Geneva's Neighborhoods and Economic Development: Lessons Learned in Cleveland

In a recent post, we discussed lessons learned from the smaller, rural communities of Prince Edward County (PEC) about the impact of a creative class on local and regional economic development. Insights can also come from the experience of big cities—in this case, Cleveland, Ohio.

Of course, Geneva is not in Canada, not in Ohio (although there is actually another Geneva in Ohio!). But there is no need to dismiss good ideas right off the bat just because other communities may be different from ours. In government, just as in business, decision-makers should take heed of best practices, and big mistakes, from elsewhere so time and money aren’t wasted reinventing the wheel’ or climbing out of a hole.

The PEC post highlighted the value of grassroots arts and tourism promotion, and focused on effective messaging coming from several small groups. With the recently announced merging of the Smith Opera House and Geneva Arts Development Council boards, it seems Geneva will not be following this path. Too bad, but we hope that artists will continue to work to find a voice in promoting their work in Geneva.

Perhaps the much anticipated and long overdue report from consultant Philip Morris will weigh in on a strategy for getting more artists engaged in promotion efforts, but the community has yet to see that report, or a report on the report, even though Phil Beckley promised it to us some months ago.

What interests us most about Cleveland is its neighborhoods. There are three elements of Cleveland’s neighborhood revitalization that-- a recent visit suggested-- seem to be working really well:

1. Establishing neighborhood identities;
2. Maximizing open/public spaces and related programming;
3. Developing and marketing downtown loft housing as an upscale and progressive alternative to suburban sprawl.

Neighborhoods in Cleveland are designated by unique signage, coherent design schemes, and themed festivals.  

Little Italy has distinctive markers (see them here) and hosts the renowned "Feast of the Assumption" festival each August.  You can read more about this neighborhood here.  

The "Warehouse District," as the name suggests, is a series of buildings that used to warehouses that are now home to large, family-friendly lofts.  Their festival, held this past weekend, is meant to showcase the benefits of city living for all ages.

"Ohio City" is a neighborhood on historic buildings, mostly single family homes, that had been largely abandoned in the 1970s.  But now the area is thriving as Cleveland embraced the concept of 'adaptive reuse' and created a mixed-income community that attracted commercial and retail offerings that, in turn, attracted more residents.  You can read about the Ohio City neighborhood and its famous West Side Market here.

The University Heights district is not just home to Case Western Reserve University, but also to museums and eclectic shops and restaurants that make it a multicultural district.

"The Flats," not so much a neighborhood as a revitalized riverfront night life district, offers a variety of restaurants and clubs along the Cuyahoga River.  What had been a declining industrial district is now a revitalized historic district accented by architecturally interested and well-lighted lift bridges.

Amongst all these neighborhoods, are a series of parks and recreation facilities for city residents and visitors alike.  The park system is treated as a system of the whole, hence the “MetroParks” title. People are encouraged to use different parks for different purposes, instead of relying simply on the area closest to their home. You can read more about this program here.

Granted, there are also portions of the city that are not thriving. Several areas, particularly Euclid and the Southeast, have high vacancy rates, little-to-no retail or commercial offerings, and neglected properties. A windshield survey of a main corridor, Rte. 2, showed large, multiple family apartment buildings that had been totally abandoned. Some windows were boarded up, others just broken and open to the elements, overgrown weeds and former industrial sites left to crumble.

What the troubled areas of Cleveland lack is the cohesion of the other neighborhoods. Many of the raw materials are the same: historic properties, former industrial buildings, open space but something is missing. Communities need a purpose and they need to be able to communicate that purpose to the residents (who we hope are involved in defining that purpose) and to people passing through.

When we look at Geneva, we see neighborhoods that have the ability to be defined and marketed in a way that boosts community pride and tourist interest. In marketing terms, this would be called ‘branding.’ One example would be to continue the development of Geneva’s Torrey Park as a Little Italy, long ago proposed by Steve O’Malley, and recognized by an impressive plaque donated by Sons of Italy. Geneva needs a message, something that communicates what people love, need, and want in their residence, their company headquarters, their home base, their vacation destination. We need to communicate that Geneva is a place to live, to labor, and to linger.

Nuisance Parties or Nuisance Councilors?

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and time certainly flies when we’re on air with Ted Baker. This month’s interview began with a topic that we ran out of time for during our last appearance—the nuisance party ordinance. Augustine explained why she had been labeled the ‘party pooper’ councilor and clarified some details of the ordinance that had led some people to object to it at the last regular Council meeting.

