Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Things I Do When I'm Not Blogging

My second ever freelance writing job is up on the Catalyst website. Once again I did the Notebook section which includes an interview with Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic.

Among the revelations, that the mayors are again attempting to reach consensus and offer a school funding reform proposal:

    Well we just reconvened. I was at the U.S.
    Conference of Mayors annual meeting and a
    number of Ohio mayors asked me to convene
    a meeting. We met there and made a commitment
    that I would reconvene a group. We
    did that with just mayors and brought an
    expert that we had used early on from Colorado.
    I understand [Governor Ted] Strickland’s
    reluctance to jump in as the first thing
    he did to try to solve this because I think there
    would have been major problems and I think
    he’s played this pretty well. But somewhere
    here in the next year and a half we’ve got to
    address this issue. This is a huge problem that
    I think may only get solved by constitutional
    amendment, and in a constitutional amendment
    you’ve got to keep it simple. And the
    simple way of dealing with it is to deal with the
    funding formula first, get off of the property
    tax, and shift to an income or sales tax base
By the way, in his State of the State address today, Gov. Strickland reprised the "What if we weren't afraid" trope he used in the cover interview last issue. It's great to be writing for a publication that's so easy to promote.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, which of the Presidential nomination candidates would qualify for school board? Aren't Mike Huckabee's Arkansas results better than Hillary Clinton's? Oh, and aren't high school graduates supposed to be able to evaluate the "qualifications, responsibilities, and duties" of candidates for public office?

"In 2001 you created a committee to evaluate Board of Education candidates. What was the impetus for that and what was the result?"
"It was a step short of takeover. It was to say we have to have leaders who are willing to not just acquiesce or lie down and roll over whenever the union president screams about something. And we needed a superintendent to be strong and a leader; the only way you get that is to have a board that is made up of strong individuals who are willing to lead. So we tried to get a group of people to be nonpartisan and just view these races as important key leadership positions. They did a pretty good job of getting the right people in place and there's been a pretty significant turnaround."