Crain's Cleveland Business

City of Westlake, Stark settle lawsuit over Crocker Park’s next addition.

Protecting at-risk workers

OSHA’s new program aims to reduce injuries in food manufacturing

BY` RACHEL ABBEY MCCAFFERTY

Food processing is a eld that comes with many risks: sharp equipment, high temperatures, caustic chemicals. • A new program from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration aims to better protect the workers in that industry, reducing injuries and fatalities. • In October, OSHA started outreach for its new Local Emphasis Program in food processing in Ohio and Illinois. ere are more than 1,400 manufacturing sites in the two states where workers make animal-based, plant-based or confectionery products, a news release noted. • And it’s dangerous work. Injury rates among the more than 90,000 food production workers at those sites are notably higher than those for other types of manufacturing jobs. • For example, OSHA found that in 2019, Ohio’s food production workers had almost a 57% higher rate of amputation and a 16% higher rate of fracture than manufacturers in the private sector overall, the release said.

Firm selected to operate Cuyahoga County utility

BY KIM PALMER

Cuyahoga County is one crucial step closer to realizing the goal of the outgoing administration to o er a modern electrical grid system providing resilient, non-interrupted power to some of the region’s commercial, industrial and manufacturing businesses.

In what was former County Execu-

Buckeye State spends big bucks

BY JOE SCALZO

Late New Year’s Eve, Adam Suliman, JACK’s senior vice president for sports and digital gaming, went from being bummed that fans couldn’t bet on that night’s Ohio State-Georgia game to thinking, “What happens if this game goes into overtime?”

“Our team was kind of nervous because we knew we were going to get slammed by people wanting to place bets on the game,” Suliman said.

Alas, as the clock struck midnight, legalized sports gambling arrived in Ohio in the most Ohio way possible — with one of its beloved sports teams su ering a heartbreaking loss.

tive Armond Budish’s nal o cial announcement, Compass Energy Platform was selected to set up and operate the county’s public utility, which was created to build out a series of regional microgrids that use locally generated power from places such as a large solar array in Brooklyn.

The Cleveland Cavaliers and Caesars Sportsbook celebrated the ceremonial grand opening for Caesars Sportsbook at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. | CLEVELAND CAVALIERS

GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCK

Ohio leads the nation in betting in sports gambling’s rst weekend

ICP drops plans for Seven Hills project

MICHELLE JARBOE

e future of a 54-acre site in Seven Hills is back on the drawing board, after rising costs and nancing challenges prompted a developer to drop plans for a $100 million project.

Industrial Commercial Properties LLC of May eld Heights has abandoned its vision for the 7Hills District, a 10-acre development that was set to include 240 apartments, 93,000 square feet of o ces and about 50,000 square feet of restaurants and retail on Rockside Road.

In response, PulteGroup has shelved its plans to build homes on roughly 35 acres next door.

“It was not for a lack of e ort on everyone’s part, including the city,” said Chris Salata, ICP’s chief operating ofcer.

“Timing and the state of the capital markets is ultimately what caused us to walk away,” he said, citing higher interest rates and in ation that shaved millions of dollars o the value of a proposed tax-incrementnancing deal and drove up the cost of debt service.

Seven Hills has been talking about potential development on the site for more than a decade. e property sits on the south side of Rockside, west of Interstate 77, between Crossview Road and Lombardo Center.

Developers Louis Beck and Je Graef started assembling the land in 2015. In 2018, Fairmount Properties of Orange Village oated plans for the frontage that included o ces, retail, apartments and a hotel.

Fairmount bowed out of the project in 2021, and ICP stepped in with a pared-down proposal — fewer apartments, less o ce space and a reduced retail footprint, along with structured parking.

Salata said there was ample demand for all of those uses. e developer was wooing multiple o ce tenants. But even with the prospect of public incentives, ICP didn’t see a path forward in a volatile market.

“ e various food groups there, we remain bullish on all three of those in that Rockside corridor,” he said. But, he added, “you had to pack a lot of

density on that site to make the yield worthwhile.”

Pulte hasn’t given up on the southern portion of the property, where the publicly traded builder proposed nearly 150 townhomes. e residen-

tor of entitlement and planning. “We’re still very interested in the site and the development opportunity.”

tial and commercial portions of the site are inextricably intertwined, though, because of utilities, infrastructure needs and zoning as a 35-plus-acre planned unit development district.

“Our plans are on hold,” con rmed Jim O’Connor, Pulte’s regional direc-

Amazon warehouse in Brooklyn sells for $53.9M

STAN BULLARD

Time-consuming real estate developments usually do not bring fast money to mind, but that’s the case with the recent sale of the Amazon Distribution Center in Brooklyn for $53.9 million.

e 123,366-square-foot building on 17 acres just became operational for Amazon last August. On Dec. 12, an a liate of developer Industrial Commercial Properties of May eld Heights sold the structure at 10575 Memphis Ave. to an a liate of Stonemont Financial Group of Atlanta using the name SFG STPK LM BROOKLYN LLC, according to Cuyahoga County land records.

Chris Salata, ICP chief operating officer, said in a phone interview on Wednesday, Jan. 4, that ICP had

conducted a “whisper campaign” to offer the building to investors before beginning construction of the property. The site in Brooklyn formerly housed the Memphis Drivein theater.

“It became a forward commitment to sell the building before we put a shovel in the ground,” Salata said. He declined to comment on the sale price.

Zack Markwell, Stonemont CEO and managing principal, also would not comment on the transaction.

Stonemont has surfaced within the past year as a major partner in the development and acquisition of large industrial warehouses in Northeast Ohio. Its projects here include a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in a joint venture with Geis Cos. of

ICP and Pulte struck deals with Beck and Graef, who planned to develop the residential lots with help from Doug Krause of Hinckley-based Carrington Homes. Graef didn’t respond to a phone call about the collapse of the 7Hills District plan and renewed e orts to market the site.

Mayor Anthony Biasiotta hopes that another commercial developer will emerge, though any substantial mixed-use proposal will face the same headwinds that ICP encountered.

“It’s my understanding that the

owners of the property are already engaged in discussions with other developers,” Biasiotta said. “And I’m hopeful that they settle on one and we take a longer-term approach to this project and re ne it even more. e city stands ready and willing to help once the property owners settle on a new developer.”

ICP, which teamed up on the Seven Hills proposal with frequent joint-venture partner Industrial Realty Group LLC, once hoped to deliver the o ce building in late 2023 and wrap up the apartments and retail buildings in 2024.

e company unveiled its plans in February 2022 and set an aggressive pace. “We don’t kick a lot of tires. When we put something under contract, we execute,” Salata told Crain’s at the time.

But a year ago, the Federal Reserve still was keeping the federal funds rate near zero and buying billions of dollars in bonds each month to stimulate the economy.

e Fed began raising rates in March and pushed the target interest rate to between 4.25% and 4.5% by mid-December in an e ort to curb in ation.

“Across the country, you see some of the deals are starting to delay or take a pause due to the capital markets. … De nitely, you’re seeing a lot of mixed-use projects like this take a pause,” Salata said this week.

“We were pretty disappointed,” he added, “as I think all the other stakeholders were.”

Michelle Jarboe: michelle.jarboe@ crain.com, (216) 771-5437, @mjarboe

Streetsboro

Stonemont

Stan Bullard: sbullard@crain.com, (216) 771-5228, @CrainRltywriter

in Shalersville, as well as development of a warehouse near the junction of I-71 and I-76 in Westeld Township.

offers real estate in-

vestment strategies and vehicles to institutions, family offices, trusts and high-net-worth individuals. The firm’s founders and managing principals have a combined history

of more than 60 years’ experience and $20 billion invested.

A rendering shows the now-dropped plans for the 7Hills District project on Rockside Road which called for an o ce building, 240 apartments and retail. | DIMIT ARCHITECTS

Stonemont Financial Group is the new owner of the Amazon property on the former site of the Memphis Drive-in in Brooklyn. Above is the lookalike Amazon warehouse in Valley View. STAN BULLARD/CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS

“TIMING AND THE STATE OF THE CAPITAL MARKETS IS ULTIMATELY WHAT CAUSED US TO WALK AWAY.”

—Chris Salata, ICP’s chief operating o cer

Dieken talks Deshaun Watson, future of FirstEnergy Stadium

BY JOE SCALZO

When Bu alo Bills safety Damar Hamlin su ered cardiac arrest in a Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Jan. 2, Doug Dieken’s mind immediately ashed back to his rookie season, 1971, when Detroit Lions wide receiver Chuck Hughes collapsed late in a game against the Chicago Bears.

“I remember (Bears linebacker) Dick (Butkus) was waving frantically for the medics to come out on the eld,” said Dieken, who was in his rst season as a left tackle for the Cleveland Browns that year. “It was one of those situations where you knew it wasn’t good at all.”

Hughes left the eld in an ambulance, then the Bears and Lions played the nal 62 seconds. Hughes was pronounced dead soon after, becoming the only NFL player to date to die on the eld during a game.

Monday’s game, meanwhile, was postponed inde nitely, which Dieken said was not only the right decision, it was the only decision. e game was later canceled.

“I was a (union) player rep in 1982, and I think the Players Association immediately has to say, ‘ ey’re not nishing this game,’” said Dieken, who spoke by phone on Tuesday, Jan. 3. “It’s unfair to the family of the player and all the players out there (to keep playing) because it hits you. When you lose a guy during the course of a game with a knee injury, that even hits you.

“Fortunately, I never had to witness or be part of something like that (Hamlin or Hughes). I almost said as soon as it happened, ‘ at’s it.’”

Dieken set team records with 194 straight starts and 203 consecutive games played for the Browns between 1971 and 1984, then moved upstairs to the radio booth, where he missed just two games over his 34-year career as an analyst.

“I was just talking to a friend about this, how I played every game in high school, college and the pros,” Dieken said. “I said I always got up because I was afraid my mom would go on the eld and check on me.”

Dieken, who retired from the booth after last year’s season nale, spoke about his radio career, the current state of the Browns and his dislike of robocalls, which come to his home phone at a disturbingly high frequency.

“If during an election year, one of those politicians comes out and says, ‘We’re eliminating robocalls,’ they’ve got my vote,” he said.

` Do you miss being in the booth this fall?

I miss being around (play-by-play man) Jimmy (Donovan) and (producer Jason) Gibbs and (audio engineer Dave) Spano and the guys I worked with. They were great guys. I still stay in touch with Jimmy. In fact, I called him (Monday) night when this (Hamlin) thing was going on and talked to him a little bit about it. Chuck Hughes, these announcers had no recollection of it because it was 1971 and these guys probably weren’t even watching football back then. I remember Butkus waving the medical sta out on the eld because he knew it was a serious situation.

` I remember the other guy from Detroit, (Mike) Utley, that got paralyzed. That was immediately what I thought of.

And Darryl Stingley got paralyzed, too. It does happen.

` When you retired, there were a lot of people who said nice things and wrote nice things about you. What was that like for you to hear?

Humbling. I always felt that the playby-play guy is THE guy. I worked with Nev (Chandler) and I worked with Casey (Coleman) and I worked with Jimmy and you’re just the sidekick. The greatest compliment I ever heard was when Nev passed away and this person wrote a letter that said, “I was a football fan and I lost my eyesight some years ago and I couldn’t watch the games anymore, so I lost interest in football. And then one day I happened to be listening to Nev do the game and it was like I could see it.” And I thought, if you’re a play-by-play guy, there’s no greater compliment.

