Leveraging Lake Erie
Chris Ronayne Interview TranscriptParticipants:
Chris Ronayne
Director, City Planning Commission, City of Cleveland
Joe Frolik
Associate Editor, The Plain DealerJoe Frolik: Well Chris thanks for joining us today. In the Lakefront planning process for the last two years or so, I’ve heard you and the Mayor a lot talk about wanting Clevelanders in Northeast Ohio to be able to touch the lake. What do you mean by that?
Chris Ronayne: Well Joe, we have a history in this city where we have neighborhoods that once were really truly connected to the waterfront. The Mayor, early on, as early as her campaign days for Mayor went out into the neighborhoods and she heard from people about those days, particularly the elder residents who said, before we built a lot of those barriers, we could get down to the lake. We have from Edgewater to Glenville, Collinwood, St. Clair, Ohio City, Detroit Shoreway, thousands of residents who live within a mile of the lake but they cannot get across to it. Our whole charge has been reaching the lake, touch the lake, and physically connect to the lake.
So the Mayor in April 2002 embarked on this lakefront plan. A comprehensive vision to help Clevelanders connect to their lake; the name means something. Connecting Cleveland, the 20/20 lakefront plan and the lakefront plan is just that. We tied this to our citywide plan so we call it our 20/20 plan but it is really a 50 year vision. We haven’t had a lakefront plan in a comprehensive way commissioned in this city since the 1940’s. It’s been 55 years since the Mayor has taken up a comprehensive plan for the waterfront. Really what happened since that first plan in 1946 commissioned then under Mayor Thomas Berk unfortunately a lot of infrastructure was built in that time between in those last 50 years of the 20th century that disconnected our neighborhoods from the lake. We built a highway; we completed a highway that divided us right off from our lake. We build additional utilities, some that had a waterfront access, some that did not. Some of them need not have been on the lake. We built an airport right on the lake taking up 450 acres of lakefront property. And in the end what Clevelanders were left with is a lot of barriers between themselves and the lake.
I’m sure some of these are Cleveland assets, some of them are needs, but many of them need not have been there had there been some foresight. The Mayor is trying to turn things back, back maybe to where they were 100 years ago when Clevelanders could physically connect to the lake. So she commissioned our team, the Lakefront Plan Team, along with a group of consultants, some here local in Cleveland and some in Chicago that were trying to put together essentially reknitting the community to it’s lakefront. We looked at 4 systems. We looked at how a park system might connect itself from a couple of great state parks, Edgewater, where we are today to Gordon Park, connecting those parks that are 8 miles from one another, now that’s one system.
Another system is a waterside system. How do you actually from the water looking back at the lake, connect boaters, connect recreationalists back to the landside. Another is the physical connectors of sort of, unbuilding, if you will, in some places, that infrastructure that divides us. Turning a highway into a boulevard that’s crossable by pedestrians, and finally and perhaps most importantly back to the original vision that started two years ago, was the neighborhoods; what does this mean for the neighborhoods, show us a) how to get to the lake and b) when we get there, give us a reason to go there.
That was literally someone said that to us in the stockyard neighborhoods in the city of Cleveland, help me find a way to get there and when I get there, give me the amenities and the reason to go there.
Joe Frolik: Let me jump back a little bit. You know you talk about touching the lake; I mean as we sit here it looks like it ought to be really easy. You know I remember the summer I moved here in the early 80’s having a very vivid memory of driving down the shoreway and as someone who had gone to school and lived in Chicago thinking why in the world was it designed the way it was? As you’ve gone through, I’m sure you must have gone through old planning documents and stuff. What’s your sense of why was the lakefront sort of and the waterfront I should say because the river not necessarily, why was the city designed the way it was without taking advantage of what we now might say are these great assets?
