Frustrated with the Toledo Water Department? Give money to Anita Lopez, flyer urgers

In a clever fundraising event, Lucas County Auditor and mayoral candidate Anita Lopez is hoping to raise money by piggybacking on the area's frustration with the Toledo Water Department.

The flyer, pictured below, starts with "OVERHAUL THE WATER DEPARTMENT" and asks "Fed up with the water department? Please join us for a shindig featuring Anita Lopez." It's Aug. 29th and light snacks are provided, but it's a cash bar.

The contribution levels are:

• $25 Fed Up
• $100 No Deposits
• $250 No Back Billing
• $500 No waiting for phone calls to be answered
• $1000 Accurate Meter Readings
• $5000 Put the Bill in the Consumers' Names

A lot of people are upset with the Water Department, so this seems like a perfect theme for a fundraiser and it's also one of the more clever ones I've seen since I started in politics 20 years ago.

The department requires the property owner to be the name on the water account for an address. This has a lot of landlords and renters upset because it makes them responsible for billing and collecting for water service in a rental unit.

Earlier this year, they started requiring a $200 deposit for any new service, but quickly backed off on on the terms, allowing prior customers with good service to have the deposit waived.

Responding to complaints about waiting hours to get a phone call answered, the city expanded the department's customer service call center hours, beginning at 7 a.m. (an hour earlier) and closing at 6 p.m. (a half-hour later). They also said they'd answer all the calls for anyone still on hold in the queue at 6 p.m. They also hired 8 more people and changed the grace period from 15 calendar days to 15 business day.

But Toledoans are still upset with the increased fees for water and sewer service and the increases that are scheduled over the next couple of years.

Interestingly, it is City Council that actually approved the fee increases, though the current mayor, Mike Bell, did sign the legislation.

And it was City Council who decided, along with the previous mayor, to put the trash tax on the water bill and threaten people with the cut off of their water service if they didn't pay the trash tax and recycling fee (which was supposed to be reduced to zero but is now a permanent part of the city's revenue).

Of course, this doesn't even get to the minimum charge structure. If you're traveling or frugal with your water consumption, it doesn't matter. If you don't use a certain amount of water each month, they'll bill you a minimum. And your sewer service charge is tied to your water usage.

Granted, the city council and Democrat mayors (since 1990) ignored maintenance and replacement needs of the water/sewer infrastructure over the years, choosing instead to spend limited tax dollars on their own pet projects, so we do have some serious needs in the area, as the recent sink holes and water main breaks demonstrate. And we're still dealing with EPA regulations that are impacting the costs.

But connecting the problems which have been decades in the making with the current mayor, who is rather good at public relations, might be a bit hard.

In fact, Bell, as an independent, would have a great response by saying it was the Democrats who ignored the problem for so long and he's actually dealing with instead of 'kicking the can down the road' (one of his oft-used phrases).

He inherited a mess and he's cleaning it up.

While it might not be as valid an issue for the actual campaign, it's definitely a fun one for a fundraiser.

Here is the flyer:

*** Aside: I have not decided which mayoral candidate to support in the upcoming election. ***

Bill to penalize TARTA-like campaign actions passes from house committee

Press Release on the bill to impose a criminal penalty for what TARTA did when it 'loaned' public funds to their levy campaign:

Legislation to Penalize Campaign Finance Violators Passes from House Committee

COLUMBUS—The House Criminal Justice Committee yesterday approved legislation that, when enacted, will impose a criminal penalty on public officials who knowingly use public funds for political purposes.

House Bill 326—jointly sponsored by Representatives Jeff McClain (R-Upper Sandusky) and Brian Hill (R-Zanesville)—institutes a penalty of a first-degree misdemeanor, similar to the penalty for other campaign finance law violations. Currently, the Ohio Revised Code specifies that it is illegal to utilize tax dollars for political purposes but does not include a criminal penalty.

“This bill is very straightforward,” McClain said. “It simply protects taxpayer dollars and is deserving of the unanimous support it received.”

“Taxpayers are one step closer to holding their public officials accountable if they misuse public dollars and violate campaign finance laws,” Hill said. “Thank you to Chairman Slaby and the members of the Criminal Justice committee for their speedy consideration and unanimous support of this important legislation.”

