Star Beacon
March 20, 2008 01:40 pm
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If you read Carl Feather’s“Reality Check” series over the past few weeks, you experienced a pretty good outline of our problems and even some solutions.
Yes, there is hope. In fact, we could mark the series as the point of return. We hit the bottom and at this point we start working our way back up.
After all, Ashtabula County wasn’t always so depressed, it wasn’t always doom and gloom.
We had the big manufacturing plants in Ashtabula County. Remember those along State Road in Ashtabula Township?
I’ve been told you couldn’t find a parking place in downtown Conneaut in the 1950s on a Friday night because of all of the traffic with payday at the Nickel Plate Railroad.
Feather’s series tells the human side of depression and recession.
Ashtabula County has many problems. We have a less-educated workforce. We have the fallout of NAFTA.
Our best and brightest don’t even consider staying in Ashtabula County once they get their college degrees. As a public service, the Star Beacon even publishes a list of those students who our leaving our area. You can find it once or twice a week under titles such as “College news” and “Dean’s list.”
Yes, we have problems, but we also do precious little to solve those problems.
And that is sad. We have people hurting, really hurting.
Yet what are our public officials worried about?
Well, Conneaut City Council spent a year with a doomed-to-failure rental inspection program.
I’m not saying rental inspections are a bad idea. I’m saying no Conneaut council in the past 50 years has had the backbone to enact rental inspections. Even a lackluster, watered down version didn’t get the time of day. So why spend a year’s time on a plan that is doomed to failure when there are so many pressing matters?
Even as doomed as the rental inspection program was, at least it was introduced as a way to make a positive difference.
These days Conneaut council is obsessed with subjects like: When did City Manager Doug Lewis get angry with Burdick Plumbing and for how long?
Who cares?
Other big issues on Conneaut’s agenda, should people be permitted to speak during audience participation for more than five minutes?
Should work sessions be televised?
How about spending some time on something that matters, like creating a game plan to bring worthwhile jobs to the city, to increase the tax base.
Then there’s Ashtabula City Council, whose members divide their time between butting into the business of the Ashtabula School Board and seeking revenge on those who got Tom Simon defeated in his re-election bid for city solicitor.
It’s not like there isn’t poverty in Ashtabula. It isn’t like the downtown is looking more and more shabby. It isn’t that drugs and crime aren’t ongoing problems.
Why not spend some time on something that matters?
Geneva-on-the-Lake spent some time at a recent meeting discussing whether to spend required funds for routine maintenance on its municipal golf course. Or the big challenge for Rock Creek, do we move into larger headquarters to accommodate the larger crowd?
Back when the county commissioners consisted of Robert Boggs, Duane Feher and Deborah Newcomb, they decided to build what became the Lodge and Conference Center at Geneva State Park. That decision has been second-guessed almost daily ever since.
It has been an expense. The commissioners rammed it through with little public input.
But at least it was an idea, a vision. Ashtabula County is in desperate need of public officials with a vision. Not nitpickers. Not people with an ax to grind. Not people looking to punish others.
As we listen to the rhetoric of our candidates who are running in November, pay attention to what vision they have.
Yeah, Ohio has more economic problems than the rest of the country. But given Ashtabula County’s location, with all of our railroads, with our fresh-water ports, with our highways, with our proximity to Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Buffalo, we should be doing better than the rest of the state, not worse.
The ball has been dropped again and again in Ashtabula County. We can either do something about it or wallow in our own malaise.
Plans for aircraft maintenance classes at the Ashtabula County Airport Authority could bring students from the main Kent State campus. Public officials should be doing all that they can to make this a reality.
That and the health and science building at the Kent State Ashtabula campus could help turn Ashtabula County into a diversified, educational mecca. Maybe the Ashtabula County Joint Vocational School could develop programs in tangent with these developments.
We need whatever positive steps we can take. Jason Strong, Ashtabula’s executive director of housing and community development, moaned to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette we need someone to save us.
Given the atmosphere here today, that savior could show up and be escorted out of town.
Lebzelter is special sections editor. E-mail him at bobleb@starbeacon.com.
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A ROBERT LEBZELTER column