home, garden & auto
PRESS The
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Bay Metro Suburban Maumee
April 18, 2016 A special supplement pers to The Press Newspa
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SPRING
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Spring pring home, garden & au auto See special section
RESS April 18, 2016
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Serving More Than h 33 33,000 000 H Homes & B Businesses i iin 4 C Counties ti
Olympic trials See page 17 M
Will pledge to voters be broken? By Kelly J. Kaczala and Melissa A. Burden
Culverts being replaced The Ohio Department of Transportation has begun a project to replace four culverts along State Route 51 at Little Cedar, Ayers, Dry, and Crane creeks in Wood County. Geddis Paving, Toledo, started work on the $1.6 million project during the week of April 11. Route 51, between Frey and Mathews roads, will be closed through May. The detour is State Route 795 to I-280. Additional closures will be announced. The replacements are expected to be complete in September. All work is weather permitting. (Press photo by Ken Grosjean)
Law unfair to urban homeowners Kelly Dean considers herself a “longterm” East Toledoan — she raised her children here, has invested in the community, and now she has an opportunity to give back to the community. Dean, a Toledo Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and AmeriCorps neighborhood outreach coordinator, has a plan — “to engage and empower existing neighborhood leaders and identify new leaders in the Birmingham neighborhood.” Growing up, her family was in the construction business, so when she sees an East Toledo property in disrepair, she can assess whether it can be rehabilitated or must be torn down. Dean and East Toledo Family Center community builder Jodi Gross, leader of One Voice for East Toledo, led a volunteer survey that investigated 1,700 parcels in East Toledo, grading each parcel. Dean doesn’t mind seeing dilapidated properties torn down, but she believes many are destroyed that could have been rehabbed. “At this point, I think we had roughly
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...I also stand up and say, ‘This is my neighborhood. My children have to walk through this neighborhood.
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By J. Patrick Eaken Press Staff Writer news@presspublications.com
15 houses that were on the demo (demolition) list in the Birmingham neighborhood, with six to eight remaining. This is all coming out of the (Lucas County) land bank,” Dean said. “There are some preliminary talks right now about trying to rehab some of these houses. I know I come from a construction family, so I can look at a house and it may be (rated) a ‘D’, but I can see the potential in that house. We can benefit from having people be in those homes rather than actually demolishing them.”
She is also seeking to change legislation, and that includes at the federal level. Gross says community leaders have lobbied to Washington leaders to bring more positive change to historic urban neighborhoods that have suffered since the 2008 housing crisis. They argue the Wall Street banks were bailed out for their mistakes, but the homeowners were not. Gross says the Lucas County Land Bank is doing its part, but more can be done, and that includes saving more houses that can be rehabbed. “There are lots of land banks across the United States. But Toledo and Cleveland are the top two land banks, and Toledo is probably the better because we get a lot more done. The issue is, when they get this money, it is only supposed to be for demos,” Gross said. “But we talked to (U.S. Senator) Sherrod Brown about changing the policy so that it is not just for demos — that they can’t just tear down another 1,000 houses and not rehab houses and allow people in the homes to get their roofs repaired or to get their porches repaired. Those rehabs are important because we have a really good housing stock, Continued on page 4
Last fall, just before Oregon voters went to the polls to decide whether to pass a 3.95-mill operating levy for the school district, Superintendent Hal Gregory and School Board President Carol Molnar took out an ad in The Press that explained where the estimated $1.9 million annual revenue would go should the levy pass. The ad stated that the funds would “exclusively” go toward extra-curricular activities and Clay’s Career Technical programs. The half-page ad, with the headline “Open letter to the residents of Oregon and Jerusalem Township communities,” was nine paragraphs long. “Our need for new money is real,” stated the ad, which was signed by both Gregory and Molnar. The revenue, according to the ad, would be used “exclusively to protect all of our extra-curricular programs and keep Clay’s Career-Technical programs under local control.” The word “exclusively” in the ad was highlighted in bold. If the levy failed, according to the ad, the Clay Career-Technical programs would be shifted to a JVS (Junior Vocational School), and residents would be assessed an “automatic unvoted 3.2 mill levy,” by the county auditor. The assessment would be equal to the amount all JVS member districts pay to access the local JVS. Either way, residents would be paying for vocational programs, whether it stayed local at Clay, or was provided outside the district. Basically, it was the voters’ call. “Residents can invest 3.95-mills to Oregon City Schools and our community to keep everything, or pay 3.2-mills to the JVS and lose easy access and local control of programs,” stated the ad. In addition, busing for all extra-curricular programs and field trips would be eliminated immediately. Sporting and other related activities would continue as scheduled, but parents would have to transport students to those events. And beginning in the fall of the 2016-2017 school year, all after-school and extra-curricular activities would be eliminated. All sports, marching band, choir, and clubs at Clay High School, Continued on page 2
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And we wonder why our lake has toxic algae blooms that can be seen from outer space? Mike Ferner See page 10