Hotel Bruce

Welcome to the Bruce blog—a weekly update on news, events and issues affecting life in Cleveland. Reporting as it happens on transit, development, planning, environment and arts & culture.

Basically, we write about creative ideas forming, talk to the people who have an inside track on the issues, and sometimes offer a commentary of our own. (For disclosure purposes, Bruce blog is a local, independent writer who also works part-time with nonprofit organization EcoCity Cleveland. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of EcoCity or any other organization).

The fight to save St. Michael Hospital is one step closer to being over. The hospital, located in Slavic Village, along with Mt. Sinai in University Circle, grabbed headlines last year as citizens fought alongside political heavyweights Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Stephanie Tubbs Jones to save them from the axe. Spiraling health care costs, emergency room primary care and declining numbers of insured patients put the hospitals in financial straits, while deals involving University Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic failed to materialize.

Last week, the Cleveland Planning Commission granted final approval for the design of a new MetroHealth primary care clinic for Slavic Village that will go into an old Kmart on Broadway. MetroHealth and the owner of the building, Edens & Avant, agreed to spend $11 million to tear off the façade, redesign the interior and improve the site around the Kmart. The deal will certainly spell the end of St. Michael’s (earlier this year, Mt. Sinai was purchased by Case).

Last month, the planning commission and councilman Ed Rybka leveled criticism and ultimately managed to hold up approval of the design. Apparently, the initial proposal of $6.7 million to improve the building, which is set back hundreds of feet from the street in a giant sea of asphalt, did not include site improvement for pedestrians. After planning commission approval last week, a small article buried in the PD’s Metro section failed to mention what design improvements were won in negotiations. Bruce blog went in search of answers.

It seems Edens & Avant agreed to put in landscaped parking “islands,” a landscaped strip, brick “piers” at three of the four entryways and a pedestrian walkway that links the smaller Broadway Shoppes to the west end of the site back to the larger development, according to Marlane Weslian at Slavic Village Development. Additional evergreen trees will be added to the eastern edge to create a buffer for future potential residential development. Plus, the design of the building will create a new clinic entrance and porte cochere for the MetroHealth clinic, so a striped pedestrian walkway was added from the porte cochere (or main gate) entrance to Aetna Road.

If that doesn’t exactly inspire images of people strolling up for a checkup, the Slavic Village BRD Design Review Committee and the Planning
Department hope that bike racks and a possible bike trail do. Slavic Village has been studying ways to improve livability, and with recent news that it will receive a Robert Wood Johnson Active Living by Design grant, odds are good that it will green light one of the projects that has been on the boards—a bikeway "rails to trails" path. The old rail line runs just to the north of the Kmart site and, if completed, the property owners agree to remove the existing board fence to open the bikeway to the development.

“We are very pleased with the results of everyone's hard work and think that the project will enhance the community,” Weslian says.

FirstEnergy, which supplies many thousands of Northeast Ohio residents with their power, will be under the white-hot spotlight as a soon-to-be released report points the blame for the Blackout of 2003 at the Akron-based utility. According to the New York Times, the report from the National Energy Regulatory Commission, blames First Energy for not executing a ‘contingency plan’ when its line to the grid went down last August. That lack of decision caused a cascade effect that knocked out the entire system from Cleveland to Detroit to New York City.

First Energy, in a feeble attempt to avoid this black eye, blames a computer system for not catching the problem. It reminds Bruce blog of an old saying, only a mediocre player blames his equipment. With a company the size of FirstEnergy, is there really an excuse to not have a back-up computer system running a redundant check on the entire system?

Pundits were quick to note this week that an over reliance on nuclear energy may have extended the blackout.

“A nuclear reactor is a very cumbersome piece of machinery,” Case professor of Physics Philip Taylor writes in the latest Sierra Club newsletter. “It cannot be turned on and off like a flashlight, but requires days to start up once it has been shut down. Even worse, it cannot be started up at all unless it is provided with electric power.”

The solution, according to Dr. Taylor and nationally respected energy experts such as Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, is for local power providers to invest in a ‘decentralized’ system and create ‘alternative’ supply.

Bruce blog agrees, adding that, out of this crisis, an opportunity could arise for First Energy to help the nation avoid this mess again. The company could take a page from Long Island Power, which was spurred by New York Governor Pataki’s aggressive executive order to provide a way to produce 25 percent of that state’s energy from renewable resources by 2012. Long Island Power created a Request for Proposal to develop a wind farm off of the coast of Long Island that will produce up to 100 megawatts of clean power. The RFP was answered by New York-based Arcadia Wind, a private developer which will provide all of the resources to plan, site, develop and own the wind turbines under the agreement that Long Island Power will buy as much energy as they can produce. Could FirstEnergy, with the right prompting, follow suit?

Last week, the board of NOACA, the region’s transportation planning agency, approved the controversial re-striping of I-71 from a two to a three-lane highway in Medina County. It seemed as though the pre-meeting bluster was much ado about nothing, except for a little surprise ending that Cleveland may not have expected. Before the meeting, the city, which shares decision-making power with representatives from Northeast Ohio’s five-county region, approved the re-striping since the lane was already added to the highway (but hadn’t been striped even after it was built). Critics of the highway widening stated their case back in 1998 that a wider highway would make it easier for people to commute from the border of Cuyahoga County to Cleveland every day, thus facilitating urban sprawl. But last week, the board opened a discussion about continuing to widen I-71 south of Rt. 18, which, some observers thought, caught Cleveland officials off guard. Even so, negotiations will continue as the city needs cooperation with the Innerbelt and Shoreway redevelopment. Even though Medina County agreed in ’98 to not pursue new interchanges with the widening, it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising group ponies up the 50 percent match to build a new interchange. First stops might be Boston Road or further south near Lodi. Rural and suburban representatives claim its good for the region. Among the three no votes, outgoing Euclid Mayor Oyaski and Cuyahoga County Planning Commission director Paul Alsenas argued that the segmentation of the project into little pieces as to avoid environmental impact studies make it illegal. Stay tuned.

Cleveland Neighborhood Development Corp, the umbrella group for the city’s CDCs, published an interesting item in its November newsletter about a study showing that two out of three Americans are concerned about housing costs. The study, conducted by the National Association of Realtors, found that Americans are willing to vote for a candidate who works to make housing more affordable. In addition, more than 70 percent of the 1,000 urban and suburban residents polled would like government to make affordable housing for renters and homeowners a higher priority. And 82 percent support more affordable housing in their community if the units ‘fit with the area and were pleasant to look at.’ Click for detailed results.

I missed the “Bruce” party at the new Grog Shop space, but, fortunately, I could spend some time here with the Bruce site this evening and feel like I was reconnected with a lot of reasons why I like to live and work for this City.

I have to tell you, I really like this site and the work that you do! The stories/features in Bruce have a combination of personal focus and clarity of writing that makes them both readable and compelling for anyone who claims to be interested in the true “cool grit” between the show gloss that some people want to, unfortunately, use to promote our town to outsiders.