Chris Ronayne: Well now going back, we gone back 50 years, let’s go back 200 years in the city of Cleveland. In the late 1700’s when Moses Cleveland landed in this town with the Connecticut Land Company, they found 2 water systems. Great Lake Erie, obviously predecessors before them saw this wonderful, wonderful wide open sea of lakes that we know as the Great Lakes but when we began to migrate towards cities and begin to develop land in and around this Midwest area, it was the Connecticut Land Company and Moses Cleveland that came to this Cuyahoga River Valley and saw a place that sat between a river and a lake, landed literally on the banks of what we now know today as the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. But when they went to the uplands, the MO was to really plan a town around what they knew which was a New England town square if you will, hence Public Square. We began to plan from the Public Square looking out and in that time not only did we sort of insulate ourselves from the lake, we built around a square without much interface to the waterfront as some greater international cities interface with waters today but also there were some legitimate reasons to stay away from the waterfront. Home weatherization systems in those days, late 1700’s, early 1800’s simply it wasn’t there. We didn’t have sophisticated home weatherization home weatherization systems, so people needed to shelter themselves from harsh conditions and that’s the winter time problem. In the summertime problem, there were bacteria and other disease problems that would matriculate as a result of standing water in the Cuyahoga River and which at that point was sort of swampy marsh conditions. So there wasn’t really a modus operandi to be near the waterfront in those early days. And really it was again the town planted around a town square that built on a grid pattern as they knew in the New England states. We jump a little bit forward and what took hold on the waterfronts in Cleveland in the early 1800’s mid-1800’s, industry. We had this wonderful nexus between the river and Great Lake Erie and we built a canal system. And when that canal system was build in the 1830’s, to jog the Cuyahoga River, we could start moving goods to the Ohio River and we really blossomed and it was in those decades that this city began to grow. But what was dominating on the waterfronts in those days was certainly industry and that continued on as we began to build steel product in this community and other product where we were shipping large quantities of bulk material to our city visa vie the Great Lakes states and the St. Lawrence seaway and now up the Cuyahoga River. So industry took hold and that more or less dominated our waterscape through the 1800’s. You get into the early 1900’s and the same goes, we’ve been through the industrial revolution, things are plugging along, but the waters are starting to get relatively contaminated.
Joe Frolik: You might not want to connect to the water.
Chris Ronayne: Exactly. And as you know, we worked our way through most of the 20th century with waters that ultimately people did not want to be near and that all sort of came to a head in the 1960’s, when in the late 1960’s when the Cuyahoga River burned, really the genesis of the Cleveland Water Act was right here in Cleveland Ohio and you know 30 years out we are beginning to clean up the water systems, it is again, well for the first time in our city--- the place to be. Hot cities that are on waterfronts and I mean hot not in the weather sense, but growth opportunity cities that have a waterfront, we’ve got what not every other city in America has, we have a Great Lake and a Cuyahoga River and people want to be near that and they’ve experienced that in other cities and we are saying why not here in Cleveland. So not only is it a knitting back the neighborhoods that exist here in the city to the waterfronts but it’s also about creation of new residential housing that takes advantage this wonderful view out to these Great Lakes.
Joe Frolik: Let’s talk a little bit more about that idea. David Beach from Eco City Cleveland said that in the past, cities were maybe defined by location, we are on the nexus of a river and a great lake, so from a transportation standpoint this was a great place, you could run first the railroads and then the interstate highways right along the same sort of path that nature had carved. David suggested that perhaps in the 21st century, place is going to be more important, having a sense of place and a uniqueness. Do you agree with that and if so how does that drive design particularly as it relates to the waterfronts?
Chris Ronayne: Well I agree in total with David about this issue. In the old days, yes, it was location, location, location and then along came Las Vegas and then somebody said, well gee you can build in a place that has no water at all and you can build in the middle of a desert and with the right set of attractions people will migrate. It might be an interesting example, but it did blow away the notion of location, location, location. So whereas we really used to be a place that had a necessary relationship to you know natural conditions, typographical conditions, and other things, that that was the whole origin of our city was around the natural conditions and the transport conditions and shipping commerce opportunities that we had, now what we are today is essentially a lat-long point on a map. We are a location, but those cities that will get ahead are those cities that understand that you have to convert this sense of location to a sense of place and I wholeheartedly agree with that point of view. Its not just about place, it’s about competitive place. It’s about building place that gives you every amenity that you can otherwise get out there. Whether it’s in the suburbs of Cleveland or some other city outside of our region, what we know today is labor is mobile, very mobile; graduating students from colleges choose cities, they choose them as if they are consumer goods. Literally to be consumed, so you have to package all of the amenities of place that brings people here. Why do people want to move to certain Chicago neighborhoods, why do people want to move to the Greenwich Village in New York, why do people want to move out to San Francisco? Because there’s been a focus on place and all of the amenities built to attract. We are, like anywhere else, now a consumer good as a city to be consumed, to be marketed, to be packaged and to try to compete with all of those other places out there. So I agree, it is not just locational draw anymore, it’s really about place and building competitive place and what that means is what everybody has told us over the last two years, I want to be able to touch the water, I want to be able to be along this water, all along the way. I want to have a waterside connection. I want to have a place for my boat. I want to be able to dine around the water and I want to live near it and I want to be able to get to it and I want a continuous journey when I do get there. We think that people are willing to sacrifice a few of the conveniences that they have had in the past, like quick commute times through the downtown on a highway, where if you’re not looking you won’t even see the waterfront because you are speeding past it. We think those are some of the things that people are willing to give on in order to take the good of the amenities that we can develop in and around the waterfront. But most definitely this is a huge competitive asset for the city of Cleveland. Probably beyond human capital, this is the hugest asset of the city, is this Great Lake Erie and still not totally tapped from our point of view.
