Nashville versus Cleveland

Submitted by lmcshane on Sat, 01/05/2019 - 14:10.

By now, most people realize that Nashville beat out Cleveland and Pittsburgh for the Amazon HQ2.

Why and how will be analyzed in depth.  Digital inclusion needs to be part of that discussion.  Unfortunately, in typical CLE-CUY fashion-- the focus and distribution of funds needed to change the equation is being directed through the Cleveland Foundation and through a dysfuctional community development service model at the municipal and county level--ALL dependent on FEDERAL MONIES.

https://www.nashville.gov/Services/Metro-Public-WIFI.aspx

How can the Cleveland Metroparks affect the inevitable shift to the digital infrastructure and smart grid network needed by EV vehicles? First, by changing the name of the countywide agency to the Cuyahoga County Metroparks. This is not an urban park district.  It serves all communities in Cuyahoga County.

Second, Bernie Moreno needs to focus his Blockland energies to developing the EV charging network in the Cuyahoga County Metroparks.  We all desperately need to prevent the typical Fund for our Economic Future and Vibrant NEO bullsh#t. in the move to blockchain efficiencies.  Ditch the Unify Project affiliation. 

We can not afford charlatans, anymore.

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The F#CKING Nightmare NEVER ends

To Ohio Auditor - Northeast Ohio Division

Please see attached comments. Cuyahoga County Council has drafted legislation to provide continued funding to an unchecked mafia-led organization - the Cuyahoga County Land Bank. 
 
The Cuyahoga County Land Bank has already poisoned families in East Cleveland and has destroyed the housing market in Cleveland.  In collusion with CDCs like Detroit Shoreway, properties have been awarded to developers with no oversight and no accountability.  The George Group recently received a property at 3025 W. 25.  Cleveland Housing Network, rebranded Cleveland Housing Partnership, in collusion with EDEN has also just received several commercial land parcels transferred by the CCLB at 3873-3881 W. 25th St. 
 
This is a criminal enterprise run by a crook - Gus Frangos, who also should be investigated for mortgage fraud for the properties he owned using Ladon Ruffin as a front.  Reporter Leila Atassi was assigned to investigate this fraud and her story was pulled by the Plain Dealer.
 
Respectfully,
 
Laura McShane

 

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https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2019/01/cuyahoga-county-considers-sweeping-housing-program-to-stabilize-neighborhoods.html?

Jamese Rokakis and Gus Frangos are imbedded in the Land Bank and Thriving Communities, a non-profit. Both are former Cleveland City Council members during the era when Cleveland was spiraling down. Rokakis was County Treasurer during the Dimora-Russo era. (He saw nothing.) Brady and Miller are also former Cleveland City Council members.
What a gang of sleaze-bags. Now they want to create an "agency" a program a government slush fund where their fellow Democrats will get "jobs" and many of their cronies will have a hand in the till.
Sadly voters, especially in Cleveland, East Cleveland, Euclid, Garfield and Maple Heights will believe they are being served with more free stuff. Construction companies that have connection to legislators in the Democrat Machine will profit from the re-distribution of your tax dollars. PLEASE, folks, wake up

 The legislation is sponsored by Council President Dan Brady, Vice President Pernel Jones Jr. and council members Dale Miller and Cheryl Stephens. It was drafted in concert with the county land bank, formally known as the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation, and the county’s Department of Development.

 ME: I can not live here...this can not be happening...it is a never ending nightmare.

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Eric J Brewer on FB:

Frank. Here's something else your community development employees have not explained well to you and council. All the money that's been illegally spent by the "CDC's" is required by federal law to be "recaptured" by "the city" or "participating jurisdiction" in a lawsuit against them. Cleveland, Frank, is the "participating jurisdiction." Detroit Shoreway is the "subrecipient." Shit's highly technical. I read the relevant US Code, CFR and OMB Circulars regarding HUD spending and "allowable costs" and trained with the state's CDBG directors. Ask HUD's Columbus field office folk. I was the only mayor in the state who attended their meetings. I didn't just send my employees.