The issue arose after a recent audit of the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority (TARTA) revealed that in 2007 and 2008, TARTA illegally loaned nearly $67,000 to Citizens for TARTA, the political action committee that gathers resources to fund TARTA levy campaigns.

Having passed from the Criminal Justice Committee, House Bill 326 now awaits a vote by the full Ohio House of Representatives.

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Fact-checking Obama's Toledo speech on auto bailout

I didn't do the leg work, but Glenn Kessler, The Fact Checker, at The Washington Post did. In his column he starts with this:

"With some of the economic indicators looking a bit dicey, President Obama traveled to Ohio last week to tout what the administration considers a good-news story: the rescue of the domestic automobile industry. In fact, he also made it the subject of his weekly radio address.

We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.

What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.

Let’s look at the claims in the order in which the president said them."

Read the entire analysis and educate yourself about the truth versus the spin.

Obama doesn't get it - this isn't a campaign anymore

In this Breitbart article, Obama fires back at political critics, President Barack Obama tries to draw a parallel between a couple of incidences in his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination and what he's going through now with the failure of his economic stimulus plan and the overwhelming rejection of his health care reform.

And the comparison shows he just doesn't get it.

This is no longer a campaign - this is governance.

During the primary, he was trying to win over the votes of fellow Democrats who believe, pretty much, what he does. There are many who will say they were swayed by his rhetoric and lofty ideals but really didn't know what he stood for - and for that I fault the voting public and the press, who didn't ask the tough questions which would have revealed his intentions during the campaign.

But that point aside, trying to convince people with the same ideology that you're the best one of several to represent that ideology is much different from convincing an entire nation, the majority of whom claim no party or are Republicans, to join your cause.

Obama isn't going to the opposing side and presenting his viewpoint on the issue, he's handpicking audiences and 'preaching to the choir' and trying to re-energize his base. But that will only go so far as the vast majority of Americans are not in that group to begin with.

He's still in campaign mode, trying to sell an idea, when the public would rather have the facts and the details - all the things they were too busy to bother with during the actual campaign. Now that Obama is in the White House, the public expects him to manage the operations, though he's had absolutely no experience whatsoever in doing something even remotely similar. And now it shows, especially in how he blames everyone else for his failure in this regard.

"Voters, it seems, want to understand a little more about what ObamaCare will mean for them, what it will do to the doctor-patient relationship, and what it will cost future generations in higher taxes and, yes, rationed supply.

Rather than examine the public’s concerns, the plans’ inconsistencies or the sheer irresponsibility of trying to ram something this big and complicated through Congress without a small-scale trial, the Obama administration is pointing fingers. Lots of them."

He also, wrongly, thinks the opposition is all about him - that Republicans are trying to deny him a victory, rather than acknowledge that it's the general public that doesn't like the idea.

That's what you do in a campaign - demonize and blame the other side, appeal to the sympathy of the voters for your position, and promise you'll do better if just given the chance. Now that he's got the chance, though, he's failing.

His win demonstrates that he knows how to persuade people to an idea, but his actions since January 20 show he doesn't know what it takes to actually follow through with the details and documentation and evidence to support those ideas.

So he reverts to what his knows and what put him in this position in the first place - campaigning ... trying to convince his base that his ideas are still the right ones. In doing so, he neglects those he really needs to persuade, reinforcing their opinion that they are, indeed, right on the issue.



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Sidenote: Obama is not the only one to find himself in such a position. Voters routinely elect legislators and other similarly-experienced individuals into the management positions of administrative/executive office. Voters - and political parties who endorse - rarely stop to think about the skills necessary to actually do a job once elected. Rather, they focus on the electability of the individual or the person's stated prior accomplishments. Getting a bill passed in a legislative body is much different than implementing it when approved - and voting on a budget or advocating for a particular funding line item is very different from creating the budget in the first place. The skill sets necessary for those functions are very different, and may, in fact, be opposite, but people rarely distinguish that fact or vote accordingly. This sets everyone up for failure: the elected official who finds they don't have the skills they need to actually to govern, and the public who expected governance but gets none from someone they never should have put into such a position to begin with.
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