And if someone listened to Jimmy, they would have the same feeling, because he’s the best in the business.

` Yeah, I’m sure you get asked to compare Nev and Casey and Jimmy. How do you do that?

There’s a lot of similarities between Nev and Jimmy. The way they approach it. The preparation. The ability to entertain

while informing. I still think Jimmy could be hosting a late-night talk show. He is such a talent.

` And it’s amazing to hear him talk about how much he works on it and how much he analyzes himself afterward.

Yeah, he listens to himself after every game. I was afraid to listen to it because I’m afraid I’ll be embarrassed. (Laughs.)

Jimmy, it’s a piece of art that he puts together every week. The one thing is, it’s his show and the color guy, you’re just the sidekick. It’s your job to get out of the way. It’s a relationship that you build by understanding what the roles are.

` Have you listened to the games? To be honest, I watch them on the TV. I watched last week’s game at the West End (Tavern). It’s kind of entertaining, because I’ve never really been able to sit in an audience where I’ve been able to see how the fans are reacting. I’ve had season tickets for going on 50 years and I nally sat in them this year, twice. Of course, it happened to be the Jets game and the Patriots game, so I’m starting to think maybe I’m bad luck. On Sunday, after I watched the game at the West End, these two fans came over after the game as I got up to leave. We had a very nice talk and they said they didn’t want to bother me during the game. And I thought, “How respectful was that,” that they waited until the game was over to say hello.

` Do you get recognized a lot?

Yeah, it’s the longevity factor and because I was on TV a lot. We did the “Red Zone” for many years. We did a bunch of shows, Jimmy and I and (sports reporter Tony) Grossi. And of course my main claim to fame was that I did “Big Chuck and Lil’ John.”

` What do you make of what the Browns have done over the last year?

Obviously, you’re in a waiting period. If you thought that after those first 11 games, he (Watson) was going to

ride in on a white horse and save us all, that’s wrong. I thought (Jacoby) Brissett did a good job filling in that (stopgap) role. The thing people don’t realize is that practice speed and game speed are totally different. It’s like you’re driving through Bay Village and all the sudden you get on I-90. People are moving a lot faster and there’s an adjustment period. When you go from a preseason game to a regular-season game, the speed increases. And then when you get to the playoffs, you take it to another level.

` Did you agree with the Browns’ decision to trade for him and sign him to that big contract?

Well, I mean, I like Baker (May eld).

I have a great amount of respect for people who play hurt. Like I alluded to before, I never missed a game except an exhibition game when I had to get

my knee scoped. And I thought Baker gutted it out and everything. But, obviously, quarterback is what makes the thing go. I think the question now is: Where are the Houston Texans going to be in four years and where are the Browns going to be with all the loaded capital they (the Texans) received for him? The other part of it is the guaranteed money. You’ve got (Ravens quarterback) Lamar Jackson, his contract is up. (Bengals quarterback)

Joe Burrow, his contract is going to be up in a couple of years. Financially, I don’t know where the Bengals would be compared to the Browns, but I’m sure they don’t have the same assets. That contract is going to rock the NFL. But if you produce and you win, everybody forgets everything.

the stadium, especially when the lease is up in six years?

I don’t know. I’ve only sat in my seats twice in my life and it was obviously in better weather than the last game or two. That’s one of those things where you have to put the fans first. That Red Right 88 game was like the third-coldest in the history of the NFL. People said, “Geez, you guys had to be cold!” Not as cold as those people sitting in the stands. They weren’t wandering around, they weren’t moving. You put your feet on that cement and the cold goes right up your body. The climate here, you’re going to have some rough days. But I think in a lot of ways, that was part of being from a cold-weather team. You got a chance to play in it. Now you’ve got these indoor facilities like they do in Berea where you could practice inside. I think there was only once, or maybe a couple times, that I remember we didn’t go outside (to practice). We actually went over to the I-X Center before they turned it into what it was back in the 1970s. You were dodging steel pillars while you were trying to run plays.

` So what you’re saying is the world is di erent and maybe it’s time to change with it?

The world is a lot di erent and the fans pay good money for the tickets. Hopefully, the fans come rst because they’re what makes the game. If you didn’t have any fans, you wouldn’t have the big contracts.

`

Let me talk about FirstEnergy Stadium. What would you do with

` Let me ask one more question and it’s a little bit morbid. You’re 73. Will you see a Browns Super Bowl before you pass on? I would hope so. I would like to see these fans be rewarded for their loyalty.

Jim Donovan poses with Doug Dieken in the Doug Dieken Radio Booth after Dieken’s nal game as the team’s radio analyst on Jan. 9, 2022, at FirstEnergy Stadium. | CLEVELAND BROWNS

Cleveland Clinic, UH, Summa grow their community bene t , annual gures show

BY LYDIA COUTRÉ

Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and Summa Health each grew their community bene t in 2021, according to annual gures reported to the federal government as a snapshot of the value proposition of their tax-exempt status.

UH contributed $531 million in community bene t, and the Clinic provided a 2021 total of $1.41 billion for its operations in Ohio, Florida and Nevada. Summa Health’s investment in its community was $178 million.

Nonpro t hospitals must report these gures annually as a requirement of the Internal Revenue Service. e reports are divided into categories like education, research and Medicaid shortfall, which has for years made up the largest portion of the health systems’ community bene t totals. Medicaid shortfall — the gap between the cost of caring for Medicaid patients and the reimbursements the hospitals receive — accounted for roughly half of the Clinic’s and UH’s community bene t, and about 38% of Summa’s total.

UH’s total for Medicaid shortfall has increased year over year for the past several years, which “is a conscious decision to make place-based investments in communities that have been historically medical deserts,” said Heidi Gartland, UH chief government and community relations o cer.

“A health system could make a decision to actually divest from communities that have low amounts of reim-

bursement where they lose a lot of money, which has not been UH’s decision,” she said, pointing to the UH Rainbow Ahuja Center for Women and Children, which has more than doubled patient ow from the communities of Hough, Fairfax, Glenville and Mount Pleasant.

Another major community bene t bucket — the second-largest for UH and the Clinic — is education.

“ e need for physicians, the need for nurses, the need for allied health always continue to grow for a variety of reasons,” said Bob Waitkus, executive director of taxation and compliance at Cleveland Clinic. “Not only is the organization growing, you know, the population’s aging, there’s looming physician shortages and nursing shortages…. ere’s always that emphasis on education and training, to improve the skills of existing practitioners and train the next generation.”

Summa Health increased its community bene t outlay in every category, which was delivered as follows: $67.9 million in Medicaid shortfall, $49.7 million in subsidized health services (programs o ered at a nancial loss to the hospital like traumatic stress, senior health and dental care), $14 million in charity care, $25.9 million for education, $6 million for research and $14.5 million for community health improvement services, programs and support.

“ is report highlights our long-standing commitment to overcoming social determinants of health in the communities we serve,” said Dr.

Cli Deveny, president and CEO of Summa, in a provided statement. “ e events of the past few years have exposed signi cant health care disparities among di erent segments of our community.”

e Clinic’s community bene t total included: $667 million in Medicaid shortfall, $332.2 million in education, $101 million in research, $179.1 million in nancial assistance, $110.5 in community health improvement and $33.5 million in subsidized health services.

“At the end of the day, we recognize and embrace our obligation to give back to the community, and one of the ways to do that is by making sure that we provide access to those most in need of care,” Waitkus said. “As the organization grows, we know that this obligation to give back to the community is going to grow, as well.”

UH’s new investment strategy really started in earnest in 2020, Gartland said. It focuses on three pillars: anchor and social venture investment for large-scale impact; social service investment in collaboration with community partners; and regional community health.

“I think you’re gonna be seeing much more intentionality there with what we’re doing in the space of housing, what we’re doing with food insecurity, what we’re doing with just safety in the community,” she said.

UH’s community bene t spending includes $279 million in Medicaid shortfall, $104 million in education, $65 million in research, $50 million in charity care and $33 million in community health improvement services, programs and support.

Lydia Coutré: lcoutre@crain.com, (216) 771-5479, @LydiaCoutre

Roetzel picks up Walter Haver eld departures

BY JEREMY NOBILE

LEGAL Roetzel & Andress has snapped up a group of the approximately two dozen attorneys who departed Walter Haver eld at the end of 2022 amid the rm’s broader investments in some core practice areas, including public law.

Akron-based Roetzel said it has brought on 30 new attorneys in the past year, which builds on the rm’s net headcount across its 13-o ce footprint and enhances its local benches in Northeast Ohio in particular.

ose hires include seven lawyers from Walter Haver eld. Of that group, six have joined the rm’s Cleveland o ce, and the seventh has been added in Columbus.

Other additions are dotted around o ces such as Cincinnati, Chicago and Florida.

“We remain steadfast in our commitment to deepening our capabilities and client service in key practice areas at Roetzel, including additions in public law, labor and employment, education, products and transportation, and litigation, among others,” said Roetzel chairman Bob Blackham. “ is talented group of attorneys and their respective areas of focus perfectly comple-

ment several areas of strength at Roetzel and provide a platform for cross-practice collaboration that will be extremely bene cial to our clients.”

Roetzel’s pickups from Walter Haver eld come as the Cleveland-based rm drops its public law and education law practice groups. at move underscores a refocusing on work in the corporate and private business sectors for the 90-year-old business.

On Walter Haver eld’s side, Ralph Cascarilla, the rm’s longtime managing partner, said that the rm’s dual work in public and private arenas has grown in tandem, which has presented some challenges between the two.

“We have made a concerted e ort to develop the corporate tax and commercial litigation components of the rm,” Cascarilla told Crain’s in October. “And as we have expanded our real estate practice as well, we bump up to some issues with public entities, and con icts develop.”

ose con icts were among “major precipitating factors in why we talked about this idea of a transition,” Cascarilla explained.

A few weeks after Walter Havereld said it was eliminating some

practice groups, Weston Hurd said it would bring on a dozen of the departing attorneys, bolstering its education law practice.

Roetzel, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to add to its own education and public law groups.

“Roetzel remains committed to deepening our capabilities and client service across core practices of the rm,” Blackham said. “ e investment represented by our recent public law hires is evidence of this commitment, both in the expansion of our established direct governmental work, as well as our private client matters, where our broad understanding of the public ecosystem provides a distinct advantage, particularly in Northeast Ohio.”

Roetzel reported 76 in-market attorneys for Northeast Ohio between its Akron and Cleveland o ces for the 2022 Crain’s law rms list. With some departures mixed in with recent additions, the rm now has just shy of 80 lawyers in the local region, including 40 in Cleveland.

Firmwide, the company stands at 176 attorneys today, compared with 157 when the Crain’s list was published.

Jeremy Nobile: jnobile@crain.com, (216) 771-5362, @JeremyNobile

Waitkus

Gartland

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Turkeyfoot Golf Links in Akron area is being sold

DAN SHINGLER

Turkeyfoot Golf Links in Portage Lakes south of Akron is being sold. But the historic course is not about to become history.

e buyer, local businessman Tim Adkins, said he’ll build a mixed-use development with housing on the last nine holes of the 27-hole course, known as the “water nine,” because it sits largely on lakefront property. e water nine holes also tend to be shorter than the rest of the course, and many say it’s not as challenging as the main 18 for players.

Adkins plans to keep the main 18 holes in play, he said.

Golfers and local residents have for decades feared the course would be bought and replaced entirely by new houses in the popular suburb between Akron and North Canton. But the family that owned it never let that happen, and now COVID might have helped save it from the earthmovers, or at least preserved its primary 18 holes.