Baker then turned our attention to the recent post on the ‘proffer agreement’ between the former city manager and the NYS Attorney General. He wanted details and we explained that we don’t have the details—that’s the point! This agreement was made when we were both on council yet, as Capraro stated, we were unaware that it existed. It’s not for a failure to ask questions (we think it’s safe to say that we always ask the tough questions) but instead indicates a climate on Council that prevented answers from being given. With some new faces in city government now, we are optimistic that we won’t see a similar situation occur, but our point in raising the issue is to ensure that the systems are in place to make City Council accountable to the city residents, in exercising its oversight of financial and personnel matters.

When asking questions is seen as a bigger nuisance than public urination, we know things are topsy turvy! But we hope the City’s on course to turn itself around. For more on this interview, or to listen to our past appearances, visit the NoStringsGeneva Radio Archive.

What Was John Edwards Thinking?Plausible Deniability Revisited

What was John Edwards thinking when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, despite having had an extra-marital affair with Rielle Hunter in 2006? Everyone agrees that if Edwards had won the nomination, the affair would have eventually come out, and his candidacy and his party’s ambitions would have been dashed.

Political America believes that SEX IS TRUTH, that the rock bottom truth about a politician’s sexuality is the rock bottom truth about him or her (although we can’t, off hand recall any hers) as a person, literally, their character-- who they really are.

So, if Edwards cheated on his wife, who, as a cancer patient, was doubly vulnerable and doubly sympathetic, and therefore doubly violated, and lied about it to the American people—as they say-- then he is unfit for office and belongs in the dustbin of history. He’s not a man of his word. He lost his self-control. He was a hypocrite. After all, he had campaigned against lies, greed, and power, on behalf of a needy and unprotected other America. Unfit to be president. Even if Bill Clinton had survived 'right wing conspiratorial' efforts to remove him from the presidency on essentially the same grounds.

Edwards told ABC news that he “didn’t think anyone would ever know about it,” that his campaigning success had led him to believe “you could do whatever you want,” and get away with it, that he was a narcissist. In other words, that he had arrived at a point of radical self-love where virtually the entire world appeared as a reflection of himself. It is more likely that a pre-existing narcissism drove him to his candidacy than the other way around, but, either way, his grandiosity in the course of campaigning got the best of him.

Strange thing is, the tabloids were on to him long ago, and had confronted him about his fling with Hunter. He denied it, and that worked, for a while. There was, then, plausible deniability.

The term, plausible deniability, dates to the Church Committee of the 1970s, and the Watergate era. According to Wikipedia, plausible deniability refers to the situation or context surrounding the events that can help the responsible parties avoid blame for what they've done

Sometimes, higher ups responsible for any wrong doing deny any knowledge of an action they had, in fact, ordered; they then go on to blame the very subordinates they had ordered to carry it out. Their denial of any wrong doing is plausible if people think it is reasonable that the higher up would not have known about an act, let alone would have had it carried out on their behalf. It can also mean there’s just not much evidence left behind and so the responsible party enjoys the benefit of the doubt.

We believe, though, that in politics and government, sometimes the actions of the responsible party are so outrageous that the average, trusting citizen would not believe it possible that such an act would have been committed, and so, in that sense, any denial is plausible.

We believe that’s what was sheltering Edwards and protecting him—for a while. Who would believe that a man of his ambition, who had professed an array of virtues centered on empathy for victims, with a highly sympathetic figure in his wife on stage with him, would have ever been sleeping around with another woman? Not many. Only the persistence of inquiring minds brought about the truth. And there’s a lesson there.

"Why would you ever want to Proffer?":A Good Question For Any Council

No Strings is about truth-telling, not negativity. As you know, we’ve been fairly optimistic about the City’s new administration and Council’s new approach to City business-- setting budget priorities and holding a series of proactive work sessions on a variety of issues.

Most recently, the Council held a work session to explore a code of ethics for the City that would better conform with the New York State Public Officer’s Law and would give clearer guidelines to Council and City staff alike.

All of these meetings, including the upcoming pre-budget session on city finances, suggest that Council’s role is changing for the better, becoming the policy-makers and policy-watchers the City Charter says they should be. Councilors are elected to set priorities and goals for the City, and to monitor the progress of staff in achieving those goals.

After all, if Council doesn’t stay on top of things, or is encouraged to stay out of the City’s business, then they might not notice that changes are needed until it’s too late. Here’s an example:

In the midst of Council’s review of the City Attorney position, we posted a comparison between what the City paid in outside legal services and what the City paid its own City Attorney. We got those numbers from City records, records available to any member of the public through the FOIL process.