Joe Frolik: And it’s sort of the magnet for that human capital. Particularly, I think, like people like yourself and your wife, young professionals who can do what you do anywhere.
Chris Ronayne: Exactly. That’s right. I mean we literally, you know, what we are competing for, first obviously to build on the quality of place for those who live here. Our general goal is to improve the quality of life for those who live in our neighborhoods. But most definitely also on our list is this notion of trying to attract a graduating student from Case and then trying to retain that graduating student, trying to attract that graduating student from Ohio State University or the University of Cincinnati. How are we competing with our pier cities in Pittsburg or Milwaukee or Chicago for that matter? What are we doing to attract them to this place? Sure they want a job when they get there, there needs to be that promise of a job but in terms of retention and attraction it’s also about all of these amenities, you know, if they are a rower, they can row on the river, if they are a runner, they can run that Tow Path trail. We’d like to run that through the city of Cleveland. If they are looking for continuance of their education, they’ve got some great graduate universities around here, but these are the amenities we need to continue to build of and they need a downtown dining experience, you know, they need connections from the neighborhoods out to the lake. So it is all about reaching out to that market that is mobile and can go anywhere else in the universe if they choose.
Joe Frolik: Now you mentioned rowers on the river and boaters, people who’ve done that know that this is also remains a commercial waterfront. We have a freighter that is going by in the background here, you can again if you are on the river sometimes you have to pull aside because sometimes the barges are coming up and down the river. How do you in terms of the planning process and thinking all the way through of the economic value of the waterfronts, how do you integrate the commercial realities of what Cleveland is and will be for the foreseeable future with developing the residential, the amenities side, sort of the softer side, what do we do about the hard old Cleveland?
Chris Ronayne: Well think about the things that define our town. For sure, it’s the waterfront, that’s one of the defining features of our town. Most definitely we have a history of sports and great sports in this community. The Cleveland Browns are a part of this definition, the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, all the amenities at University Circle but so to is the steel making in this community. That’s the heart and soul and the character of this town. Why not celebrate that and why not tell that story and why not, what we are trying to do is forge the balance. Why not forge a balance between industry, recreation, that interaction of human beings, commerce, where it all comes together at the waterfront? You know and I know that what people enjoy about this waterfront are the sunsets, they enjoy the boats, the steamships that come by. They enjoy some of, some people view the industrial scape of the Cuyahoga River Valley as very majestic, you know, and so take all of that into account and we’ve got an incredible story to tell and that story ought to be told with accessible routes down to the waterfront that interpret that entire story. That’s the whole nature of this Cuyahoga River Valley plan, is to bring people down for some form of visa vie the Tow Path Trail to jog the Canal Pathway to tell the story along the way but also to sustain industry in those very places. There is no reason as we learned with ISG Steel that we cannot have an operating steel mill and a trailway that runs past it. And the same should go for the lakefront, you know, part of what people think is special on this waterfront is that it is a working waterfront but where perhaps we haven’t focused in the last 50 years in this town is how to get people down to that waterfront and all the while sustain industry. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive and we’ve learned that through our work with ISG. We’ve got a lot of work to do with the old river channel and the flats industrial area, how to balance this market drive for more housing, this market drive for some commercial that’s not your core general industry and also can you sustain jobs. And, we can do it, we feel very strongly that there’s enough space. There’s 2500 acres to develop in this Great Lake Erie area on just our shoreline. There’s another 1200 acres in the industrial flats themselves. So you are dealing with almost 4000 acres of developable property in and around the waterfronts. It is a doable proposition. I think we take our cues just as much from places like Milwaukee and Chicago but we also take it from places like Duluth that interact well with their own industry on the waterfronts. We are a similar town in that regard and we ought to celebrate. People ought to be able to go out the old Coast Guard station and look back at a port authority that’s bringing a steamship in with you know traditional ore that’s going to the mills and they ought to be able to tell their kids that story on how that all works here on the waterfront. It ought to be part of the charm everybody loves to have dinner down by the water and see one of those wonderful ships go by. It’s a story of jobs in this community past, present and future.