“It’s been very pro table the last few years,” Adkins said.

A huge increase in rounds played since the pandemic struck has given Adkins con dence he can keep the 18 holes open and busy, he said.

Although Adkins said that ever since he was a youth and worked on one for the rst time, “I’ve always wanted to own a golf course,” it wasn’t the pandemic golf boom that drove him to agree to purchase Turkeyfoot.

“I’d heard a national homebuilder was about to buy it, and I didn’t want to see that happen,” Adkins said. “ ey were talking about putting 400 homes on the course.”

Adkins is a Portage Lakes resident who owns the Upper Deck bar cattycorner from the course and rents the bar property from the ornton family, which owns the golf course. He said he contacted the orntons as soon as he heard of plans to develop the course.

He said he matched the builder’s bid of $8.5 million for the course and the 167 acres that it sits upon, and his status as a local who intended to keep the course open carried the day.

Mary (nee ornton) Mozingo said it was a tough decision for her family, which has owned the land there since before the Civil War and has seen its ownership become split up among 22 family members over the years. But eventually they reached an agreement to sell the course, in part because someone other than a big developer was the buyer.

To the ornton family, Turkeyfoot Golf Links is more than a piece of land and more than a business. It’s a huge piece of their personal history.

“ e family has owned the property since 1840,” Mozingo said, noting that her grandfather opened the course’s rst 18 holes in 1925, before adding the water nine in the 1930s. e course has caught the attention of developers for decades.

ere’s not much lakefront property for sale in Portage Lakes, where even expensive homes are sometimes torn

down to make room for new ones. But the family has always resisted the temptation to sell it because it hoped the course could be maintained, Mozingo said.

She said she was happy a buyer such as Adkins arose. Now she’s counting on him to succeed and deliver.

“We’re living o the promise that Tim will maintain the course, and we’ll celebrate the 100th anniversary in 2025,” Mozingo said. “ e Northeast Ohio golf community doesn’t need to lose another course. We’ve lost too many. e local golf community needs this property, and our neighbors need this property.”

One of those neighbors is Joe Durkin, who owns Foxy Golf in Portage Lakes, next to the course, and also in Canton.

Durkin said many of his patrons play the course and it always gets rave reviews.

“Customers tell us it’s always in really good shape and that’s the biggest thing with a golf course. It’s well-manicured and well taken care of, and that’s what counts,” he said.

He himself rates the course among the top public courses in Northeast Ohio.

“I would de nitely rank it in the top three,” Durkin said.

Tim Davis, president of Akron District Golf Association, goes further than that.

“Conditionwise and with the upkeep, it’s second to none in the area,” Davis said. “And I mean the big area, the NEO area. If it’s not the best, it’s

one of the best. ... eir greenskeeper is a workaholic.”

at upkeep, with some help from the pandemic, has helped business at the course, where both Adkins and Turkeyfoot general manager Mike irion said golfers have logged about 50,000 rounds in each of the last two years.

“I didn’t think we’d ever top 2021, but we did last year,” said irion, who plans to stay on as GM when Adkins takes over, probably in January.

“We were all relieved when we found out it was someone local who was buying it and would keep the course open,” irion said. “It’s great that someone who cares about the golf course and the history of the golf course is buying it.”

Now, Adkins has to gure out what to do with the nine holes he intends to develop.

ose holes occupy about 67 acres that are in the city of New Franklin, while the remaining 100 acres and 18 holes are in Green. New Franklin Mayor Paul Adamson is aware of plans to develop the water nine, Adkins said, but did not return two calls by 3 p.m. ursday, Jan. 5.

As for what he’ll develop, Adkins hasn’t decided beyond envisioning a mixed-use development that is mostly residential and probably will include at least a restaurant and co ee shop, or something similar. e property is now zoned for residential use, Adkins said.

In addition to a possible zoning variance for any retail components, Adkins said he hopes to get water and sewer lines extended to the property from the intersection of South Main Street and Route 619, about 500 feet from the course in New Franklin.

In the meantime, Adkins said, he’s working with architects at Akron’s GBC Design Inc. to develop a plan for the water nine and preparing for next year’s golf season on the main 18 holes.

at last part, about preparing for a new season of golf, is music to the ears of many, including Davis.

“We’ve lost enough courses,” Davis said, “I’m glad someone bought it and it didn’t go to a developer.”

Dan Shingler: dshingler@crain.com, (216) 771-5290

MEMORIES: e ings Remembered gift store company plans to close its headquarters in Richmond Heights and a warehouse in North Jackson Township by Jan. 27, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Noti cation led by its current owner, Enesco Properties of Itasca, Illinois. Enesco said in the notice, led Dec. 27, 2022, that it plans to completely close the ings Remembered o ce at 26301 Curtiss Wright Parkway near the Cuyahoga County Airport in Richmond Heights, as well as the operation at 300 S. Bailey Road in North Jackson. A total of more than 160 jobs will be eliminated in the two operations. Jobs that will be eliminated in Richmond Heights will gut the operation of the chain, which specialized in engraved gifts for special occasions with a vast bricks-and-mortar retail network. Store-closing sales, with most items at $4.99, began last week, and store shelves are emptying out.

BUSY 2023: e Greater Cleveland Sports Commission is ready to rock and rumble in 2023. And that’s just in January. e GCSC announced it will host nine major sporting events in 2023 that will provide an estimated $17,875,000 in economic impact to Northeast Ohio. e slate includes this month’s Junior Volleyball Association’s Rock ‘N Rumble, which will be held on the next two weekends in January at the Huntington Convention Center. e tournament had

been a one-weekend event for the previous six years. e two events will draw more than 450 girls volleyball teams, an estimated 8,000 spectators and generate $6.3 million, the GCSC said.

FAB-ULOUS DEAL: Bedford Heightsbased Olympic Steel Inc. has acquired all the shares outstanding of Wichita, Kansas-based Metal-Fab Inc., the metals service center announced. e $131 million acquisition is “expected to be immediately accretive,” the company said. Metal-Fab, which has two warehousing

and fabrication facilities in Kansas, will now operate as Metal-Fab, an Olympic Steel company, led by president Mark Ohm. e business makes venting and ltration products.

APPETITE FOR GROWTH: e J.M. Smucker Co. is getting a new senior vice president and general manager of its consumer foods business. e Orrville-based manufacturer announced Rebecca Scheidler will take the job e ective Monday, Jan. 16. She will succeed Tina Floyd, who is leaving Smucker on Friday, Jan. 13, to become CEO of Hudsonville Ice Cream,

a Michigan company that has been making ice cream since 1926. Scheidler has been Smucker’s vice president, customer and category business, and vice president, marketing for consumer foods. She will be responsible for the company’s $1.7 billion consumer foods business, which includes the fast-growing Uncrustables brand and the snacks and spreads portfolio, led by the Jif and Smucker’s brands.

QUITE A DEMONSTRATION: Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. unveiled a demonstration tire comprised of 90%

sustainable materials — proving the company’s ability to produce a consumer tire with a high level of sustainable material content — with plans to sell a 70% sustainable tire in 2023. e Akron-based tiremaker said the demonstration tire passed all regulatory and internal testing. It also o ered the potential for fuel savings and a reduced carbon footprint due to its lower rolling resistance compared with a reference tire made from traditional materials. e demonstration tire is made up of 17 sustainable ingredients — de ned as bio-based/renewable, recycled material or material produced via sustainable practices — across 12 di erent tire components.

SURVEY SAYS: Dempsey Surveying, a land surveying company in Lakewood with deep roots serving Northeast Ohio and other markets, has been acquired by Atwell LLC, a South eld, Michigan-based national consulting, engineering and construction services rm. Atwell said the deal expands the company’s Cleveland presence and its surveying capabilities in the Midwest.

Christopher Dempsey, CEO of Dempsey Surveying, said he sold the concern because he has no siblings in the business and wanted to provide stability for the company’s 11 sta ers. He will remain with Atwell. Dempsey launched his surveying company in 2002 and, as a second-generation land surveyor, has been providing such services since 1985.

The water nine at Turkeyfoot Golf Links includes some of the last unbuilt waterfront property in Portage Lakes and is the site of proposed development, while the course’s remaining 18 holes will remain in play. CONTRIBUTED

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. unveiled a demonstration tire comprised of 90% sustainable materials. BLOOMBERG FILE PHOTO

Say Yes Cleveland works to close funding gap

BY RACHEL ABBEY MCCAFFERTY

With the help of American Rescue Plan Act funding, Say Yes Cleveland has made some progress in shrinking a funding gap that threatened its ability to o er support services to students and families, but there’s still much work to do.

In October, Say Yes Cleveland announced it was facing a signi cant funding gap of about $4.5 million for the year. e missing funding was supposed to go toward supporting Say Yes Cleveland’s family support specialists, which connect students and families with wraparound services.

Startups get support from new investment funds

BY RACHEL ABBEY MCCAFFERTY

In its rst year, the Advanced Manufacturing Fund has invested in two manufacturing startups and has led to the creation of another fund for even earlier-stage manufacturing opportunities.

e Advanced Manufacturing Fund is a seed fund aimed at supporting manufacturing and physical product startups in the state. Initial funding came from Ohio’s ird Frontier program, as well as private funders. Cleveland-based MAGNET: e Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network is serving as a non-funding facilitator and does not

play a role in making investment decisions. e fund was o cially started in the fourth quarter of 2021, having grown out of MAGNET’s annual pitch competition for physical product startups and entrepreneurs.

Since then, the fund has invested in two local startups: SweatID and Octet Scienti c Inc. SweatID, the fund’s rst investment, is looking to create wearable fabric sensors that can monitor hydration levels for users such as athletes. Octet Scienti c is developing specialty chemicals for sustainable batteries, speci cally for recharging zinc-based ones. CEO and founder Onas Bolton told Crain’s last spring that the company

thinks “zinc-based batteries are a real answer for large-scale grid storage, basically any battery that doesn’t have to move.” He also spoke of the di culty of attracting investment funding for physical product startups like his.

In an email, Andrea Navratil, director of new ventures for MAGNET, said the investing team behind the Advanced Manufacturing Fund “is excited about both of these deals as it starts to demonstrate the broad industry thesis the fund was created to support. Additionally, there are several under review and a few in diligence so 2023 should hold more exciting announcements for the fund

and continued momentum.”

Navratil also noted that, during the deal review process, the managers of the fund realized there was another investment gap in the manufacturing startup space. ey created a separate fund, Innovative Manufacturing Holdings LLC, to support very early-stage manufacturing businesses. ese are typically pre-revenue businesses, Navratil said. at fund has already invested in three startups: Radcli e Watts, which makes a medical device for psoriasis and eczema; a startup working on a learning process product for people who are blind; and a sporting goods product.

Say Yes Cleveland, which provides postsecondary scholarships and wraparound services while students are still in their K-12 education career, launched in 2019, fully rolling out those support services to all schools in the program this academic year. e scholarship funds are largely raised by private sources, but the support services are funded by “collaborative e orts and funds of our public partners,” Say Yes Cleveland director of communications Jon Benedict wrote in an email in October.

Cuyahoga County Council in October approved far less funding than expected for Say Yes for the year. e County Council is one of the six convening organizations behind Say Yes locally, and this year approved no more than $4.9 million for the organization’s scal year that ends July 23, 2023. e proposal considered by committee had originally been more than $9 million for the year. e approximately $4.5 million gap meant Say Yes Cleveland could have run out of funding for the year by March.

