Mark Tumeo is a councilman in Cleveland Heights, and he recently touched the third rail in local politics. In a council meeting, he suggested his suburb merge with University Heights. He followed it up with an op-ed column in the Plain Dealer. And on the Sound of Ideas, he explained his thinking. He says costs for city services are only going up.
Mark Tumeo: For sound economic development, in my opinion, you can't tax the citiznery into submission, so we need to find a way expand our income base. It's a standard business approach. And so for a government--we live on incvome tax, you need to increase people.
That explanation fell flat on the other side of the University Heights border.
Mayor Beryl Rothschild, University Heights: We have nothing to gain by joining Cleveland Heights.
Beryl Rothschild has been mayor of University Heights for 32 years.
Rothschild: We are not as a city experiencing the economic downturn in the way that Cleveland Heights is. We have a balanced budget...we are doing fine.
Mayor Rothschild also said that because University Heights has less than a a fourth of the population of Cleveland Heights, the needs of her constituents would be subsumed by those of Cleveland Heights.
But, whether local municipalities consider mergers, collaborating on city services or going it alone, they all face the same challenge: rising costs and fewer taxpayers. Mark Rosentraub teaches at Cleveland State University's Levin College of Urban Affairs.
Mark Rosentraub: We've lost over 100,000 since the 2000 census, and some of us fear in the 2010 census we'll be down 150,000 from 2000... You can't lose 150 thousand people and continue to do business exactly the same way.
You can hear the rest of the conversation at wcpn-dot-org-slash-soi.