Joe Frolik: You are one of the Mayor’s embassaries I know to this group of Great Lake cities that have sort of tried to see sort of the common problems and with the issues about Lake Erie restorations, so can you talk a little bit about that and again how that sort of fits in, in terms of preservation of the quality of the lake if indeed we’re going to make it an as strategic advantage for us in terms of future economic growth?
Chris Ronayne: Well just when you look at this place behind us, you look at 13 trillion gallons of fresh water in Great Lake Erie alone. The Great Lakes represents 90% of the fresh water supply in the United States, 20% around the globe. From our standpoints, as Great Lakes cities, this is our competitive asset in the global arena. We literally hold that much of the fresh water supply in the world right here in these 8 Great Lakes states in the Great Lakes basin. What Mayor Campbell has been a part of is an initiative that was started by Mayor Daly in Chicago which is to suggest that cities on the waterfronts should have standing in this national debate about water quality. So we have joined with 40 cities in and around the Great Lakes including the Canadian provinces and their cities and we meet on a regular basis. We have a monthly phone call with the Great Lakes cities initiative, it’s now staffed out of Chicago and the basic driving forces are these, that the cities should have standing in Washington about the future of these waterfronts. We depend on them for water bearing commerce, our fisheries both from an industry standpoint and a recreational standpoint, just having fresh water that people can swim in, potable drinking water and all that matters. Just like the Everglades got a significant source of funds dedicated for it’s restoration and cleanup, we are asking for that of Washington in the form of the Great Lakes Restoration Fund which would be multibillion dollar remediation fund for our water quality. And also we have interests that come to us by industrialists by saying; you need to keep the Asian carp out of the water system. You need to remediate that dead zone that is out in Great Lake Erie. That is not something that we want to see in the headlines that we’ve got a great dead zone in the middle of the lake. So the aquatic life in the lake is very important. So it is all about keeping a sustainable water system out of the Great Lakes. But we also think that over time, it will be in our country the center point conversation about growth. Where should this nation grow that we’ll grow 80 million people in the next 25 years, possibly doubling our population into the 22nd century and where should people live? Should we be piping this water out to the southwest states and what we view as non-sustainable places because it is unnatural? And so there is a conversation now between the Great Lakes government and the Great Lakes cities about the future distribution of this water supply. It helps us in this notion of bringing back and sustaining some of the population that has left this community and it helps from a global standpoint in the conversation about sustainability in general. So, these Great Lakes mean everything to us from commerce to enjoyment and recreation to population retention but ultimately to the issue of global sustainability and so we are glad to be a part of the Mayor’s conversation about the quality of the Great Lakes.
Joe Frolik: Oh okay. You mentioned that you don’t want to see headlines about the dead zones and stuff. We just had some headlines recently about the poverty in Cleveland. The highest concentration of poverty in the country, clearly this has been a tough few decades more for the region in general in terms of the growth needs visa vie the rest of the country. When talk about the ambitious plans of sort of redefining, reorienting the city and what can happen along the lake, where does the money come from to do that? The stuff that you think needs to be done here?
Chris Ronayne: We will, as the city of Cleveland, go for any source of funds outside our own general fund. Unabashedly that’s where we stand on this issue. But you know what, we have had tremendous partnership from a congressional delegation, we had a good partnership from the state of Ohio. State of Ohio has put up to $5 million in planning money into this project alone and then through congressional earmarks there’s another $20 million just for amenities that we think is out on the horizon, we need the transportation bill to be reauthorized and passed through the House and Senate and with the President’s signature on it and then there is a significant source of funds that can come to us through transportation monies for the reconstruction of the inner belt, the flats and doing these all in concerts and creating a sort of orchestral synergy what needs to happen with all of these plans. So we are not asking tax payers of the city of Cleveland to necessarily foot the bill for the waterfront improvements. We view this asset as a regional asset that ought to have buy-in from multiple municipalities in Northeast Ohio. But it’s a bet we think is worth taking. That this is absolutely a part of our future, we can’t turn off the lights and say, we are a poor city, and we can’t do this. Because that would only be addressing sort of in fire fighting fashion the problems de jour. We need, and Clevelanders know this, rich, poor and middleclass and otherwise know that the waterfront is part of our future and that it’s worth working on, it’s worth making these improvements. Yes we have park maintenance issues in the city of Cleveland, yes we have roadway system maintenance problems, and does that mean you should never contemplate a new boulevard system or you should never contemplate a set of new waterfront parks, absolutely not. I mean those are the measures of our future. If we are going to continue to work on building place, attracting investments, attracting population, retaining population, bringing people with jobs, with income that spit out services to the entire community. If we turn out the lights out on this project, we turn out the lights on our future.