But e orts to close that gap are underway. Benedict in an email said that County Executive Armond Budish directed $1 million of his ARPA allocation toward Say Yes Cleveland’s current-year funding; that funding, o cially to College Now Greater Cleveland to disburse to Say Yes Cleveland, was approved by the County Council on Dec. 16.

at helps, giving the program enough funding for its family support specialists through the end of April 2023, Benedict said, but it still leaves Say Yes Cleveland with a $3.5 million gap for the year.

“A number of e orts are underway to both close the remaining gap for this year and to address longterm funding for subsequent years, but those e orts remain in process at this moment,” Benedict wrote.

Rachel Abbey McCa erty: (216) 771-5379, rmcca erty@crain.com

The Modern Law Firm.

800+ attorneys strong.

Jaffe has become Taft Detroit, effective Dec. 31, 2022.

IN OCTOBER, SAY YES

CLEVELAND ANNOUNCED IT WAS FACING A SIGNIFICANT FUNDING GAP OF ABOUT $4.5 MILLION FOR THE YEAR.

Getting around

We’re just days into 2023, and there’s already one candidate for the best news of the year: e end is near for the ugly Jersey barriers along Superior Avenue on Public Square.

It’s been a long time coming, and the early-stage design plan submitted last week by LAND Studio, working with the nonpro t Group Plan Commission, is just the start of a process that will take most of 2023, and potentially longer, to complete. But as Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, who helped get the ball rolling in March 2022 when his administration asked Cleveland City Council to authorize the permanent replacement of the “temporary barriers” with “modern and removable bollards,” said in a statement at the end of last year, “We are one step closer to the Public Square that Clevelanders deserve.”

e Group Plan Commission, which works to develop and improve signature public spaces in Cleveland, announced at the end of December that it had reached its goal of collecting $3.5 million for repairs, renovations and removal of the concrete Jersey barriers. Cleveland City Council last March approved $1.5 million for the rehabilitation, while Cuyahoga County kicked in $1 million and the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority contributed $500,000. Other funders of the project: KeyBank, e Sherwin-Williams Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, Bedrock, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Rocket Mortgage and JACK Entertainment — all key stakeholders downtown.

Public Square is one of the pillars of the commission’s work, along with improvements to the downtown Mall and the long-sought pedestrian bridge to link downtown with a lake that Cleveland all-too-often ignores.

e initial, $50 million Public Square renovation, designed by James Corner Field Operations and completed in 2016, just before the city hosted the Republican National Convention, was an immediate hit. It was aesthetically pleasing, drew critical praise as the country turned its eyes to Cleveland that summer and, most importantly, created a uni ed, 6-acre pedestrian space that helped Public Square live up to its name. If you spent time on Public Square right after the renovation was unveiled, you couldn’t help but be excited by its potential

to provide a true gathering place for people and events, creating excitement in the middle of a city that needs it. at momentum was slowed substantially in 2017, when the barriers were erected in response to homeland security concerns. Although the barriers were obviously ugly and immediately panned, they became part of the status quo in Public Square, and the administration of former Mayor Frank Jackson never made a concerted e ort to remove them and take full advantage of the space’s renovation. (Big surprise.)

e LAND Studio plan submitted last ursday, Jan. 5, to the Downtown/Flats Design Review Committee involves replacing the concrete barriers with modern, stainless-steel bollards. e Bibb administration says the square’s redesign will create permanent crosswalks and curb extensions in the center. It also will narrow the middle portion of the roadway to one lane in each direction, a measure aimed at bolstering pedestrian safety. One other nod in that direction: ere will be 3- to 4-inch raised “tabletop” crosswalk for pedestrians to cross between the northern and southern portions of the square.

Cleveland’s Planning Commission was scheduled to begin its review on Friday, Jan. 6, which will kick o a process that inevitably will o er some changes and ne-tuning of the design, and eventually will lead to the selection of a bollard manufacturer. Nora Romano , LAND Studio’s associate director and Public Square project manager, told cleveland. com that the process of ordering bollards from a manufacturer could take up to 30 weeks and noted that supply chain issues a ecting construction industries could a ect timing of the project.

ere’s no rush at this point, and we’d prefer to make sure the review is methodical and well-considered so the update of Public Square returns the space to its full promise. is is also an example of saying what you’ll do and then actually doing it. Bibb during his campaign for o ce pledged a renovation, then worked expediently to introduce legislation to make that happen. City Council did its part, working quickly and constructively. e nonpro t partners and corporate community made planning and funding happen. In this case, at least, we can have nice things.

Executive Editor: Elizabeth McIntyre (emcintyre@crain.com)

Managing Editor: Scott Suttell (ssuttell@crain.com)

Contact Crain’s: 216-522-1383

Read Crain’s online: crainscleveland.com

Organizational leaders must embrace new ideas

e “Great Resignation” trend has been ongoing, even prior to COVID. While COVID ignited the trend at a higher rate, increases in retirements and realignments among the workforce have been consistently on the rise. Since the changes in the workforce are not new, what have organizations done to prepare for the loss of institutional knowledge and the acquisition of new human capital?

Successful organizations cannot remain static in their operations, policies and procedures. While losing an employee has a certain impact, acquiring a new employee can bring about advantages. A successful organization should strive to only hire the best person for the open position who can help move the organization into an ideal state from the current state.

Mickler is assistant dean of Accreditation & Strategic Initiatives at the Boler College of Business at John Carroll University.

To move the organization into an ideal state takes leadership. I’ll be more specific: It takes innovative leadership. The working environment we all find ourselves in (regardless of industry) is even more complex and fastpaced than any of us have experienced. However, this is where acquiring new human capital with outside perspectives and leading them effectively helps improve the organization.

ese new acquisitions are where the organization’s culture can help or hinder improvements. New hires may have a lot of new and innovative ideas to contribute, but if the culture is not receptive, these ideas can lead to frustration. A common statement when resistance is experienced: “We’ve never done this before and it won’t work.” Is that really the case?

Now, every employee of an organization will never be 100% on board with new ways of doing things, and not all ideas of new employees will work. Many leaders/managers are hesitant and resistant to try new things for the fear of it not working. But what if that new, innovative way of doing something actually does work? We already know the current state, based on the “way we’ve been operating.” Why not try something new? Can it possibly get worse?

Organizational leadership can improve the receptivity of the existing culture by clearly outlining expectations. Once the expectations have been clearly outlined, the question becomes, “how do WE achieve this?” Organizational leaders must remove obstacles and provide resources to help the organization move to the ideal state and thrive. Additionally, organizational leaders must be optimistic, resilient and create a team-based approach enforcing a continuous improvement mindset among all stakeholders.

Furthermore, exibility and the willingness to pilot something new must be infused in the leaders/managers. With this mindset must come the ability to try something new and have it fail without negative repercussions. ere must be e ort, ambition and key performance indicators to help meet the expectations.

Write us: Crain’s welcomes responses from readers. Letters should be as brief as possible and may be edited. Send letters to Crain’s Cleveland Business, 700 West St. Clair Ave., Suite 310, Cleveland, OH 44113, or by emailing ClevEdit@crain.com. Please include your complete name and city from which you are writing, and a telephone number for fact-checking purposes.

Sound o : Send a Personal View for the opinion page to emcintyre@crain.com. Please include a telephone number for veri cation purposes.

RONALD MICKLER JR.

PERSONAL VIEW

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP CAN IMPROVE THE RECEPTIVITY OF THE EXISTING CULTURE BY CLEARLY OUTLINING EXPECTATIONS.

Temporary concrete barricades known as Jersey barriers have bisected Public Square since 2017. | DAVID KORDALSKI/CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS FILE PHOTO

BY SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL BLOOMBERG OPINION

e start of a new year is a good time to examine assumptions and habits. at seems to be behind the “calendar purge” with which Shopify Inc. greeted 2023.

e company has declared that it is banning meetings on Wednesdays, limiting 50-person-plus meetings to ursdays, and — for two weeks — killing any meeting with three or more people. e meeting-free fortnight is designed to be a kind of reboot, after which executives are expected to encourage employees to be choosier about which meetings they schedule and attend. And in an acknowledgment that calendar clutter isn’t the only way to waste time, they are also pushing workers to be more strategic in how they use Slack.

ese changes are good. But if Shopify and other companies truly want to tackle the corporate scourge that is meeting overload, they will need to go further. If you have never experienced the misery of meeting overload, this might sound a little strange. Are meetings really that bad?

While having a few meetings is ne, too often employees spend their entire day bouncing from one to another. When meetings run back-to-back, employees have little time to prepare or to follow up; the value of getting together is wasted. One estimate suggests that useless meetings cost large companies $100 million a year. I’m surprised the gure is so low.

Meeting-clogged schedules make organizations sclerotic and slow. Need to grab your boss for an urgent chat or nd a colleague for a quick question? Good luck swinging by their desk. You’ll have to schedule a meeting. Unfortunately, you probably don’t have any mutually free time-slots for at least two weeks.

Recurring meetings are especially di cult to cancel. Sometimes, threats to get rid of a meeting will give it new life — improved attendance or agendas. But the new energy is generally short-lived. e gravitational pull of the old meeting rhythm is too strong to resist. And so the zombie meeting staggers forward, brainless but unkillable.

e problem is that although most people hate this way of working, no one wants to admit that the meetings they run contribute to the problem. Nor do attendees want to miss out: We may dread sitting in useless meetings, but if we decline them, we fear we’re being left out of the loop — or that we’ll look rude or lazy.

To cut back on meeting overload, senior leaders must do more than encourage employees to be more selective about the meetings they schedule or attend.

When organizations seek to limit the number, size or frequency of meetings, they are often treating the symptoms of an underlying disease. But addressing the root causes of meeting overload requires deeper work. Are employees spread across too many projects? Is the culture overly consensus-driven? Are meetings the only way people know to force colleagues to meet for deadlines or to compel managers to make decisions? Is the

company over-rewarding visibility at the expense of recognizing lower-pro le work?

When meeting excess is a symptom of other problems, simply asking people to meet less often is unlikely to work. I’ve experienced this rsthand. At a former employer, we tried to keep Fridays meeting-free so that sta could focus on their heads-down work, but inevitably, the logjam of meetings Monday to ursday meant that the pristine calendar space of Fridays was too alluring to ignore.

As conference rooms lled up on Fridays, the boss would send periodic emails pleading with people to stop. He probably needed to go further — make it impossible for our calendar software to function on Fridays, perhaps, or physically shoo people back to their desks. Even then, I’m sure meeting-addicted employees would have found ways to continue to confabulate.

ONE ESTIMATE SUGGESTS THAT USELESS MEETINGS COST LARGE COMPANIES $100 MILLION A YEAR.

Leaders can also experiment with di erent formats. Managers could build prep and follow-up time into the meeting itself; perhaps the rst 10 minutes are spent preparing, and the last 10 are spent ring o follow-up emails. Or limit the length of meetings to 45 minutes rather than an hour (or 20 minutes rather than 30) to make sure people have a few moments before the next one starts. Or model better meeting etiquette by using a focused agenda to guide every meeting.

In Shopify’s case, a two-week reboot doesn’t sound like enough time to create new habits. Most research into habit formation suggests that it takes 40 days, not 14, to set a new norm. Shopify should consider extending its meeting hiatus to at least a month so that the organization learns how to get work done without them.