At the time, because we were mainly interested in the big picture, we didn’t go into specific bills for specific legal work performed by the City’s major outside legal counsel, Harris Beach. But now that we’ve taken a closer look, we’ve come across things that Council should have known about-- but did not.

Most of the Harris Beach work for the City is not all that noteworthy-- the usual sorts of tasks common in municipal law: responses to challenges to property assessments, some labor law consultations, bonding, and the like.

But one big bill stuck out like a sore thumb-- the one from attorney Tom DeSimon who is “co-leader of the Government Compliance and Investigations Team” at Harris Beach (read his company bio here). The bill, which you can read for yourself here details DeSimon’s conferences with then-City Attorney Clark Cannon and then-City Manager Rich Rising regarding “Attorney General inquiry” including five telephone conferences regarding “terms of R. Rising proffer agreement and debriefing schedule.” There is also a $2000 charge for a meeting in Syracuse “with Attorney General for R. Rising debriefing.”

Even though Rising was the City Manager and the City was paying the bill, the Council was never informed of nor provided a copy of Rising’s proffer agreement. In fact, we didn’t even know, before discovering this bill, what a proffer agreement was. Do you?

Findlaw, an online legal resource, gives the following description of a proffer, also referred to, in the legal world, as a “Queen For The Day” agreement:

“A proffer agreement (also known as a queen for a day agreement) is a written agreement between the prosecutor and an individual allowing the individual to provide information about a crime or possible crime to the government, with the assurance that his words will not be used against him in the government's case-in-chief in the event of a subsequent trial…The proffer itself, which is given in a proffer session attended by you, your attorney, the prosecutor and the case agent, is almost always informally seen as a prelude to a written immunity or plea bargain agreement, provided that the government, in its sole discretion, finds your proffer truthful. (In fact, there is no reason for you ever to make a proffer absent this informal understanding.)” (you can read more about it here).

Under what circumstances would a person sign a proffer agreement? Again, Findlaw offers the following analysis:

“Why would you ever want to proffer? Because, and only because: 1) you have exposure; 2) indictment is a foregone conclusion if you don't work out a plea deal or immunity agreement; 3) you want a plea deal or immunity agreement; and, 4) the prosecutor will not give you either without first hearing your proffer. Even in this scenario, as noted above, proffering is a high-risk venture."

Augustine asked a NYCOM attorney for a definition of a proffer agreement and any information that could be offered about circumstances which might lead to one. NYCOM corroborated the ‘queen for a day’ characterization referenced above. Additionally, here’s an example of a proffer letter we found in a law book that allows viewing via the Internet (so we’re not in violation of any copyright here).

At the time of the Attorney General’s investigation, Council was briefed by Cannon and Rising about the general situation and some Councilors, including us, wanted to get a ‘second opinion’ about the matter from an independent source. The request was taken as a challenge to personal integrity rather than as an effort at responsible city decision-making. Because Council’s attitude was hands-off , no one pressed for details. If we had, perhaps we would have known about this proffer agreement and why anyone in our city government would sign one.

Council Visioning Deserved an Audience

In a recent post we discussed the conditions that can lead a council to abandon its strategic priorities. That post indicated that some of those conditions have improved in Geneva. But we also know that, in the past, city council didn’t do much in the way of establishing any strategic priorities. It looks like that situation is being remedied if Monday night’s council meeting was any indication of things to come.

The council spent over two hours discussing the strengths, challenges and unrealized opportunities in the city. They spoke about their hopes for Geneva in the long term (5 to 10 years) and set ‘strategic imperatives’ to guide their decision-making, including budgeting, in the short term. All of this was facilitated by City Manager Matt Horn, with the Comptroller, Personnel Director, and City Planner present as well.

Several weeks ago, Horn had presented each councilor with a worksheet on which they were each expected to provide their candid insights. He then put the responses together, without identifying the author of each, to guide the Monday night discussion. The majority of councilors (and the Mayor) completed the assignment and the responses reflected an honest and sincere approach to the questions.

The discussion that followed was aimed at bringing the council together in defining the city’s mission and clarifying the vision of Geneva as a community. While City Manager Horn served as facilitator, he also allowed himself to be drawn into the conversation and participated in a meaningful way. The end product was a council agreement to four key ‘strategic initiatives’ that will shape Horn’s development of the budget document and will guide the remaining community conversations on the topic of how we spend our resources. While the exact wording of each initiative is yet to be fine-tuned, the four areas of focus are: Value for the Tax Dollar; Neighborhood Enhancement; Engaged Governance; and Economic Development.

