and that includes moving businesses out of Akron by providing water services to places where I'd like to see Cleveland get something in return for just crossed water.

MAYOR CAMPBELL: It's like the Columbus model. You don't get water unless you annex yourself into the city of Columbus.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: Or do a tax sharing arrangement instead of providing water services that help move businesses both out of Akron and Cleveland.

There are many other things we can do together, and I think Jane is right. It takes just being able to sit down and talk, and I have a good sense -- there was one lucky week I remember when two announcements were made that I thought it was my luckiest week probably since my first child was born, that the mayor wasn't running and another person announced he wasn't running either and Jane announced she was running and I thought, my God, things are really looking up here and this whole thing that people talk about, the regionalization.

MR. MIXON: Joe, I'll make a comment on the regionalization issue. When I think of my own company out in Lorain County where we have 2000 associates, some of them drive as far away as from Kirtland, from Chagrin Falls. My home is on the east side of Cleveland. My lawyers, my bankers are downtown Cleveland. I'm so interconnected in the region, it would be hard to explain it, and I think many of my associates and my friends view certain assets of the City of Cleveland as regional assets.

For example, the sports teams. You go look at the tailgate parties; some of the vehicles come from pretty far away, not all from the city of Cleveland. The airport is clearly an asset manage and owned by Cleveland, but it's considered by the citizens of the area as their airport, and certainly we have explored how we can work together better with Akron. But increasingly we have to look beyond the boundaries of our cities, whether you're mayors of these communities or business people, and, you know, everyone -- let me just conclude here by saying everyone felt that the City of Cleveland would never resolve the issue with Brook Park over the I-X Center and, fortunately, Mayor Coyne and Mayor White got together, we got that resolved. We were able to buy that property.

We have secured land now for the next runway, which won't be needed -- will be needed sooner than people think. But clearly there is a case where it was a very controversial issue and it still is with all the communities around there, the noise, and the environmental issues. It's a nightmare for the mayor of Cleveland to manage when all these other communities are affected by it.

Jane, I don't know if you have had any time to reflect on that or not, but it's a tough job.

MAYOR PLUSQUELLIC: The only thing is I have to refresh the memories of our business people sometimes because when I put it in business terms, they understand it. Governmentally, everybody says, it doesn't matter, we're all in the same region.

We live off of the income tax and the income tax is based on where the employment is and until that somehow changed that to improve, we have to fight every day as mayors to try to tell people that locating your business out here doesn't help the City of Cleveland unless the taxes are paid or at least something back returned through some tax sharing agreement, something else.

And I used to describe it -- it's a different day today, but I used to describe it with the four rubber companies. When I visit friends of mine in Boston and he introduces me to a friend who said, oh, yeah, I bought a set of tires from one of those Akron rubber companies. If you are a Firestone executive, you care whether people are buying Firestone tires or Goodrich tires. To a mayor, as long as they're buying Akron tires, it doesn't matter to me.

When you put it in business terms, people understand if they're buying your product versus your competitors’ product. It makes a big difference to you. If they're located in the city of Akron they pay taxes to the City of Akron. So we have this need to do things on a regional basis and I couldn't agree more and I have put it in action. I have got real regionalism in action, not just the kind of things people talked about over the years of regionalizing water and regionalizing sewer and they leave behind this pocket which is the poor people and the elderly and the people with most needs packed in an inner city without any economic base.

And I don't mean to be critical, although probably we have all been getting along here today, but I think it's something that we have to constantly go back and remind the business community because cities ought not to be just a depository of the people who can't afford to go out and be successful in the suburbs. It can't be just a bunch of social service agencies and a few amenities that we think of as a city because that's really where we were 20 years ago, 15 years ago and we realized cities were dying.

It has to be a place for em