Joe Frolik: The public function here is perhaps changing the nature of the shoreway, almost, and then it becomes or has to go up to the private developers to come in and do the stuff. In affect you are sort of opening up land, like Oklahoma in 1989.
Chris Ronayne: Right. I mean we closed that system off over 100 years. We’ve basically closed the waterfront system to development and we are reopening it. It is an interesting conversation to be with the Ohio Department of Transportation where you are actually asking them to participate in... (plane flying overhead, interview paused and re-started with earlier question)
Joe Frolik: You talked about headlines you don’t want to see about the dead zones out in the lake, obviously we have just had some headlines about the poverty concentration. The greatest concentration of poverty in the country. We’ve had these layoffs in the city, the region the last couple of decades has underperformed visa vie the rest of the country. So the question is if you want to do these ambitious things around the lake, where’s the money come from to do that?
Chris Ronayne: Well Joe, we are going to go for creative sources of financing, no doubt. Anything but the city general fund. Sure we are a city that’s in a struggle to continue to balance it’s books, to continue to sustain services in the city of Cleveland, but you know we have had tremendous partnership from our federal partners. Mayor Campbell’s appease to the congressional delegation, has appealed to the congressional delegation to ask them for this waterfront project and they have committed millions of dollars to this project. The State of Ohio has committed millions of dollars to the planning of this development. Ultimately we want to see the transportation bill passed that needs the signoff of the Senate and the House and it needs the President’s signature but ultimately we are confident that that bill will be passed and that will bring extraordinary infrastructure investment to this plan. We feel if we turn off the lights on this project, we ought to just turn of the lights on our future. If we only deal in fire fighter fashion with the issues and the problems de jour and we are never thinking about our future, how are we ever going to grow as a community, how are we going to meet that 500,000+, how are we going to retain population, bring back population, and create competitive place if we are only ever dealing with brush fires in our community. We think that the confidence of this community about this plan both in the city of Cleveland and outside of our city borders is there. People are sick of getting on a plane and going to the great city 390 miles to the west or going to another great city on the California coast line and coming back and saying, why can’t we do this here? The answer is, we can do this here and it is interesting to be in conversation with groups like the Ohio Department of Transportation about the concept of unbuilding some of what they’ve built in the past, how unbuilding a highway and turning it into a boulevard has taken an extraordinary partnership but it’s happening and it’s because there’s a plan and there’s a vision and the neighborhoods are backing this notion of reaching the waterfront. We have really not even begun to tape the region’s interest in our waterfront either. So we have 3 constituencies. We have our neighborhood constituencies that simply want to get back to the waterfront. They want to fish on the waterline, they want to swim at the beaches, they want reach the lake, and they want to touch the lake. We’ve got a regional audience who we think we can attract better to this lakefront than we have in the past if we give them the amenities and the reasons to come down to the waterfront but we also have the international visitor opportunity. Sure they come here for the Rock Hall and what’s the rest of the experience, the Northcoast Harbor. There are a group of amenities whether it the Mather or the Science Center or Cleveland Browns Stadium, but what else is the experience. Where are the restaurants, what’s the pedestrian experience? Where is there any retail nearby? Those are all things that we know we’ve only built maybe 30% of the Northcoast Harbor out, there is so much more work to be done but what’s leveraging all of this is this wonderful natural asset Lake Erie that people want to walk by, they want to see sunsets, they want to watch boaters go by, they want to see industry communing its way up and down the Cuyahoga River. It’s part of the special charm of this character area that we know as the waterfront in Cleveland. We’ve never contemplated neighborhoods that are north neighborhoods of the city. It’s always been east, west and south. Well we are right here with our front door being the lake. The north neighborhoods of the city of Cleveland, it’s because there hasn’t been traditionally that interface. North stopped at the highway in the city of Cleveland. North didn’t stop at the lakefront horizon. So it’s something that we feel very confident, back to the question about should you, as a poor city, as a city still working on educational advancement, should you take this bet on the waterfront. You bet your life because you want to retain those graduating students and that next generation of children in the city of Cleveland. You don’t want them to go to the next city that has a good waterfront and leave a city that never did anything about it’s asset, it’s waterfront.