As for limiting 50-plus-person meetings to one day, why convene them at all? Does any meeting really need to be that large? Perhaps such super-size gatherings are justi ed on a quarterly or annual basis, but one has to wonder what gets done at such mega-meetings. Probably a handful of senior execs speak and everyone else listens. Isn’t one-way communication what email is for?

At the very least, managers seeking to cut the number of wasteful meetings should give clear targets, which work better for changing behavior than vague “less of this” and “more of that” pronouncements. Perhaps give people a “meeting budget,” a certain number of meeting-hours they can use each month. (A ve-person, one-hour meeting is ve meeting-hours.)

It makes sense that Shopify, which is trying to rebound from a di cult quarter, would seek to claw back employee time for the work that matters most. eir meeting memo is a good start — but like most new year’s resolutions, it’s only the beginning. As anyone who has ever tried to set boundaries knows, the real work happens not in declaring them, but in maintaining them.

We appreciate the spotlight on Ohio’s caregiver crisis (Dec. 12, “Caregivers in Crisis: Low wages, sta ng shortages hinder growing need for home health services”).

Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities and the people we serve have felt the stress of these caregiver shortages for years.

In 2022, we supplied nearly $3 million to employers of direct service professionals (DSPs). ese funds helped onboard and train DSPs and provide them with bonuses.

Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabili-

ties also awarded 80 family-fun packages to DSPs, so they could enjoy a memorable day with their family at local hot spots like Cedar Point, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and Urban Air Adventure & Trampoline Park.

We urge the state of Ohio to provide funds to home health care companies to adequately compensate DSPs for the vital work they do for people with developmental and other disabilities.

Kelly A. Petty Superintendent and CEO

Cuyahoga

County Board of Developmental Disabilities

Ohio must provide funds to help with caregiver crisis

2023 to be existential year for NOPEC

It’s a pretty safe bet 2023 will be a big year for NOPEC.

e state’s biggest energy aggregator will nd out if the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio is going to allow it to survive and get a lot of its customers back — nearly all of them, since NOPEC returned its 550,000 electricity customers back to their utilities’ default o erings in 2022.

After electricity prices went weird early in the year, the price of power on the spot market fell below what NOPEC and others had paid for longterm contracts. at meant NOPEC’s electricity customers were paying more for power than they would have paid if they were on their local utility’s default rate, so NOPEC returned all its customers to those rates.

While that reduced the monthly bill for more than half a million customers in Ohio, NOPEC’s move also meant power providers who had won auctions to provide power to utilities for their default-rate programs suddenly had to provide those customers with a lot of electricity. ey would also have to sell that power at below-market rates to ful ll the obligations they took on when they won those auctions, which took place long before the 2022 price volatility.

Competitors, including Dynegy, a Houston generation company that provides power to FirstEnergy customers, cried foul.

PUCO approved NOPEC’s decision to move its customers back to their utilities, but also asked NOPEC to show cause as to why the commission should allow it to continue operations, which serve about 240 Ohio communities and more than half a million customers.

Since then, it’s been a stream of back-and-forth regulatory lings and decisions by PUCO.

Most recently, PUCO announced it was delaying some parts of the process NOPEC will need to complete to get back to business, which dismayed the nonpro t.

Speci cally, the commission on Dec. 9 suspended for 90 days its consideration of NOPEC’s routine renewal application, which it had led on Nov. 22. It also postponed by one month the deadline for comments and replies on NOPEC’s show-cause proceedings.

at means the show-cause proceedings likely won’t move forward until after comments are taken through mid-January, while the renewal application won’t be considered until March.

ose were both disappointing to NOPEC executive director Chuck Keiper, who said the delay of the renewal application is particularly worrisome.

“ at was shocking to us,” Keiper said. “ ey’ve added uncertainty in a number of ways. Uncertainty for the other bidders (for power contracts), not just NOPEC.”

Cleveland Clinic aims to start construction on Innovation District towers by mid-2023

MICHELLE JARBOE

e Cleveland Clinic plans to start construction in late spring or early summer on a pair of substantial new research buildings at the southeast end of its campus.

ose towers are part of the Clinic’s contribution to the Cleveland Innovation District, a multi-institution, public-private push to create 20,000 jobs and boost research in the city over a decade. State o cials and leaders of local hospitals and universities announced the e ort — and funding to support it — in early 2021.

Now the Clinic is renovating 43,500 square feet at its Lerner Research Institute, south of Carnegie Avenue between East 96th and East 100th streets, as part of the project.

is year, the hospital plans to break ground for two buildings immediately to the south and east, anking East 100th, to create a home for its recently established Global Center for Pathogen & Human Health Research.

Linked by a skywalk over East 100th, those buildings collectively will span 358,100 square feet. An aerial rendering shows white, mid-rise structures with lots of glass facing Cedar, with a suggestion of street-level activity including outdoor seating and improved landscaping. City design-review bodies haven’t vetted those plans yet.

e Clinic expects to wrap up the Lerner renovations, including wet and dry laboratory spaces, by mid-

2023. e towers should be complete by the end of 2025, said William Peacock, the Clinic’s chief of operations, and Pat Rios, executive director of buildings and design.

Rios said the Clinic is looking at ways to liven up the buildings’ ground oors with glassy laboratories that put “science on display” and potential opportunities for community access.

“We’re still very early in the design phase of these buildings,” he cautioned, “but we’re examining amenities for both the researchers and the public to use.”

also is tapping a grant from JobsOhio, the state’s private nonpro t economic development corporation, and will bene t from a state job-creation tax credit tied to hiring and payroll.

e Innovation District projects are part of a swell of construction occurring across the hospital’s main campus.

“We’re in a huge cycle,” Peacock said.

at boom includes a renovation and expansion of the Cole Eye Institute, at East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue. at project, which started in May, is slated for completion in 2025.

the Play House buildings. e Clinic bought the complex in 2009, when the theater company moved downtown, and has used the property for everything from storage to administration to police training during the intervening years.

e total price tag for the new research buildings is $385.5 million.

e renovations at Lerner will cost $34.5 million, a hospital spokeswoman wrote in an email.

e Clinic, which reported a net loss of more than $1.5 billion for the rst three quarters of 2022, is paying for the construction projects through bond nancing, philanthropy and state money, Peacock said.

at includes a $100 million forgivable state loan for the pathogen center. e Clinic will not have to repay that money if it meets certain job-creation and job-retention thresholds. e health care giant

And site preparations are well under way for a 1 millionsquare-foot neurological institute on the north side of Carnegie, between East 86th and East 90th streets. e $1 billion project won early-stage, schematic approval from the Cleveland City Planning Commission in October, enabling the Clinic to begin foundation work.

e neurology building is replacing the Clinic’s old surgery center and an adjacent parking garage, which were demolished in the fall.

To create a construction-staging area for the project, the Clinic also is preparing to raze the former Cleveland Play House complex down the street.

at teardown is likely to start in mid- to late January, once the Clinic nishes asbestos abatement inside

At a community meeting in the Fairfax neighborhood in May, Rios told residents that the Clinic explored ways to reuse the buildings but was stymied by the chopped-up layout of the space and deferred maintenance. e complex, which includes the original 1926 building, a 1980s addition designed by noted architect and Cleveland native Philip Johnson and a onetime Sears store, required $40 million in repairs, Rios said at the time.

In mid-December, Clinic executives said they still don’t have rm plans for the Play House site.

But they hope to create a more dened western entrance to the campus, in the same way that they’re building up an eastern gateway with investments along East 105th and Cedar.

“I know there’s going to be parking,” Rios said of potential uses for the property where the Play House still stands, “but we’re trying to improve the experience as you go down Carnegie.”

With the rapid pace of changes in health care, treatments and research, “it would be premature to assign a speci c task to that land right now,” Peacock added.

DAN SHINGLER

A rendering shows two research buildings along Cedar Avenue, connected by a skywalk, near the southeastern end of the Cleveland Clinic’s main campus. | CLEVELAND CLINIC

THE INNOVATION DISTRICT PROJECTS ARE PART OF A SWELL OF CONSTRUCTION OCCURRING ACROSS THE HOSPITAL’S MAIN CAMPUS.

In 2023, Akron will work toward redeveloping Innerbelt property

Akron’s roughly 30-acre Innerbelt property has been vacant for more than ve years now, leaving an empty chasm of presumably valuable real estate in the middle of downtown.

So, what’s to become of it in the year ahead?

Not much, probably, at least in terms of visible construction or dirt being moved. But that doesn’t mean 2023 won’t be the year that determines the fate and future use of the property.

e city is waiting for a study it’s commissioned from Liz Ogbu, an Oakland architect, urbanist and consultant who focuses on “spatial justice,” including what to do with land that in the past used to house Black neighborhoods before such sites were used for projects like Akron’s Innerbelt.

Ogbu is set to deliver her work to the city sometime in June or July, and it will then be discussed by the city, residents and others interested in the site.

Black-owned businesses were reportedly taken out to make room for the Innerbelt in the 1970s.

e grant money would be used by the city to help plan for the Innerbelt property’s next use, and possibly to help prepare it for development. Along with Ogbu’s study, the city hopes to use the grant to develop a plan that is informed by the site’s past, addresses some of the social justice issues related to its previous development, and positions it for a use that will be benecial to all of Akron, city planning and urban development director Jason Segedy said.

But the site has more challenges than the city initially thought, Segedy said, and it will probably be 2024, at the earliest, before Akron determines the best use for the land, identi es speci c projects and possibly developers, and has the site ready for construction.

Ultimately, it could become a park, a private mixed-use development, the site of new housing or some combination of the three — or even some sort of development not yet considered, Segedy said.

other public facility is sought. at would require an investment, probably from a private developer.

Segedy and others point out that the city can’t simply direct a project to relocate to the Innerbelt, as some opposed to residential development in the city’s former White Pond ofce park and other sites have suggested.

Projects are designed for speci c sites, they say, and whatever ultimately goes into the Innerbelt site will have to be designed and developed for that location.

Alan Ga ney, the redeveloper working to build housing at the White Pond site, for example, said he did not and would not consider simply moving the development to the downtown site, because it would not make economic sense.

“Unfortunately, developments aren’t portable, and every project is unique,” Ga ney said, adding that if he was looking to develop on the former Innerbelt — which he’s currently not — “It would have been a completely di erent development.”

CLINIC

From Page 10

e neurological institute is scheduled to be done in late 2026, though it will take the Clinic time to move employees and equipment into the building. at timeline also could be a ected by in ation and supply-chain disruptions, which are causing problems for all sorts of construction projects.

“ ese are commitments that we’re absolutely locked on executing, and really xing our project budgets really tightly,” Peacock said of navigating those challenges.

e Clinic also is playing a role in development in neighboring Fairfax, where Fairmount Properties broke ground in late 2021 on a project that includes a Meijer neighborhood market, apartments and parking.

at building, at East 105th and Cedar, sits at the northern terminus of the Opportunity Corridor boulevard and is part of a broader district called Innovation Square.

NOPEC

From Page 10

e mixed-use development is the result of a partnership between Fairmount, based in Orange Village; the Clinic; and Fairfax Renaissance Development Corp. e Clinic and Fairfax Renaissance own the 2.9-acre site through a joint venture and are leasing it to the developer. e grocery store and apartments could open in mid-2023.

Separately, the Clinic invested $10 million in the Aura at Innovation Square, a mixed-income apartment building that is rising next door to Fairmount’s project. e Aura, scheduled to open in late 2023, is the fruit of a collaboration between Fairfax Renaissance and McCormack Baron Salazar, a St. Louis-based developer.

