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, the Bruce blog should mention it works part-time with nonprofit organization EcoCity Cleveland).

City of Cleveland officials will meet with The Cleveland-Cuyahoga Port Authority this week to consider the next step in a future home for the port. Sources say the city is being asked to consider giving its approval for an outside party, such as the Cleveland Waterfront Coalition, to hire a port expert who will study the feasibility of moving or consolidating operations at its current site. One proposal being shopped around is to move the port to Whiskey Island, where it would occupy most of the 20-acre green space. Another proposal is to consolidate the port’s operations on the 58 acres it currently occupies from the river to North Coast Harbor (including over 417,000 square feet of warehouse facilities used to store steel and machinery cargoes)—possibly opening up more lakefront property. If the port moves to Whiskey Island, the city has promised to reserve the eastern portion of land at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River as a park. Sources say a nationally recognized expert will be tapped to determine if the tremendous cost to move the port (we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, folks) balances with the benefit to the community, such as how much land will be unlocked on the lakefront?

The verbal diarrhea had barely stopped flowing from Lanigan and Malone before WMJI was racing to make amends for their DJs’ patently stupid comments encouraging motorists to run bicyclists off the road. The cost for the inexcusable act? Airtime apologies, PSAs and $10,000 (a pittance compared to what Majic’s corporate holders make in ad revenue). The ink was barely dry on the check before the bicycling community was meeting to decide how to spend it. Some at Mayor Campbell’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee suggested paying toward a Cleveland-based bicycling event scheduled for September. Others didn’t want to blow the wad so quickly and suggested spending it on bicycling education programs or police bike sensitivity training so that cops might not crack down so ruthlessly on riders (such as the spandex-clad no goodniks at Critical Mass). Bruce blog is wondering, how do you think the ‘ill gotten gains’ should be spent?

Bruce blog learned from a certain director of a local nonprofit organization that the city of Cleveland Heights owns a small cache of chess tables that it bought in the 1970s. The tables have languished in storage all of these years—inexplicably, the city never put them out for use. What gives? These could be excellent ways to provide 'city comforts' at Coventry Courtyard or at Cedar-Lee.

Now that Bruce blog broke the news that Norfolk-Southern is looking to abandon its rail line which runs through Bay Village, Westlake and Lakewood and across the mouth of the Cuyahoga, the jockeying is underway to determine who might purchase the right of way and what might be done with it. A group of local community development corps (CDCs) are meeting to determine the prospect of who might want to own the rail line. They’ll discuss such questions as, how do you put a price tag on a linear piece of property like a ROW? And would Bay Village and Westlake ever go for commuter rail? Certainly, Lakewood would have much to gain by connecting the West End to the RTA's Redline at W. 98th St. and Cudell, Detroit-Superior, and downtown Cleveland. A second idea that is floating around is converting the line into a rails-to-trails greenway for recreational bicyclists…

Transit projects, pedestrian and bike improvements and urban parks took it in the neck this week as the full appropriations committee of the U.S. House of Representatives wiped out about $600 million of enhancements for non-highway transit projects (adding it to the pool of $billions spent annually on highway projects). This means that any and all local transit projects that apply for federal matching funds are in serious jeopardy unless citizens get on the horn to their representatives and tell them to restore transportation enhancement funds when the full house votes on it in September. Projects such as the recently completed Mill Creek Reservation restoration project relied on these funds and so do hundreds of other transit projects such as bike lanes, safe routes to school programs, commuter rail, urban parks, and so on.