Joe Frolik: And in terms of, you talk about unbuilding, one of the things you work with the state, as you unbuild things like the shoreway and some of the other barriers, then I assume then the next stage of funding is the private sector, if you are going to do residential and commercial development along here. Almost like Oklahoma, you are opening up land for people to do stuff.
Chris Ronayne: Well we have had some early indicators on how hot this waterfront housing market is. And first of all we do have a study from Cleveland State University that says there are 7-10,000 interested home buyers in the region in this waterfront area. You’ve got a whole market; you know 2/3 of America today lives under rooftops that don’t have children in the home. So there is this whole market of empty nesters, there’s this whole retiring crowd in this region that may want to enjoy urbanity sometime in their life. They want to come back to their historic home here in the city of Cleveland, you’ve got that group. You’ve got young professionals again, a mobile market that finds their way to cities throughout the country that we should attract in or around the waterfront area. You’ve got young artist that want to be in an urban environment but in this relationship with the water itself. See you have a whole set of constituencies that are our future home buyers in the city of Cleveland. But the early projects that have shown this serious market interest and we looked at places like Key 55 and the conversion of the Nicholson Terminal on East 55, fully leased up, Mark Hoffman the developer now looking at Phase 2 because of the successes of his first phase. You look at these areas in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood to the west, they are marketing in their sales and marketing brochures the waterfront plan prior to it even being built and that will evolve over time but they are marketing it as waterfront housing. That’s what we have needed for decades in this community and we are finally getting it. Little connectors like Detroit Shoreway, Edgewater Bike connector which gets people from the neighborhood down to the lake, gives them the promise of that lakefront connection. But there is a market which is really holding up and showing to be true as a result of these early projects. The downtown market is all about waterfront views. From the warehouse district down to the river, from those avenue districts out around Erieview, out to the lake and potentially over time down at the Harbor Front itself.
Joe Frolik: Okay. We talked about sort of broadly, the Great Lakes region and the cooperation, do you have many discussions with the adjacent counties, going Lake and Ashtabula and Lorain and Erie and into the west and kind of the Ohio Lake Erie if you will about how we develop that lakefront or how we use the lakefront as an asset to the whole region?
Chris Ronayne: You know when you think of Great Lake Erie, it’s 200+ miles of shoreline for which there is only about 15% of that shoreline publicly assessable on the Ohio line. Very different story on the Canadian shores. When we think of Great Lake Erie, why don’t we think of it as a tourist destination unto itself, you know, if Costa Rica has built an entire economy on ecotourism, what of this notion of Great Lakes tourism? I mean we really have not exploited that tourism market for the Great Lakes yet. So we are beginning to get into these conversations visa vie the Great Lakes Cities Initiative. There’s now 40 member communities in or around the Great Lakes but there are communities of 50,000 or less that are now participating in this Great Lakes Cities Initiative. We would like to see from Toledo all the way back to the very Northeastern edge of Ohio a concentrated planning effort along the waterfront. We feel that Cleveland as the largest city in this region and along the Lake Eric shoreline; should be the legitimate header of this discussion. But we are now beginning to have discussions with certain county officials of other counties certainly municipal mayors of Cuyahoga County. But they are beginning to say: Hey what’s happening there in Cleveland. When we go to these Great Lakes Cities Initiatives we’re getting a lot of, um queries from other mayors, saying: “This is making sense, connecting to your waterfront. I’m on a waterfront too and I haven’t done it yet.” So they’re could be more collaborations. I think certainly in this notion of Ohio tourism and using this Great Lake as an economic engine to bring interest to this city. We haven’t exploited it totally. We’ve had a lot of good support from the state of Ohio. The Governor who has been the former chair of the Governors task force on the Great Lakes has been helpful in working with Mayor Campbell to make this infrastructure changes happen. But certainly a collaboration of sister cities that all dot the shoreline, we all want the same thing. We want access, we want the waterfronts to represent industry, opportunities and help us with our help us with our economic regeneration and we certainly want it as a place advancer you know as the waterfront being a leave catalyst to developing neighborhoods and housing with views to the lake. Doesn’t necessarily have to be right up on top of it, but with a view, that’s what you will be able to market.
Joe Frolik: Okay, Chris, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Chris Ronayne: Good to be here Joe.