Rios acknowledged that neighbors have criticized the Clinic over the years for treating Cedar like a back door.

“Now,” he said, “you’re seeing more of our front-of-house there and … a lot of development that’s intended to be joint-use with the community.”

Michelle Jarboe: michelle.jarboe@ crain.com, (216) 771-5437, @mjarboe

deadline due now in January. We did le 100-plus letters of support that we’ve received,” Keiper said.

Akron hopes to couple Ogbu’s work with a $1 million grant from the federal Reconnecting Communities program. at’s been funded with $1 billion to spend over the next ve years and is dedicated to reconnecting communities that were previously cut o from economic opportunities by transportation infrastructure.

In other words, projects exactly like the Innerbelt, which is wellknown for having displaced some of Akron’s prosperous Black neighborhoods and business districts when it was built. More than 700 Black households and more than 100

Residents will be invited to participate in the discussion as the city works its way through the study and possibly the grant.

e city has said it’s starting to circulate a community survey that will be open to all Akron residents willing to provide feedback or thoughts on how to use the space.

at will take place between Jan. 9 and Jan. 31 and will be followed in the spring by focus groups getting more input from residents between March and May, Akron chief communications o cer Stephanie Marsh reports.

What goes in there might not be entirely up to the city, though, especially if something requiring more private investment than a park or

But the site still likely represents an opportunity for another development, especially if the nearby Bowery District and other close-in downtown developments do well.

It’s not often that a city gets the opportunity to redevelop such a big chunk of vacant land downtown. And Akron’s not hurrying this time.

e city has apparently learned some lessons from the last time it redeveloped the site.

Rather than ignore those mistakes, Akron seems to be embracing the opportunity to learn from them, and to remember them.

e city is working on an oral history archive dedicated to the Innerbelt, which Marsh said will be part of the Akron-Summit County Public Library’s Summit Memory website and is slated to be launched in February.

Dan Shingler: dshingler@crain.com, (216) 771-5290

Keiper is optimistic, but also in a hurry. He’s gotten a fair bit of support lately, including from the communities he serves and even from some organizations that have sometimes been NOPEC’s detractors.

“On ursday (Dec. 15), we were very surprised the (Ohio) Consumers’ Counsel led something very supportive of NOPEC’s position,” Keiper said.

NOPEC led a response applauding the OCC’s ling, but Dynegy made a ling asserting that the OCC does not have standing to le on the case.

Keiper said he’s been “humbled” by support from a broad swath of local communities and leaders.

“PUCO has given us a comment

Now, though there will likely be more lings and comments along the way, Keiper’s in a waiting game. He’s frustrated by that, he said, because the delay keeps NOPEC on the sidelines of the energy markets. It can’t start buying forward contracts to lock in rates for its customers for the future, which may ultimately limit the rates from which it could choose.

But Keiper said he can’t start to do that until he has certainty NOPEC will be in business and will have its customers back.

“I cannot spend a dime until I know,” Keiper said.

Dan Shingler: dshingler@crain.com, (216) 771-5290

DAN SHINGLER

AKRON HOPES TO COUPLE OGBU’S WORK WITH A $1 MILLION GRANT FROM THE FEDERAL RECONNECTING COMMUNITIES PROGRAM.

Btech Consortium makes progress in quest to help banks

BY JEREMY NOBILE

e Btech Consortium has hit some key milestones since Fred Cummings, founder and president of Elizabeth Park Capital Management, discussed his vision for the endeavor in fall 2021.

Btech (i.e. banktech) was established to aid smaller regional and community banks to compete with the ntech capabilities of their larger counterparts and nonbank competitors.

It was formed in a partnership between Elizabeth Park, a Pepper Pike hedge fund concentrated on the banking industry, and Strandview Capital, a California venture capital out t focused on the ntech sector.

According to the rms powering it, the mission of the Btech Consortium is to “empower community banks to compete more e ectively with larger money-center banks, decrease their constraints due to legacy technology and serve their local communities better.”

Its dual-prong mission is to share technology and related best practices among its bank members, which is achieved through the so-called Consortium HUB, and also to invest directly in emerging ntech companies

that specialize in serving the community bank industry.

“ is is much di erent from most traditional VC in that this will be highly strategic,” Mike Sekits, Strandview co-founder and managing director, told Crain’s in the past. “It’s all about empowering the community banks. We think there will be excellent opportunity to leverage our bank partners and drive revenues at the portfolio companies. And we expect that many of our LPs will become customers in the companies we invest in.”

While initial plans for the consortium were outlined around the tail end of 2021, its more o cial launch was announced this past November following the rst close of the corresponding investment fund, Btech Consortium Fund I LP. — which also happens to be Elizabeth Park’s rst private investment vehicle.

“ e tech-forward community banks who have joined the Btech Consortium are taking a leadership role in advancing technology for the entire community bank industry,” said Cummings recently. “Community banks play a vital role in maintaining thriving local communities. We increasingly see technology as a key di erentiator that allows banks

to serve their customers better, generate new sources of revenue, and operate more e ciently. Our deep knowledge of the community bank industry and Strandview Capital’s decades of expertise with ntech investments provide a unique opportunity for our bank members.”

Btech o cials have declined to disclose the amount of capital raised for the fund so far, its target size or all the member banks involved with it as of now.

However, Cummings had previously noted that early plans called for pooling about $100 million in capital from investors, primarily community banks themselves, which could be invested over the next few years.

e idea has been to bring on approximately 50 banks with total assets in a range roughly between $1 billion to $70 billion that might invest approximately $2 million each on average. at opportunity to invest directly also gives those banks a chance to participate in the nancial upside of those out ts as well, including a liquidity event such as an acquisition.

e idea has been to deploy that capital over the next four years or so through minority equity investments in potentially eight to 12 companies with the consortium acquiring stakes in the range of about 20%, Cummings previously explained.

Investment targets are expected to be mid-stage startups, which tend to have software developed but need growth capital and clients, the latter of which could be supplied by the consortium’s partnering banks.

e areas of interest include business payments, cyber security, commercial loan origination and servicing, regulatory compliance, API integration to core systems, robotic process automation, credit analytics, document management and commercial deposit gathering, according to the consortium.

ana), OceanFirst Financial Corp. (Toms River, New Jersey), Park National Corp. (Newark, Ohio), Premier Financial Corp. (De ance, Ohio) and Private Bancorp of America (La Jolla, California).

“Several large and tech-forward community banks have joined as founding members of the Btech Consortium, and we have strong interest from others,” Cummings added. “We also have smaller tech-forward bank members with less legacy technology, making it potentially easier to transition to cloud-native platforms. We welcome banks interested in the Consortium to contact us about joining.”

Btech o cials con rmed that some of the banks involved in the consortium so far include Customers Bancorp (West Reading, Pennsylvania), East West Bancorp (Pasadena, California), Farmers National Banc Corp. (Can eld, Ohio), First Western Financial (Denver, Colorado), Lakeland Financial Corp. (Warsaw, Indi-

“Customers Bank has been at the forefront of banking technology for nearly a decade,” said Customers Bank CEO Sam Sidhu in a news release. “ e Btech Consortium helps to solve the buy versus build dilemma faced by mid-sized and community banks giving us access to an array of fresh, cutting-edge solutions that can be adapted to the needs of Consortium members.”

Jeremy Nobile: jnobile@crain.com, (216) 771-5362, @JeremyNobile

Crain’s Cleveland is looking to recognize top accountants or consultants in Northeast Ohio for their accomplishments. Chosen honorees will be featured in a special section online and in the February 27 print issue.

Cummings

“SEVERAL LARGE AND TECH-FORWARD COMMUNITY BANKS HAVE JOINED AS FOUNDING MEMBERS OF THE BTECH CONSORTIUM, AND WE HAVE STRONG INTEREST FROM OTHERS.”

—Fred Cummings, founder and president of Elizabeth Park Capital Management

Rockefeller is back in

Stark and Westlake settle Crocker Park lawsuit

STAN BULLARD

Given the choice between a six-story building at an undetermined time when the market is better — no small forecasting challenge, given pandemic-stunted o ce demand — or a one-story ErieBank branch now at Crocker Park, the city of Westlake has agreed to the latter.

at is the upshot of an out-ofcourt settlement to the dispute between CP Land, an a liate of Crocker Park lead developer Stark Enterprises, and the suburb over its rejection last May of a proposed ErieBank branch on a 1-acre grassy parcel that had been reserved for a large additional building as the massive mixed-use development rose around it. e lawsuit was led last October.

In a Dec. 27, 2022, journal entry, Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Joan Synenberg removed the case from the court’s active docket due to the settlement. However, she retained jurisdiction to enforce the settlement if both parties do not proceed in accordance with it.

On the city’s side, it won a redesign of the proposed bank branch that calls for a pocket park on the corner of the site at Crocker Road and American Boulevard with benches for pedestrians and a monumental sign for that entrance to the mixed-used district.

Michael Maloney, Westlake’s law director, said in a phone interview that the city is pleased with the higher-quality design of the green space near the branch and the proposed building.

e city also accepted Stark’s contention it had not found adequate market support for the larger building included in design guidelines between the developer and the city put

in place 20 years ago.

Previously, both Westlake City Council and the Westlake Planning Commission unanimously rejected the proposed single-story,

2,600-square-foot bank branch because the original guidelines called for a bigger, more expansive development on the parcel.

At the time, the city had granted Crocker Park authority to build a mini city on the site, accepting density more common in downtowns than in suburban Northeast Ohio

Weed legalization push back on track

An e ort to legalize recreational marijuana in Ohio is back in motion.

A law proposed by the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol (CRMLA) to allow for an adult-use marijuana program for people age 21 and older was re-submitted to the Ohio General Assembly on Tuesday, Jan. 3, according to a spokesman for the Ohio Secretary of State.

Ohio’s conservative lawmakers may avoid acting on the bill, which would set the stage for citizens to vote on the measure later this year.

is is because the CRMLA is pursuing marijuana legalization in the state through what’s known as an initiated statute.

rough this process, the CRMLA must collect enough veri ed voter signatures — precisely one half of 6% of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election — to bring a proposed law before the legislature.

Once the bill is transmitted to the General Assembly, lawmakers have four months, or until early May in this case, to act on it.

If they do not pass the measure as presented in that time, or simply take no action at all, the campaign then can submit a second, fresh tranche of signatures (approximately 126,000)

to qualify for the fall ballot. e deadline to turn in those petitions would be in early July.

With lawmakers failing to move last year on legalization bills introduced separately by both Democrats and Republicans — who have collectively touted bipartisan support for legalization while nonetheless pursuing it individually and getting nowhere — the CRMLA is all the more prepared for a referendum.

“ is is an issue that is widely popular,” said CRMLA spokesman Tom Haren. “Polling consistently shows Ohio is in favor of legalization for adults. is is not a partisan issue any longer. We are full steam ahead for 2023 on our end, and if the General Assembly does not pass our proposal, we will gather the signatures to be on the ballot in November.”

Gallup surveys last fall showed for the third straight year that 68% of U.S. adults favor legalizing marijuana for general, recreational use.

Here are some key features of what the proposed CRMLA law would do: ` Legalize and regulate the cultivation, manufacture, testing and sale of marijuana and marijuana products to adults age 21 and over.

` Legalize home grow for adults 21 and older with a limit of six plants per adult, but 12 plants per household.

