BACK TO THE BOONDOGGLE & HOW IT STACKS UP

Some added thoughts this morning about the Medical Mart nonsense.

I go back to original my thoughts about the Medical Mart and Convention Center. The splashy presentations by Christopher Kennedy and his MMPI gang didn’t change a thing.

The deal stinks.

How does it make sense for Cuyahoga County to build whatever Kennedy finally decrees with some $1 billion in public money (construction and financing), and then pay $108 million to Kennedy to operate this public building? That’s what memorandum of understanding between the two says. There is, of course, no signed contract so it could be worse.

The original plan says County taxpayers take a bath.

It makes absolutely no sense at all.

Tim Hagan – family friend of the Kennedy family – didn’t give that sweet a bargain to Dick Jacobs. And he gave Jacobs a sweeter sweetheart deal than one could imagine.

No one had to ask whether these facilities would pay property taxes. That’s the reason the County will build (publicly) and then give operation of the facilities to Kennedy (private). It’s public property and doesn’t pay taxes, though clearly at least the Medical Mart portion should pay property taxes. That is a business.

Once you give such broad authority to a private company you have lost control of the public building and, of course, of public interest. To say nothing of public money.

So this is a bad deal squared.

I wonder how many restaurants and other retail outlets will be built into this scheme. I suspect there will be revenue-making schemes galore. This will be to the detriment of downtown businesses the facility supposedly will help. For example, Hagan, principally with Mayor White, had a fancy 900-seat restaurant built for Jacobs at the stadium and a four-story, $5-million office building. He who talks about public interests and The People.

The latest version of the mall plan talks of a four-story Medical Mart. The previous endorsed site at Higbee’s talked of only two floors at rent free.

I speculate the four-story Medical Mart will not only be for the display of products that supposedly will draw buyers here. I’d suggest there will be fancy offices for Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. (MMPI), and no doubt fully accessorized by County money – meaning everything from computers and telephone system to desks and copiers.

That’s what Hagan did for Jacobs at the stadium, though the lease never called for any executive office building for the team. (Jacobs even got a special boat-shaped conference table with inlaid wood replicating baseball stitching and a metal Wahoo emblem. Nothing too good for some people.)

When the dough flows nothing is too good for these kinds of special elites.

From the beginning I’ve said that the Medical Mart was simply the gimmick Cleveland corporate leaders invented to sell the public on an expensive new convention center. They have never offered any proof of a medical mart’s economic impact.

I still rest my case on that proposition – that this is $1 billion boondoggle of a proposition.