We agree that these four areas cover most of the activities that a city could undertake to serve its residents to the best of its ability (we say ‘most’ because maybe there are some that haven’t occurred to us yet that might not, but we can’t think of any at the moment). Getting value for taxes paid takes the focus off of the numbers (remember last year’s claim that there was no tax increase despite the fact that most people experienced at least a 7% increase due to their assessments?) and onto the way the money is being spent to serve people. Enhancing Neighborhoods catches issues of property maintenance, safety, recreation and initiatives like community organizing and planning. Economic Development might seem like an old term in Geneva, but we hope this will be a new incarnation of it, less about tax breaks and landing industrial projects (strategies that have proven largely ineffective in the Upstate economy) and more about developing and supporting small businesses and innovative enterprise ideas consistent with the community’s vision of itself. To put it another way, we’re looking for mindful economic enhancement and job creation, not just catch-as-catch-can government-funded projects. Lastly, it makes sense that City Council would include a self-reflective initiative in its budget document. After all, the buck stops with the Council, so it should not be immune to describing its own commitment to making Geneva great(er). When asked by Councilor Cosentino to explain what council should be doing differently, many Councilors offered ideas. Councilor Valentino explained that he would like to see everyone “roll up their sleeves” and get into more in depth discussions about issues. He pointed out that not every councilor can be a specialist in every area of city government, which seems to open the door to reconsidering a committee structure, similar to other local governments in the area. Councilor Augustine suggested more frequent ward meetings and other means of outreaching to constituents, more worksessions to allow Council to consider complex issues that are not well-suited to long once-a-month business meetings. Councilor D’Amico said it means doing more than just showing up for meetings, it’s a commitment to keep generating ideas and doing research in between meetings.

All in all, what happened in the City Council chambers Monday night was an example of ‘engaged governance.’ It was a meeting with discussion, debate, disagreement, and yet decisions were still made. This is not to say that the rest of Council’s term is sure to be tulips and smiles, but it showed that the new Mayor’s commitment to collaboration is an attainable goal, especially with a city manager who’s committed to, and clearly skilled at, driving a good decision-making process.

The Hallmarks of Effective Local Governments

Recently, Augustine received an invitation to participate in a national study regarding the effectiveness of local governments, with a specific focus on the council-manager form of government. The study is being run by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Northern Michigan University, both of which offer a Master's degree in Public Administration.

From the perspective of a research subject, it seemed that the study was examining two things: First, how councils and managers conduct and implement strategic visioning for their communities; and second, how intra-council conflicts can lead to decisions that stray from that vision. For example, Augustine was asked to consider the following list of issues:

• Economic Development
• Public Private Cooperation and Partnerships
• Land Use/Zoning
• General Taxation
• Tax Increment Financing
• Recruiting New Businesses
• Transportation
• Public Works
• Education
• Government Administration
• Employee Relations
• Intergovernmental Relations
• Collective Bargaining
• Emergency Preparedness
• Energy Policy
• Eminent Domain
  

and provide an assessment of Council’s overall knowledge of each issue, interest in each issue, and effectiveness of policy-making with regards to each. She was then asked to describe the extent to which each of the following factors led to conflicts amongst Council that may have hindered decision-making:

• Different interpretations about mission
• Low trust among council members
• Low trust of Mayor
• Personality differences among council members
• Varying levels of confidence among council members
• Different expectations of the information needed to make decisions
• Different levels of commitment to the local government
• Different preferences for decision-making processes
• Pressure to raise taxes
• Varying levels of skill among council members
• Role conflicts between council and staff
• Low trust of City Manager

As you can see, the former City Council, under the direction of the former City Manager, could have served as a ‘case study’ for these researchers because there was conflict on each of these points. The election that was in full swing at this time last year was focused on getting council out from under the manager’s thumb, seating councilors who took their role seriously and could check their egos at the door and roll up their sleeves for the best interests of Geneva. Augustine’s answers to the questions reflected the improvement in governance that has been evident following the departure of the former manager. On one hand, she could speak to the broken system we navigated with him at the helm, but she could also communicate the renewed sense of possibilities now.

While some of these ‘pressure points’ still exist with the current council, those related to the City Manager, the Mayor, and city staff are no longer present. Now, the question remains if the new council will find the will, and a way, to address each of those issues above (from Economic Development to Eminent Domain) in a way that puts pursuit of a strategic community vision at the forefront of the decision-making.