` Establish a 10% excise tax for adultuse sales at the point of sale.

` Create protocols for licensing additional cultivators, processors and dispensaries, which would be regulated through a single agency, the Division of Cannabis Control, instead of the separate regulatory bodies that oversee aspects of the Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program today.

` Establish a framework for use of annual tax-generated proceeds. at includes separate carveouts of: 36% for social equity and jobs programs; 36% to be divvied up among communities that host adult-use dispensaries; 25% to fund education and treatment for individuals with addiction issues; and 3% to fund a Division of Cannabis Control.

e CRMLA rst started with its legalization campaign in 2020, but e orts to collect signatures that year were stymied by the rise of COVID-19.

e campaign regrouped in 2021 and submitted signatures around the end of the year. is put the measure on track to come before lawmakers in 2022 and, if not passed, ballots for the fall midterm election.

Republicans, however, attempted to block the measure from moving along by questioning in court whether the CRMLA actually met certain

realty projects, as “neo-urban” mixed-use districts gained planning and development favor in the 2000s. The plan also included a mix of first-floor retail, upper-floor apartment rentals or office space and adjoining for-sale townhouses that now totals 4.5 million square feet of property.

“We were willing to compromise for a much improved plan,” Malo-

ney said. “We studied the office market and decided the original concept would not work given the changed market for commercial space. Office demand has changed after the pandemic, and interest rates and construction costs have climbed.”

John Slagter, a Tucker Ellis attorney who represented CP Land and Stark, said in a phone interview, “From my perspective, on behalf of my client, we were encouraged by the fact we were able to reach a resolution that allows a quality tenant, ErieBank, to be part of the Crocker Park project and its future success. It is unfortunate we had to file a lawsuit. We’re all happy we were able to amicably resolve it relatively quickly to allow the project to go forward in a timely manner.”

Through a spokesperson, Stark Enterprises CEO Ezra Stark said in a texted statement, “We are very appreciative of our partnership with the city of Westlake as we are able to work through items together as they represent themselves.”

The proposed branch gives ErieBank a location in the far western suburbs in addition to its existing Seven Hills and Woodmere Village branches.

ErieBank has been a leading lender for multifamily construction loans during the recent Cleveland-area apartment boom.

ErieBank is part of Clearfield, Pennsylvania-based CNB Financial Corp.’s CNB Bank.

Wesley Gillespie, ErieBank’s Northeast Ohio regional president, did not return two calls and an email by 2 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5.

Stan Bullard: sbullard@crain.com, (216) 771-5228, @CrainRltywriter

deadlines for submitting its proposed law.

CRMLA sued back in late April in Franklin County and requested a declaratory judgment that would keep the process moving along.

Ultimately, a settlement was

Nobile: jnobile@crain.com, (216) 771-5362, @JeremyNobile

reached that allowed the CRMLA to

carry over previously veri ed signatures at the start of 2023, and so the measure could be introduced to lawmakers with the beginning of this year’s General Assembly.

Jeremy

MARIJUANA

JEREMY NOBILE

A marijuana plant grown by Standard Wellness Co. CONTRIBUTED

Instead of the six-story building planned for years for the south end of Crocker Park, the city of Westlake has agreed to a plan for a one-story ErieBank branch on the site. | STAN BULLARD/CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS

“WE WERE WILLING TO COMPROMISE FOR A MUCH IMPROVED PLAN.”

—Michael Maloney, Westlake’s law director

Microgrids are systems that use redundant energy sources and technology to provide consistent power with virtually no downtime or brownouts. ey’re designed to employ clean power from renewable and local energy sources, including solar, wind and thermal.

Compass Energy, the Los Angeles-based utility development andnancing rm selected as part of an October RFQ, will oversee the launch and operations for the county-owned utility and will build out the microgrid projects, said Mike Foley, Cuyahoga County’s sustainability director.

As part of the development of a public utility, “Compass Energy will generally be the rst point of contact for the nuts-and-bolts operations of the utility and oversee the technical standards for developers, bill customers, create reports for regional and national grid operators, and assist with nancing projects,” Foley said.

Compass Energy will take on the nancial costs of the project, which could include bringing in other private nancial partners, in exchange for future fee collections from microgrid end-users.

Using a public utility partnered with a private developer to create microgrids has not been attempted before, said Rick Bolton, CEO of Compass Energy. But the timing of the project is advantageous because there are new sources of federal funding dedicated to resilient, clean energy that the rm plans to apply for.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, about 70% of the nation’s electrical grid is more than 25 years old. e necessity to upgrade is multiplied by the demand that most businesses have for high-quality, resilient power, Bolton said.

“Many businesses, like data centers, advanced manufacturing concerns, medical researchers, need not only resilience but high-quality pow-

GAMBLING

From Page 1

“ ere was de nitely an audible groan at both properties when he (OSU kicker Noah Ruggles) missed the kick,” Suliman said, referring to the sportsbooks at JACK’s downtown casino and istledown racino. “ at was a bummer because it was a heck of a football game.”

Some fans stuck around to bet anyway — one loyal JACK customer in her 90s walked over to the downtown sportsbook around 1 a.m. and placed a $1 bet on the Browns-Commanders game, just to say she did it, Suliman said — and by 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day, the place was again packed.

“It was shoulder-to-shoulder in there through midnight,” said Suliman, whose company also operates the mobile sports gambling app, betJACK. “ ere was a lot of betting, a lot of yelling at the screen during the Browns’ big win, and a lot of happy customers who won some bets.

“It was everything you would want for the grand opening of a sportsbook.”

As expected, Ohio’s sports gambling industry had a huge opening weekend, with the Buckeye State leading the nation with 11.3 million online sports wagering transactions,

er, and by o ering this kind of power, Cuyahoga County makes a strong argument that this utility contributes to the region’s economic development,” he said.

Grid modernization has received a lot of attention recently and is deemed a crucial part of the country’s overall infrastructure upgrades.

e bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year set aside $10.5 billion as a part of the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program, which is designed to enhance grid exibility and improve the resilience of the power system against growing threats of extreme weather and climate change. Bolton

said the utility will apply for a GRIP grant to help with microgrid construction.

“Microgrids and local distributed generation play a role in counteracting climate change through adding renewable energy, reducing carbon footprints while also protecting customers and communities by keeping the power on during emergencies,” he said.

To date, Cuyahoga County has received a total of $1.8 million in federal funding for the utility creation and grid buildout, including $300,000 to design a microgrid district within the Aerozone Alliance, the 50-square-mile area that sur-

Aerozone Alliance executive director Hrishue Mahalaha is a vocal supporter of a microgrid in the district as a means to attract businesses to what he envisions as a bustling economic hub.

“When you have assets like Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and NASA Glenn, you nd that those areas become strong economic hubs for things like logistics, distribution, aviation, aeronautics, airspace, technology and advanced manufacturing because of the stickiness that enables those industries to prosper.

Unfortunately, that is not the case in (all of) Northeast Ohio,” Mahalaha said.

He said the district’s goal is to “stack our infrastructure story. We already have relatively uncongested roadways, rail and airport, so when businesses are looking to expand, to relocate, to move, they see we have all of these important capabilities.” e new county administration headed by Chris Ronayne, who was sworn into o ce at the beginning of the year, supports microgrid projects set to begin in the cities of Euclid, Cleveland Heights, Brooklyn and Brook Park, where legislation enabling the county utility has

a.m.) on New Year’s Day.

Unlike New York’s 2022 sports gambling rollout, which saw multiple apps crash, Ohio’s went pretty smoothly, with the most common complaints coming from fans who couldn’t earn their sign-up bonuses. One outlet got a wrist-slap from the state, with the Ohio Casino Control Commission seeking a $350,000 ne from DraftKings for violating the state’s laws on advertising to individuals under age 21. (DraftKings has an estimated net worth of $9.3 billion.)

Gov. Mike DeWine also told reporters he has taken a personal interest in enforcing the state’s advertising regulations.

according to Vancouver-based company GeoComply.

lion).

Cincinnati

While mobile gambling dominates the market — about 80% to 90% of sports bets take place on phones, with DraftKings and FanDuel controlling about two-thirds of that — there are plenty of ways to bet in person in Northeast Ohio, from JACK’s two sportsbooks to the sportsbooks at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (RMFH), MGM North eld and Hollywood Gaming at Mahoning Valley. Sportsbooks at Canton’s Hall of Fame Village and Geneva’s Spire Institute and Academy will open later this year. ( e Browns and Guardians have both been approved for sportsbook licenses, but have no immediate plans to open one.) Plus, more than 1,500 Ohio outlets — mostly

at was 2 million more than the nation’s top market, New York, and 3 million more than third-place Pennsylvania (8.2 mil-

was Ohio’s busiest city with 1.9 million transactions — no surprise, since the Bengals were set to play the season’s biggest Monday

Night Football game on Jan. 2 — followed by Columbus (1 million) and Cleveland (772,000). About 234,000 of those transactions took place in the rst hour (midnight through 1

rounds Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and the NASA Glenn Research Center.

The Caesars Sportsbook at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse was one of ve Northeast Ohio sportsbooks that opened Jan. 1. | CLEVELAND CAVALIERS

Compass Energy Platform was selected to set up and operate the county’s public utility, which was created to build out a series of regional microgrids that use locally generated power from places such as a large solar array in Brooklyn (above). CUYAHOGA COUNTY

passed, Foley said.

Funding for microgrids in the Aerozone and the industrial corridor in the city of Euclid, south of I-90 along East 222nd Street, is in hand, and work is set to begin sometime in 2024, Foley said. e goal is to provide the microgrid to commercial customers, but other public customers could be added.

“We want this to be able to bleed over into the community to overlap with non-commercial customers, like schools and re stations,” Foley said.

Kim Palmer: kpalmer@crain.com, (216) 771-5384, @kimfouro ve

bars and restaurants — have been approved for lottery-style kiosks.

e 10,355-square-foot Caesars Sportsbook at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse accepted its rst wagers on Jan. 1, but didn’t have its ceremonial grand opening until the following night, just before the Cavaliers’ home game against the Chicago Bulls.

Years from now, the Cavs fans in attendance will remember that

OSHA

A significant portion of the food manufacturing workforce are “vulnerable workers,” such as ethnic or racial minorities or individuals for whom English isn’t their first language, said Janelle Madzia, assistant area director for OSHA in Cleveland. For workers who don’t speak English, there can be a communication barrier that gets in the way of training.

Howard Eberts, OSHA area director for Cleveland, added that the nature of the machinery used in food processing contributes to the risk of injury — and that another vulnerable population, those who are economically insecure, are more likely to take those risky jobs. And there are a lot of temporary workers in food processing, as well, Madzia said.

Beyond the equipment needed to process food, the industry comes with other risks, Eberts said, namely the chemicals used for sanitizing and areas of high heat. All those factors make training — and training in a language the worker knows well — and appropriate protective equipment critical.

Madzia and Eberts spoke with Crain’s about the new Local Emphasis Program in December.

e conversation that follows has been edited for length, style and grammar.

` Crain’s: How does our area compare to other regions?

Eberts: It’s fairly consistent across the country, even though there’s di erent types of jobs. We piloted this in the state of Wisconsin, which is in our region. They started it, then we looked at Ohio and Illinois data and found similarities. It’s a higher risk of serious injuries, including amputations, lacerations, fatalities, in these types of environments, that’s consistent across our region and, I believe, across the U.S. The agency in the past has looked at poultry processing, we’ve looked at meatpacking out in the Kansas City area, and those are similar types of hazards in similar types of work environments that have created a higher injury rate and greater risk to the workers out there.

