Please, Don't Ask

John Carney, board chairman of the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, opened the recent public hearing for the relocation of the port’s maritime facilities by announcing there would beno questions from the more than 100 people in attendance.

If this happened in a Third World country, Washington would term it a human-rights violation.

The public could not ask why the port was being moved, or how much it would cost, or what the impact on the environment would be, or why the studies, costing more than $900,000, were not available for citizens.

Though there were no protests, no one could ask why John Carney, a developer with downtown interests that could be affected by the project, was presiding over the meeting. The Carney family history is replete with projects involving politics and public money in one form or another. His father, the late John Carney, and his uncle James were the subject of scathing headlines for two decades over their methods in acquiring prime real estate.

A project the scope of the port relocation — up to 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars — requires transparency, which is only clouded by Carney sitting on the board.

No one could ask what happened to the lakefront plan developed over 32 months and 200 stakeholder meetings during Mayor Jane Campbell’s administration. The city, the county and the civic sector agreed to the 50-year plan for projects large and small dotting our shoreline. Yet the time, effort and millions of dollars that went into it have been suddenly abandoned like trash on the highway.

Then again, you don’t have to ask questions to see that our business, civic and political leadership struggles to adopt a communitywide vision for the future and to work toward its end. The lack of planning and execution is becoming a hallmark of our existence. No better example exists than the fumbled effort to build a new county administration building, which resulted in the costly Ameritrust Building fiasco.

In fact, as the evening wore on, it became clear that the meeting was not as much a public hearing as theater designed to mislead a public desperate for jobs and prosperity into thinking they were present at the creation of progress.

Instead of questions, nearly 30 civic and business leaders stood behind a microphone to register their support for the plan without knowing anything about it. The well-orchestrated charade included a degree of self-deception that speaks more to the town’s nature than any study. Millions of dollars of plans lie in dusty planning offices that never resulted in anything more than bold headlines that signified nothing.

The media, as usual, reported the play and not the plot.

The plan being put forth by the port seems to have the same architects as the Ameritrust fumble — the county commissioners — and the Medical Mart/ convention center, which is another project the public was told not to question (this time by County Commissioner Tim Hagan).

Indeed, the real issue behind all of these projects is money and who is going to make it.

The port’s docks and warehouses need to be moved from their present Cuyahoga River location to open up land for development of the lakefront. It is probably the most valuable property between New York and Chicago. The port’s land is a condo developer’s dream with its lakefront view and potentially pricey rents.

The plan presented at the alleged public hearing would move the port to an area at the foot of East 55th Street, which would be created over a 20-year period by material dredged from the Cuyahoga River. No accurate cost has been determined, but the total price of creating the port and building the necessary infrastructure to support it may very well cost more than a billion dollars.

Though alluring on face value, the question becomes whether an investment of this magnitude would provide a worthy economic return to the community. The answer can be as fanciful and nebulous as one may want to make it.

In his presentation, Adam Wasserman, president of the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, said that the new site was needed to take advantage of the growing shipping container business.

Yet ships used in international trade are too large for an outdated St. Lawrence Seaway. For Cleveland to take advantage of the container business, the cargos would have to be off-loaded to smaller ships that could navigate the seaway, which would add to shipping costs.

One observer with shipping experience on the Great Lakes says that the rail industry on the East Coast would offer fierce competition to such a plan and could make the shipping container business for Cleveland’s port no certainty.

The port authority has examined a number of locations in which to create new facilities. It has not released its study as support, and those who have seen the preliminary studies say that the results are hardly persuasive.

Any proposal that the port makes must be transparent and free of any potential conflicts by those associated with the port. It’s fair to ask, “What is wrong with an honest and direct presentation of the facts in a real public hearing?”

Then again, the port board isn’t taking any questions. Maybe it’s afraid someone might ask why we should trust a county government that has proven its incompetence in recent times with its indecision and financial legerdemain.