The Observation Deck

http://www.cleveland.com/brecksville/in ... -surg.html

Why is the administration willing to complete the destruction of Lakewood Hospital to make way for a substandard facility, designed to fail that will be closed in only three years?

Bill Call wrote:http://www.cleveland.com/brecksville/index.ssf/2013/10/metrohealth_plans_medical-surg.html

Bill,

Brecksville will have a state-of-the-art fitness center within the facility even though they already have a recreation department?

Brecksville, I suspect, enjoys a very high municipal tax/income base, relative to the low size of its population and the modest municipal services that need to be delivered (e.g. collecting a couple cans of trash from those one-acre properties). Plus Brecksville does not have to serve the hoi polloi. The only way Lakewood will be able to compete with Brecksville, is if what ex-urbans pay for motoring begins to reflect the actual cost of motoring. Gasoline needs to be priced to reflect the externalities, the cost paid by government to protect shipping lanes, the medical cost of auto mishaps, the environmental costs. When those costs are paid by motorists and not by others (taxpayers, the insured), Brecksville, not Lakewood, will find it hard to compete.

Lakewood residents should be screaming for a gas tax, as high a tax as can possibly be passed. If the external costs of gasoline were to be paid at the pump, gas would cot several more dollars per gallon....

Yikes!!!!!!!! Tim you're making sense!!!! For a conservative who wudda thunk it?! Stan

Scott Meeson wrote:Bill,

Brecksville will have a state-of-the-art fitness center within the facility even though they already have a recreation department?

Yes. Brecksville, population 13,000, can support a full service medical center with 100, doctors, operating rooms and all the rest but Lakewood, population 52,000, cannot. At least that's the theory of the Cleveland Clinic.

Property values in Cuyahoga County are plummeting. The decline in values threatens to undermine the County's ability to fund new development. According to Mayor Summers one solution is to encourage business and people to leave the County while they still can.