Recapturing illegally-spent money is a federal law requirement, Frank. It's why council members being "administratively" involved in the illegal "equitable" distribution of federal block grant funds to the CDC's and non-profits they're supporting outside the "action plan" and "consolidated plan" criminally exceeds the duties of a legislative member of the municipal government. Council's duty in this debacle is to ensure that you recapture funds illegally spent by the CDC's. You are also supposed to criminally prosecute the "sub-recipients" whose boards are non-compliant with the "two-thirds local membership requirement;" as well as Detroit Shoreway employees like Adam Rosen for submitting fraudulent "time allocation" sheets in exchange for federal dollars.

If you, as the city's chief law enforcement officer under Ohio law, were enforcing the federal grant agreement council authorized the community development director to sign, which should actually be signed by the mayor; you would assign police investigators and prosecutors to forensicly-audit every CDC's records for violations of spending laws, overcharging, fraud and illegal board compositions. Why do you think I terminated East Cleveland's agreement with Andy Nikiforovs' Community Housing Solutions? Ask Kevin Conwell.

When HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson invited me to the agency's headquarters to meet with him in Washington, D.C., he introduced me to the agency's career top bureaucrat, Nelson Bregon. Bregon told me I had to get the money back from every sub-recpient that had ever received and misspent a dime of federal funds or we had to repay HUD out of the general fund and face a cut in funding.

You've essentially, since 2000, been subsidizing all these gotdamned "CDC's" out of the general fund. And since general fund dollars are being "misappropriated" to reimburse HUD for misspent CDC dollars like those going to Detroit Shoreway, council should be investigating you for not investigating the CDC's for fucking up. They won't because a criminal investigation will point back to them. Since all of the city's elected officials are too "conflicted" to perform the legal duties of the public offices they hold regarding the enforcement of its federal grant agreement with HUD, the feds are going after all of you.

Frank. You're an attorney. A federal prosecutor can make the argument that you and Kevin Kelley have "abdicated" the performance of official law enforcement and legislative duties in the management of the "participating jurisdiction's" grant agreement with HUD.

That's the basis behind the HUD Inspector General's investigation of the city's community development department. Y'all are fucking up federal money and fucking over the poor people it's not getting to as Congress intended. Cleveland's poverty data reflects opportunities for the poor in this town to receive between $30 million and $50 million a year instead of the approximately $20 million it's been reduced to because of the misappropriations; and the city's chronic inability to comply with federal laws as a participating jurisdiction.

Frank. As you read these words do I write as if I'm "guessing?" Matt Zone's got too much involvement in Detroit Shoreway's affairs for some of the money not to go to him. I know, for a fact, what I've shared about Rosen. Hi Joe. We haven't talked since I interviewed you about the cops questioning you and another politician over a murder at the state office tower. I know it wasn't you or him. Y'all were just friends.

Frank. Your community development department is fucked. The feds are going in hard because the money Congress sent here for poor folk isn't getting to poor folk. This is the "worst" place in the nation for this shit. I don't think another PJ in the USA has a council that passed legislation to spend federal monies in violation of every word that told them not to do it in the grant agreement they authorized the community development director to enter. Did y'all think the feds were not going to enforce its side of the agreement with an FBI investigation and federal prosecutors?

If you think what's going on with the building department is a problem, wait until the HUD Inspector General, FBI, U.S. Treasury goes back and examines every single dollar that went to a sub-recipient CDC and every person who received and spent one. Treasury agents examine tax returns. A stamp on a fraudulent tax return sent through the mail is a count of wire fraud. All that "rich" shit in Detroit Shoreway? Every single property that received a federal dollar comes with a federal law requirement that 5 percent of units be set-aside for real low-income people who fall within the "federal government's" low-income guidelines.

These laws can't be put aside or reconfigured through manipulatlng words like "electing" to appoint or lease to people who "represent" the poor. The federal government doesn't play this game that y'all play locally where a law spells out instructions and you say because it doesn't say you can't do something then you can do it. If a federal law doesn't tell you to do something then don't do it.