` Crain’s: What will this program include?

e key to any new initiative or idea is that it must contribute to the bottom line — and, it must improve the bottom line. Organizational leaders must nd ways to incorporate new ideas and new energy into the culture, especially with this ongoing fast-paced workforce trend, which will continue. Furthermore, organizational leaders must in uence employees to relinquish the mindset of “this is the way we do things around here.” e updated phrase with the new energy coming into organizations today should be, “ is is the way we should be doing things around here.”

Before thinking or saying “I won’t do it,” or “it won’t work,” try taking a step back to see if e ort on your part as a leader to implement something new might actually help improve the organization and move it from the current state to the ideal state. If fear of failure has you paralyzed, try the following:

1. Analyze how you think the idea will fail

2. Identify what/who you think will contribute to that failure

3. Address the area(s) you identied causing the failure by improving the area(s) you feel will lead to success

`

Crain’s: What are some of the contributing factors that you’ve found? What is making this a more dangerous subset of the manufacturing industry in our area?

Madzia: So what they did nd is that there was a large amount of violations. We looked at data, and we looked to see, of the amount of inspections that we’ve done in this type of industry over the last 10 scal years, what were the most commonly cited violations. And what we found was that a lot of them were related

the new year.

“ e next morning, we were talking about how we were less than three days into 2023 and how memorable of a year it’s already become for us. We look forward to many more memorable moments, but it was a very special way for us to culminate over a three-year journey in opening the sportsbook.”

to ine ective or absent guarding on production machinery. Often, too, there was de ciencies in regards to the hazardous energy control methods, you know, lockout/tagout. Associated with that, training was also a problem that was leading to the injuries.

` Crain’s: Now, how does that compare to other sectors of manufacturing? Have you been able to nd any commonalities, why this is causing more injuries and fatalities?

Madzia: One of the things that might be causing this is that there’s a vulnerable workforce that are in this type of industry. Vulnerable could be a variety of di erent things. Also, we’re starting to see more injuries on

city.

—Nic Barlage, the CEO of the Cavaliers and RMFH

night for something else that happened: Donovan Mitchell exploding for a franchise-record 71 points in a 145-134 overtime win.

“To have the exclamation point of Donovan scoring 71 on the day we opened the sportsbook, it was just … it was epic, is probably the best way to put it,” said Nic Barlage, the CEO of the Cavaliers and RMFH. “It was an epic experience, an epic moment, an epic performance and just such a great way to catapult us into

While JACK’s sportsbooks are a smaller version of what you’d see in an upscale Las Vegas casino — with lots of huge screens, comfy chairs and nearby slots and table games — the RMFH sportsbook is closer to what you’d see at one of the arena’s sponsored spaces such as the Great Lakes Experience. It’s on the street level, at the corner of Huron Road and Ontario Street, and fans can walk in without a ticket.

“We really wanted our sportsbook to have kind of a transient, open-air feel to it,” Barlage said. “When you go to a lot of these traditional sportsbooks, you kind of feel like you’re going into a movie theater or a little bit of a bunker. We wanted it to feel connected to downtown and to have the walkability factor of the

“You can walk in right in and place a bet and walk right out, or you can hang out in the lounge for lunch or dinner. You can hang out for four or ve hours if you want to. … We wanted it to be a very prescriptive solution for our fans and one that ultimately could meet people where they are in regard to their level of engagement.”

JACK, meanwhile, has built its entire marketing campaign around its Cleveland roots, calling itself “Ohio’s Gaming Company.” Suliman said it’s how the company differentiates itself in such a competitive industry.

“It’s not only a marketing emphasis, it’s core to the philosophy of our organization,” Suliman said. “Our company motto for a long time has been ‘Born Here, Raised Here.’ We are the only sports betting and gaming company based in Ohio, and we think that matters. We think that matters to our customers and we know it matters to our team members. It’s something we take very seriously. When we put a product out there that claims to be Ohio’s sportsbook, which betJACK is, it’s important to live up to that.”

Joe Scalzo: joe.scalzo@crain.com, (216) 771-5256, @JoeScalzo01

Madzia: The initiative is supposed to provide outreach. We’ll be doing some outreach and education and training. And there will also be enforcement activities here. (Reporter’s note: Madzia said enforcement will begin in February.) The outreach activities usually include something like letters to the employer. OSHA will often have training sessions with the stakeholders. We’ll try to share electronic information via our website. We’ll do public service announcements, news releases: anything we can to try to communicate to these employers about the concerns that we’re seeing and trying to assist them to help us lower the numbers, lower the injuries.

` Crain’s: What are some of the things that workers should be looking out for in this industry?

Madzia: I was on the inspection side for 12 years before I went over to supervising. You know, if it looks wrong, it’s probably wrong.

Rachel Abbey McCa erty: (216) 771-5379, rmcca erty@crain.com

4. Implement measures designed to ensure the failure will occur under speci c conditions, minimizing impact

Leadership is action and you, as a leader, owe it to yourself and those you oversee to move the organization into an ideal state. Be welcoming of new ideas, push innovation, be entrepreneurial, and try something new. What could possibly go wrong?

the third shift, so those evening work shifts.

Janelle Madzia, top, is assistant area director for OSHA in Cleveland. Howard Eberts is OSHA area director for Cleveland. OSHA’s new program aims to reduce injuries. COURTESY PHOTOS

“TO HAVE THE EXCLAMATION POINT OF DONOVAN SCORING 71 ON THE DAY WE OPENED THE SPORTSBOOK, IT WAS JUST … IT WAS EPIC, IS PROBABLY THE BEST WAY TO PUT IT.”

LEADERSHIP IS ACTION AND YOU, AS A LEADER, OWE IT TO YOURSELF AND THOSE YOU OVERSEE TO MOVE THE ORGANIZATION INTO AN IDEAL STATE.

PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

Maloney + Novotny LLC

Maloney + Novotny LLC is pleased to announce that Scott Dunn, CPA, CVA has been promoted to Shareholder. Scott’s practice focuses on providing tax and accounting services to a wide range of industries including construction, manufacturing, real estate, service rms, employee bene t plans, and not-for-pro t organizations. He is well versed in business valuations for shareholder buy/sell, gifting, and estate planning. Scott is a graduate of Walsh University.

Centric Consulting

Centric Consulting is happy to announce that Kindra Helm has been promoted to Partner. Kindra has successfully lled leadership roles at Centric since she joined the rm in 2014. She has contributed extensively to several of Centric’s global practice management initiatives. Kindra is continuously praised for her delivery excellence, relationship building, and focus on providing Unmatched Experiences for Centric’s clients and employees. Congratulations, Kindra!

BOARDS

The Center for Community Solutions

Kyle Miller serves as External Affairs

Manager for Dominion Energy, working with local of cials, municipalities, and community and business leaders. He previously worked in government affairs for the Sisters of Charity Health System and on the U.S. Senate committee on Environment and Public Works, including as lead negotiator for a key economic development bill and surface transportation bill. Twice-elected to serve his local city council, Kyle now serves on civic boards and committees.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Baird

Brian Kurtz has been promoted to Executive Market Director at Baird, further recognizing his leadership within the Private Wealth Management business. Kurtz will support strategic efforts around the rm’s acquisition of Hefren-Tillotson and growing Baird’s footprint in the Northeastern market. Kurtz has been at Baird for over 20 years and is a board member of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association Champion’s Circle. He earned a BSBA in Finance from John Carroll University.

Class

Michael comes to Brouse with experience assisting businesses and individuals in a variety of different contractual disputes including employment contracts, residential construction, landlord/ tenant agreements, noncompete, and non-solicitation agreements.

LAW

Kastner

Westman & Wilkins

Amanda Smith has been promoted to Shareholder at Akron labor and employment rm, Kastner Westman & Wilkins (KWW). She’s an Ohio State Bar AssociationCerti ed Specialist in Labor and Employment Law, a National Diversity Council Certi ed Diversity Professional and serves as KWW’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DE&I”) Of cer. Smith is a member of the OSBA and Akron Bar Association, where she’s the Chairperson of the Labor and Employment Section.

LAW Taft

CONSTRUCTION

Ohio Home Builders Association

Enzo Perfetto was elected the 2023 Vice President of The Ohio Home Builders Association. The OHBA is a 4000-member trade association representing home builders and their associate vendors in a legislative and regulatory capacity on a statewide basis. It is an af liate of the National Association of Home Builders.

OHBA serves its membership by promoting proactive involvement on state issues and legislation impacting the residential building industry such as wetlands and affordable housing.

INSURANCE / FINANCIAL

Hylant

Nick Fratalonie, one of the industry’s leading insurance experts, has joined Hylant. Previously serving as an account executive for a large insurance company, Fratalonie’s primary focus as of ce president will be on the growth of the Cleveland of ce. His knowledge will create a strategic direction to drive the Ohio region’s revenue growth while meeting the everincreasing insurance needs of Hylant clients.

Hickman Lowder Lidrbauch & Welch Co., L.P.A. Hickman & Lowder has changed its name to Hickman Lowder Lidrbauch & Welch Co., L.P.A. In doing so, we recognize the important contributions of our colleagues, Elena A. Lidrbauch, CELA* and Ethan A. Welch, as managers and principal shareholders of our rm. Serving clients for over 40 years, our new rm name re ects our growth as a nationally recognized leader on issues related to special needs estate planning, Elder Law, Medicaid, special education, and other associated areas of law. The fundamental principle that guides the rm is the belief in the value of each human being, and that everyone, regardless of age, health, or capacity deserves the best life possible. *Certi ed Elder Law Attorney by the National Elder Law Foundation

LAW

Mansour Gavin LPA

Kenneth Smith has been promoted to Partner with Mansour Gavin LPA where he is a member of the rm’s labor and employment, intellectual property, and business and general civil litigation groups. Ken’s considerable experience in his areas of practice and his commitment to client service will signi cantly strengthen the rm. Ken earned his J.D., cum laude, from Case Western Reserve University School of Law and B.A., with high distinction, from Penn State University.

Khouloude Abboud is an associate in Taft’s Lending and Finance practice. She represents local, regional, and national banks, public companies, and large corporate borrowers in connection with a wide range of secured and unsecured nancing transactions. Robert K. Schmidt is of counsel in Taft’s Intellectual Property practice. He drafts, prosecutes, and appeals patent applications in a variety of areas, including medical devices, aerospace and defense systems, sensors, electronics, wireless systems, and circuits for quantum computing to secure broad protection for inventions. He has extensive experience before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

NONPROFITS

The McGregor Foundation

The McGregor Foundation, whose mission is to Support Seniors and Those Who Serve Them, today announced the appointment of Kate Fox Nagel, DrPH, MPH, as Chair of its Board of Directors. Dr. Nagel, who joined the McGregor Board in 2015, succeeds Anthony Kuhel, Jr., who served as Chair since 2021.

https://mcgregoramasa.org

Schmidt

Abboud

LAW

Lidrbauch

Laura Picariello

Brouse

McDowell, LPA Brouse McDowell is proud to welcome Marissa Atterholt as an Associate in the rm’s Business Transactions and Corporate Counseling Practice Group, and Michael Class as an Associate in the rm’s Insurance Recovery Practice Group. Marissa joins Brouse with law rm experience representing diverse clients across a variety of industries. She focuses her practice on private equity transactions, mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and general business law matters.

Atterholt

CONSULTING

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