Alphonso explained that shit to the letter. We had that St. Louis - East Saint Louis hookup. I was also in the Bexar County Young Democrats with President Bill Clinton's HUD Secretary, Henry Cisneros. Frank. I ain't guessing. Y'all got troubles and your employees don't have a clue how to figure them out or explain them to you and council. You're reading these words and saying, "Damn. No one has ever explained block grant like this before."

When one of Bregon's director's at HUD showed me records from Community Housing Solutions when it was Lutheran Housing that dated back to 1974, and explained to me what they revealed, and my duty as mayor, why the fuck do you think I came back home and went in hard? They told me I was responsible and that I could go to jail.

Frank. Y'all are fucking with folk who you have no idea how thorough they are in knowing "their" shit and how y'all have fucked up. The duties that should have been performed and were not are already documented. All federal prosecutors have to do compare the records the city has created and line up the dots with the relevant sections of the U.S. Code, CFR and OMB circulars that are in the grant agreements none of you bothered to read, obey and enforce. You might feel picked on but this shit is unique only to Cleveland.

We could have rolled to D.C. together and met Alphonso if you'd showed up at the city club like I did with the purpose of meeting him. Alphonso blew me away when he told me how Bregon told him I was the only mayor in the country who'd asked to meet with all of HUD's officials who were connected to the distribution of federal dollars to his city. Bregon's career spanned three decades. The request seemed perfectly logical for me. I'd been reading HUD's regulations and observed that its employees were fucking up. I met with their bosses. All of them.

Bregon made sure I got the "other side" of duties his employees were required by federal law to perform. I'd observed that inspections hadn't complied with duties in HUD's manuals; and that funds we'd been asked to return had actually been lawfully spent.

So to some extent, Frank, HUD's Columbus and Chicago field offices have been "complicit" in this shit. That's the mitigating factor, but only to some extent. Alphonso told me that no matter what HUD employees do or don't do when they fail to perform acts, it doesn't negate the PJ's duty to hold them accountable as well. You're responsible for enforcing both sides of the agreement.

In D.C. HUD officials know Cleveland's poverty authorizes the city's poor to receive money they, we, are not getting. They've got all the data and people like me (not me) are complaining directly to them about you; and bypassing the locals. I learned that from going to D.C., too. The pressure on you is coming from D.C. and it's not going to stop. It's only going to get more aggressive because you can't leave all these poor U.S. citizens who need help unserved.

Louis Stokes got a special provision in an appropriations bill that made East Cleveland a "direct entitlement" city thanks to Mayor Darryl Pittman; and with help of Gerald Kisner. Instead of going through the county Darryl got the money directly from D.C. for a city that did not meet the 50,000 population threshold. Darryl didn't like the fact that East Cleveland's poverty statistics were being used to get the money from HUD; but the county received it and gave East Cleveland what they wanted. Darryl said the commissioners were using and fucking over poor black folk. Black mayors protect their folk.

So despite it's tiny size, East Cleveland's community development requirements are exactly the same as Cleveland's, Cuyahoga County's and the State of Ohio's. I've also managed it twice. HUD's inspector general audited me. As voters had decided to elect Gary Norton instead of re-electing me, I got a call from the Inspector General in December 2009 to inform me I had zero audit findings and that East Cleveland's block grant allocation would be increased by $300,000. Norton fucked it all up.

Frank. You and the council have a duty to get money to this city's poor people and to file civil complaints to recapture misspent HUD funds by the CDC's. You have a duty to criminally prosecute misappropriated funds. Not performing tnose "mandatory" duties creates a federal investigation because the feds will want to know why you're not.

To all who serve in elected and appointed public office. If you do not read you cannot lead. Frank. Council. Y'all need some serious help with a quickness. It's about to get funky up in this shit here.

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Eric Jonathan Brewer the whole CDC network was hatched in the nineties by two CLE council persons - Jim Rokakis and Gus Frangos. They have milked the cow for too long - now they are going for more control/money through the Cuyahoga County Land Bank https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2019/01/cuyahoga-county-considers-sweepi... This needs to stop.